August Strindberg
Born	Johan August Strindberg (1849-01-22)22 January 1849 Stockholm, Sweden
Died	14 May 1912(1912-05-14) (aged 63) Stockholm, Sweden
Resting place	Norra begravningsplatsen
Occupation	Playwright • Novelist • Essayist • Poet • Painter
Nationality	Swedish
Period	Modernism
Literary movement	Naturalism Expressionism
Notable work(s)	The Red Room (1879) The Father (1887) Miss Julie (1888) Inferno (1897) To Damascus (1898) A Dream Play (1902) The Ghost Sonata (1908)
Spouse(s)	Siri von Essen (1877–91) Frida Uhl (1893–95) Harriet Bosse (1901–02)
Influences William Shakespeare, André Antoine, Georg Brandes, Henrik Ibsen, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Reinhardt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emanuel Swedenborg, Émile Zola
Influenced Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, Joe Orton, Arthur Adamov, Pär Lagerkvist, German Expressionism,[1] Karl Schönherr, Reinhard Sorge, Georg Kaiser, Oscar Kokoschka, Ernst Toller, Ingmar Bergman, Jan Myrdal, Lars Norén, Lars von Trier
Signature

Johan August Strindberg ( pronounced (help·info); 22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter.^[2][3][4] A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics.^[5] 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.^[6][7] 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.^[8] 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.^[9][10]

The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, at the age of 32, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough.^[2][11] In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that — building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play — responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established Théâtre Libre (opened 1887).^[12] In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasised.^[13] Strindberg modelled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.^[14]

During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult.^[15] A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalisation and return to Sweden.^[15] Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult."^[16] In 1898 he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage.^[17] His A Dream Play (1902) — with its radical attempt to dramatise 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.^[18] He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his playwriting career.^[19] He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modelled on Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus, that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).^[20]

Biography[link]

Youth[link]

The school in Klara, Stockholm, whose harsh discipline haunted Strindberg in his adult life.

Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid).^[21] In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect.".^[22] When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city.^[23] A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan.^[24] He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life.^[25] He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year.^[26] In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years.^[27] As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism).^[28] His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence.^[27] When he was thirteen, she died.^[29] Though his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealised maternal figure.^[30] Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson.^[31] According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies.^[30] He passed his graduation exam in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.^[32]

Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for exams and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm.^[33] He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry exam which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.

1870s[link]

Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays.^[34] It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin.^[35] He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet — Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility.^[36] After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on the 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn.^[37] The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870.^[38][39] As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable.^[40] That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.^[39][41]

Portrait of Strindberg from April 1875.

Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse.^{[citation needed]} During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote an historical tragedy, Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called The Outlaw.^[39][42] Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802).^[43] Following further revision in the summer, The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871.^[39][44][45] Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler.^[46] Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called Master Olof.^[39][47] In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions.^[48][49] Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating.^[50] In Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.^[51][52][53]

Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm.^[54] He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes' Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature.^[55] From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library.^{[56][56][57][58]} That same month, Strindberg offered Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected.^[56] He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.^[39][59]

Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness — he became infatuated with her.^[60][61] Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent."^[62] As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883).^[63] From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret.^[64][65] Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre.^[66][67] They married a year later, on 30 December 1877;^[68][69] Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later.^[70][71] On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt.^[72][73] In November 1879, his novel The Red Room was published.^[74] A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.^[74] While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius.^[75] As a result of The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia.^[76][77] Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction."^[78] In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:

I am a socialist, a nihilist, a republican, anything that is anti-reactionary!... I want to turn everything upside down to see what lies beneath; I believe we are so webbed, so horribly regimented, that no spring-cleaning is possible, everything must be burned, blown to bits, and then we can start afresh...^[79]

1880s[link]

Strindberg's first wife, Siri von Essen, as Margit in Sir Bengt's Wife (1882) at the New Theatre.

Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880.^[80] Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha.^[81] That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson.^[80] A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title Spring Harvest.^[82] From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper.^[83] In April he began work on The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations.^[84] At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again.^[85] Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö.^[86] That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, Studies in Cultural History, was published.^[87] Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version — the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews.^[88] While this production of Master Olaf was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler.^[89] In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal — my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.^[90]

Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, The New Kingdom.^[91] While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre.^[92] He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.^[93]

Newspaper illustration of Strindberg's reception on his return to Stockholm on 20 October 1884 to face charges of blasphemy arising from a story in the first volume of his collection Getting Married.

