August Strindberg

August Strindberg (born Jan. 22, 1849, Stockholm, Swed.—died May 14, 1912, Stockholm) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, who combined psychology and Naturalism in a new kind of European drama that evolved into Expressionist drama. His chief works include The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), Creditors (1888), A Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1907).

Early years

Strindberg’s father, Carl Oskar Strindberg, was a bankrupt aristocrat who worked as a steamship agent, and his mother was a former waitress. His childhood was marred by emotional insecurity, poverty, his grandmother’s religious fanaticism, and neglect, as he relates in his remarkable autobiography Tjänstekvinnans son (1886–87; The Son of a Servant, 1913). He studied intermittently at the University of Uppsala, preparing in turn for the ministry and a career in medicine but never taking a degree. To earn his living, he worked as a free-lance journalist in Stockholm, as well as at other jobs that he almost invariably lost. Meanwhile he struggled to complete his first important work, the historical drama Mäster Olof (published in 1872), on the theme of the Swedish Reformation, influenced by Shakespeare and by Henrik Ibsen’s Brand. The Royal Theatre’s rejection of Mäster Olof deepened his pessimism and sharpened his contempt for official institutions and traditions. For several years he continued revising the play—later recognized as the first modern Swedish drama—thus delaying his development as a dramatist of contemporary problems.

In 1874 he became a librarian at the Royal Library, and in 1875 he met the Finno-Swedish Siri von Essen, then the unhappy wife of an officer of the guards; two years later they married. Their intense but ultimately disastrous relationship ended in divorce in 1891, when Strindberg, to his great grief, lost the custody of their four children. At first, however, marriage stimulated his writing, and in 1879 he published his first novel, The Red Room, a satirical account of abuses and frauds in Stockholm society: this was something new in Swedish fiction and made its author nationally famous.

He also wrote more plays, of which Lucky Peter’s Travels (1881) contains the most biting social criticism. In 1883, the year after he published Det nya riket (“The New Kingdom”), a withering satire on contemporary Sweden, Strindberg left Stockholm with his family and for six years moved restlessly about the Continent. Although he was then approaching a state of complete mental breakdown, he produced a great number of plays, novels, and stories. The publication in 1884 of the first volume of his collected stories, Married, led to a prosecution for blasphemy. He was acquitted, but the case affected his mind, and he imagined himself persecuted, even by Siri.

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Philosophy 101

He returned to drama with new intensity, and the conflict between the sexes inspired some of the outstanding works written at this time, such as The Father, Miss Julie, and The Creditors. All of these were written in total revolt against contemporary social conventions. In these bold and concentrated works, he combined the techniques of dramatic Naturalism—including unaffected dialogue, stark rather than luxurious scenery, and the use of stage props as symbols—with his own conception of psychology, thereby inaugurating a new movement in European drama. The People of Hemsö, a vigorous novel about the Stockholm skerries (rocky islands), always one of Strindberg’s happiest sources of inspiration, was also produced during this intensively creative phase.

The years after his return to Sweden in 1889 were lonely and unhappy. Even though revered as a famous writer who had become the voice of modern Sweden, he was by now an alcoholic unable to find steady employment. In 1892 he went abroad again, to Berlin. His second marriage, to a young Austrian journalist, Frida Uhl, followed in 1893; they finally parted in Paris in 1895.

A period of literary sterility, emotional and physical stress, and considerable mental instability culminated in a kind of religious conversion, the crisis that he described in Inferno. During these years Strindberg devoted considerable time to experiments in alchemy and to the study of theosophy.

Late years

His new faith, coloured by mysticism, re-created him as a writer. The immediate result was a drama in three parts, To Damascus, in which he depicts himself as “the Stranger,” a wanderer seeking spiritual peace and finding it with another character, “the Lady,” who resembles both Siri and Frida.

By this time Strindberg had again returned to Sweden, settling first in Lund and then, in 1899, in Stockholm, where he lived until his death. The summers he often spent among his beloved skerries. His view that life is ruled by the “Powers,” punitive but righteous, was reflected in a series of historical plays that he began in 1889. Of these, Gustav Vasa is the best, masterly in its firmness of construction, characterization, and its vigorous dialogue. In 1901 he married the young Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse; in 1904 they parted, and again Strindberg lost the child, his fifth.

Yet his last marriage, this “spring in winter,” as he called it, inspired, among other works, the plays The Dance of Death and A Dream Play, as well as the charming autobiography Ensam (“Alone”) and some lyrical poems. Renewed bitterness after his parting from his last wife provoked the grotesquely satirical novel Svarta Fanor (1907; “Black Banners”), which attacked the vices and follies of Stockholm’s literary coteries, as Strindberg saw them. Kammarspel (“Chamber Plays”), written for the little Intima Theatre, which Strindberg ran for a time with a young producer, August Falck, embody further developments of his dramatic technique: of these, The Ghost Sonata is the most fantastic, anticipating much in later European drama. His last play, The Great Highway, a symbolic presentation of his own life, appeared in 1909.