IN THE tradition of Swedenborg, Linnaeus and Strindberg, the Dwedish writer Lars Gyllensten sought to reconcile the spiritual with the material world. A sceptical mystic and inquiring rationalist, he explored the realms of classical mythology as well as scientific research in his philosophical quest.
Gyllensten was brought up in an upper-middle-class environment in Stockholm. Although he was a dedicated reader of great literature from an early age, his professional education was purely scientific. He studied at the Karolinska Institute and became a doctor of medicine and assistant professor of histology in 1953. He remained in the world of medical research and teaching for the next two decades, serving as a reader and deputy professor in Stockholm.
When he left academia in 1973 to become a full-time writer, his name was already well-known in the literary world. With his colleague Torgny Greitz, Gyllensten had made his debut in 1946 under the pseudonym Jan Wictor. In their verse collection Camera Obscura, the two young medical students made fun of contemporary Swedish poetry of the mid-1940s, which they regarded as too inarticulate and too open to arbitrary interpretations.
This inclination to “unmask and reveal” persisted from this debut into his more mature books. In these later, more searching writings, Gyllensten gave proof of a dialectic motion between a Kirkegaardian existentialism and a scientific experimentalism; an interconnectedness that drew on both his reading of the philosophical tradition and his training as a physician.
At the same time, however, Gyllensten was a child of his age; shaped by the experiences of totalitarianism, he was deeply suspicious of ideology. In an early book he spoke of “the bankruptcy of naivety” and asked how one could live a meaningful life when all gods, systems and programmes had lost their attraction.
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In a number of books in the 1950s and 1960s, including Barnabok (Children’s Book) in 1952, Senilia in 1956 and Kains memoarer in 1963 (The Testament of Cain, 1967), Gyllensten developed these themes and thereby contributed to the re-orientation of Swedish literature away from the predominant tradition of realism. Gyllensten also took an active part in public debate with a series of articles and essays on faith, technology and human dignity.
In 1966 he was elected to the Swedish Academy, and he served as its permanent secretary from 1977 to 1986. In this position he was instrumental in introducing lesser-known writers to a global circle of readers by awarding them the Nobel Prize for Literature. Among these were Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), Czeslaw Milosz (1980) and Gabriel García Márquez (1982).
In the late 1980s, however, he left the academy in protest at its failure to support Salman Rushdie after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the writer of The Satanic Verses.
Sometimes described as a Swedish counterpart to Thomas Mann and Albert Camus, Gyllensten was a writer who ought to have had a greater European reputation, but only a handful of his works have been translated into English, French and German.
He continued to write throughout his life, and in his last book, published in 2004, he returned to the fundamental questions he raised after the war: “What’s the meaning of this doubtful, tragicomic but also wonderful existence? What’s life meant for?” His wife, Inga-Lisa, predeceased him, and he is survived by a daughter.
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Lars Gyllensten, writer, histologist and member of the Swedish Academy, was born on November 12, 1921. He died on May 25, 2006, aged 84.