Word: bredsdorff
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...ELIAS BREDSDORFF...
...unsurpassed master of the fairy tale. Who has not smiled ruefully at the imperial victim of The Emperor's New Clothes, or identified with The Princess on the Pea? What youth remains ignorant of Andersen's articulate birds and magic elves? Yet, as Cambridge Professor Elias Bredsdorff brilliantly demonstrates, these creatures were the offhand productions of a vast and thwarted literary ambition...
...actor, dancer and singer. But he radiated intelligence, and something about him hinted at fame. Benefactors sent the adolescent to school, where Hans decided to become a playwright. "You can stand pain if you can write about it," he declared to a friend. The fledgling author became, says Bredsdorff, "a man of deep and apparently irreconcilable contrasts." Heinrich Heine, who observed Andersen in action, called the writer "a tall thin man with hollow sunken cheeks [whose] manner reveals the sort of fawning servility that princes like." All his adult life, Andersen oscillated between vanity and self-abnegation, pride and humility...
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