Translated from the "Litterarisches Echo,"
August 15, 1911
The republication of The Confession of a Fool represents the lastlink in the chain of Strindberg's autobiographical novels. A Germanversion of the book was published as far back as 1893, but it wasmutilated, abbreviated, corrupted, and falsified to such an extentthat the attorney-general, misled by the revolting language, blamedthe author for the misdeeds of the translator and prohibited the saleof the book. This was a splendid advertisement for this profound work,but there were many who would have rejoiced if the translation had beencompletely ignored. It distorted Strindberg's character and was thecause of many prejudices which exist to this day.
Schering's new translation is an attempt to make reparation for thiscrime. "It is impossible," he says, "that any attorney-general can nowdoubt the high morality of this book." Strindberg himself has calledit a terrible book, and has regretted that he ever wrote it. He hasnever published it in Swedish, his own language, because not only isit too personal in character, but it also revealed a still bleedingwound. It contains the relentless description of his first marriage, sosuperbly candid an account, that one is reminded of the last testamentof a man for whom death has no longer any terror. We know from hisfascinating novel Separated, how painful the burden was which he hadto bear, and how terribly he suffered during the period of his firstmarriage. So much so, indeed, that he had to write this book before hecould face the thought of death with composure. Doubtless, a man forwhom life holds no longer any charm would give us a genuinely truthfulaccount of his inner life, and there is no denying that a book whichtakes its entire matter from the inner life is of vastly greaterimportance and on an immeasurably higher level than a million novels,be they written ever so well. The great importance of The Confessionof a Fool lies in the fact that it depicts the struggle of a highlyintellectual man to free himself from the slavery of sexuality, andfrom a woman who is a typical representative of her sex.
Apart from this, it is an intense joy from an artistic point of view tofollow the "confessor" through the book, as he looks at himself fromall sides in order to gain self-knowledge; that he conceals nothingfrom us, not even those deep secrets which he would fain keep even inthe face of death. One sees Strindberg brooding over his own soul tofathom its depths. He plumbs its hidden profoundnesses, he takes topieces the inner wheels of his mechanism, so as to know for himself andto show us how he is made and what is the cause of the instinct whichdrives him to confess and to create. He opens wide his heart and letsus see that he carries in his breast his heaven and also his horriblehell. We see angels and devils fighting in his soul for supremacy, andthe divine in him stepping between them with its creative Let there be!
It was on the thirteenth of May, 1875, at Stockholm.
I well remember the large room of the Royal Library which extendedthrough a whole wing of the Castle, with its beechen wainscoting, brownwith age like the meerschaum of a much-used cigar-holde