Hans Christian Andersen. (credit: The Bettmann Archive)
For more information on Hans Christian Andersen, visit Britannica.com.
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Hans Christian Andersen |
For more information on Hans Christian Andersen, visit Britannica.com.
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| Biography: Hans Christian Andersen |
The Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) enjoyed fame in his own lifetime as a novelist,dramatist, and poet, but his fairy tales are his great contribution to world literature.
Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2, 1805, in Odense, Denmark. His father was a shoemaker and his mother a washerwoman, and he was the first Danish author to emerge from the lowest class. At the age of 14, Andersen convinced his mother to let him try his luck in Copenhagen rather than be apprenticed to a tailor. When she asked what he intended to do there, he replied, "I'II become famous! First you suffer cruelly, and then you become famous."
For 3 years he lived in one of Copenhagen's disreputable districts. He tried to become a singer, dancer, and actor but failed. When he was 17, a prominent government official arranged a scholarship for Andersen in order to repair his spotty education. But he was an indifferent student and was unable to study systematically. He never learned to spell or to write the elegant Danish of the period. Thus his literary style remained close to the spoken language and is still fresh and living today, unlike that of most of his contemporaries.
After spending 7 years at school, mostly under the supervision of a neurotic rector who seems to have hated him, Andersen celebrated the passing of his university examinations in 1828 by writing his first prose narrative, an unrestrained satirical fantasy. This, his first success, was quickly followed by a vaudeville and a collection of poems. Andersen's career as an author was begun, and his years of suffering were at an end.
A lifelong bachelor, he was frequently in love (with, among others, the singer Jenny Lind). He lived most of his life as a guest on the country estates of wealthy Danes. He made numerous journeys abroad, where he met and in many cases became friends with prominent Europeans, among them the English novelist Charles Dickens. Andersen died on Aug. 4, 1875.
Literary Career
In 1835 Andersen completed his first novel, The Improvisatore, and published his first small volume of fairy tales, an event that went virtually unnoticed. The Improvisatore has a finely done Italian setting and, like most of Andersen's novels, was based on his own life. It was a success not only in Denmark but also in England and Germany. He wrote five more novels, all of them combining highly artificial plots with remarkably vivid descriptions of landscape and local customs.
As a dramatist, Andersen failed almost absolutely. But many of his poems are still a part of living Danish literature, and his most enduring contributions, after the fairy tales, are his travel books and his autobiography. In vividness, spontaneity, and impressionistic insight into character and scene, the travel books (of which A Poet's Bazaar is the masterpiece) rival the tales, and the kernels of many of the tales are found there.
World fame came to Andersen early. In 1846 the publication of his collected works in German gave him the opportunity to write an autobiography (published in both German and English in 1847). This book formed the basis of the Danish version, The Fairy Tale of My Life (1855).
Fairy Tales
Andersen began his fairy-tale writing by retelling folk tales he had heard as a child. Very soon, however, he began to create original stories, and the vast majority of his tales are original. The first volumes in 1835-1837 contained 19 tales and were called Fairy Tales Told for Children. In 1845 the title changed to New Fairy Tales. The four volumes appearing with this title contained 22 original tales and mark the great flowering of Andersen's genius. In 1852 the title was changed to Stories, and from then on the volumes were called New Fairy Tales and Stories. During the next years Andersen published a number of volumes of fairy tales, and his last works of this type appeared in 1872. Among his most popular tales are "The Ugly Duckling," "The Princess and the Pea," and "The Little Mermaid."
At first Andersen dismissed his fairy-tale writing as a "bagatelle" and, encouraged by friends and prominent Danish critics, considered abandoning the genre. But he later came to believe that the fairy tale would be the "universal poetry" of which so many romantic writers dreamed, the poetic form of the future, which would synthesize folk art and literature and encompass the tragic and the comic, the naive and the ironic.
