History of august strindberg

Strindberg subsequently broke with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the Modern European stage and Expressionism. 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.

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 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. 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. 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 dark, paranoid and confusing tale of his years in Paris, written in French—he claims to have successfully carried out experiments in alchemy and cast black magic spells on his daughter.

He had children with all his wives, but his hypersensitive, neurotic character led to bitter divorces. Late in his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner , 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 shocking 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 the family were under stress in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace.

Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated heatedly among writers, critics and politicians. Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled, and his legacy of words and deeds has often been interpreted as misogynist by both his contemporaries as well as modern readers. However, most acknowledge that he had uncommon insight into the hypocrisy of his society 's gender expectations, sexual behavior, and morality.

Marriage and the family were under stress in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and morality were debated heatedly among writers and critics as well as politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.

Strindberg was admired by the working classes as a radical writer. For his political standpoints, Strindberg has been heavily promoted in socialist countries, such as the Soviet Union , Central and Eastern Europe , and in Cuba. It is not so widely known that he also was a telegrapher , painter , photographer, and alchemist. As a young student, before he became a writer, he worked for a while as an assistant in a chemist's shop in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden.

On his death in , from cancer at the age of 63, August Strindberg was interred in the Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. There are several statues and busts erected of him in Stockholm, most prominently one by Carl Eldh. His early plays were written in the Naturalistic style, and his works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.

Later, he underwent a time of inner turmoil known as the Inferno Period, which culminated in the production of a book written in French, appropriately entitled Inferno. Afterwards, he broke with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the Modern European stage and Expressionism. It remains one of Strindberg's most admired and influential dramas, seen as an important precursor to both dramatic expressionism and surrealism.

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. Mortensen and Brian W. The older and still sound biography by V.

McGill, August Strindberg: The Bedeviled Viking , slights the latter half of Strindberg's life and has not been revised to accommodate the findings of more recent scholarship. For Strindberg's contribution to the novel see the excellent work by Eric O. Alrik Gustafson, A History of Swedish Literature , contains a critical bibliography of sources on Strindberg's life and work in Swedish and English.

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August Strindberg gale. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. He was, at this time, an outspoken socialist , mainly influenced by anarchist or libertarian socialist ideas. He read widely among progressive thinkers, including Cabet , Fourier , Babeuf , Saint-Simon , Proudhon , and Owen , whom he referred to as "friends of humanity and sharp thinkers.

By the early s, many young political and literary radicals in Sweden had come to view Strindberg as a champion of their causes. However, in contrast to the Marxist -influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement , Strindberg espoused an older type of agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas. His views remained as fluid and eclectic as they were uncompromising, and on certain issues he could be wildly out of step with the younger generation of socialists.

To Martin Kylhammar, the young Strindberg "was a 'reactionary radical' whose writing was populist and democratic but who persisted in an antiquated romanticizing of agrarian life. Although he had been an early proponent of women's rights , calling for women's suffrage in , Strindberg later became disenchanted with what he viewed as an unnatural equation of the sexes.

In times of personal conflict and marital trouble which was much of the time , he could lash out with crudely misogynistic statements. His troubled marriage with Siri von Essen, ended in an upsetting divorce in , became the inspiration for The Defence of a Fool , begun in and published in Strindberg famously sought to insert a warning to lawmakers against "granting citizens' rights to half-apes, lower beings, sick children, [who are] sick and crazed thirteen times a year during their periods, completely insane while pregnant, and irresponsible throughout the rest of their lives.

Strindberg's misogyny was at odds with the younger generation of socialist activists and has drawn attention in contemporary [ when? So has Strindberg's anti-Jewish rhetoric. Although particularly targeting Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life, he also attacked Jews and Judaism as such. Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg.

In the mids he toned down and then mostly ended his anti-Jewish rhetoric, after publicly declaring himself not to be an anti-Semite in A self-declared atheist in his younger years, Strindberg would also re-embrace Christianity , without necessarily making his peace with the church. As noted by Stockholm's Strindberg Museum , the personal and spiritual crisis that Strindberg underwent in Paris in the s, which prompted the writing of Inferno , had aesthetic as well as philosophical and political implications: "Before the Inferno crisis — 92 , Strindberg was influenced by anarchism , Rousseau , Schopenhauer , and Nietzsche ; in the years after the crisis — he was influenced by Swedenborg , Goethe , Shakespeare , and Beethoven.

What is the purpose of having toiled through thirty years only to gain, through experience, that which I had already understood as a concept? In my youth, I was a sincere believer, and you [i. Out of a free-thinker you have made me an atheist; out of an atheist, a religious believer. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have praised socialism.

Five years later, you have proven to me the unreasonableness of socialism. Everything that once enthralled me you have invalidated! And presuming that I will now abandon myself to religion, I am certain that you will, in ten years, disprove religion. Strindberg, Inferno , Chapter XV. Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer.

However, several former admirers were disappointed and troubled by what they viewed as Strindberg's descent into religious conservatism and, perhaps, madness. His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting , now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism.

To the young Strindberg, the trail-blazer, the rouser from sleep, let us offer all our praise and admiration. To the writer in a more mature age [let us offer] a place of rank on the Aeropagus of European erudition. But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [] and A Blue Book [], who, in the shadows of Inferno [] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism — let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self.

Hjalmar Branting, in Social-Demokraten , 22 January Toward the end of his life, however, Strindberg would dramatically reassert his role as a radical standard-bearer and return to the good graces of progressive Swedish opinion. In April , Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII "pharao worship" , the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam "the spirit-seer of Djursholm" , and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin "the humbug explorer".

The ensuing debate, known as "Strindbergsfejden" or "The Strindberg Feud", is one of the most significant literary debates in Swedish history. It came to comprise about a thousand articles by various authors across some eighty newspapers, raging for two years until Strindberg's death in The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics.

Strindberg, something of a polymath , was also a telegrapher , theosophist , painter, photographer and alchemist. Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process. 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 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 19th-century art. 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.

Anders Zorn also did a portrait. Strindberg's 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 him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars.

The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted;. Today, in these days of x-rays, the miracle was that neither a camera nor a lens was used. For me this means a great opportunity to demonstrate the real circumstances by means of my photographs made without a camera and lens, recording the firmament in early spring His interest in the occult in the s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific.

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

Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions , as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel. It remains unclear to what extent the book represents a genuine attempt at autobiography or exaggerates for literary effect.

Olof Lagercrantz has suggested that Strindberg staged and imagined elements of the crisis as material for his literary production. Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married, and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner — who was 41 years younger than Strindberg.

She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He was related to Nils Strindberg a son of one of August's cousins. Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Marriage and families were under stress 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. It is now a museum, known as the Strindberg Museum , which is open to visitors. It contains numerous of Strindberg's personal possessions including his piano.

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History of august strindberg

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