27 December

Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament

1895 The most prestigious prize in literature has its home not in one of the imperial capitals of the world, but in Stockholm. And, even more ironically, it is funded by the revenue from the world’s most popular explosive.

The story behind the setting up of the Nobel Prizes is legendary. Time magazine (16 October 2000) offers one chatty version. In 1888, Alfred’s brother Ludwig Nobel had died while visiting Cannes:

Alfred, a pacifist who liked to write poetry, had intended his explosive to be used mostly for peaceful purposes and was dismayed that it became so powerful an instrument of war. A French newspaper – thinking it was Alfred and not his brother who had passed on – ran his obituary in 1888 under the cutting headline ‘Le marchand de la mort est mort’ (the merchant of death is dead). With the family name obviously in need of some burnishing, Nobel hit on the idea of his golden prize.

Seven years later, on 27 December 1895, Nobel (who was childless) drew up his last will and testament. In it he decreed that the bulk of his wealth, derived from his deadly invention, should be invested to establish a foundation that should superintend the annual award of monetary prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace (economics came later).

The criterion for science was clear-cut. It should go to whomever was judged to have made ‘the most important discovery’. That for literature was fuzzier. It instructed that the Literature Prize be given ‘to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. The epithet ‘ideal’ – which is both moral and aesthetic, and extremely slippery – has been the cause of much controversy over the century the prize has been awarded.

Nobel died less than a year after drawing up his will, in December 1896. When the document was read out to the family it was violently objected to, and legally challenged by two nephews. The King of Sweden, Oskar II, declared the disposition of Nobel’s vast treasure ‘unpatriotic’. It took three years of difficult negotiation to get the literary prize running, under the auspices of the Swedish Academy, in 1901. The first laureate was the French author Sully Prudhomme. It was given, the judges declared, ‘in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect’. Whatever his lofty idealism, Prudhomme, alas, remains one of the less read Nobellists by posterity. In their wisdom, the judges had decided against Leo Tolstoy (as they did in 1902) because of his anarchism and eccentric religious views. The Russian claimed to be glad ‘because it saved me from the painful necessity of dealing in some way with money – generally regarded as very necessary and useful, but which I regard as the source of every kind of evil’.