August Strindberg
Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter whose prolific output spanned naturalism, symbolism, and expressionism, profoundly influencing modern European drama.[1][2] Born in Stockholm to a bourgeois family that later faced financial ruin, Strindberg pursued diverse careers before achieving literary breakthrough with his novel The Red Room (1879), a satirical critique of Swedish society.[3] His dramatic works, exceeding 60 in number, include seminal naturalist plays like The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888), which dissect psychological tensions and class-gender conflicts through deterministic lenses, alongside later visionary pieces such as A Dream Play (1901) and The Ghost Sonata (1907).[2][1] Strindberg's innovations lay in pioneering psychological realism and subjective expressionism, shifting theater from external plots to inner turmoil and dream logic, thereby paving the way for 20th-century playwrights like Eugene O'Neill and Ingmar Bergman.[2] He also produced over 30 non-dramatic works, including autobiographies like The Son of a Servant (1886) and essays on science, religion, and occultism, reflecting his intellectual restlessness and periods of mystical crisis, notably the "Inferno" phase around 1896–1897.[1] In visual arts, Strindberg experimented with photography and painted impressionistic landscapes, influenced by his alchemical interests.[1] Defining controversies arose from Strindberg's vehement antifeminism and misogynistic portrayals, evident in plays depicting women as manipulative or degenerative forces amid "the battle of the sexes," stemming from his three tumultuous marriages and personal writings like the pamphlet Marriage (1884–1886).[2][4] These views, rooted in Darwinian and social Darwinist ideas rather than mere prejudice, provoked scandals, including his 1883 prosecution for blasphemy over Getting Married, yet underscored his unflinching causal analysis of human relations.[3] Despite such polarizing elements, Strindberg's oeuvre endures for its raw empirical probing of consciousness and societal decay, cementing his status as Sweden's preeminent literary figure.[1][2]Early Life and Education
Childhood and Family Background
Johan August Strindberg was born on January 22, 1849, in Stockholm, Sweden, as the third son of Carl Oscar Strindberg, a shipping agent with ambitions in the steamship trade, and Ulrika Eleonora Norling, a former serving-maid who had worked as a waitress and housekeeper.[5] [6] Carl Oscar, born in 1811, traced his lineage to a bourgeois family with distant aristocratic claims but faced financial setbacks, including bankruptcy earlier in life, before establishing a modest position in maritime commerce.[7] Ulrika Eleonora, born January 18, 1823, in Södertälje to a tailor's family, entered Carl Oscar's household as a servant; the couple had two sons out of wedlock—Carl Axel (1839–?) and Oscar (1841–?)—before marrying in 1847, making Strindberg their first legitimate child.[8] [9] The family expanded to include at least four more children after Strindberg: a brother, Johan Emil "Olle" (1851–1924), and sisters Eleonora Elisabeth (1853–?), Edvard Theodor (a brother, dates uncertain), and possibly others, totaling seven siblings in a household marked by class tensions.[9] [3] Ulrika Eleonora died in 1862 at age 39, leaving the younger children, including the 13-year-old Strindberg, under their father's care amid declining family fortunes as Carl Oscar's business faltered.[8] The parents' union reflected Sweden's 19th-century social realities, where informal relationships preceded formal marriage, but the disparity in origins—father's mercantile status versus mother's proletarian roots—fostered domestic strain and social stigma within the family.[10] Strindberg's early years unfolded in Stockholm's Norrmalm district, in a home aspiring to middle-class respectability yet burdened by the mother's background, which Carl Oscar emphasized through strict Lutheran piety and hierarchical discipline.[11] The father's authoritarian demeanor and the mother's devout influence shaped a rigid environment, with Strindberg later recalling favoritism toward him for education despite pervasive poverty after his mother's death.[7] This backdrop of familial discord and economic precarity, without aristocratic validation, underscored the causal role of class origins in limiting upward mobility, as evidenced by the father's unfulfilled ambitions and the household's reliance on his inconsistent earnings.[3]Formative Influences and Early Struggles
