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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’
53
: 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
54
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
55
; 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.
56
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.
57
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.
58
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’.
59
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
60
, 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).
61
The archipelago scenery is also exploited by Strindberg in Le
Playdoier d’un fou ( En dåres försvarstal
62
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’
63
, 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’
64
: 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’.
65
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.
66
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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