"An Alpine Idyll" is a short story by American writer
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway ( ; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized fo ...
, set in
Austria
Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...
and presumably featuring protagonist
Nick Adams,
though not explicitly named. It was published in the 1927 collection ''
Men Without Women,'' having previously been rejected by ''
Scribner's Magazine
''Scribner's Magazine'' was an American periodical published by the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons from January 1887 to May 1939. ''Scribner's Magazine'' was the second magazine out of the Scribner's firm, after the publication of ...
''
as being too shocking for their genteel readers.
Plot summary
A mature Nick and a friend, John, return from a ski trip to
Galtur. The story takes place in spring, with the characters noting that the season was not good for skiing and lamenting that they had stayed in
Silvretta Alps
The Silvretta Alps are a mountain range of the Central Eastern Alps shared by Tyrol (state), Tirol, Vorarlberg (both in Austria) and Graubünden (Switzerland). The Austrian States of Austria, states of Tirol and Vorarlberg are connected by a pass ...
too long. The story begins with Nick and John witnessing a peasant burial. The story concludes with Nick and John, who had gone into an inn for drinks, having a discussion with the innkeeper and the sexton who had performed the burial. There is a revelation that the peasant widower, who had been snowbound with his dead wife for months, had reportedly kept her body in the woodshed and used her mouth to hold a lantern. The characters wonder whether the story was true, and the innkeeper indicated it must have been, since the peasants were "beasts."
Reviews
Joseph W. Krutch reviews the story in ''
The Nation
''The Nation'' is a progressive American monthly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper ...
'' at the time saying that it "makes the readers suddenly weary, both physically and spiritually". Another reviewer describes the work as "a gruesome tale written with great economy of detail.
[
]
Analysis
The story is known to be "hard to analyse".[ Several commentators of the 1950s and 1960s suggest that the skiing and corpse episodes may be thematically related. Edmund Wilson believes that because the skiers feel oppressed by remaining too long in the mountains, perhaps the same unnatural environment has had a dehumanizing effect on the peasant. Carlos Baker feels that the peasant may now be ashamed by the 'natural' people of the valley.][
]
References
External links
Full text of "An Alpine Idyll" at HathiTrust Digital Library
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Alpine Idyll
1927 short stories
Short stories by Ernest Hemingway
Short stories set in Switzerland
Autobiographical short stories