While the majority of Andersen's tales can be enjoyed by children, the best of them are written for adults as well and lend themselves to varying interpretations according to the sophistication of the reader. To the Danes this is the most important aspect of the tales, but it is unfortunately not often conveyed by Andersen's translators. Indeed, some of the finest and richest tales, such as "She Was No Good," "The Old Oak Tree's Last Dream," "The Shadow," "The Wind Tells of Valdemar Daae and His Daughter," and "The Bell," do not often find their way into English-language collections. More insidious, though, are the existing translations that omit entirely Andersen's wit and neglect those stylistic devices that carry his multiplicity of meanings. Andersen's collected tales form a rich fictive world, remarkably coherent and capable of many interpretations, as only the work of a great poet can be.
Further Reading
The only complete collection of Andersen's tales in English is the translation by Jean Hersholt, The Complete Andersen: All of the 168 Stories (6 vols., 1949). His novels and travel books have all been translated but not in this century. Still one of the best sources of information about Andersen's life is his autobiography, The Fairy Tale of My Life, in a translation by W. Glyn Jones (1954). Excellent biographies are Fredrik Böök, Hans Christian Andersen (1938; trans. 1962), and Monica Stirling, The Wild Swan: The Life and Times of Hans Christian Andersen (1965). A good introduction to Andersen's method is Paul V. Rubow's essay, "Idea and Form in Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales," in Svend Dahl and H.G. Topsöe-Jensen, eds., A Book on the Danish Writer Hans Christian Andersen: His Life and Work (trans. 1955).
| English Folklore: Hans Christian Andersen |
A Danish shoemaker's son who as a child had heard traditional storytelling ‘in the spinning-room or during the hop harvest’. He began writing fairytales in 1835, and continued all his life; the first English translations appeared in 1846. Some, for instance ‘The Travelling Companions’ and ‘Big Claus and Little Claus’, follow traditional plots quite closely; others are variations on old motifs, such as ‘The Little Mermaid’, elaborating the belief that water-spirits may love humans, and may desire to obtain salvation. Many, including the well-known ‘Ugly Duckling’, are entirely his own creations; almost all are full of pathos and emotionalism. Andersen's influence on the later literary fairytale in England was profound; it pervades the fairytales of Oscar Wilde, and can be felt as early as 1857 in several passages of Dickens's Little Dorrit. About a dozen are now among the stock of fairytales which most English children know, and are no longer felt as foreign.
| Fairy Tale Companion: Hans Christian Andersen |
Andersen, Hans Christian (1805–75), Danish writer, often regarded as the father of modern fairy tales. Son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, he rose to the position of a national poet and is the most well‐known Scandinavian writer of all times.
Although Andersen considered himself a novelist and playwright, his unquestionable fame is based on his fairy tales. He published four collections: Eventyr, fortalte for børn (Fairy Tales, Told for Children, 1835–42), Nye eventyr (New Fairy Tales, 1844–8), Historier (Stories, 1852–5), and Nye eventyr og historier (New Fairy Tales and Stories, 1858–72), which already during his lifetime were translated into many languages.
The sources of his stories were mostly Danish folk tales, collected and retold by his immediate predecessors J. M. Thiele, Adam Oehlenschläger and Bernhard Ingemann. Unlike the collectors, whose aim was to preserve and sometimes to classify and study fairy tales, Andersen was in the first place a writer, and his objective was to create new literary works based on folklore. As exceptions, some fairy tales have their origins in ancient poetry (‘The Naughty Boy’) or medieval European literature (‘The Emperor's New Clothes’).