In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden.^[94] Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it.^[95] By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up."^[96] In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist."^[97] In the wake of the publication of Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola.^[98] During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first.^[99] Another collection of stories, Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well-received.^[100]

In 1885, they moved back to Paris.^{[citation needed]} In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called The Defence of a Fool.^[101] In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting.^[102] After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, he concluded he need to leave Lutheranism, which he had been since childhood, and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping as one, which he had studied while a student. His works The People of Hemsö (1887) and Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in The Defence of a Fool (1893), Pariah (1889), Creditors (1889), and By the Open Sea (1890).

Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or The Red Room, is when he is a poet and journalist and it ends with him meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years spanning from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, was the time Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled He and She, it was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.

In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing The Father in matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though his reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunites to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen.^[103] It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.^[104]

First Stockholm production of Strindberg's 1888 naturalistic play Miss Julie, staged at The People's Theatre in November 1906. Sacha Sjöström (left) as Kristin, Manda Björling as Miss Julie, and August Falck as Jean.

Before writing Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by Andre Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. As the "son of a servant," it is believed this play was inspired by his marriage to an aristocratic woman.

In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche to submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as Creditors (1889), The Stronger (1889), and Pariah (1889).

In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre," in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general were also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.

1890s[link]

After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled his creativity, and Strindberg insisted he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: Debit and Credit (1892), Facing Death (1892), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1893). His play The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, Playing with Fire (1893) and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904).

In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin, Germany. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including The Father, Miss Julie and Creditors.

Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than he. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."

Michael Chekhov as Erik in the MAT First Studio's 1921 production of Strindberg's Erik XIV (1899).

Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid 1890s, and perhaps that he experienced temporarily insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz believed he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of his edited journals Legends and Jacob Wrestling (both 1898), where he noted the impact Emanuel Swedenborg had on his current work.

"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting for retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and felt his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.

In 1899, he returned to Sweden, following a successful production of Master Olaf in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become the national poet and felt historical dramas were the way to attain that status. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology. Works included the so called Vasa Trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs (1899), Gustavus Vasa (1899), and Erik XIV (1899).

1900s[link]

Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theater in 1902 (including The Bond, The Stronger, and The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theater, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.

In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote The Last of the Knights (1908), Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and The Regents (1909).

A portrait of August Strindberg by Richard Bergh (1905).

His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century,^[105] (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.

August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of Miss Julie and wrote to him for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of Miss Julie. August Palme, Strindberg's friend, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.

In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special award. Nathan Söderblom was noted as a donor, yet he was criticized by the conservative party. In total there was 45,000 Swedish crowns collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Albert Bonniers förlag paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for his complete works. He invited his first three children to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri, and the other for himself.

He founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm in 1907. His theatre was modeled after Max Reinhart's Kammerspiel Haus. Strindberg had the intention of the theatre being used for his plays and his plays only, he also had the intention of the theatre being used mainly to perform chamber plays. For the theater's opening, Strindberg wrote four chamber plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican. Strindberg had very specific ideas about how the theatre would be opened and operated. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The small stage and minimal amount of seats was meant to give the audience a greater feeling of involvement in the work. Unlike most theatres at this time, the Intima Teater was not a place in which people could come to socialize. By setting up his rules and creating an intimate atmosphere, Strindberg was able to demand the audiences focus. When the theatre opened in 1907 with a performance of The Pelican it was a rather large hit. Strindberg used a minimal technique, as was his way, by only having a back drop and some sea shells on the stage for scene design and props. Strindberg was much more concerned with the actors portraying the written word than the stage looking pretty. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugén, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of The Pelican. The theatre eventually went bankrupt in 1910, but did not close until Strindberg's death in 1912. The newspapers wrote about the theatre until its death; however, Strindberg felt it was entirely unsuccessful. He felt that he never had the opportunity to successfully stage a play the way he wanted to — which was the purpose of the theatre in the first place.

Later life and death[link]

Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Wärner Oland.^[106]

During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach disease, presumably cancer. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred in the Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm, and thousands of people followed his corpse during the funeral proceedings.

Legacy[link]

Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are a few of the many people who have cited him as an influence.^[33] Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists."^[107]

A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People of Hemsö.

Detail of mural in honour of August Strindberg in Stockholm, at the Rådmansgatan subway station.

Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science.

Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the "Inferno crisis," he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7) in which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Friedrich Nietzsche.

Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.

His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss Julie, and The Father.

Politics[link]

Carl Eldh's grand statue of Strindberg in Tegnérlunden, Stockholm.

