August Strindberg Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Johan August Strindberg was born on January 22, 1849, in Stockholm, Sweden, into a family whose tensions and hierarchies would echo throughout his writing. His father, Carl Oscar Strindberg, worked as a shipping agent, and his mother, Ulrika Eleonora Norling, had been a servant before their marriage. Strindberg later recast this background with searing candor in the autobiographical sequence The Son of a Servant, turning private history into a study of class, piety, and authority. He attended Uppsala University intermittently, restless and intellectually combative, studying languages and the sciences while supporting himself as a tutor, actor, and journalist. He also worked for a time at the Royal Library in Stockholm, an experience that sharpened his skepticism toward official culture and bureaucracy.

First Steps in Literature and Theatre
Strindberg began writing plays as a young man, notably Master Olof (1872), a drama about the Reformation figure Olaus Petri. Its path to the stage was difficult, emblematic of Strindberg's early struggles with theatrical institutions; only later, in 1881, did the actor-manager August Lindberg mount a production that announced a formidable new voice. Strindberg's national breakthrough came with the novel The Red Room (1879), a satirical panorama of Stockholm's artists, journalists, officials, and speculators. Its mordant wit and exacting realism helped inaugurate a modern Swedish prose and positioned him at the forefront of Scandinavian letters.

Naturalism, Controversy, and Marriage
During the 1880s Strindberg emerged as a leading dramatist of European naturalism. In plays such as The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1888), he scrutinized marriage, sexuality, and power as relentless contests of will. His portrayal of class and gender, influenced by contemporary science and psychology, was frank enough to provoke censors and critics. The story collection Married (1884) led to a blasphemy prosecution in Stockholm; he was acquitted, but the episode hardened his conviction that literature must speak against social cant.

His personal life intertwined with the stage. He married the Finnish-Swedish actress Siri von Essen in 1877, and she appeared in several of his works, helping to shape his understanding of performance and the female roles he wrote. The marriage was tumultuous and ultimately ended in divorce, leaving behind a trail of autobiographical reckoning, including the confessional A Fool's Confession. These years also brought intense debates with contemporaries, and although Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen rarely met, the two were often paired by critics as rival architects of modern drama.

Exile, Crisis, and Transformation
From the late 1880s into the 1890s Strindberg lived for long periods outside Sweden, in Denmark, Germany, Austria, and France. In Berlin he gravitated to avant-garde circles and befriended artists, most notably the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whose portraits of Strindberg and explorations of psychological states paralleled the dramatist's own interests. Around the mid-1890s he experienced what later came to be called his "Inferno" crisis: an unstable phase of intense isolation, esoteric experiments, and spiritual anxiety, much of it during stays in Paris. He studied alchemy, read mystical writers, and recorded the terrors and revelations of the period in Inferno (1897). The crisis, though destructive, widened his sense of theatre's possibilities, opening the way to a symbolist, dreamlike style.

Return to the Stage: Dream Plays and Chamber Works
Strindberg's turn-of-the-century plays expanded naturalism into realms of dream and myth. To Damascus (1898, 1901) stages a pilgrimage of self-knowledge through cyclical scenes and shifting identities. The Dance of Death (1900) distills marriage into a grim duet of survival. A Dream Play (1901) crystallizes his new dramaturgy: space and time dissolve, cause and effect weaken, and the stage becomes a site for inward experience, shaped by motifs of pity and illusion. During these years he married twice more: to the Austrian writer and journalist Frida Uhl in 1893, and later to the actress Harriet Bosse in 1901. Both relationships were brief and fraught but artistically consequential; Uhl's literary milieu broadened his European contacts, while Bosse's stage gifts inspired several late roles and sustained his belief in an intimate, actor-centered theatre.

In 1907 he joined forces with the actor-director August Falck to found the Intimate Theatre (Intima Teatern) in Stockholm, a small stage dedicated to his "chamber plays". Written with musical economy and psychological concentration, works like The Ghost Sonata, The Pelican, and The Storm were crafted for close-up acting, spare design, and swift scene changes. This collaboration refined his late style and gave him a home for experiments that larger institutions hesitated to attempt.

Art, Science, and Photography
Beyond literature Strindberg pursued science and the visual arts with obsessive energy. He painted seascapes and storm skies in vigorous, tactile strokes that paralleled the turbulence of his prose. He conducted chemical and optical experiments, and he explored photography not only as documentation but as speculation. His camera-less "celestographs", in which photosensitive plates were exposed directly to the night sky, tried to register cosmic traces beyond ordinary sight. These ventures were often eccentric, yet they reveal a consistent method: observing pressures invisible to common sense and translating them into expressive form.

Public Debates and Later Years
In his final decade Strindberg became a lightning rod in Swedish public life. He criticized cultural authorities and literary institutions, and his interventions helped ignite a wide-ranging dispute often referred to as the Strindberg Feud. The controversy drew in critics, journalists, and members of the academy, turning questions of style, morality, and national identity into front-page politics. At the same time he kept writing at a prodigious pace, producing short stories, essays, polemics, and a stream of plays that younger directors in Germany and elsewhere quickly embraced. Actors and producers who had championed him earlier, including August Lindberg and August Falck, continued to shape his reception, while artists such as Edvard Munch helped fix his image as the severe, searching face of modernism.

Death and Legacy
Strindberg died in Stockholm on May 14, 1912. His funeral drew vast crowds, a testament to the impact he had made as a dramatist, novelist, and cultural provocateur. He left behind a body of work that redefined what theatre could do: the naturalist x-ray of social relations in The Father and Miss Julie; the destabilized, visionary landscapes of To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata; the concentrated studies for the Intimate Theatre. His marriages to Siri von Essen, Frida Uhl, and Harriet Bosse, and his collaborations with actors and directors such as August Lindberg and August Falck, bound his art to the living presence of performers. The friendships and frictions of his European years, including his association with Edvard Munch, placed him at the crossroads of modern art. Strindberg's dramas, in their blend of psychological intensity, formal innovation, and moral ferocity, remain central to the repertoire and continue to shape the language of the stage across the world.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by August, under the main topics: Wisdom - Justice - Friendship - Learning - Deep.

Other people realated to August: Henrik Ibsen (Poet), Georg Brandes (Critic), Anders Zorn (Artist), James Huneker (Writer), Mike Figgis (Director), Otto Weininger (Philosopher), Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (Author)