Hjalmar Bergman

• Born: September 19, 1883
• Birthplace: Örebro, Sweden
• Died: January 1, 1931
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

Other Literary Forms

Hjalmar Bergman wrote several important novels, many short stories, and film scripts vital to the emergence of the film industry.

Achievements

It is safe to say that a Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, and a Swede, August Strindberg, laid the groundwork for modernism in drama. They have become internationally known. The major Scandinavian playwrights in the generation to follow, Gunnar Heiberg in Norway and Hjalmar Bergman and Pär Lagerkvist in Sweden, never developed an international reputation for their drama, though Lagerkvist, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951, achieved wide recognition as a novelist. In an epoch-making manifesto, “Modern teater: Synpunkter och angrepp” (1918; “Modern Theatre: Points of View and Attack,” 1966), Lagerkvist declared that the playwright was at the crossroads: He had to choose between Ibsen’s psychological realism, and Strindberg’s expressionism and spiritual fantastication. This was Bergman’s challenge as he wandered from one extreme to the other, testing the boundaries and exploring the ground between. Inevitably, Bergman’s sense of theater put him rather closer to the spirit of Strindberg. Of the three playwrights of his generation, only Bergman developed anything like an international reputation in the theater, chiefly through Georges and Ludmilla Pitoëff in Paris. In the United States, he remains largely unproduced and unknown; in Sweden he is the only important playwright after Strindberg and an important way-station between Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman, who was no relation but felt a strong affinity for his namesake. The legacy is a peculiar blend of comedy and vision.

Taking his cue from Strindberg’s chamber plays and from the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s diaphanous mood plays, Hjalmar Bergman developed what he called marionette plays , highly stylized and symbolic, destined to cast a long shadow from their many shadows. He then proceeded to explore all the devices and strategies of the expressionism that had originated in Sweden and was flourishing in Germany.

Bergman acquired his immense Swedish popularity (a Stockholm restaurant and a theater are named for him) as a realistic novelist, in a series of genre pictures of the commercial center of Sweden’s iron-ore district, the so-called bergslag, where he grew up, and in a study of changing social dynamics in that area. These novels were later to be turned into plays which lost something in detail but gained in dramatic situation and, in fact, emerged as farces. So, in the drama Bergman was never a pure Ibsenesque realist.

Bergman was indefatigable. He found plots everywhere. He explored everything. Sweden could scarcely have laid the groundwork in the film industry without Bergman’s supplying of scripts to Victor Sjöström; in his later years, he turned his attention to radio drama and undoubtedly would have moved on to television if it had been ready for him.

Biography

Hjalmar Fredrik Elgérus Bergman was born September 19, 1883, in the commercial city of Örebro, the son of a bank director. From his family he derived an economic security that persisted until 1910 when he was forced to rely on his writing for sustenance. A domineering father and a propensity toward obesity made Bergman painfully sensitive in his youth. It may indeed be said that when he grew up he spent most of his life traveling from one hotel to another, writing feverishly, in flight from his accumulated neuroses.

Bergman’s formal education was not extensive. On graduation from high school in 1900 in nearby Västerås, he traveled in Austria and Germany, reading in leisurely fashion Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Fyodor Dostoevski. One of the most influential books in Bergman’s youth was Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767-1769; Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1889). A year at Uppsala University was largely a private discipline in philosophy and aesthetics under the tutelage of Hans Larsson. Once more Bergman’s restlessness took him abroad, this time to Italy, where he was charmed and engrossed by the folkways but, most ironically, beset by an eye ailment that threatened blindness and kept him from enjoying fully the travel that his spirit required. At this time there was a passing encounter with the young E. M. Forster about which not much is known.

Bergman was attracted to drama early in his life. He never missed the engagements of traveling theater companies in Örebro. In 1903 he became acquainted with the great theater family Lindberg, of whom the father, August, was one of the eminent actors of his time (he led a company to Chicago) and the son, Per, an internationally known stage and screen director, and author of Bakom Masker (1949; behind masks), one of the most important critical memoirs of Bergman. Bergman’s talent was thus whetted, and he wrote his first play in 1904, a lyric closet drama, a kind of folk passion play, Mary, Mother of Jesus, published by his father but never staged. Bergman further cemented his relations with the theater by becoming married to Stina, August Lindberg’s second daughter, in 1908. That same year brought Bergman to the stage: Dramaten, the most important theater in Stockholm. The play was Lady Vendla’s Chain, laid in the time of King Charles XII of Sweden (1697-1718), a fantasy about a powerful old man who oppresses the weak around him and turns them into puppets. Finally their fear of him is overcome and they set fire to his house and escape their servitude. The play has not survived, but the subject gave notice of things to come.

