f weeks later the
performance was repeated across the Sound, in the Swedish city of
Malmoe, on which occasion the writer of this introduction, then a
young actor, assisted in the stage management. One of the actors
was Gustav Wied, a Danish playwright and novelist, whose exquisite
art since then has won him European fame. In the audience was Ola
Hansson, a Swedish novelist and poet who had just published a
short story from which Strindberg, according to his own
acknowledgment on playbill and title-page, had taken the name and
the theme of "Pariah."

Mr. Hansson has printed a number of letters (_Tilskueren_,
Copenhagen, July, 1912) written to him by Strindberg about that
time, as well as some very informative comments of his own.
Concerning the performance of Malmoe he writes: "It gave me a very
unpleasant sensation. What did it mean? Why had Strindberg turned
my simple theme upsidedown so that it became unrecognisable? Not a
vestige of the 'theme from Ola Hansson' remained. Yet he had even
suggested that he and I act the play together, I not knowing that
it was to be a duel between two criminals. And he had at first
planned to call it 'Aryan and Pariah'--which meant, of course,
that the strong Aryan, Strindberg, was to crush the weak Pariah,
Hansson, _coram populo_."

In regard to his own story Mr. Hansson informs us that it dealt
with "a man who commits a forgery and then tells about it, doing
both in a sort of somnambulistic state whereby everything is left
vague and undefined." At that moment "Raskolnikov" was in the air,
so to speak. And without wanting in any way to suggest imitation,
I feel sure that the groundnote of the story was distinctly
Dostoievskian. Strindberg himself had been reading Nietzsche and
was--largely under the pressure of a reaction against the popular
disapproval of his anti-feministic attitude--being driven more and
more into a superman philosophy which reached its climax in the
two novels "Chandalah" (1889) and "At the Edge of the Sea" (1890).
The Nietzschean note is unmistakable in the two plays contained in
the present volume.

But these plays are strongly colored by something else--by
something that is neither Hansson-Dostoievski nor Strindberg-
Nietzsche. The solution of the problem is found in the letters
published by Mr. Hansson. These show that while Strindberg was
still planning "Creditors," and before he had begun "Pariah," he
had borrowed from Hansson a volume of tales by Edga