Who knows “Au bord de l'eau”?

Even in France, the poem about the timeless mood of two lovers on the bank of a river, published in 1875, is hardly known to anyone.

No more than its author, Sully Prudhomme.

Not surprisingly, most poems come and go.

And even most of the lyricists.

But Prudhomme, whose mostly sentimental verses were once maliciously called crochet doily poetry, was not just any poet.

He was the first ever Nobel Prize winner in literature.

Jürgen Kaube

Editor.

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When the Swedish Academy finally began awarding the award in 1901, years after Alfred Nobel's testamentary decree of 1885, it did not choose Tolstoy, who had not been proposed, Émile Zola or the Provencal lyric poet Frédéric Mistral, or Malwida von Meysenbug, who were all among the nominees, but a warm-hearted French poet who soon nobody knew any more.

A three-day conference has just taken place in the German Literature Archive in Marbach, devoted to research into the Nobel Prize, its history and its effects.

What appears to be a somewhat special topic at first glance leads to central questions in the sociology of literature on the second.

Because the Nobel Prize has established itself as a world event.

It stands above all other tens of thousands of literary prizes awarded annually.

There is wagering, groaning and arguing.

Some trust him to build canons, others treat him like the result of some kind of annual world championship in writing.

The sustainability of the highest literary honor

It is clear how nonsensical this idea is. Literature is not a sport, it contains no achievement that can be clearly determined. The member of the Swedish Academy Anders Olsson also left no doubt during the digitally held Marbach conference that the Nobel Prize winners did not emerge from a competition. There are no long and short lists, no rankings. The claim by Fabien Accominotti (Madison) that the price was borne by a belief in hierarchy missed him in this respect. Nobody will think that Peter Handke is simply and clearly a better author than William Vollmann or Annie Ernaux.

But what is the Nobel Prize then? It is nominated, and, according to Olsson, quite nonsensical proposals are made, and the remaining two hundred names are compared. The committee meets weekly. For a long time it only chose from the proposals submitted, but now it can make some itself. Former award winners, members of other academies and professors of literary studies are also eligible to submit. As a rule, the prize can only be received by those who have previously been nominated at least once. In 1938 the little accident happened with Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, who was honored for her good-natured novels about Chinese country life without such qualifications and subsequently considered to be not a happy choice.

On the other hand, what Jacob Habinek (Linköping) has calculated on the basis of the Academy's files that can be viewed, top positions in terms of being nominated do not guarantee the price. Anders Olsson mentioned in this connection that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad had not even been nominated. Subsequent regret therefore accompanies the price that only living authors can get. The poet and publisher of many Nobel Prize winners Michael Krüger, in his conversation with Olsson, rightly called for research into the sustainability of the highest literary honor. In other words: In the end, it does not decide on the canon in the sense of what is still widely read, it only increases the chances of being accepted into it. The Nobel Prize does not protect against being forgotten: Whoever reads Carl Spitteler today,not to mention Paul Heyse?