The history of the Paris Commune, during 1871, caused young Strindberg to develop the opinion that politics is a conflict between the upper and lower classes. He was admired by many as a far left writer. He was a socialist (or perhaps more of an anarchist, which he himself claimed on at least one occasion^[108][109]). Strindberg's political opinions nevertheless changed considerably within this category over the years, and he was never primarily a political writer. Nor did he often campaign for any one issue, preferring instead to scorn his enemies manifesto-style — the military, the church, the monarchy, the politicians, the stingy publishers, the incompetent reviewers, the narrow-minded, the idiots — and he was not loyal to any party or ideology. Many of his works, however, had at least some politics and sometimes an abundance of it. They often displayed the conviction that life and the prevailing system was profoundly unjust and injurious to ordinary citizens.

The changing nature of his political positions shows in his changing stance on the women's rights issue. Early on, Strindberg was sympathetic to women of 19th-century Sweden, calling for women's suffrage as early as 1884. However, during other periods he had wildly misogynistic opinions, calling for lawmakers to reconsider the emancipation of these "half-apes... mad... criminal, instinctively evil animals." This is controversial in contemporary assessments of Strindberg, as have his antisemitic descriptions of Jews (and, in particular, Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life) in some works (e.g., Det nya riket), particularly during the early 1880s. Strindberg's antisemitic pronouncements, just like his opinions of women, have been debated, and also seem to have varied considerably. Many of these attitudes, passions and behaviours may have been developed for literary reasons and ended as soon as he had exploited them in books.^[110]

In satirizing Swedish society — in particular the upper classes, the cultural and political establishment, and his many personal and professional foes — he could be very confrontational, with scarcely concealed caricatures of political opponents. This could take the form of brutal character disparagement or mockery, and while the presentation was generally skilful, it was not necessarily subtle.

His daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry, Vladimir Martynovich Smirnov ("Paulsson").^[111] Because of his political views, Strindberg was promoted strongly in socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union and Cuba.^{[citation needed]}

Other interests[link]

Self-portrait at Värmdö-Brevik, Tyresö Municipality, in 1891.

The Town - painting by Strindberg from 1903

Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist.

Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.^[112] Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th century art.^[113] Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a self-portrait.^[114]

His interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of Strindberg.

Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life. In the curious autobiographical work Inferno—a paranoid and confusing tale of his years in Paris, written in French—he claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter.

Personal life[link]

Strindberg's third wife, the actress Harriet Bosse, as Indra's Daughter in the 1907 première of A Dream Play.

Strindberg was married three times, as follows:

• Siri von Essen: married 1877–91 (14 years), 2 daughters (Karin Smirnov, Greta), 1 son (Hans); and a daughter who died in infancy
• Frida Uhl: married 1893–95, (2 years) 1 daughter, Kerstin, and
• Harriet Bosse: married 1901–02(?) (2 years), 1 daughter, Anne-Marie.

Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963) who was 41 years younger than Strindberg. She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated.^[115] He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet. He was also related to Nils Strindberg (a son of one of August's cousins).

Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Most acknowledge, however, that he had uncommon insight into the hypocrisy of his society's gender roles and sexual morality. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.

Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. It is now a museum.

Several statues and busts of him have been erected in Stockholm, the most prominent of which is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park next to the house where Strindberg lived the last years of his life.

Bibliography[link]

• August Strindberg bibliography

	Theatre portal
	Novels portal

Notes[link]

Sources[link]

Further reading

• Livry, Anatoly, "August Strindberg : de Rhadamanthe à Busiris et l'Etna de Zarathoustra", Nietzscheforschung, Berlin, "Akademie Verlag", 2011, p. 123 - 135
• Prideaux, Sue, Strindberg: A Life, Yale University Press, May 15, 2012. ISBN 978-0300136937

External links[link]

• August Strindberg at the Internet Broadway Database
• August Strindberg at the Internet Movie Database
• Photographs by Strindberg from the National Library of Sweden on Flickr

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Johan August Strindberg

English-language translations in the public domain[link]

• Works by or about August Strindberg at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Works by August Strindberg at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)

Public domain translations of Strindberg's drama

• The Father, Countess Julie, The Outlaw, The Stronger
• Comrades, Facing Death, Pariah, Easter
• Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm
• There are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, and Pariah
• To Damascus Part 1
• Road To Damascus Parts 1, 2, and 3

Public domain translations of Strindberg's novels

• The Red Room.
• The Confession of a Fool.

