The content, however, was never truly naive. From The Eternal Smile on, his style largely abandoned the expressionist pathos and brusque effects of his early works and there was a strong striving for simplicity, classical precision and clean telling, sometimes appearing close to naivism. Anguish is everything / the anguish of living.' ('Love is nothing', 1916.) This pessimism, however, slowly faded, as testified by his subsequent works, Det eviga leendet (The Eternal Smile, 1920), the autobiographical novel Gäst hos verkligheten (Guest of Reality, 1925) and the prose monologue Det besegrade livet (The defeated Life, 1927), in which the faith in man is predominant. 'Anguish, anguish is my heritage / the wound of my throat / the cry of my heart in the world.' ('Anguish', 1916.) 'Love is nothing. He tried to explore how a person can find a meaningful life in a world where a war can kill millions for very little reason. His anguish was derived from his fear of death, the World War, and personal crisis.

One of the author's earliest works is Ångest (Anguish, 1916), a violent and disillusioned collection of poems.

In his early years Lagerkvist supported modernist and aesthetically radical views, as shown by his manifesto Ordkonst och bildkonst (word art and picture art) (1913) and the plays Den Svåra Stunden ('The Difficult Hour'). Much of his writing is informed by a lifelong interest in man and his symbols and gods and in the position of Man (both as individual and mankind) in a world where the Divine is no longer present, no longer speaking. Though he was politically a socialist for most of his life, he never indulged in the idea that 'religion is the opium of the people'. In his teens he broke away from Christian beliefs, but unlike many other writers and thinkers in his generation he did not become vehemently critical of religious beliefs as such. Lagerkvist received a traditional religious education - he would say, with little exaggeration, that he 'had had the good fortune to grow up in a home where the only books known were the Bible and the Book of Hymns'.

As a moralist, he used religious motifs and figures from the Christian tradition without following the doctrines of the church. Among his central themes was the fundamental question of good and evil, which he examined through such figures as the man who was freed instead of Jesus, Barabbas, and the wandering Jew Ahasuerus. Lagerkvist wrote poems, plays, novels, stories, and essays of considerable expressive power and influence from his early 20s to his late 70s. Pär Fabian Lagerkvist ( - 11 July 1974) was a Swedish author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951, 'for the artistic vigour and true independence of mind with which he endeavours in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind'.

Lagerkvist barabbas