This mad genius, August Strindberg, matters, a lot. He is significant and eternal. Countless efforts, born of love and hatred alike, have been made to determine his place in the world. His writings and his character defied ordinary criticism. In both life and profession, he played the role of a destroyer. He mocked religion and patriarchal morality, ridiculed ladylike virtue, and scorned the structures of society. There was something both strange and comical in the speed and ferocity of his rise, a disruption to the orderly circuits of tradition and convention.
The path he took was a complicated and diverse journey that unsettled many. During the times he went silent, his contemporaries congratulated themselves, thinking his terrible lust and madness to dismantle their cherished systems, beliefs, and ideals had finally quieted. But he would return, fiercer, more merciless, and more destructive than before, exposing ugliness and laying bare the filth. He lived, made enemies, shattered idols, and desecrated temples. He sowed truth and reaped hatred.
His colossal spirit operated through a mind that seemed to explode with ideas. He published dramas, novels, and stories with such versatility and pent-up energy that to ordinary people – and to those who wished to confine him to literary norms – he seemed incomprehensible and offensive. Stormy and subversive, he spoke and wrote about history, science, politics, art, and literature.
He wrote books many deemed immoral. His blasphemous outbursts filled religious people with anger and mournful sighs, commanding the attention of all. He dissected the human heart and revealed its vileness and corruption. He threw men and women at each other with sudden love and hate, then smiled and walked away from the evil he had ignited in and between them. He attacked himself with savage hatred and in books accused of misogyny, reflected spiritual torment in bodily pain, pointing to his sins and wounds.
Some said, “He’s a deviant—he must be imprisoned!” Others said, “He’s insane, let’s certify his madness and lock him away!” Many said, “He’s unworthy and vile, let’s ignore and dismiss him.”
And yet, when public opinion was sure he was wicked, mad, and unfit – condemned as anti-social and demonic for his words and ideas – he rendered all judgments null with the magic of his writing. He kept writing. His pen overflowed with artistic brilliance, filled with virtues that could not arise from a mind steeped in vice. He painted images of nature with the sensitivity of a spiritual naturalist. His mind was a garden of flowers and also a jungle of decay, rot, and destruction.
He was himself—and tirelessly sought more of himself. Atheist, believer, rebel, scientist, visionary, modernist, traditionalist, mystic, sensualist, ascetic, author, painter, photographer, musician, journalist—all these roles were essential players in the theater of his life. Critics saw him each time in a new guise, an elusive self, different and unique. He was the director of this extraordinary performance of “I.” A rebellious soul at war with itself—good and evil, pure and impure, light and dark—a gathering of contradictions! Brilliant in his divine creation of his own world, one personal yet universally powerful. He could not offer peace or satisfaction. Like the prophet Jacob, he wrestled with God—not for a night, but his whole life—fighting not for the sake of battle, but to free countless souls from bondage.
A complete example of humanity, a fragment of the eternal human drama from birth to death, he cannot be fully understood except by those who read, comprehend, live, and share all of him.
He devoured and mastered chemistry, astronomy, botany, physics, geology, entomology, medicine, linguistics, psychology, economics, and politics. Specialists who clung to fixed formulas found him absurd. To him, no boundary existed between human sciences; all knowledge melted together in a crucible where he brewed a new elixir to quench the thirst of seeking souls. A solipsist who absorbed, rejected, and reshaped ethical theories as part of a sacred duty—one who exiled and denied anyone opposed to him. A freethinking dictator, a traditional democrat, his own jailer and prisoner.
He was an iconoclast like Ibsen! A prophetic sage among fools, exposing the hypocrisy and weakness of small souls. With Nietzsche’s Übermensch, he displayed and destroyed the weak and sickly of this terrifying age. His humanism was a poison that stripped things bare and illustrated wounds and sickness with dreadful realism. A darkness that denied false light. A loud cry, a lightning strike, a furious storm of rebellion against every king, leader, lawyer, and self-important official. He alone was an army—a defeated conqueror of life, a winning loser, constantly on the move. He walked, got wounded, wounded others, and kept walking—until that final breath: death.
His body of work includes around 115 titles—plays, novels, stories, essays, and poems. Many contradict or oppose the ones before or after. This constant transformation set him apart from his contemporaries and made him equally incomprehensible to them. So liberal was his vital force that he could stop where others pressed on. Like a snake, he shed his skin, like a chameleon, changed his colors—symbolizing perpetual movement and change. Forever young, forever old—a phoenix striving to be reborn from his renewed self.
In his notebooks, recording dreams and supernatural experiences from the last 14 years of his life—accessible only to approved researchers at his Stockholm home and museum—he shows his final spiritual evolution. But they also reveal a man ever-changing, a genius battling melancholy, paranoia, schizophrenia, and madness. The delay in releasing these notes may stem from fears that superficial readers would misjudge him without truly understanding. Those who once cursed his atheism might be bewildered by his later religious, even superstitious, writings.
As death neared, he would clutch the heavy Bible on the table beside his single, lonely bed and clearly declare: “I’ve made peace with life. This has been my punishment. I am obedient. This is the only truth.”
His final wish was to be buried not among the rich, but alone, atop the hill at Haga Norra Cemetery—“beneath the spruces.”
