like Strindberg; his childhood of hate is Strindberg's own; other
details--such as for instance that THE STRANGER has refused to
attend his father's funeral, that the Parish Council has wanted to
take his child away from him, that on account of his writings he
has suffered lawsuits, illness, poverty, exile, divorce; that in
the police description he is characterised as a person without a
permanent situation, with uncertain income; married, but had
deserted his wife and left his children; known as entertaining
subversive opinions on social questions (by _The Red Room_, _The
New Realm_ and other works Strindberg became the great standard-bearer
of the Swedish Radicals in their campaign against conventionalism
and bureaucracy); that he gives the impression of not being in full
possession of his senses; that he is sought by his children's
guardian because of unpaid maintenance allowance--everything
corresponds to the experiences of the unfortunate Strindberg
himself, with all his bitter defeats in life and his triumphs in
the world of letters.

Those scenes where THE STRANGER is uncertain whether the people he
sees before him are real or not--he catches hold of THE BEGGAR'S
arm to feel whether he is a real, live person--or those occasions
when he appears as a visionary or thought-reader--he describes the
kitchen in his wife's parental home without ever having seen it,
and knows her thoughts before she has expressed them--have their
deep foundation in Strindberg's mental make-up, especially as it
was during the period of tension in the middle of the 1890's,
termed the Inferno period, because at that time Strindberg thought
that he lived in hell. Our most prominent student of Strindberg,
Professor Martin Lamm, wrote about this in his work on Strindberg's
dramas: