Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking

  In May 1998 Astrid had a stroke, which meant that she always had to have a nurse nearby, and during her last three years she seemed to be living in a time before Lasse’s death. You couldn’t talk to her about anything that had happened after that, explains Karin Nyman. Yet there were no major changes to her personality; certainly her sense of humor seemed unimpaired. During one of Karin’s visits to Karolinska Hospital, where her mother was recuperating after her stroke, she asked whether Astrid wanted her to switch the radio on before she left. The answer was a brief, clear “no.” Karin was surprised:

  “Surely you’re not just going to sit here getting a bit bored?”

  “No, I’m going to lie here getting completely bored.”

  Outside, the sun rose and fell. A new millennium announced its hectic arrival, but in Dalagatan 46 things took their usual tranquil course. Only nurses, family, and close friends had access to Astrid Lindgren. Apart from Karin, her family, and Lasse’s family, visitors included her sister Stina; Margareta Strömstedt and her sister Lisa; her former colleague and successor at Rabén and Sjögren, Marianne Eriksson; and her friend from the park, Alli Viridén. And Kerstin Kvint, of course, who still went through the mail twice a week, and had now become stenographer to one of literary history’s most assiduous stenographers: “For a while after the hemorrhage she was very sad and reticent and couldn’t really get interested in the letters, but I read them to her just as I used to, and answered them myself. Our work continued like that up until Christmas 2001. Then there was a period when she seemed happier and spryer, and could laugh and say long sentences.”

  Astrid Lindgren knew that her urn would one day rest in Vimmerby Cemetery beside her mother and father and two of her siblings. Anne-Marie Fries was a little more than 150 feet away, and at twice that distance was Reinhold Blomberg, one of the men with whom Astrid Lindgren had once had a relationship but whom she’d never loved. As she said in an interview with Stina Dabrowski in 1993: “My great loves have always been children. . . . I’m more a mother than anything else, so I’ve got more joy from my children.”

  Her final years were spent in the rooms overlooking Vasa Park, where Astrid had lived and written so intensely with her husband and children, family, and friends. She had entertained a stream of guests, from authors, child psychologists, and feminists to national and international politicians. Often, however, she had simply danced to the gramophone, alone and happy. Now it was mostly the radio she listened to, and most of all she loved the second movement of Mozart’s divinely beautiful Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major, which she had called “my funeral adagio” in a letter to Anne-Marie Fries in the summer of 1978.

  After the stroke in 1998, Astrid occasionally declared that she’d had enough of living. “I want to die!” she told Karin. On better days, however, she would ask her daughter or Kerstin Kvint to read to her. She requested Swedish classics like Pär Lagerkvist or Verner von Heidenstam, or some of Astrid’s own texts, including the poem “Om jag vore gud” (If I were God) and selected chapters from Pippi Longstocking. This wasn’t because she wanted to enjoy her world-famous narrative voice, but rather so that she could relive the sense of freedom and fullness, of eternity, that had accompanied the creation of every single book. Of euphoric solitude, in which she had never been alone. As Astrid put it in a letter to Louise Hartung in November 1958: “I’m probably only completely happy when I write. I don’t mean during a particular period of writing, but in the moments when I’m in the act of writing itself.”

  She died on January 28, 2002, at ten o’clock in the morning, at home in her bed in Vasastan. By her side were two nurses, a doctor, and Karin. For the rest of the day, Stockholmers of all ages flocked to Dalagatan 46 to lay down a flower or light a candle. That evening there was a special television broadcast, and the next day all the newspapers in Scandinavia and Germany printed comprehensive obituaries; larger publications in Sweden also devoted special sections to her. The funeral, worthy of a queen or statesman, took place on March 8, International Women’s Day. Everyone was in attendance: feminists, with children and grandchildren; the Swedish prime minister; several generations of the royal family; and a hundred thousand ordinary Swedes, who lined the streets as the coffin was carried to Storkyrkan, the ancient church in Stockholm’s old town.

  What a day, what a life.

  Astrid Lindgren: Selected Titles

  Confidences of Britt-Mari (1944)

  Kerstin and I (1945)

  Pippi Longstocking (1945)

  Pippi Longstocking Goes Aboard (1946)

  Bill Bergson, Master Detective (1946)

  The Children of Noisy Village (1947)

  Pippi in the South Seas (1948)

  Happy Times in Noisy Village (1949)

  Nils Karlsson the Elf and Other Adventures (1949)

  Kajsa Kavat and Other Children (1950)

  Kati in America (1950)

  Bill Bergson Lives Dangerously (1951)

  Nothing but Fun in Noisy Village (1952)

  Kati in Italy (1952)

  Bill Bergson and the White Rose Rescue (1953)

  Mio, My Son (1954)

  Kati in Paris (1954)

  Karlsson-on-the-Roof (1955)

  Rasmus and the Vagabond (1956)

  Rasmus, Pontus, and Toker (1957)

  South Meadow (1959)

  Mardie (1960)

  Lotta on Troublemaker Street (1961)

  Karlsson Flies Again (1962)

  Emil in the Soup Tureen (1963)

  We on Seacrow Island (1964)

  Emil’s Pranks (1966)

  The World’s Best Karlsson (1968)

  Emil and His Clever Pig (1970)

  The Brothers Lionheart (1973)

  Samuel August from Sevedstorp and Hanna from Hult (1975)

  Mardie to the Rescue (1976)

  Ronia the Robber’s Daughter (1981)

  Original Pippi (2007)

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  Other Sources

  Astrid Lindgren Archive, National Library, Stockholm.

  Private letters, diaries, and images, Karin Nyman/Saltkråkan AB.