Johan August Strindberg was born on January 22, 1849, in Stockholm, Sweden, as the third child in a family strained by financial instability and social disparities.[12] His father, Carl Oscar Strindberg, worked as a steamship agent after earlier business failures, descending from minor nobility but facing bankruptcy, while his mother, Ulrika Eleonora Norling, had been a serving girl before marriage, creating a persistent class tension that Strindberg later described as a source of familial shame and resentment.[13] The household, devoutly Lutheran and patriarchal, included half-siblings from the father's prior relationship, fostering emotional neglect and insecurity amid poverty, which Strindberg attributed to his grandmother's religious fanaticism and the family's rigid piety.[14] These dynamics instilled a sense of outsider status, shaping his early skepticism toward bourgeois conventions and authority, evident in his later autobiographical reflections on childhood misery and favoritism toward his education by his mother.[7] Strindberg's intellectual formation drew from voracious self-education in natural sciences, religion, and literature during adolescence, including early enthusiasm for photography and Darwinian evolution, which influenced his emerging materialist worldview and rejection of supernatural explanations.[14] Exposure to Charles Darwin's works, encountered amid Sweden's late-19th-century scientific debates, reinforced his interest in causal mechanisms of human behavior, prefiguring the deterministic naturalism of his initial literary output, though he later critiqued strict Darwinism for overlooking psychological depths.[15] Family religious pressures clashed with these secular readings, cultivating a rebellious intellect that prized empirical observation over dogma, as seen in his adolescent experiments with chemistry and biology.[16] The death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1862, when Strindberg was 13, exacerbated family fractures, prompting his father's swift remarriage to the housekeeper and further alienating the boy amid deepened poverty.[17] After secondary schooling, he enrolled at Uppsala University in 1867 aiming for medicine or chemistry but abandoned studies by 1868 due to academic failures and financial pressures, resorting to tutoring and casual labor.[5] Subsequent attempts at the Royal Institute of Technology for chemical training and brief returns to Uppsala for aesthetics and languages in 1870 yielded no degree, as he juggled menial roles like schoolteaching, acting auditions, journalism, and librarianship to subsist.[17] These early setbacks—marked by rejection from theatrical circles and chronic underemployment—fueled a pattern of itinerant striving, honing his critique of institutional rigidity while igniting literary ambitions through unpublished plays and essays drafted amid isolation.[5]Literary Career: Naturalistic Period
Debut Works and Initial Recognition
Strindberg's first significant literary work was the historical drama Master Olof, completed in the summer of 1872 while he was employed as a tutor.[18] This play, depicting the reformer Olaus Petri's conflicts with the Catholic Church during Sweden's Reformation, marked his entry into serious dramaturgy but faced initial rejection by the Royal Theatre.[19] Strindberg revised the script multiple times, converting it from prose to verse, before its premiere on December 30, 1881, at the New Theatre in Stockholm under August Lindberg's direction; the five-hour production received favorable reviews, solidifying his emerging reputation as a playwright.[20] Prior to the play's staging, Strindberg achieved breakthrough recognition with his debut novel The Red Room (Röda rummet), published in 1879.[19] This satirical narrative exposed corruption, fraud, and hypocrisy in Stockholm's artistic, journalistic, and bureaucratic circles through the disillusioned protagonist Arvid Falk's experiences.[21] Hailed as an innovative work introducing realism to Swedish literature, it became an immediate commercial success and established Strindberg as a national literary figure, often credited as the first modern Swedish novel for its contemporary setting and critical edge.[21] These early works reflected Strindberg's naturalistic leanings and social critique, drawing from his observations of institutional failures and personal frustrations, though initial publication of shorter pieces in journals from 1870 onward had garnered limited attention.[19] The combined impact of The Red Room's fame and Master Olof's eventual acclaim propelled him from obscurity to prominence in Sweden's cultural scene by the early 1880s, despite ongoing controversies over his provocative themes.[18]Major Naturalistic Plays and Social Critiques
Strindberg's naturalistic plays of the late 1880s marked a shift toward deterministic portrayals of human behavior, influenced by Émile Zola's emphasis on heredity, environment, and instinctual drives as causal forces overriding free will.[22] In works such as The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he dissected marital discord, class antagonism, and sexual power dynamics, often portraying women as manipulative or unstable actors in zero-sum conflicts with men.[23] These dramas critiqued bourgeois institutions like marriage and aristocracy, viewing them as arenas where biological imperatives and social conditioning inevitably produce tragedy, rather than moral failings or abstract ideals.[2] The Father, premiered in 1887 in Copenhagen after rejections in Sweden due to its provocative content, centers on Captain Adolf, a scientist whose rational worldview crumbles under his wife Laura's psychological warfare over their daughter's future.