other[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: August Strindberg

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: August Strindberg

• Strindberg, August (in Swedish), Works, Projekt Runeberg, http://runeberg.org/authors/strindbg.html .
• Strindberg (in Swedish), Collected works (National ed.), Stockholm University, http://www.littvet.su.se/strb/ .
• "Concordance", Språkbanken, SE: Gothenburg University, http://spraakbanken.gu.se/konk/ .
• (in Swedish) Strindbergssällskapet [The Strindberg Society], http://www.auguststrindberg.se/ .
• Strindbergssällskapet [The Strindberg Society], http://www.auguststrindberg.se/index2.htm .
• Strindbergs Museet [The Strindberg museum], SE, http://www.strindbergsmuseet.se/index_eng.html .
• (in German) Strindberg Museum in Austria, Saxen, Upper Austria, http://www.strindbergmuseum.at/ .
• August Strindberg Society, Los Angeles, CA, USA, http://www.tassla.org/ .
• Strindberg, Citations in the streets, Stockholm, http://www.erasmuspc.com/index.php?id=18394&type=article 
• Productions of Strindberg's plays, Australia: AusStage, http://www.ausstage.edu.au/indexdrilldown.jsp?xcid=59&f_contrib_id=2590 
• "The Celestographs of August Strindberg", Cabinet, Summer 2001, http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/3/celesographs.php .
• Review of exhibition of paintings by Strindberg, British Theatre Guide, http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/articles/130305.htm 
• Strindberg and Helium, http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/ .
• Strindberg, August, "The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation", in Robinson, Michael, Selected essays, http://books.google.gr/books?id=G-rbnAl3wKAC&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=strindberg+role+of+chance+in+art#v=onepage&q=strindberg%20role%20of%20chance%20in%20art&f=false .

v t e August Strindberg Bibliography Paintings Drama works Master Olof The Father Miss Julie Creditors The Stronger To Damascus Easter The Dance of Death A Dream Play The Ghost Sonata The Great Highway Prose works The Red Room Getting Married The Son of a Servant The People of Hemsö The Defence of a Fool Inferno Alone Adaptations of Strindberg's works Miss Julie: 1951 film 1965 opera 1977 opera 1999 film After Miss Julie Julie The Stronger Karin Månsdotter Play Strindberg Dance of Death Dreamplay Related topics Blå tornet Strindbergs Intima Teater Strindberg Museum

Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman during production of Wild Strawberries (1957).
Born	Ernst Ingmar Bergman (1918-07-14)14 July 1918 Uppsala, Sweden
Died	30 July 2007(2007-07-30) (aged 89) Fårö, Sweden
Occupation	Film director, producer, screenwriter
Years active	1944–2005
Influenced by	August Strindberg[1] Victor Sjöström[2] Akira Kurosawa[2] Federico Fellini[2] Marcel Carné[2]
Spouse	Else Fisher (m. 1943–1945) Ellen Lundström (m. 1945–1950) Gun Grut (m. 1951–1959) Käbi Laretei (m. 1959–1969) Ingrid von Rosen (m. 1971–1995)
Awards	Goethe Prize

Ernst Ingmar Bergman (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈɪŋmar ˈbærjman] ( listen); 14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera," he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential film directors of all time.^[3]

He directed over sixty films and documentaries for cinematic release and for television, most of which he also wrote. He also directed over one hundred and seventy plays. Among his company of actors were Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow. Most of his films were set in the landscape of Sweden. His major subjects were death, illness, faith, betrayal, and insanity.

Bergman was active for more than six decades. In 1976 his career was seriously threatened as the result of a botched criminal investigation for alleged income tax evasion. Outraged, Bergman suspended a number of pending productions, closed his studios, and went into self-imposed exile in Germany for eight years.

Early life[link]

A young Bergman

Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Erik Bergman, a Lutheran minister and later chaplain to the King of Sweden, and Karin Akerblom, a nurse.^[4] He grew up with his older brother Dag and sister Margareta surrounded by religious imagery and discussion. His father was a conservative parish minister with strict parenting concepts. Ingmar was locked up in dark closets for "infractions" like wetting the bed. "While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang, or listened", Ingmar wrote in his autobiography Laterna Magica:

"I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans."