Bergman’s first popular success was a novel, Hans nåds testamente (1910; the baron’s will), which also initiated a series of works that explored the topography, social mores, and changing values of Sweden’s central iron-ore district. This was Bergman’s terrain, though he usually wrote about it from a safe distance. From then on Bergman lived abroad, returning to the Stockholm archipelago in the summers, and his life became his work. There were interruptions, chiefly homosexual infatuations, but he always returned to Stina, and Stina was loyal beyond the line of duty and beyond Bergman’s death. For the rest of her life, she was his chief advocate, advising directors and editors, staging a series of his plays in English in the summers, always defending their marriage.

Bergman’s experiments in symbolic and expressionistic theater are significant, but their failure to find an audience disturbed him. He kept coming back to the bergslag, the district of his youth, most notably in another popular success, the novel Markurells i Wadköping (1919; God’s Orchid, 1924). In 1917, a chance viewing of Victor Sjöström’s film, Terje Viken (1916; based on an Ibsen poem) captivated Bergman and led him into an infatuation with film, the writing of some thirty scenarios (many unproduced), and an eventual stay in Hollywood (1923-1924), when Sjöström persuaded him to take a job as script writer and assistant director. The visit was far from happy; he left after only a few months, convinced that vulgarity had reached a new stage of refinement and that America scarcely had the moral mission it assumed for itself in the world.

In 1926, in spite of an agonizing skin infection and a deterioration of the nervous system, Bergman threw his energies into a new medium, into the writing of radio sketches. By 1929, he had become Sweden’s most popular radio playwright. From 1919 onward, the idea of death had never been far from Bergman’s mind and in 1929 he began to write the epilogue of his life, what he knew to be his last will and testament. Characteristically, he assumed a Pagliacci role in a radio serial called Clownen Jac (1930; Jac the Clown, 1995). Bergman put his physical resources to the limit to play the clown role himself, the part of a performer who abandons his jesting and mime to read his spiritual and artistic credo to an uncomprehending audience. The work is uneven but moving, not merely as a personal statement but as a manifesto of the age. A few days later, Bergman left for Berlin, where he quietly died alone in his usual habitat, the bleak isolation of a hotel room.

Analysis

Hjalmar Bergman was endlessly fecund and inventive, a source of inspiration. Drama was his life—and he was one of the great fabulists. His dramaturgy can best be summed up in these three stages: the marionette plays (1917), the expressionistic plays (1918-1923), and the realistic farces (1925-1930).

Dödens arlekin

The focal situation in Dödens arlekin (death’s harlequin) is the death of Alexander Broman, the personification of an authority that has dominated family, business, and community to a state of tyranny and paralysis. The stage is his office, the empty chair a symbol of his absent and declining authority. Broman never appears, but his presence is felt in a thousand ways. It is here that the children converge. Bertil, the only son and the heir apparent, is too cowed from long parental domination either to approach the bedside of his dying father or to take any kind of decisive action. The daughter Tyra arrives with her engineer husband Lerche, to whom she was married because of her father’s will in the matter. She would rather have married Dr. Brising, the community doctor, who is in attendance; the relationship is, in fact, renewed. Tyra’s sister Magda wanted to marry Lerche, but again parental authority had it otherwise; Magda has become a hard, even brutal woman, to whom Bertil constantly turns for support.

The intrigue of the play is realistic, but an aura of commedia hovers over everything. Indeed, Dr. Brising is the “death’s harlequin” of the title. He calls himself a “death-doctor” because Broman’s overriding authority has left him no province except that of signing certificates of death. He dances to two kinds of bells, that in the death chamber and those on Tyra’s sleigh. They are not unrelated. As Brising puts it: “Death has a wonderfully stimulating effect—on the surroundings.”

