Nordahl Grieg

Born Nov. 1, 1902, in Bergen; died Dec. 2, 1943, near Berlin. Norwegian writer.

Grieg’s first collection of poems. Round the Cape of Good Hope (1922). the novel The Ship Sails On (1924; Russian translation, 1926), and the collection of poems Stones in the Stream (1925) reflect impressions in romantic form from Grieg’s travels. He studied philology at the universities of Oslo and Oxford. In 1925, Grieg wrote a dissertation on R. Kipling and in 1932, a book of essays The Young Dead Ones (on J. Keats, P. B. Shelley, G. G. Byron, and others). In 1927 he published Chinese Days and an expressionist drama on a biblical theme. Barabbas, in which the principal theme of Grieg’s work first appears—the necessity and justification of revolution. The optimistic motifs of the collection of lyric poetry Norway in Our Hearts (1929) give way to social pessimism in the drama The Atlantic Ocean (1932; Russian translation, 1935). After staying in the USSR from 1933 to 1935, Grieg became a convinced Marxist. In the drama Our Glory and Our Might (1935; Russian translation, 1936) a new hero appeared—the people. In the play But Tomorrow . . .(1936) the theme of antagonism between capitalists and the nation (natsiia, nation in the historical sense) is set in the traditional form of a psychological drama. From 1936 to 1937, Grieg put out the literary social journal Veien frem, on the pages of which he came out against fascism and the threat of a new war. In 1937, as a military correspondent, he took part in the National Revolutionary War of the Spanish people, 1936–39; this was reflected in his journalistic collection Spanish Summer (1937; Russian translation. 1938) and in the novel But Young the World Must Be (1938). Grieg’s popular heroic play The Defeat (1937) portrays the events of the Paris Commune of 1871. After Norway’s capture by the Hitlerites (1940), Grieg took part in armed activity against the occupationists. He perished on board a bomber during an air raid over Berlin. His poems were circulated underground in Norway. Later they came out in the collections Freedom (in English translation, War Poems), published in 1945, and Hope, published in 1946.