August Strindberg—1906
August Strindberg—1907. Photo's: A. Malmström, Stockholm.
Comparisons between Rousseau's Confessions, Dialogues, and Rêveries, and Strindberg's Inferno readily suggest themselves. Both writers reveal, by their minute analysis of sick thoughts, the consciousness of a lunacy which is a necessary experience on the road to spiritual health, and, therefore, shameless. There is much similarity in the stories of persistent attacks by invisible enemies, of plots, and persecutions, in the egocentric deductions from natural phenomena and the events of the world. But there is also a great difference. Rousseau manages to keep a watchful eye on the preservation of friendly relations with the world throughout his aberrations, whilst Strindberg recklessly defies its judgment.
Strindberg's persecutional mania developed rapidly during the spring and summer of 1896. Every object, every incident was charged with a sinister meaning. He became obsessed with the idea that his former friend, Przybyszewski, whom he writes of as Popoffsky, intended to murder him. The reason for this suspicion lay in Strindberg's former intimacy with the woman who afterwards became Przybyszewski's wife. One day his ear caught the strains of Schumann's Aufschwung, played by an unseen musician in an adjoining house. He became strangely agitated. The pianist who played Aufschwung in such a manner could only be Przybyszewski, and the music must be a prelude to the revenge which he was about to inflict on Strindberg. With the horror of his impending fate mingled remorse and self-accusation. "My friend, the Russian," he writes, "my disciple who called me father because he had learnt everything from me, my famulus who looked upon me as master, and kissed my hands because his life began where mine ended. It is he who has come from Vienna to Paris in order to kill me...." The reflection that he had not borne the Pole's efforts to injure him meekly, but retaliated, at first invested the thought of death with a sacrificial grandeur. But when Aufschwung was played every day between four and five fear of death increased. He felt a fierce hatred of the man who thus hunted him down. He sought confirmation of his suspicions by questioning the coterie of artists which met at Mme. Charlotte's crêmerie in rue de la Grande Chaumière. The answers seemed to him evasive, and Strindberg withdrew from the circle of friends, convinced that there was a widespread plot against him. The Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch, was at this time painting Strindberg's portrait, and was alternately trusted by him, and suspected as an accomplice in the crime contemplated.