There are several ways in which Andersen may be said to have created the genre of modern fairy tale. First, he gave the fairy tale a personal touch. His very first fairy tale, ‘The Tinder Box’, opens in a matter‐of‐fact way, instead of the traditional ‘Once upon a time’, and its characters, including the king, speak a colloquial, everyday language. This feature became the trademark of Andersen's style. Quite a number of his early fairy tales are retellings of traditional folk tales, such as ‘Little Claus and Big Claus’, ‘The Princess and the Pea’, ‘The Travelling Companion’, ‘The Swineherd’, ‘The Wild Swans’; however, in Andersen's rendering they acquire an unmistakable individuality and brilliant irony. Kings go around in battered slippers and personally open gates of their kingdoms; princesses read newspapers and roast chicken; and many supernatural creatures in later tales behave and talk like ordinary people. An explicit narrative voice, commenting on the events and addressing the listener, is another characteristic trait of Andersen's tales. It is not accidental that many fairy tales were told by Andersen to real children before he wrote them down. However, there are no conventional morals in them, possibly with the exception of ‘The Red Shoes’.
Secondly, Andersen brought the fairy tale into the everyday. His first original fairy tale, ‘Little Ida's Flowers’, recalls the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann in its elaborate combination of the ordinary and the fantastic, its nocturnal magical transformations, and its use of the child as a narrative lens. Still closer to Hoffmann is ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ with its animation of the realm of toys. However, in both tales Andersen's melancholic view of life is revealed: both end tragically, thus raising the question whether children's literature must depend on happy endings. These may be counterbalanced by more conventional stories of trials and reward, such as ‘Thumbelina’ or ‘The Snow Queen’, the latter based on the popular Norse legend of the Ice Maiden.
In a group of fairy tales, Andersen went still further in animating the material world around him and introducing everyday objects as protagonists: ‘The Sweethearts’ (also known as ‘The Top and the Ball’), ‘The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep’, ‘The Shirt Collar’, ‘The Darning‐Needle’; he is credited with being a pioneer in this respect. Also, flowers and plants are ascribed a rich spiritual life, as in ‘The Daisy’, or arrogance, as in ‘The Fir Tree’, or otherwise are depicted as having a limited petty bourgeois horizon, as in ‘Five Peas from One Pod’.
Andersen's animal tales are also radically different from traditional fables. While in ‘The Storks’ he makes an original interpretation of the popular saying that babies are brought by storks, in several stories (‘The Happy Family’, ‘The Sprinters’, ‘The Dung‐Beetle’) Andersen makes animals represent different perspectives on life, and the stories themselves are more like satirical sketches of human manners than fairy tales for children. ‘The Ugly Duckling’, probably one of Andersen's best‐known stories, is a camouflaged autobiography, echoing the writer's much‐quoted statement: ‘First you must endure a lot, then you get famous.’ The animals, including the protagonist, possess human traits, views, and emotions, making the story indeed a poignant account of the road from humiliation through sufferings to well‐deserved bliss. The message is, however, ambivalent: you have to be born a swan in order to become one.
Another programmatic fairy tale is ‘The Little Mermaid’, based on a medieval ballad, eagerly exploited by romantic poets. Andersen, however, reversed the roles and, toning down the ballad's motif of the Christian versus the pagan, created a beautiful and tragic story of impossible love, which certainly also reflected his personal experience.
While most of Andersen's fairy tales are firmly anchored in his home country and often mention concrete topographical details, like the Round Tower in Copenhagen, some fairy tales have exotic settings, like China in ‘The Nightingale’, or unspecified ‘Southern countries’ in ‘The Shadow’. This tale, based loosely on a story by Adelbert von Chamisso, which it also mentions indirectly, is probably the most enigmatic and disturbing of his tales. Published in 1847, it marked a general change in Andersen tales, from being addressed to children to a wider audience, even primarily adults. In fact, his late tales, which he himself characterized as ‘Stories’ rather than ‘Fairy Tales’, are much less known and almost never published in contemporary collections for children. Among them is Andersen's tribute to modern technology, ‘The Great Sea‐Serpent’, depicting the first transatlantic telegraph cable.
The significance of Andersen may be illustrated by the fact that the world's most prestigious prize in children's literature, the Andersen Medal, is named after him, and that his birthday, 2 April, is celebrated as the International Children's Book Day.