Although raised in a devout Lutheran household, Bergman later stated that he lost his faith at age eight, and only came to terms with this fact while making Winter Light.^[5] Bergman's interest in theatre and film began early: "At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a magic lantern, a possession that altered the course of his life. Within a year, he had created, by playing with this toy, a private world in which he felt completely at home, he recalled. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes, and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts."^[6][7]

In 1934, aged 16, he was sent to Germany to spend the summer vacation with family friends. He attended a Nazi rally in Weimar at which he saw Adolf Hitler.^[8] He later wrote in Laterna Magica (The Magic Lantern) about the visit to Germany, describing how the German family had put a portrait of Adolf Hitler on the wall by his bed, and that "for many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats".^[9] Bergman did two five-month stretches of mandatory military service.

In 1937, he entered Stockholm University College (later renamed Stockholm University), to study art and literature. He spent most of his time involved in student theatre and became a "genuine movie addict".^[10] At the same time, a romantic involvement led to a break with his father that lasted for years. Although he did not graduate, he wrote a number of plays, as well as an opera, and became an assistant director at a theater. In 1942, he was given the chance to direct one of his own scripts, Caspar's Death. The play was seen by members of Svensk Filmindustri, which then offered Bergman a position working on scripts. In 1943, he married Else Fisher.

Career[link]

Film work[link]

Bergman's film career began in 1941 with his rewriting of scripts, but his first major accomplishment was in 1944 when he wrote the screenplay for Torment/Frenzy (Hets), a film directed by Alf Sjöberg. Along with writing the screenplay, he was also given position as assistant director to the film. In his second autobiographical work, Images: My Life in Film, Bergman describes the filming of the exteriors as his actual film directorial debut.^[11] The international success of this film led to Bergman's first opportunity to direct a year later. During the next ten years, he wrote and directed more than a dozen films including The Devil's Wanton/Prison (Fängelse) in 1949 and The Naked Night/Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton) and Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika), both from 1953.

Bergman first achieved worldwide success with Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende) (1955), which won for "Best poetic humor" and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes the following year. This was followed by The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) and Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället), released in Sweden ten months apart in 1957. The Seventh Seal won a special jury prize and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes and Wild Strawberries won numerous awards for Bergman and its star, Victor Sjöström. Bergman continued to be productive for the next two decades. From the early 1960s, he spent much of his life on the Swedish island of Fårö, where he made several films.

In the early 1960s he directed three films that explored the theme of faith and doubt in God, Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en Spegel – 1961), Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna – 1962), and The Silence (Tystnaden – 1963). Critics created the notion that the common themes in these three films represented trilogy or cinematic triptych. Bergman initially responded that he did not plan these three films as a trilogy and that he could not see any common motifs in them, but he later seemed to have adopted the notion, with some equivocation.^[12][13] In 1964 he made a parody of Fellini with All These Women.^[14]

In 1966, he directed Persona, a film that he himself considered one of his most important works. While the shockingly experimental film won few awards many consider it his masterpiece. Other notable films of the period include The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan – 1960), Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen – 1968), Shame (Skammen – 1968) and A Passion/The Passion of Anna (En Passion – 1969). Bergman also produced extensively for Swedish television at this time. Two works of note were Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap – 1973) and The Magic Flute (Trollflöjten – 1975).

After his arrest in 1976 for tax evasion, Bergman swore he would never again make films in Sweden. He shut down his film studio on the island of Fårö and went into self-imposed exile. He briefly considered the possibility of working in America and his next film, The Serpent's Egg (1977) was a German-U.S. production and his second English-language film (the first being 1971's "The Touch"). This was followed a year later with a British-Norwegian co-production of Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten – 1978) starring Ingrid Bergman. The one other film he directed was From the Life of the Marionettes (Aus dem Leben der Marionetten – 1980) a British-German co-production.

In 1982, he temporarily returned to his homeland to direct Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander). Bergman stated that the film would be his last, and that afterwards he would focus on directing theatre. Since then, he wrote several film scripts and directed a number of television specials. As with previous work for TV, some of these productions were later released in theatres. The last such work was Saraband (2003), a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage and directed by Bergman when he was eighty-four years old.

Repertory company[link]

Bergman developed a personal "repertory company" of Swedish actors whom he repeatedly cast in his films, including Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Bengt Ekerot, Anders Ek and Gunnar Björnstrand, each of whom appeared in at least five Bergman features. Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, who appeared in nine of Bergman's films and one televisual film (Saraband), was the last to join this group (in the 1966 film Persona), and ultimately became most closely associated with Bergman, both artistically and personally. They had a daughter together, Linn Ullmann (born 1966).

