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| Birth Name(s) : August Strindberg |
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Full August Strindberg Biography
Johan August Strindberg (help·info) (January 22, 1849 – May 14, 1912) was a Swedish writer, playwright, and painter. Along with Henrik Ibsen, Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen he is arguably the most influential and most important of all Scandinavian authors. Strindberg is known as one of the fathers of modern theatre. His work falls into two major literary movements, Naturalism and Expressionism.
Strindberg was the third son of Carl Oscar Strindberg, a shipping agent from a bourgeois family, and Ulrika Eleonora (Nora) Norling. Ulrika was twelve years Carl's junior and of humble origin, called a "servant woman" in the title of Strindberg's autobiographical novel, Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of a Servant). Strindberg's paternal grandfather Zacharias was born in 1758 to a clergyman in Jämtland and settled in Stockholm, where he became a successful spice tradesman and a major in the Burghers' Military Corps. Strindberg's aunt Lisette was married to the English-born inventor and industrialist Samuel Owen. Carl Oscar Strindberg's older brother Johan Ludvig Strindberg was a successful businessman, the model for the protagonist Arvid Falk's wealthy and socially ambitious uncle in Strindberg's novel Röda rummet (The Red Room).
Strindberg's own version of his childhood is available in his novel The Son of a Servant, but at least one of his biographers, Olof Lagercrantz, warns against its use as a biographical source. Much of what Strindberg wrote has an autobiographical character, but Lagercrantz notes Strindberg's "talent to make us believe what he wants us to believe," and his unwillingness to accept any characterization of his person other than his own.
Strindberg would spend the next several years between Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for exams and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a chemist's shop in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. He returned to Uppsala in January 1870 to study and work on a set of plays, the first of which opened at the Royal Theatre in September 1870, a biography of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. In Uppsala, he started Runa, a small literary club with friends who all took pseudonyms from Nordic mythology; Strindberg called himself Frö after the god of fertility. He spent a few more semesters in Uppsala, finally leaving in March 1872 without graduating. He would often ridicule Uppsala and its professors, as when he published Från Fjerdingen och Svartbäcken ("From Fjerdingen and Svartbäcken", 1877), short stories depicting Uppsala student life. After leaving university for the last time, he embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm.
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. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.
The rise and fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 became a political awakening for the young Strindberg, and he started to see politics as a conflict between the upper- and lower classes. Strindberg was admired by the working classes as a radical writer. He was a Socialist (or maybe more of an Anarchist which he himself claimed on at least one occasion) and his daughter Karin Strindberg married Vladimir Smirnov, one of the leading Russian Bolsheviks. As for his political standpoints, Strindberg was heavily promoted in socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Later, he underwent a time of inner turmoil known as the Inferno Period, which culminated in the production of a book written in French, Inferno. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Nietzsche.
It is not so widely known that Strindberg also was a telegrapher, painter, photographer and alchemist.
Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in Stockholm, where he lived 1908 - 1912. It is today a museum.
By the end of his life Strindberg had returned to Christianity, authoring religious works inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg.
On Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia, and he never fully recovered. At this time he also started to suffer from a stomach disease, presumably cancer. He died in May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred in the Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm, and thousands of people followed him during the funeral proceedings.
Several statues and busts of him have been erected in Stockholm; most prominently Carl Eldh's erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park next to the house were Strindberg lived the last years of his life. |
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