ABSTRACT
Claes Ahlund discusses the changing relation to cultural decadence in the works of three Swedish authors; August Strindberg, Bertil Malmberg and Frida Stéenhoff. The focus is on the later stage, when the attraction of decadent aesthetics waned and decadence came to be seen as an unequivocally negative force threatening the national culture. Strindberg viewed his time as one of decay, or even as a “triumph of evil” but also as the starting point of a regeneration in the Nietzschean vein. Malmberg, who in his early poetry assumes the role of the decadent poet, moves on to write a large number of pronounced nationalist poems in the 1910s. His conservative retrograde nationalism is contrasted with the position of Stéenhoff, who adopts a progressive internationalism.
