August Strindberg

(click to enlarge)
Strindberg, lithograph by Edvard Munch, 1896 (credit: Courtesy of the Munch-Museet, Oslo; photograph, O. Vaering)

(born Jan. 22, 1849, Stockholm, Swed. — died May 14, 1912, Stockholm) Swedish playwright and novelist. While working as a journalist, he wrote the historical drama Mäster Olof (1872); though rejected by the national theatre and not produced until 1890, it is now considered the first modern Swedish drama. He won fame with his novel The Red Room (1879), which satirized the Stockholm art world. His unhappy life included three marriages and episodes of mental instability. In his most creative period he moved restlessly around Europe for six years, writing his three major plays: The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and The Creditors (1890). These iconoclastic works portrayed the battle of the sexes using a combination of dramatic naturalism and psychology. During this period he also wrote three novels. After a mental breakdown he experienced a religious conversion that inspired symbolic dramas such as The Dance of Death (1901), A Dream Play (1902), and five "chamber plays," including The Ghost Sonata (1907).

For more information on Johan August Strindberg, visit Britannica.com.

Strindberg, [Johann] August (1849–1912), playwright. Although the Swedish dramatist's plays have never been popular in commercial theatre, they have been performed with some frequency by experimental and collegiate playhouses. The best known are probably Miss Julie and The Father, which, despite a paucity of notable American productions, have exerted a major influence on American dramaturgy. Strindberg's use of both realism, naturalism, and, later, of expressionism had a notable effect on the writings of Eugene O'Neill and other American dramatists.

(b Stockholm, 22 Jan 1849; d Stockholm, 14 May 1912). Swedish painter, sculptor and playwright. He had no art training, but learnt from artist friends after abandoning his studies at the University of Uppsala in 1872. The chief influence on him was Per Ekstr?m, whose broken colour-spot technique he attempted to copy during his initial painting period in 1872-4 in Stockholm and on the skerry-islands Kymmend? and Sandhamn. Very little of Strindberg's early painting survives, but he had already found his special motifs: the sea, usually with turbulent waves; solitary trees or flowers on bare cliffs or sandy beaches in the outermost fringe of the skerries. After he stopped painting in 1874 he became Sweden's leading art critic, as well as the ideological leader of the radical Swedish artists' movement, which in 1884 formed the Konstn?rsf?rbund (the Artists' Association) in protest against the Academy of Art. Prominent among the members were the painters Carl Olof Larsson, Karl Nordstr?m and Richard Bergh. During this period, however, he produced sketches in words and pictures as illustrations to his own writings, which Carl Larsson was commissioned to do thereafter. From 1883 he stayed abroad, primarily in France and Switzerland, and belonged during a couple of long periods to the Scandinavian artists' colony in Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau in France. In 1886 in Switzerland he started photography and took a series of self-portraits that were intended for publication (see Gundlach and others, pp. 251-7). After the failure of his first marriage and a couple of years spent in Denmark, he returned in 1889 to Stockholm, where in addition to his writing he began in 1890 to experiment with drawing and sculpture, for example The Weeping Boy (plaster, h. 200 mm, 1891; Stockholm, Strindbergsmus.).

See the Abbreviations for further details.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) is considered Sweden's greatest author. Although his reputation outside Sweden rests on his plays, in Sweden he is equally important for his stories, novels, poetry, and autobiographical works.

August Strindberg was born on Jan. 22, 1849, in Stockholm. His father, although poor, came from a good family; his mother had been a servant. Family life was disharmonic; Strindberg felt he had been an unwanted child, and he suffered as well from the class distinction between his parents. He began writing plays while a student at Uppsala University. His first mature play, Master Olof (1872), written when he was 23 years old, is considered Sweden's first great drama. It was rejected by the Royal Dramatic Theater because of its "irreverent" - that is, realistic - treatment of Swedish national heroes and because it was written in prose, unthinkable for tragedy at the time. The play gives an excellent picture of Strindberg's radical intellectual interests then: Jean Jacques Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard, Henrik Ibsen, the Danish literary reformer George Brandes, and the English historian Henry Buckle.

