Authors: Carl Spitteler

With theology his primary focus, by 1867 Spitteler was preparing himself for a future as a Protestant minister. A crisis of faith turned him from that direction, however, and by 1870 he no longer hoped for a religious career. Having no means of earning a living, he managed to secure an invitation from Finnish general Carl August Standertskjöld to tutor his young children in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Spitteler spent the years 1871 to 1879 in Russia and Finland, during which time he wrote his first major literary work, the verse epic Prometheus und Epimetheus (1880–81; Prometheus and Epimetheus, 1931). Under the pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem, he self-published the piece, which he had conceived during his university years. Its lack of commercial success proved disheartening to Spitteler, who moved back to Switzerland and resigned himself to earning his living as a schoolteacher rather than as a poet.

In 1883, Spitteler married his former student Marie op der Hoff, and together they had two daughters. Supplementing his income with newspaper work, he wrote for the Schweizer Grenzpost (Swiss border post) in Basel from 1885 to 1886 and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (New Zürich times) in Zürich from 1890 to 1892. When in 1892 his wife received a substantial inheritance from her parents, Spitteler used his new financial independence to retire from teaching and newspaper writing, move his family to Lucerne, and concentrate full time on his writing. Preferring to live and work in near-seclusion, he produced novels and several collections of poems, short stories, and critical essays.

Two incidents briefly marred an otherwise peaceful literary life for Spitteler. Upon republishing Prometheus and Epimetheus in the early 1890s, this time under his own name, Spitteler was accused of plagiarizing some of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas, despite the fact that Spitteler’s original publication of his epic predated Nietzsche’s work. Eventually, Spitteler felt compelled to defend himself against plagiarism charges in Meine Beziehungen zu Nietzsche (My relation to Nietzsche) in 1908. The second troubling incident occurred in 1914 when, in a speech later published under the title Unser Schweizer Standpunkt (Our Swiss standpoint, 1915), Spitteler publicly voiced support for Swiss neutrality in World War I–era Europe and opposed the increasingly popular view that German-speaking Swiss citizens should ally themselves with Germany. In contrast to earning the disdain of many German-speaking Swiss for his views, he earned praise from the French and the French-speaking Swiss. In 1915 he was given a banquet in his honor in Geneva by various French institutions, among them the Académie française (French Academy), the Ligue des droits de l’homme (League of human rights), and the Société des gens de lettres de France (Society of men of letters of France), the latter of which awarded him a medal in 1916.

Spitteler’s most noteworthy epic poem, Olympischer Frühling (Olympic spring), appeared in four volumes between 1900 and 1905 and was revised in 1910. The culmination of a lifetime of work, this six-hundred-page work combines many facets of Spitteler’s ideas, including religion, philosophy, mythology, and allegory. The first two volumes were relatively unnoticed, but famous composer Felix Weingartner endorsed the work in a special pamphlet, Carl Spitteler, ein künstlerisches Erlebnis (Carl Spitteler, an artistic experience, 1904), bringing widespread recognition to those first two books, along with the other two yet to come. At age seventy-five, Spitteler was awarded the 1919 Nobel Prize in Literature for Olympischer Frühling; being too ill to travel to Stockholm, he received the award from the Swiss minister of foreign affairs, who had accepted it on Spitteler’s behalf.

Four years later, Spitteler died in Lucerne, shortly after producing Prometheus der Dulder (Prometheus the sufferer, 1924), a new rhyming version of his first epic. Following his death, much praise was accorded Spitteler’s life and work; the most notable was given by French author and art historian Romain Rolland, who called Spitteler “our Homer, the greatest German poet since Goethe, the only master of the epic since Milton died three centuries ago. But a more solitary figure amid the art of his day than either the one or the other of these.”