His love for morning was part of a longing for more light. For years, addicted to early solo walks, he left his “Blue Tower” at 7 a.m. and walked quickly through the streets and squares of Stockholm, returning to his desk by 9. In his last years of solitude, he worked the rest of the day. In his masterpiece Inferno, he wrote: “Since youth, I’ve devoted my morning walks to meditations that prepare me for the day’s work. No one may join me—not even my wife. In the morning, my mind is so filled with balance and expansion that I come close to ecstasy; I don’t walk—I fly. I no longer feel my body. All sorrows vanish, and I become entirely spirit. This is my hour of inner focus, my prayer, my sacred rite.”
The people of Stockholm saw him often—the greatest writer in their history—walking through their streets: a man with a broad forehead, painfully furrowed, searching eyes, a bitter expression, pride on his face—a man within and with himself, always silent, always walking. He seemed to ponder boundless sorrow and human suffering, his own included. He only paused if he saw a child—especially a little girl—remembering his own children, far from him with their mothers. He would gently touch their heads, speak to them kindly, and when they smiled, his whole expression would change. Love for children, respect for their questions and joy, glowed through his often-hateful face.
Obsessed with exposing the ugliness of things, the injustice, deceit, and lies of humanity, he insisted: “One must never bargain over telling the truth!” And if he found someone untainted by hypocrisy, his face shone with childlike joy. Though he designed eternal mysteries and dramas, he himself remained simple, and his relationship with people and existence—despite his complex, mysterious gaze—was simple and open.
On May 14, 1912, the stillness of death took hold of a life that had been a battlefield. On the afternoon of May 13, conscious and speaking one last time, he recognized his daughter Greta and her husband Dr. Philip beside his bed. Fully aware of the end, he motioned for his Bible. Holding it, he said, “All that is personal is now gone. I have made peace with life. This has been my punishment. I am obedient. This is the only truth.” He kissed his daughter: “Greta, my dear.” Then to the doctor: “Henrik, are you still here?” He muttered incoherently, on the edge of life and death. His last words were: “I’ve said my final word. There’s nothing more to say.” He clutched the Bible to his chest as if it were all he needed in the end. Then silence—and stillness—until death.
In the early morning of May 19, 1912, his body was buried. A glorious spring day with sun and blue skies. Around sixty thousand people came to honor the one they knew was deeply real and tragically great. Royals, statesmen, academics, capitalists, workers, writers, artists, and vast crowds of everyday people came to say farewell to a mysterious man who, with brutal honesty and inspired genius, blended hate and love, revealing the true self of humanity and life.
In a tribute after his death, Maxim Gorky compared him with pride and reverence to Dankó, who tore out his heart to light the way for humanity in darkness—a flame that still burns today in every word he left behind.
He—a singular genius, a unique madman, a lover and hater of mankind and life, king of both love and hate—was neither more nor less than himself. He was August Strindberg.
[1] Solipsism
Solipsism (from the Latin solus meaning “alone” and ipse meaning “self”) is a philosophical doctrine centered on the idea that “my mind is the only thing I can be certain of.” The logic of solipsism is rooted in an epistemological or metaphysical view that asserts nothing beyond human consciousness can be justified or guaranteed. Consequently, external worlds and other minds are either unknowable or not truly created. In the history of philosophy, solipsism has always been regarded as a suspicious and ambiguous theory.
[2] Iconoclasm
Iconoclasm refers to a religious movement in which followers of a religion destroy sacred images or icons of their own faith. Iconoclasts believe that depicting sacred religious concepts is either erroneous or misleading. Strindberg, through his artistic clashes and confrontations with Ibsen, prompted the creation of masterpieces by both himself and Ibsen. Ibsen—the man whom Strindberg once referred to as his spiritual mentor, from whom he had learned and whose influence was evident in his early works—eventually became his greatest intellectual adversary. It was a progressive, intellectual rivalry. Strindberg rejected Ibsen’s view of women, calling it narrow-minded. The debate and conflict between these two giants of world drama is extensive. I have written a full account of it in the preface to one of Strindberg’s works. —M
[3] Norra begravningsplatsen
Norra begravningsplatsen (The Northern Cemetery), located in the Haga norra area, is a large cemetery in Stockholm, situated in the Solna district. It was inaugurated on June 9, 1827, and is the resting place of several prominent Swedes, including Alfred Nobel, Ingrid Bergman, and others. —M
[4] Inferno
[5] Danko
Danko is a hero from an old Danube legend, whose story inspired Maxim Gorky’s tale The Flaming Heart of Danko. In this story, Gorky recounts the lives of people who, after being attacked by enemies, are driven deep into a forest. Afraid to return and struggling to survive in the wilderness, they are overcome by despair and fear of death. Eventually, one among them rises up and rekindles the spirit of life in their hearts. Danko, who had endured great hardship for these people, looked at them and saw they were like animals—many had gathered around him, but there was no sign of gratitude on their faces, nor could any be expected. Anger flared in his heart, but was quickly extinguished by the love he had for them. He loved the people and feared they might perish without him. Thus, the desire to save them burned like a sacred flame in his heart. This desire to lead and save them suddenly sparked a fire in his eyes.