En skugga

En skugga (a shadow) has been called “a proverb in one act.” It might as well be called a brief venture into allegory. In it, Bergman effectively fuses two themes, that of youth mated (or about to be mated) to old age, and the symbolic splitting of personality, somewhat in the fashion of Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” Erik spends the bride’s last night prior to marriage with her, while the aging groom-to-be lurks suspiciously outside her door with the mother. In the morning, before a planned elopement with Vera, Erik tries to dismiss his servant, who has guarded the rendezvous. Though Erik and the servant are two separate personalities, it is clear that Bergman intends to represent man’s better self dismissing his base, evil self. The evil self wins and stabs Erik, who is discovered in an ugly sprawl on the bride’s bed. Vera claims him in a passionate close: “He has eyes, lips, breast, arms, hands. And you call him a shadow? He gave his life for his honor. . . . He gave me everything I asked for.” Ultimately the “shadow” comes to signify sensual passion, darkly shadowing blood and violence; the real culprit is society.

Mr. Sleeman Is Coming

The third of these “marionette plays,” Mr. Sleeman Is Coming, opens with the interestingly contrasted dialogue of two impoverished old maids, Aunt Bina and Aunt Mina, who are about to marry off their young, lovely niece, Anne-Marie, to a desiccated old man, Herr Sleeman, the pillar of an adjoining community. In the second tableau of this almost ballet-like artifice, Anne-Marie disappears into the woods with her Green Hunter, but she is submissively back the next morning to accept the inevitable. There is real horror in the old man’s arrival. The movements of his body are grotesque; he repeats the words that the Green Hunter had spoken, turning their petals to dust. As Per Lindberg remarks, “Sleeman is the rubber stamp of that which once was life.” He is a symbol of the quiet, apparently friendly power that desiccates life and turns people into will-less marionettes. None of Bergman’s plays surpasses the delicate stylization of this graceful work, which has, quite understandably, become a favorite acting exercise in Scandinavia.

Spelhuset

The immediate public response to the marionette plays was not good and Bergman, disappointed, experimented in another direction. Spelhuset (the gaming house) is Bergman’s best effort in expressionism, which means that it was not so much a play as a charade, in spite of its exquisite theatricality. The play was in step with the advances of German expressionism and used that movement’s whole bag of tricks. The presiding metaphor is not the theater or the circus, but the casino. “All the world’s a gaming house,” with its labyrinthine deceits, with the Manager as Ringmaster. Society has effaced character to the point of the generic: The Railroad King, First Croupier, Second Croupier, Bejeweled Beldam, First Cocotte, Second Cocotte, and so on. Much is dumb show and mumbo-jumbo. Karin and Gerhard, untainted youth, have managed to keep their identity and, hence, their names. Karin is involved in the gambling, wins a fortune at the expense of The Railroad King, but manages to make her escape with Gerhard in a lurid finale of conflagration and murder. The play did not find its way into production until 1930; Bergman himself was present, making his last public appearance in Sweden before he left the next day for Germany and early death. The play, as it turned out, was a premonition.

Sagan

Sagan(the legend) is similarly slight in plot but rich in scenic effect. The lovely Rose would marry her doctor, Gerhard, if she had her way about it; Sune would probably marry Astrid, who worships him. Rose and Sune, however, are forced into betrothal by Family and Money, represented in a gallery of grotesques, of caricatures: the Rich Uncle, the Harridan of a Mother, the Effete Young Chamberlain, and the Heavy Aunt. Authority has its way, though just what happens at the end is not clear. Stina Bergman, who presided over the writing, says that Rose takes morphine and dies; the play says that Sune ecstatically drags her off shouting: “the sun, the sun”—perhaps a sardonic echo of the ending of Henrik Ibsen’s play Gengangere (pb. 1881; Ghosts, 1885). Bergman never really resolved the play because, as he thought, “it will never get played.” Nevertheless, it has been frequently staged, chiefly by Ingmar Bergman, though not yet as a film.

