Johan August Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849. He was a
Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who
often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg’s career spanned
four decades, during which time he wrote over sixty plays and more than thirty
works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A
bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of
dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and
history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic
techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of
dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the
“father” of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has
frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.
In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet,
and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known
mostly as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof,
in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at
the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father
(1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas
that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen’s prose
problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play
– responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola’s manifesto “Naturalism in the
Theatre” (1881) and the example set by André Antoine’s newly established Théâtre
Libre (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the
predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play)
and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the “vacillating,
disintegrated” characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived
Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine’s theatre and
he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays “On Psychic Murder” (1887),
“On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre” (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie,
the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the
theatrical movement.
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in
scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent
psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his “Inferno crisis”)
led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the
ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become “the Zola
of the Occult”. In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which,
like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A
Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the
unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space
and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters –
was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also
returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his
play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a
small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt’s Kammerspielhaus, that staged
his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Strindberg died shortly after the first staging of one of his
plays in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley
Theatre in New York, in a translation by painter and playwright Edith Gardener
Shearn Oland and her husband actor Warner Oland. They jointly published their
translations of his plays in book form in 1912.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia
and he never recovered completely. He also began to suffer more clearly from a
stomach cancer (early signs of which had been felt in 1908). The final weeks of
his life were painful. He had long since become a national celebrity, even if
highly controversial, and when it became clear that he was seriously ill the
daily papers in Stockholm began reporting on his health in every edition. He
received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died
on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.
Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in
Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his
body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were
allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were
taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his
funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds
of onlookers. However, the workers’ organisations requested that the funeral
should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their
respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May.
According to Strindberg’s last wish, the funeral procession was to start at
8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless
waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short
service was conducted by Nathan Söderblom by the bier in Strindberg’s home, in
the presence of three of Strindberg’s children and his housekeeper, after which
the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was
followed by groups of students, workers, members of Parliament and a couple of
cabinet ministers, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the
streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier.
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne,
and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an
influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature,
dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg’s influence on
his work, and referred to him as “that greatest genius of all modern
dramatists." Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said of Strindberg:
”[he] was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche".
A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His
novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the
Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg’s best-known play from this
period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People
of Hemsö.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called “greater
Naturalism.” He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise
the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic “slice of
life” because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting.
Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological “battle of brains”:
two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the
other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe.
He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make
literature akin to a science.
Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the
“Inferno crisis,” he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7) in
which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters
with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism
and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the
pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A
Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.
His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss
Julie, and The Father.
Internationally, Strindberg is chiefly remembered as a
playwright, but in his native Sweden his name is associated no less with novels
and other writings. Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of
Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a
Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing
different genres and styles. He is often, though not universally, viewed as
Sweden’s greatest author, and taught in schools as a key figure of Swedish
culture. The most important contemporary literary award in Sweden,
Augustpriset, is named for Strindberg.
The Swedish Composer Ture Rangström dedicated his first
Symphony, which was finished in 1914, to August Strindberg in memoriam.