During these years Strindberg led an unruly life with a circle of young bohemians and earned his living as a private tutor, insurance agent, journalist, translator (of, among others, Mark Twain and Bret Harte), and assistant in the Royal Library. He married Siri von Essen in 1877; this marriage was the longest and most decisive of his three marriages, which all ended in divorce.

In spite of Master Olof and other, lesser works, Strindberg was unknown when, in 1879, he published the novel The Red Room. This work was Sweden's first realistic novel, a robust satire on just about everything Strindberg had observed in the Stockholm of the 1870s. The novel was a scandal and made him famous overnight.

In the early 1880s Strindberg's work reflected the happy years of his marriage to Siri and his growing confidence as a writer. His most successful play of the time, Lucky Per's Journey (1882), was written for his actress-wife. However, he began to make enemies, especially when he ventured into history-writing from a then radical point of view. He responded, typically, with another social satire, The New Kingdom (1882), much more bitter and personal than The Red Room, which stirred up more hostility. He fled Sweden with his family in 1883, but before leaving he published a collection of angry poems which, in form and style, were completely new in Swedish literature.

In 1884 appeared a collection of stories, Married (the second, harsher collection appeared in 1886), which reflected in their bold treatment of sexual matters the influence of French naturalism. However, what outraged the public was the first clear evidence in the stories of Strindberg's lifelong hatred of the feminist movement and the emancipated woman. In his views on these questions, Strindberg stood alone among major Scandinavian authors. A man who three times married ambitious, career-minded women, he insisted that a woman's place is in the home. Thus he lost the support of many liberal friends.

Mental Crisis

Strindberg's enemies - their ranks now greatly increased - found a trivial occasion to bring a charge of blasphemy against him. To save his publishers, he returned to Sweden, stood trial, and was acquitted. The strain, however, was too much, and the trial marked the acceleration of the persecution complex that led, a decade later, to a period of nearly total madness.

In spite of the damage caused by the trial, the strain of trying to support a growing family by his pen, and even, for a time, a total boycott of his work in Sweden, Strindberg produced many of his greatest works in the last half of the 1880s. These include the plays upon which his European reputation was first based - the naturalistic dramas The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889) - and the autobiographical novels The Son of a Servant and The Confession of a Fool (the latter a ruthlessly one-sided account of his marriage to Siri von Essen). Characteristically, in the midst of his growing personal troubles, he wrote one of his happiest, freshest novels, The People of Hemsö (1887).

Strindberg's European reputation grew, and his plays created sensations when they were performed in private theaters (to escape police censorship) in Denmark, Germany, and France. However, overwork and the nightmarish breakup of his first marriage led to further deterioration of his mental health, and he rejected the offers of producers and turned to science (believing he could synthesize elements) and then to alchemy (to make the gold he sorely needed), and finally he began to study the occult and write for occult journals.

In studying mysticism, theosophy, and especially the works of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, Strindberg felt he had found an answer to why he (and mankind generally) suffered so much. In finding an answer, he recovered his sanity, and a new, perhaps the greatest, period of his authorship began.

Later Career

From the "Inferno" crisis - named for the remarkable account he wrote of the years of near madness, Inferno (1897) - until his death in 1912, Strindberg wrote 29 plays, a volume of poetry, and about 15 volumes of prose. The most important plays of his last period, the expressionistic period, are To Damascus I-III (1898-1904), There Are Crimes and Crimes (1899), Easter (1901), The Dance of Death (1901), Crown Bride (1902), A Dream Play (1902), and the "chamber plays" he wrote for his own theater in 1907. He also wrote a number of historical dramas, the best of which is Gustaf Vasa, and a final, autobiographical play, The Great Highway (1909). Of his prose work, mention should be made of the gripping, personal novels Alone (1903) and The Scapegoat (1907) and the remarkable diary Blå böcker (1907-1912; Blue Books).

Strindberg's last years were comparatively calm, broken only by the "feud" occasioned by the novel Svarta fanor (1907; Black Banners), a final, savage attack on his enemies, real and imagined, all readily identifiable in the book. He died alone, as he had lived, on May 14, 1912, in Stockholm.

