Title:  There are Crimes and Crimes

Author:  August Strindberg

Release Date:  January, 2004 [EBook #4970] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 8, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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There are Crimes and Crimes

A Comedy

by

August Strindberg

Translated from the Swedish with an Introduction by Edwin Bjorkman

INTRODUCTION

Strindberg was fifty years old when he wrote “There Are Crimes and Crimes.”  In the same year, 1899, he produced three of his finest historical dramas:  “The Saga of the Folkungs,” “Gustavus Vasa,” and “Eric XIV.”  Just before, he had finished “Advent,” which he described as “A Mystery,” and which was published together with “There Are Crimes and Crimes” under the common title of “In a Higher Court.”  Back of these dramas lay his strange confessional works, “Inferno” and “Legends,” and the first two parts of his autobiographical dream-play, “Toward Damascus”—­all of which were finished between May, 1897, and some time in the latter part of 1898.  And back of these again lay that period of mental crisis, when, at Paris, in 1895 and 1896, he strove to make gold by the transmutation of baser metals, while at the same time his spirit was travelling through all the seven hells in its search for the heaven promised by the great mystics of the past.

“There Are Crimes and Crimes” may, in fact, be regarded as his first definite step beyond that crisis, of which the preceding works were at once the record and closing chord.  When, in 1909, he issued “The Author,” being a long withheld fourth part of his first autobiographical series, “The Bondwoman’s Son,” he prefixed to it an analytical summary of the entire body of his work.  Opposite the works from 1897-8 appears in this summary the following passage:  “The great crisis at the age of fifty; revolutions in the life of the soul, desert wanderings, Swedenborgian Heavens and Hells.”  But concerning “There Are Crimes and Crimes” and the three historical dramas from the same year he writes triumphantly:  “Light after darkness; new productivity, with recovered Faith, Hope and Love—­and with full, rock-firm Certitude.”

In its German version the play is named “Rausch,” or “Intoxication,” which indicates the part played by the champagne in the plunge of Maurice from the pinnacles of success to the depths of misfortune.  Strindberg has more and more come to see that a moderation verging closely on asceticism is wise for most men and essential to the man of genius who wants to fulfil his divine mission.  And he does not scorn to press home even this comparatively humble lesson with the naive directness and fiery zeal which form such conspicuous features of all his work.