Bibliography
— Maria Nikolajeva
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Hans Christian Andersen |
Bibliography
See his Fairy Tales, tr. by R. P. Keigwin (4 vol., 1956-60); The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, tr. by E. Hougaard (1983); M. Tator, ed., The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (2007); his autobiography (1855, tr. 1871); A River-A Town-A Poet, autobiographical selections by A. Dreslov (1963); his diaries, translated by S. Rossel and P. Conroy (1990); biographies by F. Böök (tr. 1962), R. Godden (1955), M. Stirling (1965), S. Toksvig (1934, repr. 1969), and E. Bredsdorff (1975).
| Artist: Hans Christian Andersen |
| Wikipedia: Hans Christian Andersen |
| Hans Christian Andersen | |
|---|---|
Painting of Andersen, 1836, by Constantin Hansen. |
|
| Born | April 2, 1805 Odense, Denmark |
| Died | August 4, 1875 (aged 70) Copenhagen, Denmark |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, fairy tales writer |
| Nationality | Danish |
| Genres | Children's literature, travelogue |
| Signature | |
Hans Christian Andersen (Danish pronunciation: [ˈhanˀs ˈkʰʁæʂd̥jan ˈɑnɐsn̩]}) (April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet noted for his children's stories. These include "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "Thumbelina", "The Little Match Girl", and the "The Ugly Duckling".
During his lifetime he was acclaimed for having delighted children worldwide, and was feted by royalty. His poetry and stories have been translated into more than 150 languages. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films.[1]
Contents |
Hans Christian Andersen was born in the town of Odense, Denmark, on Tuesday, April 2, 1805. "Hans" and "Christian" are traditional Danish names.
Andersen's father considered himself related to nobility. According to scholars at the Hans Christian Andersen Center, his paternal grandmother had told his father that their family had in the past belonged to a higher social class, but investigations prove these stories unfounded. The family apparently was affiliated with Danish royalty, but through employment or trade. Today, speculation persists that Andersen may have been an illegitimate son of the royal family. Whatever the reason, King Frederick VI took a personal interest in him as a youth and paid for a part of his education.[citation needed] According to writer Rolf Dorset, Andersen's ancestry remains indeterminate.[2] 1816. Hans Christian was forced to support himself. He worked as a weaver's apprentice and later, for a tailor. At 14, he moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor. Having an excellent soprano voice, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed. A colleague at the theatre told him that he considered Andersen a poet. Taking the suggestion seriously, he began to focus on writing.
Andersen had a half-sister, Karen Marie, with whom he managed to speak on only a few occasions before her death.[citation needed]
Jonas Collin, who, following a chance encounter with Andersen, immediately felt a great affection for him, sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse, covering all his expenses.[3] Andersen had already published his first story, The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave in 1822. Though not a keen student, he also attended school at Elsinore, until 1827.[4]
He later said his years in school were the darkest and bitterest of his life. At one school, he lived at his schoolmaster's home. There he was abused in order "to improve his character", he was told. He felt alienated from his classmates, being older than most of them. Considered unattractive, he suffered also from dyslexia. He later said the faculty had discouraged him from writing in general.[citation needed]
In 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with a short story titled "A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager". He also published a comedy and a collection of poems that season. Though he made little progress writing and publishing immediately thereafter, in 1833 he received a small traveling grant from the King, enabling him to set out on the first of his many journeys through Europe. At Jura, near Le Locle, Switzerland, he wrote the story, "Agnete and the Merman". He spent an evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante the same year, inspiring the name, The Bay of Fables. (See Voyagefever.com — an annual festival celebrates it). In October, 1834, he arrived in Rome. Andersen's first novel, The Improvisatore, was published at the beginning of 1835, becoming an instant success. During these traveling years, Hans Christian Andersen lived in an apartment at number 20, Nyhavn, Copenhagen. There, a memorial plaque was unveiled on May 8, 1835, a gift by Peter Schannong.[5]
It was during 1835 that Andersen published the first installment of his immortal Fairy Tales (Danish: Eventyr). More stories, completing the first volume, were published in 1836 and 1837. The quality of these stories was not immediately recognised, and they sold poorly. At the same time, Andersen enjoyed more success with two novels: O.T. (1836) and Only a Fiddler. His Specialty book that is still known today was the Ugly Duckling (1837).
