SOURCE: Mussari, Mark. “L'Heure bleue: Isak Dinesen and the Ascendant Imagination.” Scandinavian Studies 73, no. 1 (spring 2001): 43-62.

In the following essay, Mussari considers Dinesen's use of the color blue in the imagery of the stories comprising Winter's Tales.

Ein blauer Augenblick ist nur mehr Seele. [A blue moment is purely and simply soul]

—“Sebastian im Traum: Kindheit” Georg Trakl

In several of the stories in Winter's Tales, Isak Dinesen makes painterly use of the imaginative breadth of blue.¹ The color functions on two levels: a number of her characters are ultimately enveloped in the blue other-world she constructs early in the collection; and at the same time, her colorific language, calling to mind Kandinsky's assertion that the eye is “absorbed” into a circle of blue, draws the reader into her imagined landscape. Recognizing blue's power to express longing, the emotional state that pervades the collection, Dinesen deftly merges the...