When Strindberg died, he was world famous — but still controversial and still in great economic difficulties. One of the last things he did was to unleash a debate in the press which once again shook the Swedish public and once again made him persona non grata. His last outburst of rage ensured him the opportunity to die as an unpopular man. He did not become a national sacred relic in his lifetime.

And he still hasn't become sacrosanct. This comes out clearly in the newspaper reviews after almost every Strindberg premiere; Norwegian critics in particular point out, time after time with the same unflagging earnest, one-sidedness and exaggerations and worse in his writing. This repeated itself after the Oslo Nye Teater's production of Comrades last fall; it was declared anew that Strindberg is not as kind to women as decent writers ought to be. Now one would think that Strindberg too had the right both to exaggerate and to be one-sided when he was writing comedy — but no! He had jolly well better adopt the same proper attitude to the ladies as has been the convention in Norwegian drama ever since Solveig set out to save Peer. The Oslo press is gripped by an epidemic of indignation whenever lesser-known plays of Strindberg are produced. So alive is he still that he can anger the audience in the orchestra even fifty years after his death.

With all the misery he went though as a writer, he was in fact spared the worst of all: to be elevated to the status of saint. We still have official permission to write disparagingly about Strindberg, because to this very day — after psychoanalysis, all of modern psychiatry, two world wars and the nuclear arms race have worked humanity over — we still haven't achieved the insight into human nature which for Strindberg was only the starting point. But it would have made the old Prometheus happy on his deathbed if he had known that his ghost would assume such a frightful vitality as it has.

Probably in all of world history there is hardly any writer who has received so many bad reviews as Strindberg. If one knew him only from the theater critics, one would think they were talking about an utterly ungifted scribbler, clueless about the depiction of people, the realities of life and the art of writing in general. We shouldn't blame the critics; they don't agree with Strindberg, they don't believe the world is the way he describes it — and they sincerely and honestly assume that what they don't like must be bad — what they don't agree with must be wrong. And so they put their finger on "exaggeration," "one-sidedness," "persecution mania," "misogyny," etc., etc. We know the lesson by heart. And we can rest easy, because Strindberg so imperturbably and ineradicably outlives his critics. And because the charge of exaggeration and one-sidedness has always been the price of speaking truth. For obvious reasons it must be like that.

As a corrective to the critics' opinion it may be a propos to cite an utterance of Arnulf Øverland. It goes something like this: "You could put all of world literature on one side and Strindberg on the other, and Strindberg would be the better part." That is another of those naughty exaggerations, and Øverland will certainly get three demerits for it. Nils Kjær's opinion of Strindberg was, as is well known, about the same, and he too understood a little about literature.

The essence of this relation to Strindberg lies in his very love of truth — which again pulls Strindberg's descriptions of women into the foreground, because in fact he shares Otto Weininger's opinion: that the feminine principle itself lacks a relation to the idea of truth. For the feminine psyche, truth has no value of its own; if the truth is useful or advantageous in the moment, you speak truth and if it is unpleasant, you lie — to yourself and to others, and without feeling that you are doing anything illegitimate, you don't know it, because truth has no value of its own — it is nothing in itself. In Strindberg this is the real spiritual difference between the sexes, and all his dissections of women have this object: to test whether it is not possible to find an organ of truth in women too — despite everything. It is in reality a surgery of love he is performing. For the masculine intelligence truth is an illuminating value in itself, and Strindberg never gives up hope that the feminine consciousness too can see it like that. He never insults women by accepting them as they are, because they are so sweet and strange and irrational and quaint. For the female sex as well, two times two must be four! He loves them, therefore he takes them seriously, therefore he chastises them.

In Norway, besides a lack of understanding of Strindberg, there is also a special aversion to him because he threatens Ibsen's position. And for every year that has passed since the two died, he has threatened it more. This is due to the following:

Spiritually Ibsen died childless. What he completed had no continuation. We must go back a little in time:

The bourgeois drama was in fact created by three Scandinavians: by Ibsen in Norway, the Swede Strindberg, and the Dane [Christian Friedrich] Hebbel [1813-63]. That Hebbel was a Danish citizen and traveled to Paris on a stipend from the Danish king is remarkably little noted. There is even a long polemic in Danish between Hebbel and Heiberg, after Heiberg had done his duty as a critic and slaughtered Hebbel as a dramatist. With Mary Magdalene the bourgeois drama was created; for the first time a tragedy took place on the stage between ordinary people — a carpenter's family became the center of the world. Both Ibsen and Strindberg are unthinkable without Hebbel, but the two use his legacy in wholly different ways.

