This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

This is a book about Strindberg and about autobiographical writing, about how a particular writer projects himself in language, the problems this entails, the subterfuges it engenders, about how he finds and loses himself there. It therefore attempts to place this central aspect of Strindberg’s project upon a more nuanced and substantial footing than the familiar tradition of biographical criticism in Strindberg studies normally permits, and does not restrict itself only to those works singled out by Strindberg as explicitly autobiographical. Nor, I should perhaps add, does it concern itself in any detailed way with the laborious examination of the relative accuracy of the life Strindberg attributed to himself – whether, for example, the description of his early years in The Son of a Servant as a time of fear and hunger is in fact belied by the evident plenitude in the way of food and drink as chronicled in his father’s household accounts. In any case, the myth a writer generates about his own experience is as significant a fact as any other, and a writer like Strindberg merely accentuates the way in which all of us live our lives as fictions in terms of the available narrative and plot structures, structures that incorporate those personal symbolic landscapes which (as Strindberg well knew) are in large part unconsciously fostered by the prevailing doxa or mythologies. I am aware, however, that the approach employed here remains partial. Notwithstanding his achievement in other fields, all of which, including his scientific preoccupations deserve to be taken seriously, Strindberg’s major achievement remains his drama. A consummate creator as well as player of roles, the mosaic work of character which he elaborated in his theatrical projections is an essential complement to the life traced in his prose works, and deserves to be studied as such. Moreover, like Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, in her analysis of Strindberg in Pour une psychanalyse de l’art et de la créativité (Paris, 1971), “Je n’ai pas manqué toutefois d’être frappée par la pauvreté relative des thèmes des oeuvres biographiques si on les compare à la richesse des élaborations dont ces mêmes thèmes sont l’objet dans l’oeuvre dramatique.” Maybe the occasion to explore this elaborated wealth of drama will one day present itself.

In 1897 August Strindberg, almost fifty years old, embarked on one of the great comebacks in the history of literature. For six years he had lived as an exile in Germany, Austria, and France. Though more than twenty years earlier he had earned a place in Scandinavian literature, the general view in Sweden was that he was finished, his career over. Then, with the publication of Inferno, the novel that described some of the most harrowing experiences of his exile years, he returned swiftly to the center of Swedish literary life. In Out of Inferno Harry G. Carlson analyzes the reasons for Strindberg’s collapse and subsequent reemergence as an influential modern writer. Strindberg’s early success was as a realist, or Naturalist, writer in the 1870s and 1880s. Astute and politically conscious, Strindberg emphasized social relevance in his art. At the same time, however, he instinctively trusted his highly inventive "visions." The tensions and contradictions between realist and dreamer ultimately helped precipitate the collapse of his career in the Inferno years. Carlson explores Strindberg’s struggle to redefine both his art and himself as an artist, and the influence on him of various intellectual trends in fin de siècle Berlin and Paris—occultism, alchemy, Orientalism, medievalism. After declaring himself finished with drama and fiction, Strindberg turned to an old love, painting, and sought out friends in avant-garde circles, among them Munch and Gauguin. His renewed interest in painting and in experiments in the powers of the visual imagination laid the groundwork for the radical experimentation of his later drama. In the extraordinary atmosphere of artistic ferment in Berlin and Paris, Strindberg’s always sensitive visual imagination became recharged with energy, and the writer was inspired to return to work. The results in plays like To Damascus, A Dream Play, The Dance of Death, Erik XIV, and The Ghost Sonata amounted to a vision of drama that helped change the course of the modern theatre.

This copiously annotated bibliography documents and examines the whole range of commentary on Strindberg's works and activity in many fields besides the plays for which he is internationally best known. These include his prose fiction and poetry, his work as an historian and natural historian, and his relationship to the other arts, most notably his painting. It is concerned with both lasting works of literary and dramatic criticism, as well as reviews of his books and plays in the theatre, and some more ephemeral material, all of this in several languages. Organised generically and by subject and individual work, the bibliography enables the reader to trace the changing impact of Strindberg and his works in various countries and during different periods. It is thus very much a study in reception as well as a bibliographical record of published material. It traces the developing image of Strindberg and his writing both during his lifetime and in subsequent years, and with frequent cross reference offers a comprehensive overview of a literary and existential project that has rarely been matched for its multifaceted diversity. The bibliography is published in three parts. Volume 2, The Plays (978-0-947623-82-1) and Volume 3, Prose, Poetry, Miscellaneous (978-0-947623-83-8) are also now available. Michael Robinson is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Scandinavian Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.