Critical Assessment

Strindberg's contribution to world drama was in two areas - naturalism and expressionism. The naturalistic works, including such plays as The Father and Miss Julie, follow the example of Émile Zola and other French writers in striving to present as scientific and objective a picture of life as possible. However, as a playwright, Strindberg was superior to Zola and most other naturalists. His superiority lies just in his refusal to burden his plays with the mass of natural scientific documentation naturalism demanded. He was forced by his own restless, impatient nature - and his great dramatic sense - to seek daring shortcuts to what he wanted to express. Furthermore, Strindberg became increasingly interested in "inner states," especially the "battle of wills," and in the power of mental suggestion, from his readings of pre-Freudian psychologists, criminologists, and authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Nietzsche. Finally, the problems his plays dealt with - often the battle between the sexes - were too personal for him to always achieve naturalistic objectivity. His woman figures are often "vampires" (Tekla in Creditors, for example), and their victims are often recognizable as Strindberg himself. For these reasons, many of Strindberg's naturalistic plays threaten constantly to break out of their naturalistic mold, and in their savagery, their heightened realism, they point ahead to the expressionistic plays which follow the "Inferno" crisis.

The expressionistic plays - such as To Damascus, The Dance of Death, and The Ghost Sonata - depart, at their most extreme, from the naturalistic plays in that Strindberg attempts to dramatize directly his emotions and view of life, neglecting almost totally a logically developed plot, psychological motivation, and realism in stage setting. Strindberg came to believe that life is a hideous dream and, in a number of these later plays, dramatizes this view. There is a kind of "realism" in even the most extreme of these plays, however - they are none of them like the moody, vague, symbolist plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, for example - but it is the aching, sharp-edged, hallucinatory realism of nightmare, not of our waking life.

The themes of the later plays are the same as in Strindberg's earlier work: life's pervasive, incomprehensible cruelty and the battle of wills in which the weaker is mercilessly destroyed. But now there is a much more overt metaphysical perspective: life is a kind of hell, or purgatory, from which we will someday be released; there are "powers" that punish us for our sins; and "mankind is to be pitied."

Strindberg's influence on world drama continues to be considerable. European expressionism around World War I owed much to his later plays, Pär Lagerkvist in Sweden and Eugene O'Neill in America believed him to be the portal figure in 20th-century drama, and the seeds of much recent experimental drama can be traced back to Strindberg too.

Further Reading

Useful accounts in English of Strindberg's life are Elizabeth Sprigge, The Strange Life of August Strindberg (1949), and Brita M. E. Mortensen and Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Work (1949). The older and still sound biography by V. J. McGill, August Strindberg: The Bedeviled Viking (1930), slights the latter half of Strindberg's life and has not been revised to accommodate the findings of more recent scholarship.

Critical works dealing with Strindberg's drama include Martin Lamm, Modern Drama (trans. 1952); Walter Gilbert Johnson, Strindberg and the Historical Drama (1963); Maurice Jacques Valency, The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama (1963); and Carl Enoch William Leonard Dahlstrom, Strindberg's Dramatic Expressionism (2d ed. 1965). For Strindberg's contribution to the novel see the excellent work by Eric O. Johannesson, The Novels of August Strindberg: A Study in Themes and Structure (1968). Alrik Gustafson, A History of Swedish Literature (1961), contains a critical bibliography of sources on Strindberg's life and work in Swedish and English.

Additional Sources

Dittmann, Reidar, Eros and psyche: Strindberg and Munch in the 1890s, Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982.

Lagercrantz, Olof Gustaf Hugo, August Strindberg, New York:Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984.

Meyer, Michael Leverson, Strindberg, New York: Random House, 1985.

Strindberg, August, Inferno and From an occult diary, Harmondsworth, Eng.; New York: Penguin Books, 1979.

Strindberg, August (1849-1912), Swedish writer, insatiably curious about art and science, whose experimental interest in photography between 1886 and 1907 was mainly an extension of his literary concerns. Thus his 1886 photographs of the French countryside (sometimes from train windows), and his family scenes and self-portraits, were intended to illustrate books he was writing. He was one of the first writers to join the fruitful dialogue between photography and literature. Ever the innovator and experimenter, Strindberg in the 1890s did research on the recording of colour; tried pinhole photography; and made photograms by placing a sensitized surface against a frost-covered window pane. In the same spirit of technical minimalism, he tried to photograph the stars by exposing a sensitized plate immersed in a developing bath to the sky; convinced that he had revolutionized astrophotography, he failed to realize that the ‘star clouds’ in the image were simply white patches produced by clumsy manipulation. Fascinated by occultism, Strindberg also attempted to photograph the soul, then gravitated towards ‘psychological portraits’. Unfortunately, although his writings indicate a wide variety of photographic experiments, only c.60 images survive.

