“First one suffers so terribly much, and then one becomes famous.”
This, in his own words, is the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s life. For more than a century and a half now, the poor shoemaker’s son from Odense has been more famous and more loved than any other Scandinavian writer of any age.
Andersen wrote 156 fairy-tales and 6 novels – and he has been translated into more than 125 different languages. He travelled all over Europe and met artists like Charles Dickens, Schumann, Mendelsohn, Alexandre Dumas and Franz Liszt. He was a great journalist and a sharp observer, and during his many journeys he wrote the most fantastic accounts of what he observed. “To travel is to live”, he said. He was friendly with kings and queens, and all over he was welcomed as a Head of State. Yet, from the time he went out into the world, at the age of fourteen, to the very end of his life, this great master of the fairy-tale was a lonely and, in many ways, unhappy man. Even after he became well-off and the emotional sufferings of his youth, after an early disappointment in love, had become a thing of the past, his sensitive, vain and egocentric mind was constantly plagued by insecurity. His novels, overshadowed by his beautiful fairy-tales, never won the acclaim he hoped they would.
Loved though his fairy-tales are, they have, to a certain extent, suffered a sad fate as well, restricted as they usually are to the nursery. In no lesser degree, however, they belong on the bookshelves of adults.
