Ibsen and Strindberg

SUBJECT: Mutual Influence: Ibsen & Strindberg

I mentioned in class how August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen followed each others' work, and demonstrated a fascination with each other late in their careers. Here's a passage from Robert Ferguson's Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography (NY: Dorset Press, 1996) where Ferguson addresses their relationship.

The most illuminating example of a mutual fascination that cuts surreally across the perceived image of two artists involves Ibsen with Strindberg. Strindberg ... saw Ibsen as an artist in decline since attaining the heights of Brand and Peer Gynt. ... In the 1890s he always spoke disparagingly of Ibsen; yet paid him the compliment of following his work closely.

Ibsen returned the compliment, and in a very strange way: in March 1895 he purchased a large oil painting of Strindberg by the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg. This painting hung in his work room in the new apartment in Arbinsgate. Ibsen gave it a title of his own, 'Madness incipent.' He referred to it in a humorous, half-joking way, saying that Strindberg 'hangs there and keeps watch, because he is my archenemy.' Every scene he wrote had to be held up to the scrutiny of Strindberg's image and to survive his imagined criticism. And true though the description of him as 'archenemy' may have been, who could doubt that in importing the image of this wild and spontaneous man into his work-room, to hang opposite Kronberg's 1877 portrait of himself [Ibsen] from Uppsala, with his doctor's scroll and his good-conduct order for services to literature pinned to his gown, Ibsen also discovered that a certain deeply truthful, perhaps even restful psychological banalce was struck in his room (Ferguson, 399-400)?

Like Ferguson, Michael Meyer, author of Ibsen (NY: Doubleday, 1971), observes that Ibsen read and admired Strindberg's work, and vice versa, whatever their conspicuous differences as individuals. Of note for us is that (according to Meyer) Ibsen had been deeply impressed by Inferno (Meyer, 772n), and that he had read the copy of To Damascus that Strindberg personally sent him in 1898 (Meyer, 785).