Historical Miniatures

Excerpt:

"You know also the constellation which we specially love--the River (Nile).Look, how it flees from the Hunter (Orion), and makes as many windings as theNile here on earth. Therefore he who wishes to learn the hidden secrets of earthmust learn them from the sky. Our wise men know only the lands which lietowards the east; but those which lie in the north under the Great Bear areunknown to us, as also are the lands towards the west. But it looks as thoughthe lands of the Bear had great destinies assigned to them. Their numbers arefour and three, like those of the Hunter. Three represents the Divine with itsattributes, four denotes the most perfect possible: three and four together formthe mysterious number seven. To gods sacrifices are offered with the unequalnumber, three; to men, with the equal number four."This is about all that I have cursorily understood of the secrets of the sky. Ifyou now wish to understand some of the secrets of the earth, let us consider thetombs of the Pharaohs...



About Author:

Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.