August Strindberg

Biography

Strindberg finished his first major play at the end of 1871, and in September 1872 the Royal Theatre rejected it. He rewrote Master Olof, about the church reformer Olaus Petri, over decades, and it reached the stage only in 1881. His resentment of official institutions lasted a long time.

He was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm. His father, Carl Oscar Strindberg, was a shipping agent; his mother, Eleonora Ulrika Norling, had earlier worked in the household as a serving-maid, hence the title of his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant. As a child he was drawn to natural science, photography and religion, to which his Pietist mother introduced him. She died when he was thirteen, and less than a year later his father married the children’s governess. Relations with his stepmother never worked out. In May 1867 Strindberg passed his school-leaving examination and enrolled at Uppsala University. His studies went by fits and starts: he worked as a teacher and private tutor, was an extra at the Royal Theatre, studied chemistry, and in 1869 failed an examination and lost interest in his courses. In 1872 he left the university without a degree, and later ridiculed Uppsala and its professors in a collection of stories about student life.

From the end of 1874 he served for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library, wrote for Stockholm newspapers, and met writers and painters in Bern’s Restaurant, in a room known as the Red Room. In 1875 he met Siri von Essen, an actress, then still married. They married on 30 December 1877. Their first child was born prematurely and lived two days. Karin, Greta and Hans were born later. In January 1879 he was declared bankrupt, and in November The Red Room appeared, a satire of Stockholm society.

In Sweden the reviews were mixed; in Denmark the novel was welcomed with enthusiasm. From 1883 Strindberg lived abroad: in France, in Switzerland, then in Germany and Denmark. The story collection Getting Married (1884) brought him a trial for blasphemy, and he was acquitted. The novel The People of Hemsö (1887) remains one of his most widely read books in Sweden. In the late 1880s he discovered naturalism and wrote The Father in a matter of weeks. In it a captain, a father and a scientist, is pushed by his wife into doubting his paternity and loses his mind. He sent a copy to Émile Zola, who replied coolly. Miss Julie and Creditors followed. The preface to Miss Julie sets out the principles of naturalist theatre and is probably his best-known statement of theory. In Copenhagen he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, modelled on the Théâtre Libre in Paris, but it lasted less than a year.

In 1891 his marriage to Siri broke down. In the following years Strindberg lived in Berlin, where his plays were staged by Otto Brahm’s company, and married the Austrian journalist Frida Uhl; that marriage fell apart within a year, though it was formally dissolved only in 1897. In 1894–1896 came a series of attacks that he himself called the “Inferno crisis”. He worked on chemistry, optics and alchemy, tried to make gold, and then returned to Sweden, settled in Lund and wrote Inferno in French. Some scholars see in the book evidence of illness; others hold that he deliberately experimented on himself. I think it can no longer be checked. Under the influence of Swedenborg he resolved to become “the Zola of the Occult”.

After the crisis he took up drama again. In 1898–1902 alone he produced about twenty plays, many on historical subjects, among them Erik XIV and Gustavus Vasa. To Damascus and A Dream Play (written in 1901, staged in 1907) abandon the ordinary time and space of the stage, and their characters split, double and merge. In 1907, together with the actor August Falck, he opened the Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, a house of 160 seats where his chamber plays were given, including The Ghost Sonata. He set out the theatre’s rules in a letter to Falck: no liquor, no Sunday performances, no intermissions. Audiences and critics did not appreciate the chamber plays at the time, and the theatre went bankrupt in 1910, though it did not close until after the author’s death.

Strindberg also drew and painted, mostly in periods of personal crisis. About 117 of his paintings are known, most of them stormy seascapes. He was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin. In photography he made many self-portraits, and also images without a camera or lens: crystals grew on the emulsion under the open sky, and he called these works Celestographs.

In 1909 the Nobel Prize in Literature went to Selma Lagerlöf. Workers’ organisations then set up a collection for a “people’s prize”, and more than twenty thousand people gave about 45,000 crowns. The publisher Bonnier paid 200,000 crowns for the rights to his collected works. Strindberg divided the money among his children and set aside a share for his former wife Siri, saying it was an old debt. In 1910 he launched attacks on the nationalist cult of Charles XII and on Sven Hedin: the quarrel, known as the Strindberg Feud, lasted until his death, and authors in almost eighty newspapers took part in it.

He died on 14 May 1912 in Stockholm, at the age of sixty-three.

He had asked to be buried as soon as possible and without onlookers, but workers’ organisations insisted on a Sunday, and the funeral was fixed for 19 May. People were waiting at his home and at the cemetery as early as seven in the morning. A short service by the coffin in his apartment was led by Nathan Söderblom, the future archbishop. By one estimate, up to sixty thousand people lined the streets along the route. He was buried in the Norra begravningsplatsen (Northern Cemetery) in Stockholm. The apartment in the Blue Tower at 85 Drottninggatan, where he lived in his last years, has been a museum since 1960.