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as a section in Fagervik och Skamsund, and then, in a revised and
enlarged edition, published independently in 1905.
92
According to
Gunnar Ollén it is the culmination for Strindberg as a poet.
93
It is
undoubtedly so, also for its perception of space. The urban room is
often represented as atmospheric, including the air and the clouds.
A vertical gaze can establish connections between the streets and the
buildings at the lower level and the sky above, i.e. between mankind’s
imprisoned and suffering condition and its yearning for liberation and
flight. The air and the drifting clouds can also connect near and far
horizontally. The urban poet’s thoughts and imagination can drift with
them, and one of their cherished destinations is towards the East,
just beyond the woods and to the sea, the islands and the skerries.
94
Geographically they are close to the urban space, yet they appear far
away, or better, in another place, buried in the past like a lost paradise,
with their promise of love, regeneration and happiness, a vanished
time that can only resist as memory and bittersweet nostalgia, as in the
poem ‘Vid dagens slut’ (SV LI: 91-92) (At the End of the Day), and in the
sequence ‘Moln-Bilder’ (Cloud Formations), where we find a homage to
the ‘greening island’, seen in a dream. Whether Kymmendö or a mix of
the islands Strindberg lived on, this greening place defines the space
of the archipelago with its connotations of lost paradise: a utopian
state of bliss and harmony where children embrace one another in
peace and love (SV LI: 100-102).
The long poem ‘Trefaldighetsnatten’ (SV LI: 121-158) (The Night
Before Trinity Sunday), may take us by surprise, for its idyllic and naïve
praise of summer joy in the archipelago (Ollén 1941: 43-44). Through
its epic and dramatic form, the celebration of summer becomes
collective, polyphonic and ritual
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, and it develops as a harmonic
dialogue and confrontation between the summer guests arriving from
town and the local population on the island, which is again Fagervik.
Rites are ways of performing shared and fundamental representations
in a community; and all the cherished details of what made summer
in Strindberg’s archipelago paradisiac are evoked: arriving with the
steamboat, gardening, fishing, cottages, crayfish, tennis, clubhouse,
opera at the summer theatre, skittle alley, white nights and even its
mosquitos, and finally the beauty of nature all around. In this way,
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the occurrence of a Christian feast coincides with the celebration of
Swedish summer and of the sacredness of nature.
A similar naïve tone characterizes Sagor (1903) (Fairy Tales). But
even when Strindberg adopts the form of the fairy tale, he does
not renounce to some realistic connotations of the archipelago
environment in summer, as a seaside resort for the Stockholmers. In
‘I midsommartider’ (SV LII: 85-95) (In Midsummertime) – reminiscent
of the simple form of the folktale, but also of Novalis’ visionary,
dream-like, metaphysical and Christian conception of Märchen – the
magic beauty of nature resembles paradise in such a way that the final
vision of ‘a greening island’ belongs to heaven rather than to earth.
The celebration of Swedish summer and the perspective of Christian
redemption are thus joined. ‘Blåvinge finner Guldpudran’ (SV LII: 195-
202) (Bluewing Finds the Golden Saxifrage) is a fairy tale for children
that intriguingly mixes the folktale with Andersen’s fairy tale, Linnaeus,
and the real story of Furusund as a fashionable seaside resort. As the
little girl manages to find the plant indicating the presence of drinkable
water, the island can happily, in the final perspective of the fairy tale,
be transformed in a seaside resort. It is, in a certain sense, a founding
myth of Strindberg’s Furusund (Persson 2004: 236-237).
We return to a gloomier atmosphere in the novel Götiska Rummen
96
,
published in 1904. It deals among other things with a divorce, and
combines the author’s memories of Värmdö in winter, during his
first divorce (Brandell 1985: 259), with those of Furusund, with its
clubhouse and the fashionable life around it. For this reason the
archipelago appears both white and icy and in its green summer
version. Götiska Rummen is particularly interesting in our perspective,
because it can neither be considered a pure archipelago novel nor a
pure Stockholm novel. The protagonists belong to a family of urban
professionals and intellectuals, who can choose at any time of the year
to dwell either in town or on the (fictional) inner island of Storö (Big
Island). Thanks to the steamboats, the newspapers and the telephone,
the characters are constantly, as it were, connected; the place where
they are staying does not change their social functions as Stockholm
professionals and intellectuals. The novel shows that it was possible,
by the turn of the century, to live at only half an hour’s distance from
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Stockholm, while being at the same time in a borderland where the
wilderness began. It witnesses therefore a historical change during the
last two decades of the nineteenth century, when the environments
of Stockholm and its archipelago tended to come closer and, to a
certain extent, merge. This sociological dimension gets tinged with the
existential one in the novel, for example when the narrator – adopting
his characters’ point of view from the steamboat going to the islands
– bitterly underscores how the archipelago, near the big town and at
the same time sufficiently distant from it, represents a retirement post
for people who have suffered marital shipwrecks or personal failures
of other kinds:
Brygga följde på brygga, och vid varje tillägg hade man tillfälle
att slunga en anmärkning, en upplysning om innebyggarne. Där
voro liksom reträttplatser, ibland gömställen för människor som
dragit sig undan världsvimlet. Den ena sagan var inte lik den
andra, och i denna ödemark, en halv timme från Stockholm hade
de satt sig ner, mest kanske för att känna närheten av havet,
det enda stora som Sveriges gnetiga natur bjöd på. Alldagliga
sorgespel hade utspelats, och man gjorde sista akten härute.
Förstörda förmögenheter, brutna familjeöden, felsteg, straffade
eller ostraffade, äregirighetens sår, sorg och saknad, allt elände
hade här slagit sig ner i gröna dalkjusor mellan gråstensknallar.
De invigde som passerade denna vattenväg kände sig defilera
förbi all livets bitterhet, och jämsides med beklämingen väcktes
ett välbehag över att vara utanför. (SV LIII: 33)
(Jetty followed after jetty, and at each new landing one had the
opportunity to drop a remark, a piece of information about
the inhabitants. Something like retirement posts were there,
at times hiding-places for people who had withdrawn from
the world crowd. One story did not resemble the other, and in
this wilderness, half an hour from Stockholm, they had settled,
perhaps mostly to feel the proximity to the sea, the only big
thing offered by Sweden’s scanty nature. Everyday tragedies had
taken place, and the last act was performed out here. Destroyed
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