Volume 39, Number 11 · June 11, 1992
Broken Glass
By Michael Meyer
Strindberg's Letters Vol. I: 1862–1892 Vol. II: 1892–1912
selected, edited, and translated by Michael Robinson
University of Chicago Press, 952 pp., $95.00 the set
August Strindberg is known outside his native Sweden chiefly as a dramatist, one of the three most influential (with Ibsen and Chekhov) since Shakespeare. Born in 1849, twenty-one years after Ibsen and eleven years before Chekhov, he was one of the most prolific and uneven of all great writers. Of his sixty plays, barely a third are performed today even in Sweden, and only a dozen or so anywhere else (but which other major dramatist apart from Shakespeare and Ibsen has left as many that have stood the test of time?). Yet these sixty plays form only a fraction of his total output. He wrote novels, poetry, over a hundred short stories, and books on an astonishing range of themes including over two thousand printed pages on scientific subjects alone. Politics, sociology, astrology, religion, aerodynamics, gardening, the occult, how to grow melons—you name it, Strindberg wrote about it. And in every field his writing was as uneven as in his plays. He wrote more rubbish than any other great writer who has lived, even Wordsworth.
Review, 2869 words
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