Though the core of the play involves Rose and Sune, the framework involves Sagan, a lovely young woman who is the mythic embodiment of unrequited love—the family curse—and also mistress of ceremonies. Invisible to the other characters, she introduces them, weaves among them, and provides the commentary and poetry of the play, like an unseen female Feste. It is a sad and lovely play that can perhaps best be described in painterly terms (Bergman was early—and briefly—a student of art): It is as if an assemblage of Rowlandson caricatures was embraced by a framework of Watteau. The nearest theatrical equivalent is Alfred de Musset’s On ne badine pas avec l’amour (pb. 1834; No Trifling with Love, 1890), also the sentiment of Bergman’s play, as an internal allusion makes clear. If there are ambiguities in the plot, there is no questioning the ritual power of this work, the most poetic of Bergman’s plays.

Porten

Porten(the portal) is another dark allegory in the expressionistic mode. Henrik, a political prisoner for an unspecified crime, has been granted clemency by the government after serving only two years of his ten-year sentence. His home has been reestablished; his family awaits him with some apprehension, as do members of the community who wonder what bought off his sentence. Some feel cheated out of the martyr that he was so long as he was in prison. Henrik appears, quoting from the opening stanza of Dante’s Inferno. He has passed through “the dark wood,” so harsh that death could hardly be more so. This, however, is no midlife crisis, as in Dante, but the edge of death. Henrik is a mass of tensions, hatreds, and suspicions of his wife’s possible infidelities and of his unknown benefactor. The engineer of his release, Michael, appears halfway through the play. He, a nobleman and one-time rival of Henrik in love, lectures Henrik on the necessity of besinning, self-possession or acceptance of one’s fate.

Bergman’s play falls into two irreconcilable parts: the political and the personal. It has its dramatic moments and to a considerable degree the presiding stage symbol of the arching portal yokes all things together, whether it is the gateway from imprisonment to release, from life to death, or from social anger to self-acceptance. Bergman says that the play grew out of a “mortal peril,” but such is the abstraction of the action that we may never know the autobiographical origin or the exact import of the message. It is no doubt for this reason that the play has had so little stage attention.

Expressionistic Plays

Of the other plays in this middle, largely expressionistic period (1918-1923), Ett experiment (an experiment) elaborates a dialectic between wealth and poverty very much under the influence of George Bernard Shaw, Lodolezzi sjunger (Lodolezzi sings) is an exotic bagatelle, and Vävaren i Bagdad (the weaver of Bagdad) exploits—and to some degree satirizes—the then current preoccupation with Eastern themes (Bergman had just translated The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments into Swedish).

The Swedenhielms

The Swedenhielms was Bergman’s first big play and his first big success. His many earlier plays were adroitly turned but slender. Though he clearly wanted to write a very Swedish drama (Stina calls it Sweden’s “first classic comedy”), it has played successfully in fourteen countries (although minimally in the United States) and has had extensive exposure in film and television. So, clearly, its national character has not limited its ability to travel.

The apparent center of the play is the ebullient, extravagant, controversial Rolf Swedenhielm, an engineer who is about to win the Nobel Prize. Will he get it, will he not? His reception of the prize is resolved early enough to indicate that this is not the major tension of the play. Svante Arrhenius, who received the Nobel Prize for his work on electrolytic dissociation, is said to have been the real-life model on which Rolf Swedenhielm was based, though even more of Bergman’s own father goes into the portrait. Then there are the three, apparently flighty, children: Rolf, Jr., who follows in his father’s scientific footsteps; Julia, a posturing actress who is always in somebody else’s play; and Bo, a light-headed lieutenant in the air force. This is essentially a family play. The boys are gamblers and high-livers in a family of aristocratic poverty. So the tension of the play, as it increasingly appears, arises in anticipation of how the father might react to the profligacy of the children and how he might ultimately be disgraced at the moment of his distinction. A creditor (right out of Ibsen) confronts the father with a handful of promissory notes that only the prize money can resolve. Most distressing are Bo’s apparent forgeries of his father’s name.

It develops that the real forger was Boman, the housekeeper and the play’s mother figure, who was forced into such action by the extravagance of the family; she emerges the villain/heroine of the play, the sassy servant, endlessly housecleaning and keeping everybody in line, salvaging the honor of the family, the honor to which all the others merely pay lip service.

