Youth
Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel
The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect."Merriam-Webster (1995, 1074-5). One of his biographers, Olof Lagercrantz, warns against the use of
The Son of a Servant as a biographical source. Lagercrantz notes Strindberg's "talent to make us believe what he wants us to believe" and his unwillingness to accept any characterization of his person other than his own (1984).
When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. When he was thirteen, she died. Though his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealised maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard her as his worst enemy. He passed his graduation exam in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.
Strindberg would spend the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for exams and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a chemist's shop in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between his studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm.Adams (2002). He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry exam which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.
1870s
Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet...Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on the 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called
In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he first read both Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom would influence him.
Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870-1871, he re-wrote an historical tragedy,
Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called
The Outlaw. Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy
Earl Haakon (1802). Following further revision in the summer,
The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called
Master Olof. In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, which initiated decades of rewrites and insprited a bitterness and contempt for official institutions in Strindberg. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In
Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.
Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's
History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes'
Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature. From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered
Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly-built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.
Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness...he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel
The Red Room was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of
The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:
I am a socialist, a nihilist, a republican, anything that is anti-reactionary! ... I want to turn everything upside down to see what lies beneath; I believe we are so webbed, so horribly regimented, that no spring-cleaning is possible, everything must be burned, blown to bits, and then we can start afresh ...
1880s
Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of
The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed
The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title
Spring Harvest. From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the
Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on
The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larrson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years,
Studies in Cultural History, was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage
Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version...the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of
Master Olaf was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play
Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal...my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.
Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories,
The New Kingdom. While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's
A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote
Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez par Namours, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from
Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.
In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories,
Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of
Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories,
Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well-received.
In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called
The Confession of a Fool. In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play,
Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, he concluded he need to leave Lutheranism, which he had been since childhood, and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping as one, which he had studied while a student. His works
The People of Hemsö (1887) and
Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in
The Confession of a Fool (1888),
Pariah (1889),
Creditors (1889), and
By the Open Sea (1890).
Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he would rather have a scientific life instead of a literary one, and he began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began
The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or
The Red Room, is when he is a poet and journalist and it ends with him meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years spanning from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published til after his death. The three missing years, 1875—1877, was the time Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled
He and She, it was not printed until 1919, after his death. it contains the love letters between the two during that period.
In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing
The Father in matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though his reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing
The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in
The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Stindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunites to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on
The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.
Before writing
Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces,
Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by Andre Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. As the "son of a servant", it is believed this play was inspired by his marriage to an aristocratic woman.
In the essay
On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was one the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche to submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as
Creditors (1889),
The Stronger (1889), and
Pariah (1889).
In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he would ride out the final phase of the divorce and would later use this agonizing ordeal for the basis of
The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was
The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general were also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that would influence his later works.
1890s
After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled his creativity, and Strindberg insisted he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include:
Debit and Credit (1892),
Facing Death (1892),
Motherly Love (1892), and
The First Warning (1893). His play
The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies,
Playing with Fire (1893) and his post-inferno trilogy
To Damascus (1898—1904).
In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin, Germany. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including
The Father,
Miss Julie and
Creditors.
Similar to twenty years earlier when he would frequent The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he would meet a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than him; they were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me".
Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid 1890s, and perhaps that he experienced temporarily insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz believed he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of his edited journals
Legends and
Jacob Wrestling (both 1898), where he noted the impact Emanuel Swedenborg had on his current work.
"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting for retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and felt his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.
In 1899, he returned to Sweden, following a successful production of
Master Olaf in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become the national poet and he felt the way to attain that status would be to write historical dramas. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology. Works included the so called Vasa Trilogy:
The Saga of the Folkungs (1899),
Gustavus Vasa (1899), and
Erik XIV (1899).
1900s
Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theater in 1902 (including
The Bond,
The Stronger, and
The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theater, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.
In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote
The Last of the Knights (1908),
Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and
The Regents (1909).
His other works, such as
Days of Loneliness (1903),
The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and
The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels
The Gothic Rooms (1904) and
Black Banners (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.
August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of
Miss Julie and wrote to him for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of
Miss Julie. August Palme, Strindberg's friend, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.
In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. It has been suggested that Strindberg was too controversial an author to receive the prize. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special award. Nathan Söderblom was noted as a donor, yet he was criticized by the conservative party. In total there was 45,000 Swedish crowns collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Bonnier Group paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for his complete works. He invited his first three children to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri, and the other for himself.
He founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm in 1907. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugén, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of
The Pelican.
Later life and death
Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States...
The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Wärner Oland.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach disease, presumably cancer. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred in the Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm, and thousands of people followed his corpse during the funeral proceedings.
Legacy
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are a few of the many people who have cited him 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 "the greatest genius of all modern dramatists".
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.
