"Elettyjä pikkuseikkailuja" by Knut Hamsun is a collection of short stories written in the early 20th century. The pieces are autobiographical vignettes of “lived little adventures,” shifting from American prairies and Parisian boulevards to a stark Norwegian parish. A frank, restless first-person narrator observes fear, crowds, work, and the uncanny with sharp sensory detail and dry humor. Readers get atmospheric snapshots rather than a single plot, anchored by the narrator’s roaming life.
The opening of the collection first offers a compact biographical sketch of the author’s life and major works, then moves into several first-person episodes. In “Pelkoa,” the narrator recalls a night in Madelia on the American prairie when intruders break into a house, triggering overwhelming terror as he bluffs them off with a single bullet. “Muuan katuvallankumous” recreates Paris street unrest in the 1890s, from barricades and smashed lamps to scuffles with police and soldiers, mixing menace with absurdity (an umbrella “confiscated” because “it’s a revolution”). “Aave” returns to a northern childhood: after pocketing a tooth from a graveyard, the boy is haunted for years by a red-bearded apparition with a missing tooth. “Vehnäaavikolla” sketches grueling harvest work on the Red River wheat plains, the eccentric Irishman Evans, a snake slipping into a Swede’s boot, and the raucous post‑payday spree where Evans borrows the narrator’s wallet to gamble, then regains control and wins back money. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
