August Strindberg

Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 in Stockholm - 14 May 1912 in Stockholm) was a Swedish writer and playwright. Considered one of the most important writers in Sweden and recognized in the world mainly for his plays, he is considered the innovator of the Swedish theater and precursor or antecedent of the theater of cruelty and theater of the absurd. His literary career began at the age of twenty and his extensive and multifaceted production has been collected in more than seventy volumes covering all literary genres. He became interested in photography and painting, and at one stage of his life he became obsessed with alchemy. With a schizophrenic personality, during most of his life he felt harassed and persecuted. This peculiarity endowed his work with a special force and drama.

Strindberg was married three times—to Siri von Essen, Frida Uhl, and Harriet Bosse. He had children with all of them and all three were disastrous marital experiences. He starred in strong ethical and political controversies. Upon his death, he was recognized as a notable person in Sweden, and more than 50,000 people attended his funeral.

Biography

Son of Carl Oscar Strindberg, a merchant, and Ulrika Eleanora Norling, who, before their marriage, had been a domestic worker and his father's lover. His childhood was spent in an unhappy family environment. His parents' relationship, a master-maid relationship, his authoritarianism and her extreme religiosity would mark his formation. He was educated in a school for the elite, feeling displaced in his aristocratic environment. All of this will make him describe his childhood with dramatic and unhappy overtones in his autobiographies (in his stories entitled The Servant's Son ).

In 1867 he finished his baccalaureate studies and entered the University of Uppsala. His father went bankrupt and financial difficulties forced him to combine his studies with various jobs, as a primary school teacher and giving private classes. He began his studies in medicine and later in letters, without being able to finish them. He attended the Royal School of Dramatic Art in Stockholm, where he garnered yet another flop, failing to get past several miscast supporting roles.

He found various jobs, worked as a journalist for several publications and to economic hardships he joined a life in the literary bohemia of his country. At the age of twenty, in 1870, he achieved success: the Stockholm Drama Theater premiered his play To Rome, and the king granted him a scholarship to continue his studies. He began to be known for his work as a journalist.

In 1875, at the age of twenty-six, he became a librarian's assistant at the National Library in Stockholm (where "the stages of human stupidity or genius have been stratified". Self-defense), with several plays in the drawer, without being able to premiere them. This position he considered a failure in that "in order to advance in the career of a librarian and obtain a position, he should have buried six colleagues, all in good health" (Self Defense ).

At this time he became intimate with the Wrangel couple. He, baron and soldier; she, who will be his first wife, Siri von Essen, with theatrical concerns, belonged to a noble Finnish family. Strindberg and Siri began a platonic relationship and in 1877, after the Wrangel couple divorced, they married.

In 1879, with the publication of his novel The Red Room, he established himself as a writer and joined the Swedish renewal movement. In 1882 he premiered his drama Master Olof. Financial problems and Siri's impossible theatrical career facilitated the first disagreements between the couple.

Photograph by Strindberg, taken by himself.

In 1882 he provoked his first major controversy. He did various historical works and also published his satirical novel The New Kingdom. He attacked a renowned Swedish historian and the political establishment. The reaction he provoked forced him to leave Sweden. In 1883 he began, together with Siri, a six-year voluntary exile. Without being abandoned by economic hardships, they toured France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy.

In 1884 Married was published, a harsh attack on bourgeois marital relations. This earned him the general repudiation of the bourgeoisie and a process protected by the Printing Law. He won the process and during it, in one of the performances of his work The Journey of Peter the Lucky , he received the support of the popular classes. The harassment to which he was subjected during the process fueled the paranoia that would always accompany him. He felt harassed and persecuted, mainly by the feminist movement. He published a second part of Married , and if the first part begins with a successful defense of women's rights, the second part becomes an anti-feminist pamphlet. He was also living a stormy love-hate relationship with Siri, in which he accused her of betraying him and being unfaithful. Siri doubted the mental health of her husband and he accused her of making him look crazy to cover up a lesbian relationship (in Self-Defense he describes in a lurid tone her relationship with Siri until the breakup her). From this moment on, a misogynistic feeling will be revealed in his texts. When his popularity was at its lowest he wrote and published People of Hemsö , one of the most applauded texts by the Swedish people, written from exile and set in the Stockholm archipelago.

