Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 83: "I sold my soul to the Devil..."?

Q.  I wondered if you could tell me whether Karen Blixen ever said or wrote anything about having made a pact with Lucifer exchanging her health or her soul for her ability to write stories.

A.    Karen Blixen talked about her pact with the devil, explained at this link: http://www.karenblixen.com/question31.html.

She called herself a child of Lucifer in a letter from Africa (Letters from Africa, p. 244): "I am convinced that Lucifer is the angel whose wings should be hovering over me. And we know that the only solution for Lucifer was rebellion, and then the fall to his own kingdom."

To a modern reader, these references to Lucifer and the devil are perplexing. But they are much better understood if you know about the prevailing philosophical conversations among people in Karen Blixen's youth.

Karen Blixen was raised on a heavy diet of Romanticism, whose notoriety began with Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and continued through the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). All the Romantic writers were concerned with the question, "Who am I?"

Nietzsche's writing highlighted the concept of alienation, and underscored the loneliness of the artist. The artist is a creature on the fringe of society, an observer and critic, as well as the link between man and the divine.

As such, he resembles Lucifer, who was cast out of the society of angels-- conformists, or members of the bourgeois sphere, from the Romantic point of view.

The Romantics emphasized the crucial significance of extremes in defining each other, thus the necessity of good and evil, happiness and tragedy. Being Lucifer is, therefore, a good thing--although a lonely position.

Morse Peckham, in his book Romanticism, says of the Transcendental Hero in vogue in Karen Blixen's youth: "Contemporary accounts of responses to Paganini and Liszt and Carlyle and Turner and Chopin emphasize the sense of being swept away, of being dominated, of being violated. This is what people meant when they gossiped that Paganini had sold his soul to the devil."

An artist can sometimes exercise an almost superhuman effect on others--an effect that in Christian society of the 1800s was considered Lucifer-like; ie no one but God himself should have this kind of power.

Karen Blixen's friend, Thorkild Bjornvig, reports in his memoir, The Pact (referring to his pact with Karen Blixen, not a pact with the Devil), that she had said, "I promised the Devil my soul, and in return he promised me that everything I was going to experience hereafter would be turned into tales."

Copyright © 2004 by Linda Donelson. All rights reserved.