After a visit to Sweden in 1837, Andersen became inspired by Scandinavism and committed himself to writing a poem to convey his feeling of relatedness between the Swedes, the Danes and the Norwegians.[6] It was in July 1839 during a visit to the island of Funen that Andersen first wrote the text of his poem Jeg er en Skandinav (I am a Scandinavian).[6] Andersen designed the poem to capture "the beauty of the Nordic spirit, the way the three sister nations have gradually grown together" as part of a Scandinavian national anthem.[6] Composer Otto Lindblad set the poem to music and the composition was published in January 1840. Its popularity peaked in 1845, after which it was seldom sung.[6]
In 1851, he published to wide acclaim In Sweden, a volume of travel sketches. A keen traveller, Andersen published several other long travelogues: Shadow Pictures of a Journey to the Harz, Swiss Saxony, etc. etc. in the Summer of 1831 (A Poet's Bazaar (560), In Spain , and A Visit to Portugal in 1866 (The latter describes his visit with his Portuguese friends Jorge and Jose O'Neill, who were his fellows in the mid 1820s while living in Copenhagen.) In his travelogues, Andersen took heed of some of the contemporary conventions about travel writing; but always developed the genre to suit his own purposes. Each of his travelogues combines documentary and descriptive accounts of the sights he saw with more philosophical excurses on topics such as being an author, immortality, and the nature of fiction in the literary travel report. Some of the travelogues, such as In Sweden, even contain fairy-tales.
In the 1840s Andersen's attention returned to the stage, however with no great success at all. His true genius was however proved in the miscellany the Picture-Book without Pictures (1840). The fame of his Fairy Tales had grown steadily; a second series began in 1838 and a third in 1845. Andersen was now celebrated throughout Europe, although his native Denmark still showed some resistance to his pretensions. Between 1845 and 1864, H. C. Andersen lived in 67, Nyhavn, Copenhagen, where a memorial plaque is placed.[5]
In June 1847, Andersen paid his first visit to England and enjoyed a triumphal social success during the summer. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her parties where intellectual and famous people could meet, and it was at one party that he met Charles Dickens for the first time. They shook hands and walked to the veranda which was of much joy to Andersen. He wrote in his diary "We had come to the veranda, I was so happy to see and speak to England's now living writer, whom I love the most."[7]
Ten years later, Andersen visited England, primarily to visit Dickens. He stayed at Dickens' home for five weeks, oblivious to Dickens' increasingly blatant hints for him to leave. Dickens' daughter said of Andersen, "He was a bony bore, and stayed on and on."[7] Shortly after Andersen left, Dickens published David Copperfield, featuring the obsequious Uriah Heep, who is said to have been modeled on Andersen. Andersen himself greatly enjoyed the visit, and never understood why Dickens stopped answering his letters.
Andersen often fell in love with unattainable women and many of his stories are interpreted as references to his sexual grief.[8] The most famous of these was the opera soprano Jenny Lind. One of his stories, "The Nightingale", was a written expression of his passion for Lind, and became the inspiration for her nickname, the "Swedish Nightingale". Andersen was often shy around women and had extreme difficulty in proposing to Lind. When Lind was boarding a train to take her to an opera concert, Andersen gave Lind a letter of proposal. Her feelings towards him were not mutual; she saw him as a brother, writing to him in 1844 "farewell... God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny."[9] A girl named Riborg Voigt was the unrequited love of Andersen's youth. A small pouch containing a long letter from Riborg was found on Andersen's chest when he died. At one point he wrote in his diary: "Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!"[10] Other disappointments in love included Sophie Orsted, the daughter of the physicist Hans Christian Orsted, and Louise Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin.
