STRINDBERG, JOHAN AUGUST. — Swedish writer, born in Stockholm on 22 January 1849, died there on 14 May 1912. He established himself in his youth with Master Olof (1872), a drama in which the promoter of the Lutheran reform in Sweden was presented on stage and the author’s antidemocratic sentiments were expressed, and especially with Röda rummet (“The Red Room,” 1879), a naturalistic and satirical novel about the society of the Swedish capital.
The stories contained in Svenska öden och äventyr (“Swedish Destinies and Adventures,” 1882 ff.), Hemsöborna (“The Inhabitants of Hems Island,” 1887), one of the author’s most genuine works, and the harsh naturalistic drama Fröken Julie (“Miss Julie,” 1888) also belong to the naturalistic period. S. came into contact with European culture and intellectual circles during his long stays abroad, particularly in Denmark, Switzerland, where he came into contact with Russian revolutionaries, Germany, and France. Brandes introduced him to Nietzsche’s thought, and in I havsbandet (“At the Open Sea,” 1890) S. wrote his novel of the superman. Then, having become acquainted with Swedenborg’s visionary mysticism, S. passed through a profound mystical crisis, arriving at a vision of life in which suffering is justified as expiation for evil and sin and, as Gabetti writes, “his religiosity became increasingly tinged with Catholicism.” Among the many writings of this period, the most characteristic include Inferno (1897) and Till Damaskus (“The Road to Damascus,” 1898–1904); the dramas Påsk (“Easter,” 1901), with the central figure of Eleonora, in whom the meaning of suffering and expiation was poetically sublimated; Dödsdansen (“The Dance of Death,” 1901), one of the darkest and most desolate expressions of S.’s misogynism; the more properly fairy-tale dramas, in which Maeterlinck’s influence can also be discerned, such as Drömspelet (“A Dream Play,” 1902); and a new group of historical-religious tragedies, among them Gustav Vasa and Gustav Adolf. In 1907 S. founded his Intima teater and composed further fairy-tale, symbolic, and mystical dramas for it, including Spöksonaten (“The Ghost Sonata,” 1907), in which mystical exaltation reaches its highest pitch. In his final years he again engaged in violent literary and political polemics, attacking Heidenstam’s neo-humanism and professing forms of a vaguely Christianizing socialism. His death deeply moved even the humblest classes.
S. is one of the most tormented and extreme figures in late nineteenth-century European literature. His enormous oeuvre as a writer has no point of arrival, but his vocation and commitment are undeniable, and his multifaceted production is studded with surprising intuitions and anticipations of cultural and artistic movements subsequent to his age, to which he is, in substance, far less bound than Ibsen. He is a figure who, already during his lifetime, belonged not only to Sweden but to Europe, and was confusedly and painfully aware of this.