Ibsen's background, from a purely theatrical standpoint, is not stressed often enough. The first thing that happened in Norwegian theater history — and to this very day the most significant — was that the theater in Bergen hired Ibsen as director. His brilliant career is well known: first a several years' irrevokable contract, then a a stay of several months in Copenhagen and Hamburg on a fellowship, after which the young man took up his duties. He sank rapidly through the ranks; unusable as stage director, he was made dialogue coach; unusable as dialogue coach, he became stage manager — and then chief props man. After this glittering success in Bergen he assumed the position of theater director in Oslo, and literary history for the most part draws a merciful veil over the time which followed; usually it is merely implied that Henrik Ibsen was rather gloomy during these years. And one can understand why.

But the fact that the National Stage risked the experiment with the 24-year-old failed student Ibsen, whose whole merit list consisted in having flunked two subjects in his college entrance exams and having privately published a play — is the direct reason why Norwegian drama became a concept in world history. Without this passion story in Bergen and Oslo, which logically enough was succeeded by thirty years' emigration, Henrik Ibsen's later work is unthinkable. Painfully and thoroughly he learned his lesson, he never forgot it, and later in life he practically never went to the theater. The rest happened at his desk. For Ibsen theater was a medium he had mastered, and with that his interest in the theater was exhausted. He turned it to account, perfected what he knew, the way he used that tailor of the theater, Scribe — and the way in the next round he used the enormous poetic territory conquered by Hebbel. Ibsen perfected and finished. He was a perfect dramatist, and had a perfect philosophy of life. In Ibsen's universe the arithmetic problem adds up. People are characters in the traditional sense; they live in a meaningful and moral world; if virtue doesn't get its reward on this side of the grave, it gets it on the other, it is registered by the world order — or at least it is a reward in itself. Ibsen's philosophical point of departure is hand-me-down moral ideas and conceptions about ideals — and he remains within these trains of thought all his life: The world is ordered, moral, logical. He does not wish it otherwise. In the same way his point of departure respect to dramaturgical technique is also inherited and traditional. He has taken his stage technique from Scribe, among others, and he has taken the basic idea of the bourgeois drama, the dining room as the center of the world, from Hebbel. Ibsen does not want this otherwise than it is either. He perfects it and uses it. Ibsen completes and closes a period, a systematically ordered archive of a cosmos. When he arrives at the place where reason no longer suffices, he uses an experimentally developed technique of mystification, both scenic and philosophic: He gives a glimpse down into the irrational and Norwegian abyss, while he profoundly and ambiguously adds that God and morality are really down there too; for all has a moral and rational meaning, above all precisely those things we don't understand. The less we comprehend, the deeper they are, and the closer to God, eternity and ultimate wisdom they lie.

Heaven, hell and the abyss must be just as well ordered as the police station's office in Skien. The world order is an all-encompassing judicial archive. It is the bourgeois world which concludes with Ibsen.

Strindberg stands on the other side of the watershed; he is a modern person in a wholly different sense. He investigates, observes and describes. He is far less perfect than Ibsen, but he began something new. The legacy he got from Hebbel was not a theme and a new area of theatre to work with, but an attitude. He gave free play to his inheritance and he carried it further, developed it. His views of life are variable, they are always in flux, he contradicts himself, he changes both his content and his dramatic form; he was the first to introduce the most brutal naturalism, and he was the first to break with naturalism again. Until shortly before his death he was passionately engaged with practical theater, with transforming the theater, with experimentation. On a purely theatrical plane Strindberg has become an inspiration, where Ibsen has become a burden, an immovable gravestone which preserves that form of theater which Ibsen mastered and therefore wished to keep unchanged. In dramatic world literature Strindberg has many descendants, Ibsen none. In his sterility too he was perfect.

August Strindberg's literary production was enormous; it is inhomogeneous and varied — and like nearly all writers he has central works and less central works, complete and incomplete things. Many of the incomplete things are necessary preconditions for the most central productions, and it is inhuman to demand that a fruitful writer must only leave behind faultless high points. Fifty years after his death it is clearer than ever what vitality his work has had. O'Neill, Sartre, the whole "absurd" group of modernist expatriates in Paris and many others are Strindberg offspring and cannot be thought of without him. And if one looks more closely in Strindberg's work, one will find the small surprise that the shoots of the future are often to be found precisely in his least noticed, least performed, and most criticized plays.

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This page added July 2001