Formazione individuale e memoria collettiva nei romanzi autobiografici di Eyvind Johnson e Harry Martinson

Eyvind Johnson’s and Harry Martinson’s breakthrough came with autobiographical novels in the 1930s. They were part of a proletarian trend, and conveyed a realistic subject matter with an unconventional, modernistic prose style. Both series of novels display a tension between the autobiographer’s urge to keep the collective memory of poor old Sweden alive and their protagonist’s need for emancipation from that oppressive context. In addition, both series are written in the third person, thereby allowing empathy and distance, subjectivity and collectivity to interact. With the help of Philippe Lejeune’s analysis of the specificity of autobiographies in the third person, of August Strindberg’s reflections on his own seminal autobiographical project, also written in the third person, and of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of memory as determined by social frames, this article aims to shed some new light on these acknowledged masterpieces of Swedish literature.