August Strindberg

August Strindberg (1849-1912), Swedish dramatist, who is often considered the greatest figure in Swedish literature.

Strindberg was born in Stockholm on January 22, 1849, the son of an impoverished gentleman and a servant. After five years of intermittent attendance at the University of Uppsala, Strindberg was variously employed in Stockholm as schoolteacher, tutor, actor, newspaperman, and librarian. His literary output is usually separated by critics into two categories, the Naturalistic and the Expressionistic, just as his life was divided by an unproductive so-called Inferno period (1894-1896) during which the author lived in Paris, suffered mental illness, and experienced the end of two of his three unhappy marriages.

Strindberg's early works, mostly novels and plays, are strongly Naturalistic, written in revolt against the prevailing Romanticism of Swedish literature. Although plays by Strindberg were produced in the early 1870s, it was not until the publication of the novel The Red Room (1879; trans. 1913) that he achieved fame. The work trenchantly satirizes the institutions and conditions of Sweden in the late 1870s. The most important plays of Strindberg's early Naturalistic period are The Father (1887; trans. 1907), a domestic tragedy detailing one of Strindberg's favourite themes, the inherent cruelty of the marriage relationship; Miss Julie (1888; trans. 1965), a poignant study of the ill-fated sexual encounter between an ambitious footman and a neurotic count's daughter; and The Stronger (1889; trans. 1912), a one-act play about two women, one of whom silently listens to the other's compulsive confession. Miss Julie was made into a successful film (1951) by the Swedish director Alf Sjöberg, an opera (1965) by the American composer Ned Rorem, and a ballet (1950) by the Swedish choreographer Birgit Cullberg.

To inaugurate his second period of literary productivity, Strindberg wrote the autobiographical Inferno (1897; trans. 1913), describing the period of his mental incapacity. His work after this time is less realistic, influenced by his Swedenborgian faith and by such European literary movements as Symbolism and Expressionism. His play There Are Crimes and Crimes (1899; trans. 1912) deals with the conflict between ethics and aesthetics. More typical of Strindberg's later work are the two symbolic plays A Dream Play (written 1901 and produced 1907; trans. 1912) and The Spook Sonata (1908; trans. 1916). The first named requires an extraordinary series of stage effects to tell the fragmented story of the return of the daughter of the Hindu god Indra to Earth; the last named, usually performed in English as The Ghost Sonata, presents a gallery of grotesque characters confronted with the conflict between reality and illusion. The two plays were enormously important in freeing the theatre of the early 20th century from realistic conventions of time, place, and action as well as in their anticipation of such midcentury dramatic movements as the Theatre of Cruelty and the Theatre of the Absurd. The Dance of Death (1900; trans. 1912) appears to be a return to Realism; the play is filled, however, with macabre medieval symbolism as it tells of a hate-filled marriage on an isolated island.

Strindberg died in Stockholm on May 14, 1912. In his influence on modern drama he ranks with the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen and the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. His work was to influence such modern playwrights as Sean O'Casey, Eugene O'Neill, Luigi Pirandello, and Pär Lagerkvist. All the plays mentioned above are still performed in theatres throughout the world. In addition to a total of more than 70 plays, including many chronicle plays on Swedish history, Strindberg produced an enormous amount of literature in other forms. He wrote novels, short stories, poetry, essays, satire, and works on history and travel. A collection of his complete works in Swedish (planned to encompass some 75 volumes) began publication in 1981.