The play is classical in its compactness (everything seems to happen within twenty-four hours, though it could not). The badinage approaches that of the English comedy of manners (Bergman was infatuated with the Oscar Wilde of The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, pr. 1895). The character types are part of the vocabulary of classical comedy: the egocentric pater familias (who makes entrances with “The Toreador Song” or a thunderous snore); the irresponsible children who, it turns out, are not so bad after all; and the wily servant, though in this case the middle-aged, controlling domestic so well resuscitated as Dr. Borg’s domestic in Ingmar Bergman’s play Smultronstället (1957; Wild Strawberries, 1959). All in all, this is a robust, rambunctious play that works with the whole tradition of comedy.

Dollar

Like Honoré de Balzac, Bergman created his human comedy of interlocking characters and plots. In another greatly successful play, Julia Swedenhielm, now married to the industrialist Kurt Balzar, President of Svea, Inc., joins two other couples at a northerly resort-sanatorium to greet another Julia (namely Johnstone), the wealthy relative from America. Originally called The American Lady, this play came to the stage with the succinct and sardonic title Dollar.

Svea, Inc. is in trouble and needs all the help it can get. The same can be said of all three European marriages, where lust, distrust, boredom, and fear are rampant—clothed, however, in sophistication. Says one character, the doctor of the sanatorium: “European amorality is an old weed with manifold blossoms, endlessly mysterious in color and form.”

What the American lady has to offer are money and a single-minded rectitudinous nature. With a degree in theology, she holds morning prayer in the lobby. Beyond sermonizing, however, she exposes the peccadillos of her Swedish relatives with all the assurance of one of George Bernard Shaw’s virtuous ladies. So, ultimately, the play is a confrontation between American and European value systems.

Like so much of Bergman, the play skirts the edge of tragedy but always finds comic resolution. Sussi, the most high-strung of the wives, is rescued from a suicide attempt in the snow by the American Julia, disguised as a chauffeur. Julia herself, though traveling with a duke doubling (onstage) as a pedicurist, is united with the sanatorium doctor who is (not surprisingly) the raisonneur of the play. All three troubled European couples are brought to their senses in a traditional comic resolution.

The play’s intrigue subsists not so much on action as on innuendo and a kind of badinage which has come to be called “Swedenhielmese.” As film (1938), Dollar provided Ingrid Bergman with one of her best early roles, that of the Swedish Julia.

Patrasket

Next to The Swedenhielms, Patrasket (the rabble) is Bergman’s best-known original play. The fable of this farce is tested and infallible. A successful tradesman in a northern German city absents himself from his store to avoid poor relations who, not to be so easily sloughed off, take over the store while the owner, Rosenstein, hovers and agonizes in the neighborhood. Joe Meng, the adroit spokesman for the intruders, “the rabble,” is to a degree a projection of Bergman himself. He speaks for Bergman in a notable panegyric to fantasy, a luxury for the rich but a necessity for the poor. Into the figure of Meng, Bergman concentrates everything he finds of mingled tragedy and comedy in the Jewish people: displacement, resourcefulness, business acumen, poetry, music, melancholy, and flamboyance. (The late Martin Lamm, Sweden’s finest critic of the drama and for years an intimate of Bergman, believes that Meng was largely modeled after Mauritz Stiller, the renowned film director and a Russian Jew. Indeed, he suggests that the spectacular transactions Meng expects to carry out through his pretty daughter Mary have their origin in Stiller’s discovery of Greta Garbo, whom he brought to Hollywood and world fame.)

Bergman compounds business and love in a double plot consciously reminiscent of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597). Meng, like Shylock, has lost a daughter, though with Meng it is a temporary loss. Bergman appears anxious to provide in Meng a sequel, perhaps a corrective, to what he believes to be the inevitably comic interpretation of Shylock. In Shakespeare’s play, reflects Meng:

a Jew has been cheated, a Jew tormented, a Jew scorned! That was enough. Who wept? Wasn’t there one Jew in the audience? Pah! If so, he laughed harder than the rest. . . . For Israel is like unto olives, that their virtues, like oil, must be squeezed out of them.

