ABSTRACT
While there are a great number of Strindberg biographies and a massive body of Strindberg criticism incorporating a biographical approach to Strindberg’s work, Strindberg ‘the person’ still remains an elusive figure and many factual details of his life are still disputed. There have been contradicting reports, for example, of the author’s mental health throughout his life, the circumstances of his childhood, his relationship to his mother, and the ups and downs of his various marriages. Thus, for instance, symptoms of insanity described in Strindberg’s autobiographical novels, A Madman’s Defence (1887–88) and Inferno (1897), convinced several critics of the author’s actual mental illness (see Brandell 1974: 66–97 and Jaspers 1977), while at least one biographer, Jan Myrdal, considers them as signs of normal, though most often repressed, reactions of an average person, and maintains that Strindberg exposes typical Swedish male attitudes and experiences still relevant at the end of the twentieth century (Myrdal 2000: 12–18, 72–82).
