Just as Knut Hamsun had depended on translations translations to become acquainted with Dostoevsky’s work, Russian readers required translators from Norwegian to make Hamsun’s writings accessible to them. His correspondence provides an insight into his not always harmonious relations with those who fulfilled this task.
Chief among these was Peter Emanuel Hansen (1846-1930). Born in Copenhagen, from 1881 to 1904 he was the director of a school of telegraphy in St. Petersburg. Here he met and married his Russian wife Anna (1869-1942), with whom he collaborated on translations into Russian of Scandinavian authors for the Russian publishing market. At first, Hamsun’s letters suggest that the arrangement worked well and that he was on a friendly footing with the Hansens, but this was short-lived. There were various reasons for the friction between author and translator, not least Hamsun’s thorny temperament and Hansen's tardiness, but also factors beyond the control of either, including strikes and postal delays.
In November 1907 Hamsun had signed a contract with the St. Petersburg publishing house Znanie. This resulted from the urgent need to prevent pirated editions of his work appearing in Russia. At one point Hamsun even declared that he would approach the King of Norway to intervene on his behalf. In 1892 a translation of Hunger had been published without his knowledge, and in 1908 the weekly Niva had published Hamsun’s work without his consent or paying him any royalties whatsoever. When Dagny Kristensen introduced him to the Symbolist publishing house Skorpion, his first collection of stories, Siesta (1900) appeared in a translation by its director Sergei Polyakov, as did Pan (1901) with a preface by Konstantin Balmont. This growing dissemination of Hamsun’s work in Russia made it essential to ensure that his rights as an author were protected.
The author charts Hamsun's troubled relations with his Russian translators and publishers, the success of his plays in translation at the Moscow Arts Theatre in the context of Russo-Scandinavian literary contacts in the early 20th century.