Markurells of Wadköping

Matriculation (student examen), or the passage from high school to profession/university (two years after an American high school graduation), looms large among Swedish rituals, enabling the successful to wear a white cap and flourish a swagger stick on festive occasions for years to come. Markurells of Wadköping focuses on the uncertainties and tensions of just that moment in a fictional town that is part of Bergman’s territory and a conflation of Örebro and Västerås, respectively the cities of his birth and matriculation.

Markurell is the town innkeeper and entrepreneur, who with a combination of acumen, uninhibited crudity, and occasional flashes of finesse, has bought up the community, including Judge Carl-Magnus de Lorche, who represents the aristocracy (in decline) and the judiciary. Markurell is aided and abetted by Ström the barber, a sycophantic and poisonous character. Markurell’s one endearing feature is his love for his son, and to ensure his son’s passing his matriculation exam he stages an elaborate feast for the examiners: smoked salmon, ptarmigan, and an array of fine wines. It is hardly a subtle maneuver, though theatrical, and, typically, Markurell fails to view it as bribery. The uses of money are manifold. Young Markurell manages to pass the examination, though whether by dint of a last ditch effort or his father’s maneuver is not quite clear. Evidently, the examiners are vulnerable to the good things of life since they so seldom have them.

The ultimate irony—and it is a powerful and devastating one—is that Markurell turns out not to be the father of his own son. The community has known all along that Judge de Lorche is the real father, but this shattering news comes to Markurell late in the play. Nevertheless, everything arrives at a festive close in this bittersweet drama. Late in life, Bergman adapted this play from the novel which in 1919 did so much to establish his career and gave him the added momentum to write. It lacks the amplitude and detail of the original, but it is full of vitality.

The Baron’s Will

Bergman came full circle: His last and perhaps his finest play, The Baron’s Will (1931), was based on his first and perhaps finest novel, Hans nåds testamente. Even in his exhaustion, the old exuberance comes back. In the whole realm of drama, it would be hard to find a better and denser—if equally farcical—portrait of manor house society: indolent, self-indulgent, eccentric, busily engaging in backstairs sex.

The occasion is the seventieth birthday and the framing of the last will and testament of His Lordship Baron Roger Bernhusen de Saars (the original being Bergman’s godfather). The Baron dominates everything; he runs the gamut from bowels to bombast. But he is lovable after a fashion—even to the array of retainers who, grumbling, cater to his every whim. His lovely, illegitimate daughter Ingrid gets the estate, and not the priggish Roger, son of his termagant sister Julia, who is almost a match for her brother in virtuoso flights of insult. For a time it seems that Roger and Eric, another of the estate’s bastard children, will vie equally for the attention of Ingrid (they indulge in fisticuffs and there is the threat of further violence), but Ingrid and Eric, two happy offspring of healthy sexuality, are meant for each other. So love moves onward toward the new, classless society.

The retainers are marvelously portrayed; while they may defer to the aristocracy, they are outspoken and their vigor is that of the future. Bergman clearly enjoys the poetry and vulgarity of the aristocracy (in about equal proportions), but he knows that it is on the way out, whatever nostalgia he might feel. So the realism of his early novel has taken on a “story-book quality,” a kind of stylization that exploits theatricality and provides the perspective of history. Realism is dull; fantasy enriches everything. This is the essence of Bergman’s contribution to the stage.

Biliography

Bock, Sigge. Lowly Who Prevail: Vistas to the Work of Hjalmar Bergman. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 1990. A critical analysis of the work of Bergman, with emphasis on religion in his writings. Bibliography and indexes.

Linder, Erik Hjalmar. Hjalmar Bergman. Boston: Twayne, 1975. A basic biography of Bergman that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.

Petherick, Karin. Hjalmar Bergman: “Markurells i Wadköping.” 2d ed. Hull, England: Orton and Holmes, 1976. This study of God’s Orchid, one of Bergman’s novels, sheds light on his dramatic works. Bibliography.

Scobbie, Irene, ed. Aspects of Modern Swedish Literature. Rev. ed. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1999. In addition to placing Bergman within the wider tradition, this work contains a chapter on the life and works of Bergman.

Warme, Lars G., ed. A History of Swedish Literature. Vol. 3 in History of Scandinavian Literatures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Provides information on the works of Bergman and explains his role in Swedish literature.