Strindberg’s Inferno crisis remade his drama after naturalism
August Strindberg (1849–1912) wrote more than sixty plays and thirty-odd books of fiction and critique, inventing fierce naturalistic battles in The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors before occult study and a mid-1890s breakdown redirected him.
Strindberg was born in Stockholm on 22 January 1849, the third surviving son of a shipping agent and a former serving-maid, and his novel The Son of a Servant paints a childhood of insecurity, poverty, pious zeal, and neglect. His mother died when he was 13, and within a year his father married the family governess. He entered Uppsala University in 1867 but drifted between pharmacy work, teaching, tutoring, and walk-on parts at the Royal Theatre, failed a chemistry exam in 1869, and left in 1872 without a degree.
Early plays came quickly. In Rome premiered at the Royal Theatre in 1870, and though reviews were kind, he felt like drowning himself watching it. Following Shakespeare, he began writing historical drama in everyday prose rather than stately verse, and The Outlaw won him a royal stipend of 200 riksdaler. The Royal Theatre rejected Master Olof in 1872, beginning decades of rewriting and resentment; its 1881 premiere at the New Theatre finally made his name. Meanwhile, from 1874, he held a junior post at the Royal Library for eight years.
In 1875 he fell for Siri von Essen, a married baroness and aspiring actress; she divorced, and they wed in December 1877. Bankruptcy followed in 1879, but that year The Red Room, a satire of Stockholm society, became known as the first modern Swedish novel and made him famous across Scandinavia. The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889) then answered Zola’s call for naturalism, with character displacing plot.
Between 1894 and 1896 a run of apparent psychotic episodes, his Inferno crisis, led to hospital and a return home. Guided by Swedenborg, he turned to spiritual dream-plays: To Damascus in 1898 and A Dream Play in 1902, whose splitting and merging characters anticipated expressionism and surrealism. From 1907 he helped run Stockholm’s Intimate Theatre, staging chamber plays such as The Ghost Sonata.
Source: August Strindberg