In 1888 he wrote three of his best-known dramas: The Father, Miss Julia and Creditors, and one of his best novels: Ranö's romantic bell ringer. At the end of 1888 he failed in his attempts to open his own theater in the manner of André Antoine in Paris, the Experimental Theater in Copenhagen (Denmark).

In 1891 he returned to Sweden and divorced Siri. After a brief stay in Sweden he began a new voluntary exile, this time in Berlin, where he lived in bohemia for an unproductive period of several years. He met the Austrian journalist Frida Uhl, whom he married in 1893 to live his briefest marriage, since, although they did not legally divorce until 1897, the couple separated a year after the wedding (his autobiographical work Inferno begins on the day that Frida Uhl leaves him for good).

At the end of 1894 he arrived in Paris, where he experienced his worst crisis. He called it the "crisis from hell." Marital failures, her ever-present persecution mania, a period of loneliness and economic hardship contributed to her taking refuge in drink, drugs and stimulants. When in 1896 her success came to her with the premiere of The Father and Miss Julia (premiered by Antoine in her theater) her obsession was the occultism and alchemy. At this time she was corresponding with Nietzsche. Her mania for persecution led him to report that they had tried to poison him at the hotel where he was staying and to flee from hotel to hotel, always thinking that organizations and individuals were interested and were trying to kill him. He lived through a period of mysticism that also brought him closer to Catholicism.

In 1899, the crisis over, he settled permanently in Stockholm and captured this crisis in the novel Inferno and in the play Road to Damascus. It was in the rehearsals of this last work where he met the twenty-three-year-old actress Harriet Bosse, his third wife, with whom he will experience another stormy marriage relationship, this time for six years.

At this stage of his life he developed a great creative activity, always presided over by success. He wrote plays, novels, essays, newspaper articles, covering all literary genres. He also finally fulfilled his wish to open his own theater, Intima Teatern . From this period are his works The Dance of Death , Dreams and The Sonata of the Specters , among the more than twenty that he wrote in those last years of his life. In 1910 he sparked his last great controversy with the publication of an article in which he vehemently attacked King Charles XII.

On May 14, 1912, he died of cancer. The popular classes gathered at his funeral, more than 50,000 people accompanied the procession. Today, Stockholm has a museum dedicated to Strindberg where his literary, pictorial and photographic production is collected.

Nils Strindberg, a son of his cousin Johan Oscar Strindberg (1843-1905), died on S. A. Andrée's failed Arctic balloon expedition (1897).

Literary work

Strindberg has an extensive production in all literary genres, but his international recognition reaches him, especially, with his plays. His work fundamentally goes through two stages, a first naturalist until 1900 and another expressionist until his death.

In the first stage, he renews the Swedish theater with plays inspired by the aesthetics of naturalism: The Father, Creditors and mainly Miss Julia. It breaks the romantic tradition of the Swedish theater. Regarding the dialogues of Miss Julia , he will write in his prologue:

I have broken with the tradition of presenting the characters as catechists who with stupid questions provoke the brilliant replica. [...] For this I have made the minds work in an irregular way, just as it happens in reality, where in a conversation the subject is never exhausted, where a brain works as a denate wheel in which the other is enlarged to the good of God. That's why the dialogue is off course. I have provided in the first scenes of abundant material that is produced in development, work, repeats, expands the same as the theme of a musical composition.

The themes that characterize his work are present in these three dramas: what he would call the «brain fight», where violence leads to «psychological crime»; the struggle of the sexes; the struggle between the old and the new, and its misogyny.

