AUGUST STRINDBERGS TURRIS BABEL

After 1890 August Strindberg, the reformer of European theatre and the author of scandalous autobiographical prose, abandons his literary activity for a few years to take up chemical, alchemic, physical, astronomical researches. It is at that time that the author's new world's view based on archaic nature philosophy is crystallizing, and later takes the name of 'Inferno's ideology'. The last phase of Strindberg's scientific researches is linguistics. The writer turns to pre-Enlightenment idea of the language, and in particular to the hypothesis that all the languages of the world are cognates and originate from a Hebrew proto-language, and that linguistic signs do not have a conventional but a natural character. The writer's linguistic method was based on contrasting of long lists of words in many languages to point out at their common 'Hebrew' roots. In his researches, the writer referred to the mystical, linguistic theories originated in cabala and in neo-platonic Egyptology; much space devoted to a graphic analysis of Chinese ideograms, in his view similar to Syrian, Arabic, and Hebrew signs.