Quando «il lettore è affine all’autore». Una danza macabra tra August Strindberg e Søren Kierkegaard

The article aims to chronologically trace the encounter between August Strindberg and the work of Søren Kierkegaard – in particular Enten-Eller (1843) – in an attempt to identify the explicit and implicit traces that the thought of the Danish philosopher left in Strindberg’s work, especially in his prose. Strindberg’s reading of Kierkegaard’s work is peculiar because of the total absence of philosophical pre-understanding. In its genuine immediacy, it testifies to the full success of the Kierkegaardian communication strategy, which consisted in attracting the readers through aesthetics before confronting them with their own desperation, while instilling in them the need for the religious antidote. Strindberg declared, after reading Enten-Eller, that he had found Christian ethics ‘smuggled’ into it. The article also examines Strindberg’s interest in ‘experimental psychology’ operating from a literary point of view in Kierkegaard’s philosophical novels.