August Strindberg

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg

Johan August Strindberg, född 22 januari 1849 i Stockholm, död 14 maj 1912, var en svensk författare, dramatiker och bildkonstnär (målare). Han räknas som en av Sveriges mest betydelsefulla författare. Internationellt är han främst känd som dramatiker.

Under fyra decennier var Strindberg en dominerande gestalt i det litterära Sverige. Han var ständigt omdiskuterad och ofta involverad i personliga konflikter. Hans verk innehåller ett flertal romaner, noveller och dramer som räknas som klassiker inom svensk litteratur.

Strindberg var mycket produktiv (trots perioder av tystnad) och banbrytande inom flera genrer. Allmänt betraktas han som en nydanare av det svenska språket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg

Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright and writer. He is arguably the most influential and most important of all Swedish authors, and one of the most influential Scandinavian authors, along with Knut Hamsun, with whom he fraternized while in Paris in the mid 1890s, Henrik Ibsen, Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen. Strindberg is known as one of the fathers of modern theatre. His work falls into two major literary movements, Naturalism and Expressionism.[1]

Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, and essayist. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and individualist 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. 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. 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.

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.[6] 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).[7] 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.[8] 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.[9]

During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult.[10] A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalisation and return to Sweden.[10] Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult."[11] In 1898 he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage.[12] 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.[13] He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his playwriting career.[14] 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).[15]