August Strindberg

     August Strindberg was born in Stockholm. His father, Carl Oscar Strindberg, proud of a trace of aristocratic blood, was a shipping agent, but his business success was relatively modest. Strindberg's mother, Ulrika Eleanora Norling, had a proletarian background. She was a tailor's daughter, who had been a domestic servant and become Carl Oscar's mistress. August was their third son; the couple had nine more children. Strindberg's childhood was poor and miserable – he was shy and family tensions depressed him. Ulrika Eleanora died when he was 13 years old. After his father remarried, Strindberg came to hate his stepmother. To underline his sympathies with the lower-classes, Strindberg entitled his autobiography The Son of a Servant (1886).

     Strindberg became in 1874 an assistant librarian at the Royal Library, serving until his resignation in 1882. He married in 1877 Baroness Siri von Essen, who had been wife of Baron Carl Gustaf Wrangel, and was a member of the Swedish aristocracy in Finland. By the time of the marriage Siri was seven months pregnant; the child died and they had later three more children, one of whom, Kristin, wrote an account of her parents' stormy life together. In En Dares Forsvaltal (1887, A Madman's Defense) Strindberg returned to his first marriage in a story in which the narrator is torn between adoration and revulsion. However, first the marriage brought some balance into Strindberg's life.
     Strinberg´s first published novel, Roda Rummet (1879, The Red Room), a satirical story about early capitalism and corruption in Stockholm, made him nationally famous. Arvid Falk, the central character, is an aspiring writer who loses all his illusions, and finally accepts bourgeois family life. With this book Strindberg started his career as one of the most prominent figures in Nordic literature and culture. Master Olof, which first had been rejected, was produced in 1881 and received with enthusiasm.
     Svenska Folket (1880-82) was an excursion into the history of Sweden. Far from trying to establish himself as Sweden's national writer, Strindberg attacked the nation's central values, official history writing, and made himself unpopular among academic historians. Strindberg's revenge on his critics was Detny Riket (1882), a dissection of Oscarian Sweden. In Denmark he was accused of antisemitism.
     To escape the uproar which he had stirred up, and partly to follow the example of many other Scandinavian writers, Strinberg decided to travel abroad. He first moved in 1883 to France with his family and between the years 1884 and 1887 he lived with short interruptions in Switzerland. During this time he corresponded with Friedrich Nietzsche, and became interested of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Under financial and marital difficulties, Strindberg started to show symptoms of emotional crisis. Feelings of persecution were suppressed by heavy drinking of absinthe. Eventually he started to believe his wife wanted to have him locked away in a mental institution.
     The publication of the first part of his scenes of marital life Giftas (1884, Getting Married), outraged the Swedish establishment, especially the short story 'Reward of virtue', in which Strindberg mocked the Holy Communion. The book was confiscated, Strindberg was prosecuted for blasphemy but acquitted. In Sweden the younger generation hailed him as a hero. Getting Married was inspired by Ibsen's play A Doll's House (1883), but Strindberg was more on the side of Nora's husband. However, Strindberg's egalitarian vision of gender roles was radical for its day and age, although at the same time he accepted the idea that celibacy could lead to physical debility.
     Froken Julie (1888, Miss Julie), Stridberg's next major drama after Fadren (1887, The Father), coupled one of his favorite themes, the Darwinian battle between the sexes, with a social struggle and love-hate bond. Strindberg wrote it durring his stay in Denmark. The protagonist, Julie, a daughter of a count, allows herself to be seduced by her father's servant Jean. She must then confront the situation, in which Jean, a man on the rise, turns out to be the stronger person. Julie causes her own tragic fate. Unable to arrive at any reasonable plan, she orders Jean to hypnotize her into committing suicide. Miss Julie had its premiere at Strindberg's Experimental Theater in Copenhagen in 1889.