Just like his interest in women, Andersen would become attracted to nonreciprocating men. For example, Andersen wrote to Edvard Collin,[11]: "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench... my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery." Collin, who did not prefer men, wrote in his own memoir: "I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author much suffering." Likewise, the infatuations of the author for the Danish dancer Harald Scharff[12] and Carl Alexander, the young hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach,[13] did not result in any relationships. Four of his letters to Carl are edited in an anthology by Rictor Norton.
In recent times there were done some literary studies about the homoerotic camouflage in Andersen's works.[14]
In Andersen's early life, his private journal records his refusal to have sexual relations.[15][16]
In 1857, following a visit to Charles Dickens in England, Andersen was returning to Copenhagen via Paris when he made the acquaintance of fellow Danes Harald Scharff, a handsome twenty-one-year-old ballet dancer and Scharff's twenty-eight-year-old Copenhagen housemate, the Danish actor Lauritz Eckardt. Andersen and Scharff toured Notre-Dame de Paris together.[17][18] Scharff was a highly regarded artist in Denmark, having succeeded August Bournonville as principal male dancer at the Royal Ballet. Following his retirement, Bournonville described Scharff as “full of life and imagination...he is undoubtedly the finest lover we have had since I left!"[19] Scharff and his housemate were members of a circle of young, unmarried men associated with the Royal Theatre—a circle which Jonas Collin, the grandson of Andersen's first benefactor in Copenhagen despised, expressing his loathing and disgust in letters to Andersen in the early 1860s.[17]
In July 1860, Andersen was in Bavaria where he was pleasantly surprised to meet Scharff and Eckardt again. The three attended the Passion Play at Oberammergau together and then spent a week in Munich. They kept constant company, and it is probable that Andersen fell in love with Scharff at this time.[18] According to his diary, Andersen did not "feel at all well" when the two young men left Munich on 9 July 1860 for Salzburg.[20][note 1][21] A liaison with a celebrated and distinguished man such as Andersen must have held some attraction for the young Scharff, and a correspondence between the two began.[note 2] Andersen sent Scharff his photograph.[22]
Following the departure of Scharff and Eckardt for Salzburg, Andersen traveled to Switzerland but grew despondent and then depressed. In November, he returned to Copenhagen and spent Christmas at Basnæs, the estate of an aristocratic patron and friend on the coast of Zealand. His spirits lifted with the festivities and "The Snowman” was composed on New Year’s Eve 1860–61.[23] The tale was published with several others by Andersen two months later on 2 March 1861 in Copenhagen by C.A. Reitzel in New Fairy Tales and Stories. Second Series. First Collection. 1861..[24]
During the winter following his holidays at Basnæs, Andersen determined to fully open his heart to Scharff. He sent the young dancer a photograph of himself in a languid and seductive pose with a salutation using the intimate “Du” form: "Dear Scharf, here you have again Hans Christian Andersen." The two men exchanged birthday gifts in the early months of 1861: Andersen gave Scharff a five-volume collection of his tales, and Scharff gave Andersen a reproduction of Danish sculptor Herman Bissen's Minerva. Copenhagen left Andersen restless and ill-tempered, however, and he left for Rome on 4 April 1861.[25]
When Andersen returned to Copenhagen at the start of the new year 1862, Scharff was waiting for him.[26] In his diary entry for 2 January 1862, Andersen noted that Scharff "bounded up to me; threw himself round my neck and kissed me!" In other entries for January 1862, he described Scharff as "deeply devoted…very intimate…ardent and loving". In February, the poet observed that Scharff was "intimate and communicative" and in March he noted "a visit from Scharff...exchanged with him all the little secrets of the heart; I long for him daily." Later in March he wrote, "Scharff very loving...I gave him my picture." Scharff gave a silver toothbrush engraved with his name and the date to Andersen on his fifty-seventh birthday. In the winter of 1861–62, the two men entered a full-blown love affair that brought Andersen "joy, some kind of sexual fulfillment and a temporary end to loneliness."[27] He was not discreet in his conduct with Scharff, and displayed his feelings much too openly. Onlookers regarded the relationship as improper and ridiculous. In his diary for March 1862, Andersen referred to this time in his life as his "erotic period",[28]