Ingmar Bergman with his long time cinematographer Sven Nykvist during the production of Through a Glass Darkly (1960)

A great number of Bergman's interior scenes were filmed at the Filmstaden studios north of Stockholm.

Bergman began working with Sven Nykvist, his cinematographer, in 1953. The two of them developed and maintained a working relationship of sufficient rapport to allow Bergman not to worry about the composition of a shot until the day before it was filmed. On the morning of the shoot, he would briefly speak to Nykvist about the mood and composition he hoped for, and then leave Nykvist to work lacking interruption or comment until post-production discussion of the next day's work.

Financing[link]

By Bergman's own account, he never had a problem with funding. He cited two reasons for this: one, that he did not live in the United States, which he viewed as obsessed with box-office earnings; and two, that his films tended to be low-budget affairs.^{[citation needed]} (Cries and Whispers, for instance, was finished for about $450,000, while Scenes from a Marriage, a six-episode television feature, cost only $200,000.)^[15]

Technique[link]

Bergman usually wrote his own screenplays, thinking about them for months or years before starting the actual process of writing, which he viewed as somewhat tedious. His earlier films are carefully constructed and are either based on his plays or written in collaboration with other authors. Bergman stated that in his later works, when on occasion his actors would want to do things differently from his own intention, he would let them, noting that the results were often "disastrous" when he did not do so. As his career progressed, Bergman increasingly let his actors improvise their dialogue. In his latest films, he wrote just the ideas informing the scene and allowed his actors to determine the exact dialogue. When viewing daily rushes, Bergman stressed the importance of being critical but unemotive, claiming that he asked himself not if the work is great or terrible, but if it is sufficient or if it needs to be reshot.^[15]

Subjects[link]

Bergman's films usually deal with existential questions of mortality, loneliness, and religious faith. While these topics could seem cerebral, sexual desire found its way to the foreground of most of his films, whether the setting was a medieval plague (The Seventh Seal), upper-class family activity in early twentieth century Uppsala (Fanny and Alexander) or contemporary alienation (The Silence). His female characters are usually more in touch with their sexuality than the men, and unafraid to proclaim it, sometimes with breathtaking overtness (e.g., Cries and Whispers) as would define the work of "the conjurer," as Bergman called himself in a 1960 Time Magazine cover story.^[16] In an interview with Playboy in 1964, he said: "...The manifestation of sex is very important, and particularly to me, for above all, I don't want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them." Film, Bergman said, was his demanding mistress.^{[citation needed]}

Bergman's views on his career[link]

Bergman and actress Ingrid Thulin during the production of The Silence (1963)

When asked about his films, Bergman said he held Winter Light,^[17] Persona, and Cries and Whispers in the highest regard, though in an interview in 2004, Bergman said that he was "depressed" by his own films and could not watch them anymore.^[18] In these films, he said, he managed to push the medium to its limit. Bergman stated on numerous occasions (for example in the interview book Bergman on Bergman) that The Silence meant the end of the era in which religious questions were a major concern of his films.

Theatrical work[link]

Although Bergman was universally famous for his contribution to cinema, he was also an active and productive stage director all his life. During his studies at Stockholm University, he became active in its student theatre, where he made a name for himself early on. His first work after graduation was as a trainee-director at a Stockholm theatre. At twenty-six years, he became the youngest theatrical manager in Europe at the Helsingborg City Theatre. He stayed at Helsingborg for three years and then became the director at Gothenburg city theatre from 1946 to 1949.

He became director of the Malmö city theatre in 1953 and remained for seven years. Many of his star actors were people with whom he began working on stage, and a number of people in the "Bergman troupe" of his 1960s films came from Malmö's city theatre (Max von Sydow, for example). He was the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm from 1960 to 1966 and manager from 1963 to 1966, where he began a long-time collaboration with choreographer Donya Feuer.

After Bergman left Sweden because of the tax evasion incident, he became director of the Residenz Theatre of Munich, Germany (1977–84). He remained active in theatre throughout the 1990s and made his final production on stage with Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in 2002. A complete list of Bergman's work in theatre can be found under "Stage Productions and Radio Theatre Credits" at Ingmar Bergman filmography.

Tax evasion charges[link]

On 30 January 1976, while rehearsing August Strindberg's Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, he was arrested by two plainclothes police officers and charged with income tax evasion. The impact of the event on Bergman was devastating. He suffered a nervous break-down as a result of the humiliation and was hospitalized in a state of deep depression.