     After completing Miss Julie, Strindberg wrote in 1889 with Antoine's Théâtre Libre a group of one act plays, Paria, Den Starkare, and Samum, and returned to Sweden. He divorced from Siri von Essen and moved to Berlin, where he met an Austrian journalist Maria Uhl, known as Frida Uhl, his second wife, whom he married in 1893. Their honeymoon the couple spent in London, but after disagreements Strindberg escaped to the island of Rügen. The marriage became the subject of his autobiographical sketch, Klostret (1966, The Cloister), but he also dealt with marital problems in some minor works, as in the short story 'An Attenmpt at Reform'. In the ironic picture of "a model marriage" a young couple try to live together but maintain at the same their independence. They have separate rooms, share expenses and household work equally, and throw away the double bed, "that abomination which has no counterpart in nature and is responsible for a great deal of dissipation and immorality." After the birth of their baby, the husband asks himself: "Didn't she do her full share of of the work by mothering the baby? Wasn't that as good as money?" And the wife soon gets over the fact that he had to keep her.
     Haunted by guilt about deserting his children and attacked by his critics, Strindberg became possessed of a persecution mania. He also suffered from insomnia and psoriasis, and spent some weeks in the St. Louis Hospital in Paris. Between the years 1892 and 1897 Strindberg experienced several psychotic episodes, and recorded his tormented thoughts later in Inferno. Turning to painting, Strindberg created in the 1890s seascapes, which have been compared to the works of Turner. His favorite motifs included a vision from a cave toward the outside world and a wave breaking in open sea. With the help of Swedenborgian studies, and adopting the idea that certain people are destined to suffer, he emerged from the crisis.
     In the novel I Havsbandet (1890, By the Open Sea) Strindberg expressed his fascination with the sea and Swedish archipelago, which he had depicted in Hemsoborna (1887, The Natives of Hemsö), a return to his favorite place of his youth, the island of Kymmendö, where he had began to write Mäster Olaf.
     Strindberg moved to Stockholm and wrote during the following productive years from 1898 to 1909 thirty-six plays. In the Damascus trilogy 1898-1901, Pask (1901, Easter), and Ett Dromspel (1901, A Dream Play) Strindberg made use of details of his second marriage. The protagonist of the trilogy is called the 'Stranger' or 'The Unknown One', a man on a journey to discover his fate. He has left his wife and children and goes through a series of trials. In Pask (Easter) Strindberg deals with the theme of death and resurrection. The play tells a story of a woman, who lives with her children in fear of the coming of the creditor, who, in fact, brings reconciliation and the remission of debt.
     In A Dream Play Strindberg attempted to imitate the logical form of a dream. Time and space are not important in the dramaturgy, the characters split, all thoughts and perceptions emanate from a single individual's unconscious, the dreamer's. Behind the character of the luminous protagonist, Daughter of Indra, who descends to earth, was the young actress Harriet Bosse, who became the author's third wife. The emphasis on subjectivity in the play foreshadowed Freud's theories about the gap between the conscious and unconscious.
     In 1908 Strindberg settled into a house he called "the Blue Tower" and lived there until his death from stomach cancer on May 14, 1912. According to his wish, Strindberg was buried beneath wooden crucifixes with the inscription O Crux Ave Spes Unica. Faithful to his role as an iconoclast and a disturber, Strindberg fuelled the so-called Strindberg Feud from 1910 to his death with a series of newspaper articles on social, literary, and political issues. Like Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Strindberg never received the Nobel Prize for literature. However, he had actively supported the Trades Union movement and was awarded its alternative Nobel Prize.
     Strindberg wrote more than 70 plays as well as novels, short-stories and studies of Swedish history. His influnce has been wide. As a dramatist he was a source of inspiration to the German expressionists, and to Eugene O'Neill, Eugène Ionesco, and Tennessee Williams, and his impact is seen among others in the works of such playwrights as Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, and John Arden. Pär Lagerkvist wrote about Strindberg in Modern Theatre (1966).