STRINDBERG, JOHAN AUGUST. - Swedish writer, b. in Stockholm on 22 Jan. 1849, d. there on 14 May 1912. He established himself in his youth with Master Olof (1872), a drama in which the promoter of the Lutheran Reformation in Sweden was presented on the stage and the author's anti-democratic sentiments were expressed, and especially with Röda rummet ("The Red Room", 1879), a naturalistic and satirical novel about the society of the Swedish capital.
To the naturalistic period also belong the stories contained in Svenska öden och äventyr ("Swedish Destinies and Adventures", 1882 ff.), Hemsöborna ("The People of Hemsö", 1887), one of the author's most genuine works, and the crude naturalistic drama Fröken Julie ("Miss Julie", 1888). S. came into contact with European culture and intellectual circles during his long stays abroad, particularly in Denmark, in Switzerland, where he made contact with the Russian revolutionaries, in Germany, and in France. Brandes made known to him the thought of Nietzsche, and in I havsbandet ("By the Open Sea", 1890) S. wrote his novel of the superman. Then, having become acquainted with the visionary mysticism of Swedenborg, S. passed through a profound mystical crisis, arriving at a vision of life in which suffering is justified as expiation of evil and sin and, as Gabetti writes, "his religiosity became ever more colored with Catholicism". Of his many writings from this period, the most typical that may be cited are Inferno (1897) and Till Damaskus ("The Road to Damascus", 1898-1904); the dramas Påsk ("Easter", 1901) with the central figure of Eleonora, in which the sense of suffering and expiation was poetically sublimated; Dödsdansen ("The Dance of Death", 1901), one of the gloomiest and most desolate expressions of S.'s misogyny; the more properly fairy-tale dramas, in which the influence of Maeterlinck is also felt, 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 for it composed other fairy-tale, symbolic and mystical dramas, among them Spöksonaten ("The Ghost Sonata", 1907), in which mystical exaltation reaches its diapason. In his last years he engaged once again in violent literary and political polemics, attacking the neo-humanism of Heidenstam and professing forms of a vaguely Christianizing socialism. His death deeply moved even the humblest classes.
S. is one of the most tormented and exasperated figures in European literature of the late nineteenth century. There is no point of arrival in his voluminous work as a writer, but his vocation and his commitment are undeniable, and his multiform output is studded with surprising intuitions and anticipations of cultural and artistic movements later than his own era, to which he is in substance far less bound than an Ibsen. He is a figure who, already in his lifetime, belonged not only to Sweden but to Europe, and he was confusedly and painfully aware of it.
Bibliography6 works
Augusto Guidi