[23] Laura sows doubt about paternity—exploiting the era's inability to verify fatherhood scientifically—driving Adolf to apparent madness and death by suicide, as he smashes a lamp in despair.[23] Strindberg drew from Darwinian ideas of sexual selection and his own marital tensions with Siri von Essen, critiquing female cunning as a survival strategy in domestic battles, where truth becomes subjective and power accrues to the manipulator.[23] The play's naturalistic staging, with detailed domestic sets and unromanticized dialogue, underscores environmental pressures amplifying innate conflicts, rejecting romantic notions of marital harmony.[22] Miss Julie, written in 1888 and set over Midsummer's Eve at a Swedish manor, exemplifies Strindberg's preface-outlined naturalism: characters as products of heredity (Julie's hysterical mother, Jean's servile father) and milieu (the estate's rigid class barriers), culminating in the title character's seduction by valet Jean and subsequent suicide.[24] The affair exposes class fluidity under alcohol and lunar influence—Jean rises temporarily through opportunism, Julie falls due to her "degenerate" femininity—critiquing aristocratic decadence and emerging feminism as destabilizing forces.[23] Strindberg argued in the preface that such events follow inexorable laws akin to chemistry, with Julie's hybrid inheritance (noble blood tainted by maternal weakness) predestining her breakdown, a view rooted in contemporary pseudoscientific theories of atavism rather than egalitarian ideals.[2] Critics have attributed the play's intensity to Strindberg's personal animus toward women's emancipation, yet its causal realism highlights how social rituals like Midsummer festivals erode inhibitions, revealing raw power imbalances.[2] In Creditors (1889), Strindberg constructs a triangular psychodrama at a seaside resort, where sculptor Adolf confronts his wife Tekla's ex-husband Gustav, who reveals her emasculating influence and Adolf's cuckoldry fears.[25] Naturalistic elements include environmental determinism—the isolated setting amplifies jealousy—and hereditary patterns, with Tekla embodying vampiric femininity that drains male vitality, leading to Adolf's fatal stroke upon her return.[25] The play critiques marital "creditors" as parasitic obligations, portraying relationships as economic and sexual transactions where women exploit legal and social advantages post-divorce, informed by Strindberg's observations of post-separation finances in his own life.[23] Gustav's manipulative monologue exemplifies naturalistic dialogue as instinctive revelation, underscoring Strindberg's thesis that human interactions mimic animal dominance hierarchies, unmitigated by sentiment.[22] These works collectively assaulted Scandinavian moral conventions, sparking bans and debates on whether their unflinching anatomy of instincts advanced truth or merely vented personal grievance.[23]Personal Life and Relationships
First Marriage and Family Dynamics
August Strindberg first encountered Siri von Essen, a Finno-Swedish noblewoman aspiring to act and recently divorced from Baron Carl Gustav Wrangel, in 1874 while she was still married.[5] Their relationship developed amid Strindberg's encouragement of her theatrical ambitions, culminating in marriage on December 30, 1877, following her divorce finalized earlier that year.[17] The union produced three children: daughters Karin, born February 26, 1880, in Stockholm, and Greta, born in 1881; and son Hans, born in 1884 during travels abroad.[5] Initially, the family enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle in Stockholm, but financial strains and Strindberg's legal troubles from publications like The Red Room (1879) prompted relocation to continental Europe in 1883.[17] They resided nomadically in France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and Denmark for nearly six years, returning to Sweden in 1889 amid escalating personal conflicts.[5] Family dynamics soured due to Strindberg's jealous scrutiny of Siri's acting pursuits and social connections, including her intimate friendship with Danish writer Marie Caroline David, which Strindberg regarded with evident disdain in his autobiographical writings.[26] His evolving naturalistic worldview, emphasizing sexual antagonism and influenced by contemporary scientific ideas, manifested in aggressive rhetoric toward Siri and women generally, leading her to question his sanity by the late 1880s.[5] Mutual suspicions of infidelity and power struggles over child-rearing intensified, mirroring themes in Strindberg's contemporaneous works like The Father (1887), which dramatized paternal defeat in marital warfare.[17] The couple separated in 1887, with Strindberg departing for Denmark, and formalized their divorce in 1891 on grounds of irreconcilable differences; Strindberg relinquished custody of the children, a loss that deepened his personal turmoil.[5][17] This acrimonious dissolution reflected broader tensions in their partnership, where initial intellectual camaraderie gave way to ideological clashes over gender roles and autonomy.[5]