Stockholm's Archipelago and Strindberg's

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in Strindberg’s career and life – is also an archipelago story in its first 

part (SV XVI: 145-148), when the union between man and woman 

appears as a paradisiac state before the Fall, i.e. before the knowledge 

of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House and its protagonist Nora (Meidal 

2012: 138). Dalarö is the setting of a series of summers that unite 

the protagonists, the captain and his wife, in a state of perfect bliss. 

All the cherished ingredients are there, and they contribute to evoke 

what Per Wästberg has termed, quoting the title of Luis Buñuel’s film 

and with reference to the summer in the archipelago, ‘the discreet 

charm of the bourgeoisie’

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: guesthouse, veranda, white dresses, 

white nights, sailing trips, freedom, nature, joy of the senses. When 

the couple returns to Dalarö, after the problematic knowledge of Nora, 

that environment has lost its magic (SV XVI: 153-157). The captain’s 

revenge, when he proves to be a Real Man and conquers his wife again, 

defeating Ottilia (his wife’s feminist friend) and Nora (the source of 

evil), takes place at home in Stockholm (SV XVI: 157-161). 

Strindberg’s most popular, fictional adaptation of his experience 

on Kymmendö is the rural novel Hemsöborna

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 from 1887. In the 

writer’s intentions, and as an actual result, this work is an epic and 

unbiased depiction, which neither argues in favour of or against 

anything

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; it does not even make modernity one of its main themes. 

Nevertheless, as Lars Dahlbäck has indicated, the plot of the novel and 

its protagonist’s progress reflect a sweeping historical development, 

concentrating in three years a series of changes that required a much 

longer process in reality, such as the modernization of agriculture, 

a wider communication and transportation system, the impact of 

summer guests and industrial exploitation on the natural environment 

(Dahlbäck 1974: 44-45). In ‘Solrök’ we have seen the devastation 

caused by the exploitation of feldspar. The fact that Carlsson, the 

protagonist of Hemsöborna, negotiates with a German entrepreneur 

about the same business, determines a turning point in the plot, 

as Carlsson begins to experience how pride goes before a fall. The 

entrepreneur is introduced by the professor, Carlsson’s summer guest 

from Stockholm; and the steamboat where part of the deal takes 

place becomes a social marker, as it belongs to the rich people from 

town, who have come to exploit the area for industrial purposes; the 

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steamboat is comically described as a foreign territory for Carlsson.

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On the whole, the sociologically precise encounters between rural 

and urban life, and the spatial dimensions connected with them, 

serve the form of comedy in Hemsöborna, without further intellectual 

preoccupations.

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 The commercial success of this novel contributed 

to an even more widespread interest in the Stockholm archipelago 

among the Swedish readers. In the perspectives of ethnology and 

cultural history the novel is a mine of information, and its popular and 

attractive form fostered a nostalgic feeling towards nature and rural 

life. As Lars Dahlbäck and Björn Meidal have observed, Hemsöborna is 

written from a summer guest’s point of view; the action is concentrated 

in summer, while winters tend to pass quickly.

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 Even as a bourgeois 

novelist, then, Strindberg could act as an intermediary between the 

wild and the civilized space, and as an advertiser of the wilderness.

The expectations were high when Strindberg finally wrote the 

dramatic adaptation of Hemsöborna as a ‘folk comedy’.

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 This play has 

however not been successful, and has mainly been considered as a 

weak drama since its first staging in 1889 (SV XXXII: 243-259). Gunnar 

Ollén misses ‘the beautiful nature and the fresh archipelago air’ that 

characterized the novel

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, and this objection is recurring in the general 

perception, which is interesting in terms of horizon of expectations. 

Apart from impossible comparisons with the novel, which is a 

masterpiece, we can observe Strindberg’s spatial solutions in the play, 

as he is determined to convey the wide outdoor environment of the 

archipelago within the never changing interior of Mrs. Flod’s cottage. 

The ethnological richness is transferred indoors through all the visible 

working tools and the characters’ strongly vernacular language. The 

outside world is referred to in their speeches, and can be perceived 

behind the cottage door and windows, through a summarizing, typical 

panoramic view of the archipelago from above, since the cottage is 

now located on top of a hill (SV XXXII: 11).

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The archipelago scenery is also exploited by Strindberg in Le 

Playdoier  d’un  fou (En dåres försvarstal

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 in Swedish translation; A 

Madman’s Defence), the autobiographical novel written between 1887 

and 1888 about the writer’s tormented love story and marriage with 

Siri von Essen. Long passages set in the archipelago illustrate the 

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initial phase of their relationship in order to make it more intense, 

dramatic and picturesque. In summer 1875 the protagonist and 

narrator, secretly in love with the baroness, accompanies her and her 

husband from Stockholm through the archipelago to a bigger boat she 

is taking to go to Finland. The torment of the separation is interwoven 

here with the magic of the quiet, white night spent together, and the 

following sunrise that makes the islands aflame with colour (SV XXV: 

43-47). In the following autumn, the protagonist’s desperate attempt 

to flee from Stockholm to France, away from this hopeless love, ends 

at Dalarö. From the boat he recognizes the landscape that evokes 

‘visions of beautiful summer days, memories from early years’

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, and 

he implores the captain to get off. Sweet memories of Kymmendö, 

mixed with the staging of something that resembles a suicide in the 

autumn weather, reflect the protagonist’s confused state of mind (SV 

XXV: 82-98). In the third part of the novel, Kymmendö is mentioned 

again when the protagonist describes what he calls ‘the high season of 

my life’

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: his breakthrough with the novel Röda Rummet in 1879, the 

birth of his and Maria’s (Siri’s) first child in early 1880 and the first long 

summer on Kymmendö as a family man. This happiness culminates in 

‘[…] some months off from service, to live life in the wild with my 

family on a greening island in the outer Stockholm archipelago’.

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 The 

greening island corresponds, in Strindberg’s personal mythology, to 

the perception of the beauty of life as a husband and a father – in a 

certain sense the peak of happiness and pure paradise on earth to 

him.

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Strindberg’s knowledge of the nature, geography and society of 

the archipelago, of the relations between it and the city, and between 

the inner and outer archipelago, is displayed with variation and 

richness in the ten stories of Skärkarlsliv. In this respect the already 

analyzed introduction keeps its promises. In spite of this anchorage to 

reality, however, Skärkarlsliv does not plead for democracy or social 

commitment, no more than Hemsöborna did. We can even say that 

Skärkarlsliv marks, as far as the representation of the archipelago is 

concerned, the end of the democratic vision and the beginning of the 

aristocratic one. Strindberg’s detachment from his own radical and 

utopian ideas, which started in the aftermath of the Giftas issue, and 

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