Maksim Gorki

Russian Nobel Prize Candidates in the Archives of the Swedish Academy.
This study tries to answer the question why the first Nobel prize in literature was awarded to Ivan Bunin (1933), a writer whose oeuvre now is almost totally unknown outside Russia, while some of the more internationally well-known Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorki were overlooked. e main source for our analysis are the records kept in the archives of the Swedish Academy, i. e. the letters of nomination, the reports, often extensive, delivered to the Academy by the Nobel Committee’s literary experts (at the time: Alfred Jensen and, later, Anton Karlgren), and the annual reports of the Nobel Committee, which contain a short assessment of each of the nominees. Personal letters, both published and unpublished, were made use of as a complementary source.
Our analysis of archive materials leads us to conclude that candidates such as Tolstoy and Gorki were rejected more for political reasons than for the quality of their literary output. It is shown that, at least as far as those works not directly accessible to the members of the Swedish Academy were concerned, the experts’ assessments played a decisive role in the ”making of a Nobel Prize winner”. During the 1930’s it was generally felt that finally a Russian writer should receive the award, and, since no Soviet writers had been nominated during these years, the first Russian Nobel prize winner could only be an emigré writer.
Our study shows that Bunin became a Nobel Prize winner, first and foremost, thanks to the brilliant, talented and very impressive essays written by the literary expert Anton Karl- gren. After hesitating to recommend Bunin in 1923, Karlgren eventually decided to opt for him unreservedly in his later reports, at the expense of other candidates. This made it almost impossible for the Academy to give the prize to Gorki, for instance. We try to show that the 1933 Nobel prize was awarded to Bunin, ”the last Russian prose master of the great tradition”, mainly as a result of Karlgren’s personal preference.