1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Levertin, Oscar Ivan

LEVERTIN, OSCAR IVAN (1862–1906), Swedish poet and man of letters, was born of Jewish parents at Norrköping on the 17th of July 1862. He received his doctorate in letters at Upsala in 1887, and was subsequently docent at Upsala, and later professor of literature at Stockholm. Enforced sojourns in southern Europe on account of health familiarized him with foreign languages. He began by being an extreme follower of the naturalist school, but on his return in 1890 from a two years’ residence in Davos he wrote, in collaboration with the poet C. G. Verner von Heidenstam (b. 1859), a novel, Pepitas bröllop (1890), which was a direct attack on naturalism. His later volumes of short stories, Rococonoveller and Sista noveller, are fine examples of modern Swedish fiction. The lyrical beauty of his poems, Legender och visor (1891), placed him at the head of the romantic reaction in Sweden. In his poems entitled Nya Dikter (1894) he drew his material partly from medieval sources, and a third volume of poetry in 1902 sustained his reputation. His last poetical work (1905) was Kung Salomo och Morolf, poems founded on an eastern legend. As a critic he first attracted attention by his books on the Gustavian age of Swedish letters: Teater och drama under Gustaf III. (1889), &c. He was an active collaborator in the review Ord och Bild. He died in 1906, at a time when he was engaged on his Linné, posthumously published, a fragment of a great work on Linnaeus.