Karin Maria Boye was a Swedish poet and novelist, best known for the dystopian science fiction novel Kallocain.
Background
Ethnicity:
Her father was of German descent and her mother was Swede.
Karin Maria Boye was born on October 26, 1900, in Gothenburg, Vastra Gotaland, Sweden. Her family moved to Stockholm when she was nine. Her father worked as a civil engineer and she enjoyed a comfortable, middle-class upbringing during her childhood. Boye began writing at an early age, showing a keen interest in a variety of subjects, including religion and philosophy.
Education
Boye studied at the Åhlin School in Stockholm until 1920. She then studied at Uppsala University from 1921 to 1926 and received her Master of Arts degree from the University of Stockholm in 1928.
Boye started her career as a writer and poet in 1922, when her first volume of poetry, Clouds, appeared. Although Boye attained recognition fairly quickly, becoming known, while still a student, as a writer and political activist, her life was a series of crises.
In 1925, perhaps disappointed by traditional religion and philosophy but still captivated by an intense desire to understand the individual's place and destiny in the universe, Boye turned to socialism, joining Clarte, an international worker movement, founded by noted French writer and socialist Henri Barbusse.
However, her belief in socialism was shattered in 1928, when she visited the U.S.S.R. and immediately realized, unlike many of her fellow-intellectuals, that the Soviet Union, far from being a true socialist state, was a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.
Although her poetry brought her growing critical acclaim in the 1920s, Boye started writing novels to meet the social demands of a new decade. Her first novel, Astarte, not only surprised the readers who had known her as a poet, but also won an important Scandinavian literary award. Her following two novels, Merit Wakens and Too Little, explore the paradoxical and frustrating, even depressing, aspects of love, perhaps reflecting the author’s unhappy marriage.
Kallocain, Boye’s last novel and haunting description of a person’s progressive dehumanization in a totalitarian technocracy, drew praise from Swedish critics, including the poet Artur Lundkvist who hailed it as an important literary accomplishment.
However, despite the immediate success of Kallocain, later critics who recognized Boye’s talent as a novelist, judged her poetry ultimately superior to her prose.
In 1931 Boye co-founded the journal Spektrum, which introduced prominent contemporary poets, including T. S. Eliot, to Swedish readers. She also translated Eliot’s The Waste Land with Erik Mesterton. Like Eliot in The Waste Land, Boye lamented the destiny of a world which, as the political events of the 1930s progressed, seemed headed toward despair and destruction. As scholars have suggested, her mental state may have reflected the general mood of the 1930s. Suffering from severe depression, she saw a psychoanalyst during 1932-33. After several nervous breakdowns, she committed suicide in 1941, the same year British author Virginia Woolf (whom critics have compared to Boye) ended her life.
Initially fascinated by Christianity, Boye turned to the passionately anti-Christian philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas about the struggle between instinct and intellect in human culture inspired Crisis, a quest for self-understanding written in the form of a dialogue between two aspects of her personality. Sven H. Rossel termed it “one of the most disquieting religious books of the interwar period.”
Politics
During her time in Uppsala and until 1930, Boye was a member of the Swedish Clarté League, a socialist group which was at the time strongly anti-Fascist.
Views
Boye's five collections of poems—beginning with Moln (1922; “Clouds”) and ending with the posthumously published De sju dödssynderna (1941; “The Seven Deadly Sins”)—show the evolution of her outlook and style from the simple expression of a middle-class girl’s dreams and a young radical’s eager acceptance of life to bolder images, wider perspectives, and feeling for the problems of mankind.
Among her novels are Kris (1934; “Crisis”), based on her struggle to accept her lesbianism, and Kallocain (1940; Eng. trans.,1940), which describes the insupportable oppression of a totalitarian society of the future.
Membership
Boye was a member of the Swedish literary institution Samfundet De Nio (The Nine Society) from 1931 until her death in 1941.
Personality
Karin Boye was given two very different epitaphs. The best-known is the poem "Dead Amazon" (Död amazon) by Hjalmar Gullberg, in which she is depicted as "Very dark and with large eyes". Another poem was written by her close friend Ebbe Linde and is entitled "Dead friend" (Död kamrat). Here, she is depicted not as a heroic Amazon but as an ordinary human, small and grey in death, released from battles and pain.
Physical Characteristics:
Boye committed suicide on 23 April 1941. She overdosed on sleeping pills. She was found, according to the police report at the Regional Archives in Gothenburg, on 27 April, curled up at a boulder on a hill with a view just north of Alingsås, near Bolltorpsvägen, by a farmer who was going for a walk. The boulder is now a memorial stone.
Connections
Between 1929 and 1932 Boye was married to a Clarté member, Leif Björck. The marriage was apparently a friendship union. In 1932, after separating from her husband, she had a lesbian relationship with Gunnel Bergström.
During a stay in Berlin 1932-1933, she met Margot Hanel, whom she lived with for the rest of her life, and referred to as "her wife".