Keys · Welcome to the Nobel Prize Laureate Collection

ID-nummer

2024.001.001

Titel

Keys

Publik beskrivning

This collection of keys was in an envelope in Eyvind Johnson’s desk drawer. That was where his family found them after his death, and they kept them ever since. His daughter Maria Ekman writes,

“Nobody had known for ages what they went to – they were simply left, like sediments from previous phases in Eyvind’s life. (All of us will have a bunch of keys or two lying around that hasn’t been thrown out yet…) Our family referred to them as “Krilon’s keys”, after a long passage in Krilon själv, the last part of the Krilon trilogy, called “Johannes Krilon’s keys”, where Krilon sists contemplating his life based on a box of old keys.

Now, Eyvind’s keys weren’t in a box. When I eventually took care of them, they were in a plain envelope from the National Library of Sweden, stamped 1966 and addressed to Herr Doktor Eyvind Johnson. And these keys hadn’t belonged to Krilon in real life, but to Eyvind.

One thought that this hoard of keys triggers, with its reality and its simultaneous fictitious link to Krilon, so to speak, is that the Krilon trilogy was written approximately mid-career, after a number of autobiographical books, and before the series of historical novels, thereby pointing both ahead and back in his long literary practice.”

The keys were donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Eyvind Johnson’s estate in 2024.

Pristagare

Eyvind Johnson