The affair eventually came to an end. Scharff withdrew gradually from the relationship as he focused on his friendship with Eckardt, who had married the actress Josephine Thorberg. In late August 1863, Andersen was a dinner guest at the Eckhardts and sensed Scharff was no longer interested in him as an intimate friend. On 27 August 1863, the poet noted in his diary that Scharff’s passion had cooled and the dancer (whom he at one time described as a "butterfly who flits around sympathetically") wrote in his diary:
"Dinner at the Eckhardts. Scharff's infatuation with me has now passed, "now another object has captured the hero's eye." I'm not dejected about it, as I have been previously at similar disappointments." [29][30]
As the intensity of the relationship waned, Andersen felt like an old man. He speculated that he would never have another affair. In September 1863, he wrote "I cannot live in my loneliness, am weary of life." In October, he noted, "Felt old, downhill", and later in October, he visited Scharff who gave him his photograph. He wrote, "Poor young love, I can do nothing there", and on 13 November 1863, "Scharff has not visited me in eight days; with him it is over." In December, he read fairy tales at Eckhardt's house. Scharff and a dancer named Camilla Petersen were present; the two would become engaged though they would never marry. Like the other young men with whom Andersen was involved at various points in his lifetime, Scharff would move from homosexual to heterosexual relationships. The passionate relationship was over between Andersen and Scharff, but they would meet in overlapping social circles without bitterness or recriminations.[31][note 3][29][note 4][32]
In the spring of 1872, Andersen fell out of bed and was severely hurt. He never fully recovered, but he lived until August 4, 1875, dying of insidious causes in a house called Rolighed (literally: calmness), near Copenhagen, the home of his close friends Moritz Melchior, a banker, and his wife.[33] Shortly before his death, he had consulted a composer about the music for his funeral, saying: "Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps."[33] His body was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro area of Copenhagen.
At the time of his death, he was an internationally renowned and treasured artist. He received a stipend from the Danish Government as a "national treasure". Before his death, steps were already underway to erect the large statue in his honour, which was completed and is prominently placed at the town hall square in Copenhagen.[1]
In the English-speaking world, stories such as "Thumbelina", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Little Mermaid", "The Emperor's New Clothes", and "The Princess and the Pea" remain popular and are widely read. "The emperor's new clothes" and "ugly duckling" have both passed into the English language as well-known expressions.
In the Copenhagen harbor there is a statue of The Little Mermaid, placed in honor of Hans Christian Andersen. April 2, Andersen's birthday, is celebrated as International Children's Book Day.
The year 2005 was the bicentenary of Andersen's birth and his life and work was celebrated around the world. In Denmark, particularly, the nation's most famous son has been feted like no other literary figure.[citation needed][dubious ]
In the United States, statues of Hans Christian Andersen may be found in Central Park, New York, and in Solvang, California. The Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds a unique collection of Andersen materials bequeathed by the Danish-American actor Jean Hersholt.[34] Of particular note is an original scrapbook Andersen prepared for the young Jonas Drewsen.[35]
The city of Bratislava, Slovakia features a statue of Hans Christian Andersen in memory of his visit in 1841.[36]
In the city of Lublin, Poland is the Puppet & Actor Theatre of Hans Christian Andersen.[37]
A $12.5-million theme park based on Andersen's tales and life opened in Shanghai at the end of 2006. Multi-media games as well as all kinds of cultural contests related to the fairy tales are available to visitors. He was chosen as the star of the park because he is a "nice, hardworking person who was not afraid of poverty", Shanghai Gujin Investment general manager Zhai Shiqiang was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying.[38]
Some of his most famous fairy tales include:
Jens Andersen; Andersen, En Biografi; Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 2 volumes, 2003
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