Stockholm's Archipelago and Strindberg's

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Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013

Stockholm’s Archipelago 

and Strindberg’s:

Historical Reality and Modern Myth-Making

Abstract

The Stockholm Archipelago is ubiquitous in the prose, poetry, 

drama and non-fiction of August Strindberg. This article 

examines the interaction in Strindberg’s oeuvre between the city 

of Stockholm as civilized space and the wild space surrounding 

it, tracing the development of a literary myth of Eden in his 

work. Strindberg’s representations of the shifting relations 

between city and nature, it is argued, played (and still play) 

an important role in the cultural construction of mythologies 

of the loss of the wild space. The environments described in 

Strindberg’s texts are subject to changes, shifts and repetitions 

with variations, such that the archipelago in itself can be read 

as a mirror of the polyphony of points of view, the variability 

and the ambiguities we find in his oeuvre at large.

Keywords

August Strindberg, Stockholm Archipelago, city in literature, 

nature in literature, mythologies

Massimo Ciaravolo

University of Florence

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Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013

August Strindberg’s home town of Stockholm, together with its wilder 

counterpart, the archipelago or skärgård (literally meaning group, 

or circle, of islands and skerries), plays a large part in Strindberg’s 

literary universe as well as in his life. The archipelago is ubiquitous in 

his oeuvre; it occurs in prose as well as in poetry and in drama, and 

it characterizes both fiction, autobiography and non-fiction (essays, 

letters and diaries). It can sometimes provide the setting to whole 

works, but in a series of other works it can be included as one of the 

settings, or even be mentioned peripherally. Images of the archipelago 

can be conveyed while the author is living in that natural and social 

environment, which frequently occurs in his letters, but he can also 

recreate it at a great distance and with a nostalgic eye, as in the cases 

of the novel Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), written in southern 

Germany, and the collection of short stories Skärkarlsliv (Life in the 

Skerries), written in Denmark.

1

An analysis of the functions and meanings of the archipelago 

in Strindberg’s oeuvre appears as a still meaningful and needed 

endeavour, although one half of a large work, August Strindbergs 

skärgårds- och Stockholmsskildringar by Walter A. Berendsohn (1962), 

has been dedicated to this subject. Berendsohn’s book is still useful 

as a general survey of the topic and an almost complete catalogue of 

Strindberg’s works in which the archipelago plays a part. Its limits are, 

however, the vagueness in the analysis of themes and forms, in spite 

of some interesting observations, and the sharp separation between 

texts set either in the archipelago or in Stockholm or in the area of 

lake Mälaren. Nothing is said about a common feature in all these 

texts: the ways in which the urban experience and the natural spaces 

are related. This leads Berendsohn, for example, to the paradoxical 

(and interesting) conclusion that Götiska Rummen (The Gothic Rooms) 

is a Stockholm novel and not an archipelago novel (Berendsohn 1962: 

193-199), although its protagonists, as we shall see, live on an island 

almost throughout the year. What if it were both things?

My purpose is to consider Strindberg’s representation of the 

relation and the interaction between the big town of Stockholm and its 

archipelago, i.e. between the civilized and the wild space. This relation 

has been a major concern in Swedish culture since Strindberg’s 

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Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013

lifetime, when the middle class and their bourgeois lifestyle started 

to expand, and the wild space began consequently to be conquered 

by the civilized space, a process that has been going on up to present 

time, often causing a sense of irremediable loss.

2

 My aim is to consider 

this phenomenon both as a real context in terms of geography, society 

and cultural history – a context Strindberg was consciously part of 

during the second half of the nineteenth and the first decade of the 

twentieth century – and as a point of departure for the writer’s recurring 

adaptation of the myth of Eden to the Stockholm area. The attempt 

implies that these spatial relations, as they become text, are considered 

– according to Jurij Lotman’s and Angelo Marchese’s suggestions – 

as a significant structure conveying cultural models and conceptions 

of life, rather than a set of ornamental or background descriptions.

3

 

The fascinating aspect is that these conceptions vary considerably 

in Strindberg. The milieus are subject to interesting changes, shifts 

and repetitions with variations, in such a way that the archipelago in 

itself can be read as a mirror of the polyphony of points of view, the 

variability and the ambiguities we find in his oeuvre at large.

4

 Another 

challenge for the modern reader is that Strindberg – as concrete 

and precise as he always is in his observations

5

 – creates a literary 

myth of the skärgård and of Stockholm’s relation to it. The ultimate 

purpose of my article is to show how Strindberg’s representations, 

undoubtedly subjective and unique, also partake in a wider Swedish 

cultural construction of what Roland Barthes defines as contemporary 

myths of our bourgeois world

6

. 

Some limitations in the scope of my analysis must be pointed out. 

It will not include works that deal with islands outside the Stockholm 

archipelago, as the early play Den fredlöse (The Outlaw) from 1871, 

set on Island in the Middle Ages, or the story ‘De lycksaliges Ö’ (The 

Fortunate’s Isle), from 1884 and 1890, presumably describing a place 

in the Atlantic or Caribbean. Also the lake Mälaren, which can be 

included in the Stockholm archipelago from a geological point of view, 

and Gamla Stan, the historical centre of Stockholm, originally an island 

in this landscape, represent something different from what I want to 

focus. I will therefore not deal with Gamla Stockholm (Old Stockholm) 

from 1880-82, Strindberg’s collection of culture-historical essays, or 

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