Katarina von Bora, a former nun, became Martin Luther’s wife.
In Sweden, Midsummer Eve, the shortest night of the year, is a holiday with almost magical connotations, traditionally associated with love and love-making.
Felix Faure, the president of France, died in 1899.
Stallmästaregården, a restaurant dating back to the eighteenth century and still flourishing today, is located just beyond Norrtull, the northern city gates. August Strindberg (1849–1912), an older contemporary of Söderberg’s and Sweden’s best-known writer internationally, describes a party held there in his youth in two separate works, the story “Dygdens lön” in Giftas (1885; “The Reward of Virtue,” Getting Married), and the second volume of his fictional autobiography, Tjänstekvinnans son (1886; The Son of a Servant).
Hans Christian Andersen’s story “Skyggen” (“The Shadow”) was first published in 1847.
The Great Lake monster (Storsjöodjuret) has supposedly been sighted hundreds of times dating back to the seventeenth century and like the Loch Ness monster “Nessie” achieved legendary status long ago. The province of Jämtland is located by the Norwegian border in the central part of Sweden.
Carl Michael Bellman (1740–1795), Sweden’s most beloved poet of all time, set many of his texts to popular tunes of the day. The exact site of Bellman’s grave in St. Klara churchyard is unknown, but in 1851 the Swedish Academy placed a memorial stone near the entrance to the church.
Madame de Maintenon (1635–1719) was first the mistress and later the second wife of Louis XIX, King of France.
The Per Hallström story alluded to is “Göken” (“The Cuckoo”), from the collection Thanatos (1900). In the original, the small boy confuses the abstract noun “lyckan” (happiness, fortune, good luck) with the more concrete and familiar “lyktan” (lantern, lamp, light). The line quoted comes from a familiar children’s prayer, roughly analogous to “Now I lay me down to sleep,” that reads in full:
Gud, som haver barnen kär,
se till mig, som liten är.
Vart min väg i världen vänder
står min lycka i Guds händer.
Lyckan kommer, lyckan går.
Den Gud älskar, lyckan får.
God, who loves us one and all,
Look after me, for I am small.
Wherever in the world I roam,
My fate rests in God’s hands alone.
Good fortune comes, good fortune goes,
The one God loves, good fortune knows.
“The one with the whip,” the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), wrote Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) in 1881–1882. In this treatise he formulates his conception of the Übermensch (usually translated “Superman,” thanks to G. B. Shaw) and proclaims that since God is dead, human beings must find their own meaning in the here and now.
Viktor Rydberg’s poem “Tomten” (“The Christmas Elf”) has been committed to memory by generations of Swedish school children. First published in 1881, both the text and Jenny Nyström’s accompanying illustration helped establish the tomte as a Swedish analogue to St. Nicolas or Santa Claus. In his novels, Rydberg (1828–1895) often addressed religious and philosophical issues in a historical setting. He turned to the history of religion in nonfiction works as well, asserting in Bibelns lära om Kristus (1862; The Bible’s teaching about Christ) that the divinity of Jesus is not supported by the evidence of the Gospels. He also published several works about Norse mythology.
The haunting flute melody is from Mascagni’s one-act verismo opera Cavalleria Rusticana, 1890.
Both Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment (1866), by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), and the murderers in Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867) eventually suffer self-induced psychological punishment in the aftermath of their crimes.
In 1894, the French army officer Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), accused of selling military secrets to the Germans, was convicted of treason and imprisoned on Devil’s Island. He was later released and exonerated when evidence revealed that he had been the victim of conspiracy and anti-Semitism. The Dreyfus affair became a cause célèbre, a rallying point for liberals and progressives throughout Europe. When the actual perpetrator, Major Esterhazy, was courtmartialed but acquitted in 1898, the novelist and social thinker Émile Zola (1840–1902) published “J’Accuse,” a ringing denunciation of the verdict and of the French military establishment, and again affirmed Dreyfus’s innocence. Söderberg, drawing on his own experience in the novel Den allvarsamma leken (1912; trans. The Serious Game), describes how a group of Stockholm journalists stayed up half the night translating Zola’s polemic so that it could appear as a special supplement in the morning paper. Söderberg also refers to the Dreyfus affair elsewhere in his production, most notably in “Kyrkofadern Papinianus,” Historietter (1898; “Patriarch Papinianus,” Short Stories by Hjalmar Söderberg).
The figures glimpsed outside the Royal Dramatic Theater are Nils Personne, the chief administrator, and the influential director Ludvig Josephson, who died in 1899.
The 1857 collection Les Fleur du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), includes the sonnet “Spleen (I),” from which the lines are taken. Glas misquotes one of them: “L’âme d’un vieux poete . . .” (the soul of an old poet . . .) here becomes “L’ombre . . .” (the shadow/ghost . . .). The change further underscores the parallel between the poem and Glas’s own situation as well as to the Andersen tale.
Given in the original Danish in Söderberg’s text, the ironic quotation about heroic verse is from Ludvig Holberg’s play Barselstuen (1724; The lying-in room).
“The law of change” is a leitmotif in Henrik Ibsen’s play Lille Eyolf (Little Eyolf), published in 1894.
Hjalmar Emil Fredrik Söderberg (July 2, 1869 – October 14, 1941) was a Swedish novelist, playwright, poet, and journalist. Greatly appreciated in his native country, Söderberg is considered by many to be the equal of August Strindberg. Doctor Glas is his most famous work of fiction.
Rochelle Wright was Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Illinois for more than thirty years, with research specialties in modern Swedish literature and Swedish film. Her publications include Danish Emigrant Ballads and Songs (1983), The Visible Wall: Jews and Other Ethnic Outsiders in Swedish Film (1998), and numerous articles on both literary and cinematic topics. In addition to Doctor Glas, Professor Wright has translated or co-translated novels by Ivar Lo-Johansson and Kerstin Ekman. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Tom Rachman is the author of two novels, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (2014) and The Imperfectionists (2010), an international bestseller that has been translated into twenty-five languages. Rachman studied cinema at the University of Toronto, then journalism at Columbia University in New York. In 1998, he joined the Associated Press as a foreign-desk editor in New York, and then became a correspondent in Rome in 2002. From 2006 to 2008, he was an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Slate, and The New Statesman, among other publications. He lives in London.
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