Pär Lagerkvist’s Religious Beliefs
The article discusses a highly debatable issue of the 20th century Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist’s religious beliefs. Religious issues play an important role in all Lagerkvist’s works and become vital for him in his later prose. Lagerkvist’s spiritual quest makes him address to various, sometimes controversial ideas and doctrines, choose between faith and atheism, between acceptance of life and black despair. Lagerkvist does not consider himself a Christian but his works show that he always seeks truth and hopes to ﬁnd God. Lagerkvist’s self-determination as a “religious atheist” seems paradoxical but proves to be very accurate. Raised in the family of convinced Protestants, Lagerkvist had to get through the periods of total renunciation of faith. He was strongly inﬂuenced by religious existentialism. Lagerkvist starts with portraying God as a person (“Det eviga leendet”, 1920), proceeds with a prevocational and experimental mixture of paganism and Christianity (“Sibyllan”, 1956), and tries to replace faith in God with a faith in the divine, the transcendental (“Ahasverus död, 1960). Taking into account the fact that Lagerkvist often associates himself with the characters of his books, their evolution from theomachists (the Sibyl, Barabbas. Ahasuerus) to pilgrims (Tobias, Giovanni) is highly demonstrative.