— Clément Chéroux

Bibliography

• Hedström, P., Strindberg, Painter and Photographer (2001)

Strindberg, August (1849–1912), Swedish playwright. His early drama Lycko‐Pers Resa (Lucky Per's Journey, 1881) suggested that Strindberg was familiar with narrative folklore; and various folk beliefs make their way into such late symbolic plays as Spöksonaten (The Ghost Sonata, 1907). Admiration for Hans Christian Andersen reveals itself in Sagor (Tales, 1903), in which Strindberg imitates the Dane's whimsical and experimental use of the folk tale and Märchen.

Bibliography

• Mays, Milton A., ‘Strindberg's Ghost Sonata: Parodied Fairy Tale on Original Sin’, Modern Drama, 10 (1967).
• Syndergaard, Larry, ‘The Skogsra of Folklore and Strindberg's The Crown Bride’, Comparative Drama, 6 (1972).

— Niels Ingwersen

Strindberg, August (Johan August Strindberg) (Stockholm, 1849-1912, Stockholm), one of the most gifted writers and stormiest personalities of Swedish literature. He influenced German literature particularly through the Naturalistic plays Fadren (1887, Der Vater, The Father) and Fröken Julie (1888, Fräulein Julie, Miss Julie), and later through symbolical plays foreshadowing Expressionism, especially Till Damaskus (Pt. 1 and 2, 1898, Pt. 3, 1901, Nach Damaskus, To Damascus), Ett drömspel (1902, Ein Traumspiel, A Dream Play), and Spöksonaten (1907, Gespenstersonate, The Ghost Sonata). (See Stationendrama.)

Quotes:

"I always disliked dogs, those protectors of cowards who lack the courage to fight an assailant themselves."

"I dream, therefore I exist."

"Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy."

"Family... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children."

"That is the thankless position of the father in the family -- the provider for all, and the enemy of all."

"Friendship can only exist between persons with similar interests and points of view. Man and woman by the conventions of society are born with different interests and different points of view."

See more famous quotes by J. August Strindberg

"Strindberg" redirects here. For other uses, see Strindberg (disambiguation).

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August Strindberg
Born	Johan August Strindberg 21 January 1849(1849-01-21) Stockholm, Sweden
Died	14 May 1912 (aged 63) Stockholm, Sweden
Occupation	Playwright, author
Literary movement	Naturalism Expressionism
Signature

Johan August Strindberg ( pronounced (help·info) (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright and writer. He is arguably the most influential of all Swedish authors, and one of the most influential Scandinavian authors, along with Knut Hamsun, with whom he fraternized while in Paris during the mid 1890s, Henrik Ibsen, Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen. Strindberg is known as one of the developers of modern theatre. His work is of two major literary styles, Naturalism and Expressionism.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Career 1.3 Politics 1.4 Writing 1.5 Other interests 1.6 Personal life 2 Bibliography 2.1 Drama 2.2 Poetry, fiction, and autobiography 3 In popular culture 4 Gallery 5 References 6 Sources 7 External links

Biography

Early years

Strindberg was the third son of Carl Oscar Strindberg, a shipping agent, and Ulrika Eleonora (Nora) Norling. Ulrika was twelve years Carl's junior and of humble origin, called a "domestic servant woman" by Strindberg. He used this expression in the title of his autobiographical novel, Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of a Servant). Strindberg's paternal grandfather Zacharias was born during 1758 to a clergyman in Jämtland and settled in Stockholm, where he became a successful spice tradesman and a major of the Burghers' Military Corps. Strindberg's aunt Johanna Magdalena Elisabeth Strindberg (1797-1880), also called "Lisette", was married to the inventor and industrialist Samuel Owen (born 1774 in Norton-in-Hales, Shropshire, England, died February 15, 1854 in Stockholm) who went to Sweden during 1804 to help with the installation of the first steam engines for industrial use in Sweden and later during 1806 set up his own workshop 'Kungsholms Mekaniska Verkstad' in Stockholm. Carl Oscar Strindberg's older brother Johan Ludvig Strindberg was a successful businessman, the model for the protagonist Arvid Falk's wealthy and socially ambitious uncle in Strindberg's novel Röda rummet (The Red Room)Strindberg's own version of his childhood is available in his novel The Son of a Servant, but at least one of his biographers, Olof Lagercrantz, warns against its use as a biographical source. Much of what Strindberg wrote has an autobiographical character, but 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.

