JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

fluential literary historian (or constructionist) Vilhelm Andersen
resumes the widespread Scandinavian image of Jacobsen as a
Naturalistic and thus laboratoristic writer. His long section on
Jacobsen in Illustreret dansk Litteraturhistorie IV (1925) even
today has some influence on the image of Jacobsen as a promi-
nent example of the Danish Naturalism. Following V. Andersen,
Jacobsen is a scientist of botany, a Darwinist thinker and an ana-
lytical writer with an admirable sense for stylistics, nature and
human sensations. In my opinion Vilhelm Andersen affirms a
rather rigid and dogmatic image of Jacobsen the Naturalist. I have
devoted some of my time during the last 10 years to destroying as
completely as possible this image, but that’s not the topic of this
paper.
At the same time, around 1900, some quite different images of
Jacobsen as auteur can be found especially in Germany and more
occasionally in England. In the brief after word to Tiina Nun-
naly’s very much acclaimed translation of Niels Lyhne (Fjord
Press 1990), Eric O. Johannesen pays attention to the well-known
fact, that Jacobsen became a mentor to the Austrean poet Rainer
Maria Rilke. “To Rilke”, he writes, “Jacobsen obviously ranked
with Kierkegaard and Ibsen in importance along with his other
great mentor, the sculptor Auguste Rodin”. Johannesen has a quo-
tation from a letter from Rilke, dated April 2, 1904, to the Swe-
dish feminist author Ellen Key in which he writes:
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