The young Strindberg was on a collision course with everything that Swedish nationalists were called, especially defense advocates and monarchists, emphasizes Strindberg expert Björn Meidal - Strindberg writes both funny and mean about this. But his ideas rarely remained the same throughout his life.
As young, he was a socialist, but when the Social Democratic Party was formed, he becomes a superman, says Meidal.
For a third of his active life, Strindberg lived in self-imposed "exile".
"... I need to travel to laxate Sweden and Swedish stupidity out of me ..." - so he is said to have written in a letter to the publisher Carl Otto Bonnier, 1884.
Strindberg was also in constant contact with his European colleagues and their works. In Goethe, he saw a poetic ideal and in HC Andersen, he found inspiration for his fairy tales. Balzac made him aware of the Swede who, according to Björn Meidal, may have meant the most for Strindberg's creation: the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.
Rousseau's criticism of the urban was also important for Strindberg and among his many pen friends was Friedrich Nietzsche.
In southern Germany, however, homesickness for his beloved Kymmendö and for nature became so strong that he wrote the archipelago novel "Hemsöborna". Strindberg got dialectal expressions about hunting and fishing, notes Björn Meidal, who still sees important European sources of inspiration here: Homer's "Odyssey" but even more "The Toilers of the Sea" by Victor Hugo.
Strindberg also writes about the Swedish language as "a deaf-mute language that no one understands when you come out in Europe".
Erika Josefsson/TT
Facts: Hundred Swedish works
TT
The committee A cultural canon for Sweden has let two expert groups - one for the arts and one for society - agree on 100 works or phenomena that will be included in the Swedish cultural canon that the Tidö parties have initiated. The list was ready already before the summer, according to Dagens Nyheter. In TT's summer series, a number of phenomena are highlighted that are not quite as "Swedish" as we think.