From the age of seven, Strindberg matured in the Norrtull area on the northern, almost-rural periphery of Stockholm, not far from Tegnérlunden, the park where Carl Eldh's grand statue of Strindberg was later placed. He went to the elementary schools of Klara and Jakob parishes, continuing to the Stockholms Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys. He completed his graduation exam studentexamen on May 25, 1867, and matriculated at the University of Uppsala in the autumn.

Career

Strindberg would spend the next 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 first left Uppsala during 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. He returned to Uppsala during January 1870 to study and work on a set of plays, the first of which began at the Royal Theatre during September 1870, a biography of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. In Uppsala, he started Runa, a small literary club with friends who all took pseudonyms from Nordic mythology; Strindberg called himself Frö after the god of fertility. He spent a few more semesters in Uppsala, finally leaving during March 1872 without graduating. He would often ridicule Uppsala and its professors, as when he published Från Fjerdingen och Svartbäcken ("From Fjerdingen and Svartbäcken", 1877), short stories describing Uppsala student life. After leaving university for the last time, he embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm.

Politics

The history of the Paris Commune during 1871 caused young Strindberg to develop the opinion that politics is a conflict between the upper- and lower classes. He was admired by many as a radical writer. He was a socialist (or perhaps more of an anarchist, which he himself claimed on at least one occasion^{[citation needed]}). Strindberg's political opinions nevertheless changed considerably within this category over the years, and he was never primarily a political writer. Nor did he often campaign for any one issue, preferring instead to scorn his enemies manifesto-style— the military, the church, the monarchy, the politicians, the stingy publishers, the incompetent reviewers, the narrow-minded, the idiots —and he was not loyal to any party or ideology. Many of his works however had at least some politics and sometimes an abundance of it. They often displayed the conviction that life and the prevailing system was profoundly unjust and injurious to ordinary citizens.

The changing nature of his political positions is perhaps illustrable by the women's rights issue. Early on, Strindberg was sympathetic to women of 19th-century Sweden, calling for women's suffrage as early as 1884. However, during other periods he had wildly misogynistic opinions, calling for lawmakers to reconsider the emancipation of these "half-apes ... mad ... criminal, instinctively evil animals". This has become controversial in contemporary assessments of Strindberg, as have his antisemitic descriptions of Jews (and, in particular, Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life) in some works (eg. Det nya riket), particularly during the early 1880s. Strindberg's antisemitic pronouncements, just like his opinions of women, have been debated, and also seem to have varied considerably. Many of these attitudes, passions and behaviours may have been developed for literary reasons and ended as soon as he had exploited them in books.^[2]

In satirizing Swedish society—in particular the upper classes, the cultural and political establishment, and his many personal and professional foes—he could be very confrontational, with scarcely-concealed caricatures of political opponents. This could take the form of brutal character disparagement or mockery, and while the presentation was generally skilful, it was not necessarily subtle.

His daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry Vladimir Martynovich Smirnov ("Paulsson").^[3] Because of his political views, Strindberg was promoted strongly in socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union and Cuba.^{[citation needed]}

Writing

Michael Chekhov as Erik in the MAT First Studio's 1921 production of Strindberg's Erik XIV (1899).

A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (Röda rummet) (1879) made him famous. His early plays were written in the Naturalistic style. 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 (Fröken Julie). His most popular and maybe his best novel is Natives of Hemsö (Hemsöborna).

Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "Greater Naturalism." He did not prefer expository character backgrounds seen in the work of Ibsen, or write plays that gave his audiences a "slice of life" because he felt that these plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological battle of brains (hjärnornas kamp). 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. Furthermore, he intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature somewhat of a science.