The investigation was focused on an alleged 1970 transaction of 500,000 Swedish kronor (SEK) between Bergman's Swedish company Cinematograf and its Swiss subsidiary Persona, an entity that was mainly used for the paying of salaries to foreign actors. Bergman dissolved Persona in 1974 after having been notified by the Swedish Central Bank and subsequently reported the income. On 23 March 1976, the special prosecutor Anders Nordenadler dropped the charges against Bergman, saying that the alleged crime had no legal basis, saying it would be like bringing "charges against a person who has stolen his own car, thinking it was someone else's".^[19] Director General Gösta Ekman, chief of the Swedish Internal Revenue Service, defended the failed investigation, saying that the investigation was dealing with important legal material and that Bergman was treated just like any other suspect. He expressed regret that Bergman had left the country, hoping that Bergman was a "stronger" person now when the investigation had shown that he had not done any wrong.^[20]

Even though the charges were dropped, Bergman became disconsolate, fearing he would never again return to directing. Despite pleas by the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, high public figures, and leaders of the film industry, he vowed never to work again in Sweden. He closed down his studio on the island of Fårö, suspended two announced film projects, and went into self-imposed exile in Munich, Germany. Harry Schein, director of the Swedish Film Institute, estimated the immediate damage as ten million SEK (kronor) and hundreds of jobs lost.^[21]

Return[link]

Although he continued to operate from Munich, by mid-1978 Bergman had overcome some of his bitterness toward the government of Sweden. In July of that year he visited Sweden, celebrating his sixtieth birthday at Fårö, and partly resumed his work as a director at Royal Dramatic Theatre. To honor his return, the Swedish Film Institute launched a new Ingmar Bergman Prize to be awarded annually for excellence in filmmaking.^[22]

Still, he remained in Munich until 1984. In one of the last major interviews with Bergman, conducted in 2005 at Fårö Island, Bergman said that despite being active during the exile, he had effectively lost eight years of his professional life.^[23]

Bergman retired from filmmaking in December 2003. He had hip surgery in October 2006 and was making a difficult recovery. He died peacefully in his sleep,^[24] at his home on Fårö, on 30 July 2007, at the age of eighty-nine,^[25] the same day that another renowned film director, Michelangelo Antonioni, also died. He was buried on the island on 18 August 2007 in a private ceremony. A place in the Fårö churchyard was prepared for him under heavy secrecy. Although he was buried on the island of Fårö, his name and date of birth were inscribed under his wife's name on a tomb at Roslagsbro churchyard, Norrtälje Municipality, several years before his death.

On 6 April 2011, the Bank of Sweden announced that Bergman's portrait will feature on the new 200 kronor banknote, beginning in 2014–15.^[26]

Unrealised projects[link]

When Bergman died, a large archive of notes was donated to the Swedish Film Institute. Among the notes are several unpublished and unfinished scripts both for stage and films, and many more ideas for works in different stages of development. A never performed play has the title Kärlek utan älskare ("Love without lovers"), and has the note "Complete disaster!" written on the envelope; the play is about a director who disappears and an editor who tries to complete a work he has left unfinished. Other canceled projects include the script for a pornographic film which Bergman abandoned since he did not think it was alive enough, a play about a cannibal, some loose scenes set inside a womb, a film about the life of Jesus, a film about The Merry Widow, and a play with the title Från sperm till spöke ("From sperm to spook").^[27] The Swedish director Marcus Lindeen went through the material, and inspired by Kärlek utan älskare he took samples from many of the works and turned them into a play, titled Arkivet för orealiserbara drömmar och visioner ("The archive for unrealisable dreams and visions"). Lindeen's play premiered on 28 May 2012 at the Stockholm City Theatre.^[27]

Family[link]

The grave of Ingmar Bergman and his last wife, Ingrid von Rosen

Bergman was married five times:

• 25 March 1943 – 1945, to Else Fisher, choreographer and dancer (divorced). Children:
  • Lena Bergman, actress, born 1943.
• 22 July 1945 – 1950, to Ellen Lundström, choreographer and film director (divorced). Children:
  • Eva Bergman, film director, born 1945,
  • Jan Bergman, film director (1946–2000), and
  • twins Mats and Anna Bergman, both actors and film directors and born in 1948.
• 1951 – 1959, to Gun Grut, journalist (divorced). Children:
  • Ingmar Bergman Jr, airline captain, born 1951.
• 1959 – 1969, to Käbi Laretei, concert pianist (divorced). Children:
  • Daniel Bergman, film director, born 1962.
• 11 November 1971 – 20 May 1995, to Ingrid von Rosen (maiden name Karlebo) (widowed). Children:
  • Maria von Rosen, author, born 1959.

