" At that moment "Raskolnikov" was in the air,
so to speak. And without wanting in any way to suggest imitation,
I feel sure that the groundnote of the story was distinctly
Dostoievskian. Strindberg himself had been reading Nietzsche and
was--largely under the pressure of a reaction against the popular
disapproval of his anti-feministic attitude--being driven more and
more into a superman philosophy which reached its climax in the
two novels "Chandalah" (1889) and "At the Edge of the Sea" (1890).
The Nietzschean note is unmistakable in the two plays contained in
the present volume.
But these plays are strongly colored by something else--by
something that is neither Hansson-Dostoievski nor Strindberg-
Nietzsche. The solution of the problem is found in the letters
published by Mr. Hansson. These show that while Strindberg was
still planning "Creditors," and before he had begun "Pariah," he
had borrowed from Hansson a volume of tales by Edgar Allan Poe. It
was his first acquaintance with the work of Poe, though not with
American literature--for among his first printed work was a
series of translations from American humourists; and not long ago
a Swedish critic (Gunnar Castren in Samtiden, Christiania, June,
1912) wrote of Strindberg's literary beginnings that "he had
learned much from Swedish literature, but probably more from Mark
Twain and Dickens.
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