Later, he had a time of inner turmoil known as the "Inferno Period", which culminated in the production of a book written in French, Inferno. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with 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 (Dödsdansen), A Dream Play (Ett drömspel) and The Ghost Sonata (Spöksonaten) are well-known plays from this period.

One year before his death, his main book publisher Albert Bonniers förlag bought the rights to all his writings for 200,000 Swedish crowns, a fortune at that time, which Strindberg shared with his children.

Other interests

Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, painter, photographer and alchemist.

Painting and photography offered venues for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.^[4] Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his, were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of nineteenth century art.^[5] Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis.^[6]

The Town, 1903

A Coast, 1903

The White Mare II, 1892

Seascape, 1894

His interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of Strindberg.

Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life. In the curious autobiographical work Inferno—a paranoid and confusing tale of his years in Paris, written in French—he claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter.

Personal life

Strindberg was married three times, to Siri von Essen (1850–1912), Frida Uhl (1872–1943), and Harriet Bosse (1878–1961). He had children with all his wives. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963), whose book illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.

Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Most acknowledge, however, that he had uncommon insight into the hypocrisy of his society's gender roles and sexual morality. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.

Carl Eldh's grand statue of Strindberg in Tegnérlunden, Stockholm

Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. Now it is a museum.

By the end of his life Strindberg had become a religious Christian again, writing religious works inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg.

During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia, and he never recovered completely. At this time he also started to suffer from a stomach disease, presumably cancer. He died during 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.

Several statues and busts of him have been erected in Stockholm, the most prominent of which is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park next to the house where Strindberg lived the last years of his life.

Bibliography

Strindberg wrote 58 plays and an autobiography (9 volumes, A Soul's Advance, 1886-1903)

Drama

The Outlaw, 1871 Master Olof, 1872 Lucky Peter's Travels, 1882 The Father, a tragedy, 1887 Miss Julie, a naturalistic play, 1888 Comrades, 1888 Creditors, a tragicomedy, 1888 Pariah, one-act play, 1888 The Stronger, a dramatic sketch, 1888-1889 Motherly Love, one-act play, 1892 The First Warning, one-act play, 1892 To Damascus, trilogy, 1898-1902 Gustav Vasa, 1899 Erik XIV, 1899

The Dance of Death, 1900 Easter, a play in three acts, 1900 Engelbrekt, 1901 Carl XII, 1901 A Dream Play, 1901 Swan Blood, 1902 The World History Plays1903 The Nightingale of Wittenberg Through Deserts to Ancestral Lands Hellas The Lamb and the Beast The Chamber Plays, 1907 The Storm The Burned Site The Pelican The Ghost Sonata Merry Christmas!, a verse drama, 1909 The Great Highway, 1909

Poetry, fiction, and autobiography

From Fjerdingen and Svartbäcken, short stories, 1877 The Red Room, novel, 1879 Swedish People at Work and Play, social history, 1881-1882 The New Country, novel, 1882 Swedish Destiny and Adventure, I-IV, short stories, 1882-1891 Poetry in Verse and Prose, 1883 Sleepwalker Awakens to the Day, fiction, 1884 Married I-II, short stories, 1884-1886 Utopian on Reality, short stories, 1885

Son of a Servant, I-V, autobiography, 1886-1909 Natives of Hemsö, novel, 1887 The Defense's Speech of a Fool (Le plaidoyer d’un fou), 1887-1895 Life of an Island Lad, short story, 1888 Among French Peasants, 1889 By The Open Sea, novel, 1890 Inferno, novel/autobiography, 1897 An Attempt at Reform (Unknown)

In popular culture

Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (January 2009)

A mural in honor of August Strindberg in Stockholm, at the Rådmansgatan subway station

• Strindberg's play The Father was mentioned in "The West Coast Delay", an episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in a discussion between Nate Corddry and Matthew Perry. Corddry calls it the "scariest play I ever read" and used it to give advice on Perry's relationship troubles.^[7] Strindberg was also named on 30 Rock, NBC's other show dealing with the behind-the-scenes drama at an SNL-esque show.^{[citation needed]}

• Strindberg was referred to by Mortimer in Joseph Kesselring's play Arsenic and Old Lace. The character compares the stories of his eccentric, and frequently murderous and disturbed, family to be like "if Strindberg wrote Hellzapoppin'."

• Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander ends with a character reading aloud from Strindberg's A Dream Play.

• In a popular Hindi novel A Torn Happiness by Nirmal Verma, Strindberg looms large over the heads of many characters.

• In the Woody Allen movie Manhattan; Woody Allen's character, Issac Davis states: "When it comes to relationships with women, I'm the winner of the August Strindberg Award."

• In the Mel Brooks musical The Producers, the line "So keep your Strindbergs and Ibsens at bay" is present in the song, "Keep It Gay".

• A track featured on the album Eli by artists Jan Akkerman and Kaz Lux was written as a tribute to Strindberg's works.

• In the French film Jules and Jim, the main characters watch one of Strindberg's plays, influencing a change in one of the characters.

• August Strindberg was indirectly referenced in a song by Amanda Palmer titled "Strength Through Music", which contains an audio clip of a web cartoon called Strindberg and Helium. The cartoon almost exclusively quotes Strindberg's work.

Gallery

August Strindberg as a young adult.

August Strindberg, photographic self-portrait.

A portrait of August Strindberg by Richard Bergh (1905).

References

1. ^ August Strindberg at www.imagi-nation.com
2. ^ Lagercrantz, Olof: August Strindberg
3. ^ (in Russian) http://www.rchgi.spb.ru/Pr/spb_2001/usykin.htm
4. ^ Strindberg exhibition, Tate Modern
5. ^ Gunnarsson, Torsten, Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century, pages 256-60. Yale University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-300-07041-1
6. ^ Gunnarsson, page 256.
7. ^ "The West Coast Delay". Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. NBC. 2006-10-09.

Sources

• Ekman, Hans-Göran. 2000. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays. London and New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone. ISBN 0485115522.
• Lagercrantz, Olof. 1984. August Strindberg. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York. ISBN 0374106851.
• Martinus, Eivor, trans. 1987. Motherly Love / Pariah / The First Warning. By August Strindberg. Oxford: Amber Lane. ISBN 0906399793.
• Strindberg, August. 1990. The Great Highway. Absolute Classics ser. Bath: Absolute. ISBN 0948230282.
• Meyer, Michael. 1985. Strindberg: A Biography. Oxford Lives ser. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. ISBN 019281995X.
• Sandbach, Mary, trans. 1984. By The Open Sea. By August Strindberg. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987. ISBN 0140444882.
• Ward, John. 1980. The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg. London: Athlone. ISBN 0485111837.
• Paulson, Arvid, trans. 1970. World Historical Plays. By August Strindberg. New York: Twayne Publishers & The American-Scandinavian Foundation. ISBN 1135841403.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: August Strindberg

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Johan August Strindberg

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: August Strindberg

• Works by August Strindberg at Projekt Runeberg in Swedish
• Works by August Strindberg at Project Gutenberg in English
• The "national edition" of Strindberg's collected works, published by an editorial committee at Stockholm University pages in Swedish
• Concordance of Strindberg's works, based on the so far completed parts of the "national edition", hosted by Språkbanken at Gothenburg University
• The Strindberg Society (Strindbergssällskapet) pages in Swedish
• The Strindberg museum
• Strindberg in Austria, Only museum outside of Sweden dedicated to Strindberg - in Saxen, Upper Austria currently only in German
• Strindberg & Helium, a comedic multimedia interpretation of Strindberg's Inferno
• August Strindberg Society of Los Angeles, Learn about the great Swedish dramatist at the TASSLA site; plays, discussions, photos, drawings, quotes and reviews.
• Citations of Strindberg in the streets of Stockholm
• August Strindberg in AusStage
• The Celestographs of August Strindberg, Article in Cabinet magazine, Issue 3, Summer 2001.
• Review of exhibition of paintings by Strindberg

Persondata
NAME	Strindberg, August Johan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Swedish writer, playwright, painter
DATE OF BIRTH	22 January 1849
PLACE OF BIRTH	Stockholm, Sweden
DATE OF DEATH	14 May 1912
PLACE OF DEATH	Stockholm, Sweden

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