Stockholm's Archipelago and Strindberg's

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fortunes, broken family destinies, false steps, punished or 

unpunished, wounds of ambition, sorrow and regret, all the 

misery had settled down in green small valleys among granite 

rocks. The initiated who passed through this waterway felt all the 

bitterness of life march past, and alongside with the oppression, 

a relish arose for being outside of it.)

Even agriculture in the archipelago is, in this novel, considered from 

a more problematic angle, far from the pastoral tone it is possible 

to find in the essays of Likt och Olikt or in Hemsöborna. Sometimes 

agriculture does not pay off, as in the case of Anders, one of the 

protagonists’ sons (SV LIII: 70-81, 111-115); and sometimes it pays 

off all too well, as in the case of the priest and diary manager on the 

island, which gives Strindberg the opportunity of a biting and funny 

anticlerical satire (SV LIII: 57-62).

Sorrow and regret characterize the perspective of the protagonist 

and narrator in Taklagsöl

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, a story that is again related to a painful 

process of familiar separation. During a long, modernistic internal 

monologue on his deathbed

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, the protagonist recalls among other 

things two important and simultaneous events that took place in the 

archipelago the summer of the year before: the short reunion with 

his wife and their little son, and the reconciliation with his relatives. 

In his flashback, the strongly ritual elements in the Stockholm upper 

class’ celebration of summer coincide with the revelation of a mythical, 

short-lived paradisiac harmony, as ‘[i]n that moment I experienced two 

minutes, preserved in my mind as truly corresponding to the images 

of the Fortunate Isles and peace on earth’.

99

The moment of bliss, intertwined with a fundamental feeling of 

loss, and with the persistent reality of an everyday inferno lurking all 

around, is summarized in ‘Hägringar’ (Mirages), a text in En Blå Bok I 

(A Blue Book I), published in 1907. Here the ‘greening island’ appears 

again: 

Vi hålla av varandra på ett högre plan, men kunna icke vara i samma 

rum, och vi drömma om ett återseende, dematerialiserade, på 

en grönskande ö, där endast vi två få finnas och på sin höjd 

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vårt barn. Jag minns en halvtimme, då vi tre verkligen gingo 

hand i hand på en grönskande ö i havsstranden, och då fick jag 

intrycket att det var himlen. Så ringde middagsklockan, och vi 

voro åter på jorden och straxt därpå i helvetet.

100

(We love each other on a higher level, but we cannot be in the 

same room; and we dream of a reunion, dematerialized, on 

a greening island, where only the two of us, or our child at 

most, are allowed to stay. I remember half an hour when the 

three of us really walked hand in hand along the sea shore of 

a greening island, and there I got the impression that it was 

heaven. Then the dinner bell rang, and we were again on earth, 

and immediately afterwards in hell.)

Delumeau distinguishes between the history of our looking for 

an earthly paradise from the history of the hope for a perfect and 

everlasting joy in heaven (Delumeau 1992: 7-8). It seems as if the two 

perspectives can merge for Strindberg in his later years, as Meidal 

has observed (Meidal 2012: 83-86). In the above quoted passage 

from En Blå Bok I, the greening island is a place we can still locate in 

this life of ours, yet it inspires the vision of a possible dematerialized 

life to come. It is interesting to observe how Strindberg even tried to 

visualize the soul’s state after death, before its final destination, as 

a stage located on an island and in an archipelago, in what Martin 

Kylhammar calls ‘the heavenly pastoral’ (1985: 115-120). The visions 

of an ethereal, higher world, inspired by the painter Arnold Böcklin 

and by Emanuel Swedenborg, are found in the dramatic fragment 

‘Toten-Insel (Hades)’

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 – Isle of the Dead (Hades) – written in 1907, 

in the fragment ‘Armageddon. Början till En Roman’

102

 (Armageddon. 

Beginning of a Novel), written in 1907 and published in 1908, and in 

the short prose text ‘Högre Existensformer; Die Toteninsel’

103

 (Higher 

Forms of Existence; The Isle of the Dead) from 1908. These visions are 

however part of another story, a story that, because of its immutability, 

was difficult to tell even for Strindberg.

104

 

From his nonreligious, humanistic, meditative and ironic standpoint, 

the writer Werner Aspenström, who was for many years a summer 

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guest in the same house that Strindberg had rented on Kymmendö, 

has formulated some important thoughts about our contradictory, 

modern longing for natural paradise. He tends to interpret the quoted 

passage from En Blå Bok I as a reminder of our paradise as earthly, 

green and precarious, when he writes: ‘The word paradise derives from 

an Old Persian one, which means ring-wall. Isles have not seldom had 

to replace the fenced gardens of the Golden Age. As to banishment, we 

practice it by ourselves, since the gods have died’.

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Strindberg’s authorship can show consistency in spite of its 

contradictions. His metaphysical stance, interwoven with the epiphany 

of an earthly paradise, and within the persistent consciousness of a 

tormenting life, unites the examined passages in Tjänstekvinnans 

son and En Blå Bok I. In both passages the Stockholm archipelago is 

a material that is transformed in literature and myth. Since life and 

literature are so intertwined in Strindberg, it is inevitable that we, 

through him, come near a personal and almost private mythology, 

which only seems to have to do with him and his closest relatives. As 

I have tried to show, however, Strindberg’s personal voice offers an 

adaptation of traditional mythical patterns in Western culture; at the 

same time he partakes in a collective narrative about a paradise made 

of islands, shaped while Stockholm is becoming a modern big city.

The archipelago reached from Stockholm by the steamboats forms, 

as Lagercrantz has observed, a home scenery as well as an image 

of the golden age of the bourgeoisie, to which Strindberg always 

returns (Lagercrantz 1986: 13-14). Also Lotman admits that the space 

chosen by writers may coincide with their familiar landscape (Lotman 

1972: 273-274), but he looks at the spatial relations from another 

angle, as a structural function of the literary text, even beyond their 

biographical contents, or their correspondence to a real geography. 

I argue that both perspectives are needed to shed light on the topic 

I have chosen to discuss, because we do not diminish the poetic and 

literary dimensions of Strindberg’s transformation if we, at the same 

time, look at it in terms of cultural history, as an expression of a 

collective myth-making by the population of Stockholm from the last 

decades of the nineteenth century up to present time. Strindberg’s 

creation belongs to the pioneering phase of this construction, started 

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