The first four marriages ended in divorce, while the last ended when his wife Ingrid died of stomach cancer in 1995, aged 65. Aside from his marriages, Bergman had romantic relationships with actresses Harriet Andersson (1952–55), Bibi Andersson (1955–59), and Liv Ullmann (1965–70). He was the father of writer Linn Ullmann with Liv Ullmann. In all, Bergman had nine children, one of whom predeceased him. Bergman was eventually married to all of the mothers except Liv Ullmann, but his daughter with his last wife, Ingrid von Rosen, was born twelve years before their marriage.

Influence[link]

Many filmmakers have praised Bergman and cited his work as a major influence on their own:

• Woody Allen^[28] referred to Bergman as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera."^[29]
• Pedro Almodóvar^[30]
• Robert Altman^[31]
• Olivier Assayas^[32]
• Francis Ford Coppola^[33] stated: "My all-time favorite because he embodies passion, emotion and has warmth."
• Guillermo del Toro stated: "Bergman as a fabulist—my favorite—is absolutely mesmerizing."^[34]
• Asghar Farhadi^[35]
• Todd Field^[36] stated: "He was our tunnel man building the aqueducts of our cinematic collective unconscious."
• Krzysztof Kieślowski^[37] stated: "This man is one of the few film directors—perhaps the only one in the world—to have said as much about human nature as Dostoevsky or Camus."
• Stanley Kubrick^[38] stated: "I believe Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don't just sit and wait for a good story to come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them."
• Ang Lee stated: "For me the filmmaker Bergman is the greatest actor of all..."^[39]
• François Ozon^[32]
• Park Chan-wook^[32]
• Éric Rohmer stated: "The Seventh Seal is 'the most beautiful film ever."^[32]
• Marjane Satrapi^[32]
• Mamoru Oshii^[40]
• Paul Schrader stated: "I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman. What he has left is a legacy greater than any other director. I think the extraordinary thing that Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value."^[41]
• Martin Scorsese stated: "I guess I'd put it like this: if you were alive in the 50s and the 60s and of a certain age, a teenager on your way to becoming an adult, and you wanted to make films, I don't see how you couldn't be influenced by Bergman. You would have had to make a conscious effort, and even then, the influence would have snuck through."^[42]
• Steven Spielberg stated: "His love for the cinema almost gives me a guilty conscience."^[43]
• Andrei Tarkovsky^[44] held Bergman in very high regard, noting him and Robert Bresson as his two favourite filmmakers, stating "I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman." Such was Bergman's influence, Tarkovsky's last film was made in Sweden with Sven Nykvist, Bergman's longtime cinematographer, and several of Bergman's favoured actors including Erland Josephson. Bergman likewise had great respect for Tarkovsky, stating; "Tarkovsky for me is the greatest director."^[45]
• André Téchiné^[32]
• Liv Ullmann^[46]

Filmography[link]

Popular culture[link]

An Ingmar Bergman-themed parody spoofs the allegory of cheating death (Bergman's The Seventh Seal) in the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live season 1: ep.23 (7/24/1976). The sketch, titled Swedish Movie, is somberly narrated in the third-person by a Swedish-speaking Death (Tom Schiller), English subtitles scrolling. The baleful voice-over dialogue, revealed to be emanating from the apparition of Death personified, imposes upon dreamily preoccupied lovers Sven (Chevy Chase) and Inger (Louise Lasser) who send a not-so-silently jeering Death out for pizza.

See also The Dove http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dove_(1968_film)

Awards[link]

Academy Awards[link]

In 1971, Bergman received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Academy Awards ceremony. Three of his films won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The list of his nominations and awards follows:

• Won: Best Foreign Film The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan) (1960)^[47]
• Won: Best Foreign Film Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel) (1961)^[48]
• Won: Best Foreign Film Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander) (1983)
• Nominated: Best Original Screenplay, Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) (1957)
• Nominated: Best Original Screenplay Through a Glass Darkly (1961)^[48]
• Nominated: Best Original Screenplay, Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop) (1974)
• Nominated: Best Picture, Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop) (1974)
• Nominated: Best Director, Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop) (1974)
• Nominated: Best Director, Face to Face (Ansikte mot ansikte) (1977)
• Nominated: Best Original Screenplay, Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten) (1979)
• Nominated: Best Original Screenplay, Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander) (1983)
• Nominated: Best Director, Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander) (1983)