The violence in his works is of a psychological nature. Two clashing minds, one determined to destroy the other, determined to perpetrate a crime for which they can never be blamed. And if in Creditors it is the strongest mind that kills the weakest, it does not always have to be that way; in The father it is the weaker, "the kitchen timer" of the wife who destroys "the timer", the superior mind of the husband. This is so because she, with her weakness, acts with tricks and deceit. He himself, regarding his first marriage, feels like a superior brain, in a way, destroyed by Siri's inferior brain, aided by "the cult of women, superstitious stronghold of free-thinkers" (Self-defense).

Strindberg's house in Lund, on Gröne Street.

The war of the sexes and the attacks on the institution of marriage, a recurring theme in her work, is equally influenced by her disastrous marital experiences. Also in Self-Defense we can read: «Even if a husband lived more than a hundred years, he could never know anything about the true existence of his wife. He will be able to know the world, the universe, but never that person who lives with him ».

Miss Julia touches on another of Strindberg's great themes: the tensions between the old and the new. An outdated culture and society, the upper classes, in the face of attempts to renew the popular classes that, even with their contradictions, abandon their old roles of submission.

In 1888 he wrote several plays in one act for his Experimental Theater project, a theater he tried to open in Copenhagen. One of them, The strongest one, is considered one of the best monologues in theater history (although in reality there are two characters, two women, one has no dialogue).

In a second period, whose beginning coincides with that of the XX century, Strindberg delves into symbolism and expressionism, abandons the classic units of realism (action, time and space) and writes a more complex theater, an antecedent of the tendencies and avant-gardes that will dominate the theater of the century XX. His works from this period are: The Dance of Death , The Dream and The Sonata of the Specters .

Strindberg's work is the combination of his inner tension and an external world also convulsed by the changes that are taking place in him. In his narrative we can find from The Red Room , an exacerbated criticism of the institutions of his time, to Inferno , a dramatic description of the deep crisis he went through.

Other interests

Strindberg was also a telegrapher, painter, photographer and alchemist. Painting and photography offered examples of his belief that opportunity played a crucial role in the creative process. Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, going beyond those of his contemporaries in their radical lack of affiliation with visual reality. The 117 paintings accepted as his were mostly painted in just a few years, and are now considered among the most original works of art of the century XIX. Although Strindberg was a friend of Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and therefore familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can also be ascribed to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis.

List of works

Translations

• Marry. Stories of marriages, Nordic, 2013, ISBN 978-84-15717-46-1
• Tales, Nordic, 2012, ISBN 978-84-92683-85-7
• The red salon, Acantilate, 2012, ISBN 978-84-15-27752-1
• Miss Julia., Alliance, 2010, ISBN 978-84-206-3598-9
• Black flags, Funambulista, 2010, ISBN 978-84-96601-87-1
• Camera theatre: The storm; The house burned; The spectra sound; The pelicanutAlliance, 2009, ISBN 978-84-206-4381-6
• Small catechism of the lower class and other writingsCaptain Swing, 2009, ISBN 978-84-613-5392-7
• Arrival of a madman, The Blue Olivet, 2008, ISBN 978-84-936637-0-4
• Theatre chosen Alliance, 2008, ISBN 978-84-206-3295-7
• Miss Julie, Chair, 2008, ISBN 978-84-376-2439-6
• The son of the handmaid, Cultural Intervention, 2007, ISBN 978-84-96831-18-6
• Onirical Comedy; The Night of Tribes, Nordic, 2007, ISBN 978-84-934854-6
• On the banks of the free sea, El Cobre, 2005, ISBN 978-84-96095-75-5
• Complete poetry, La Poesía, Mr. Hidalgo, 2004, ISBN 978-84-95976-22-2
• Just, El Cobre, 2003, ISBN 978-84-96095-05-2
• The pelicanut, Sun Dance, 2003, ISBN 978-84-95309-95-2
• Inferno, Acantilate, 2002, ISBN 978-84-95359-77-3
• JustMarmara, 2015, ISBN 978-84-943913-4-7
• Self-defense, Editorial Bruguera, 1972, Legal deposit: B. 33.258-1972.