August Strindberg, Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, was born 174 years ago today.
A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades. During that time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis and politics.
A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques.
From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his, The Red Room (1879), has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.
During the 1890s, he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become “the Zola of the Occult.”
In 1898, he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage.
His A Dream Play (1902) — with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging and multiplication of its characters — was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism.