There is no “impartial news”

I feel I need to make a point that seems very basic, and which to me was always obvious, but which doesn’t seem to be so obvious for many people.

All “news” and everything that is shown in the media is propaganda, one way or another. There is no “impartial news”. Even when they report “only facts” (which is an impossibility, as many “facts” can be contested), there is already a partiality in choosing which “facts” to talk about and which not. We are hearing a lot about the war in Ukraine, and very little about the ongoing war in Yemen and the concomitant bombings by the U.S. in Somalia.

Sure, Russian news are propaganda in many ways. But so is the Western media. The big media are controlled by a small handful of people (you’d be surprised how small it is). Many newspapers and TV channels are not independent but are part of large conglomerates. Such large conglomerates have interests. And Western governments have interests too. And, increasingly, as we have seen with Covid, there is growing censorship even in the West. It’s just that they call “misinformation” what they don’t want you to hear, but it’s censorship all the same. (Why can’t I read “misinformation” if I want?)

So of course there is some level of propaganda in Russia, but the idea that “Putin is a crazy dictator that invaded the Ukraine for no reason” is also war propaganda. It’s like saying “Hitler invaded Poland for no reason” or “Stalin killed millions of people for no reason”. There are always reasons. They may be stupid, or evil reasons, but country leaders, usually, are not completely insane (although perhaps some ancient Roman emperors came close to it).

Also remember: “The first casualty of war is truth”.

Since Covid, I don’t really believe half of what I read on the papers, but it seems a lot of people still do. My advice to them would be: first, don’t read so much news, and second, take everything with a grain of salt. In times of war, you have to be even more careful and distrustful. A lot of things in war reporting are really just based on rumours or hearsay. Already lots of stories, from “Snake Island” to the “fire at the nuclear station” were revealed as false news or exaggerations.

I don’t think there will be a nuclear war over the Ukraine. Of course, world leaders appear to be increasingly stupid, so there is a possibility, but I will be surprised if it happens (or maybe I won’t have time to be surprised).

However, the economy is going down the toilet, and that’s going to be bad enough. Energy prices are skyrocketing. Food may end up becoming scarce or expensive in some countries. Things are going to be bad for a long time, even if the war ends soon and doesn’t escalate more.

Then next winter, if things calm down in the Ukraine, they will start talking again about a “new Covid variant”, or maybe some other disease, who knows, and things will go back to normal, or well, the “new normal.” And the economy will still be bad. But people will be happy because at least the war will have ended.

Welcome to the permanent state of emergency. I wish I had more cheerful things to say, but, well, at least I think there will be no nuclear war… So that’s cheerful, I suppose.

The Russian film director presents his view in a recent documentary

Nikita Mikhalkov is a famous Russian film director. He directed the very good movie “Burnt by the Sun”, about the Stalinist purges, which I believe won the foreign film Oscar in 1995. He also directed “Oci Ciorne” (Dark Eyes), a story based on Tchekhov’s “Lady with a dog” (1987), with Marcello Mastroianni in a main role, also very good. I think his last film that was shown internationally was “12″ (2007), about the Chechen War.

Here he weighs in on the current conflict, in a documentary produced for Russian television. He is obviously pro-Russian and pro-Putin, and makes the case about NATO interference and everything that started happening in Ukraine since 2014 with the US-sponsored “colour revolution”. I haven’t seen the full thing yet, so I can’t really vouch for its content, and I’m not very familiar with Mikhalkov’s political views, but it seems interesting and presenting something different from what you see in the mainstream Western media, which since 2020 seems to have decided to ban any alternative viewpoints, first with Covid, now with the war. I have no problem watching things that I don’t necessarily agree with. Enjoy.

Is the current war the second phase of the Great Reset?

It sounds almost like a parody of that famous poem. First they came for the anti-vaxxers, but I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t an anti-vaxxer. Then they came for the truckers, but I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t a trucker. Then they came for the Russians, but I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t Russian. They they came for the cats… And I said, what the hell, didn’t we had enough of this absurdity?

With the rise of social media, cancel culture seems to have become the new law of the land in the West. Whomever we don’t like, we just “unperson” or “ghost”. Of course, in real life, this has more serious consequences than only in social media. Just as misnamed “anti-vaxxers” were denied medical treatment, now some want to deny medical treatment to Russians as well. You can also be cancelled financially, as those who donated even a small amount of money to the truckers’ protest in Canada found out, having their donations confiscated and their bank accounts frozen for days.

The other day Apple Pay and Google Pay “cancelled” Russians, who suddenly found themselves scrambling for cash to pay their metro fares. If you think this can affect only Russians, think again. Once they have control of your “digital wallet”, they can freeze or even take your money away, for any reason — being unvaccinated, being a “domestic terrorist”, being from the wrong religion, not supporting gay marriage enough, not fighting against “climate change” enough. Well, anything.

Now you can see that when WEF leader and part-time Bond villain Karl Schwab said that “you will own nothing, and you’ll be happy”, he wasn’t kidding. But let’s dissect that famous statement a bit more. There is no mystery about “you will own nothing”. It’s more or less what the old-time communists said, too. But what about “you will be happy?”

Well, just look around. Many people were happy to wear masks for over two years. Many were happy berating “anti-vaxxers” for not submitting to a mandatory experimental gene therapy. Many are now happy with their 2-minute hate against Russia and ready to burn a pile of matrioshka dolls. Propaganda has evolved a lot in the last decades, so much that now people take care of their own brainwashing, with just a little hint from the Powers That Be. Sure, it also helps that all alternative viewpoints are eliminated — during “Covid”, all opinions not matching the official narrative were censored or deleted, labelled “misinformation”, and the same is now happening with the war in Ukraine.

However, I think that perhaps now the “Great Resetters” have gone bit too far, even for those who support them. Because a lot of people, even unconsciously, will be thinking: “if this is happening now to Russians, can it happen to me next?”

There is no way that some government or company on the other side of the world can take away your cash from your wallet or from under your mattress, but with “digital cash”, this is now possible. So I think the current sanctions will have far reaching consequences, and not just in Russia, but in the West, with people eventually not trusting Big Tech or Big Pharma or Big Banks anymore, and the economy and the society at some point crashing.

Notes on “Taras Bulba” and the current Ukrainian war

The European Union has banned RT and other Russian media, accusing them of “misinformation”. Since “Covid”, we are supposed to trust only the official Western big media and governments; any other source of information is dismissed as “misinformation” and directly censored. I don’t remember having seen anything like this before, but it seems that we are no longer allowed to have our own opinion about anything.

Another worrying development is European countries sending weapons to the Ukraine, at the same time that they say they are for “peace”. If they are for peace, why are they sending weapons to a country in war? Is that not helping to prolong the conflict? Not to mention, risking being involved in the war, as sending weapons and soldiers can be described as a casus belli (Even Switzerland and Sweden ended their usually neutral status).

Is this war bad or good? I suppose it depends on how it ends.

Nowadays, in particular since the last two World Wars, but also the Vietnam war and other more recent battles in the Middle East, wars are seen mostly as a catalogue of horrors with no redeeming value. Everybody is “anti-war”. But it was not always so; and for centuries war was seen as an occasion for heroism and as a fine occupation for young men. Warriors were celebrated by poets and singers from the beginning of recorded history. Many classics of literature, starting with the Iliad, are about war.

I have just read Nikolai’s Gogol “Taras Bulba“, which is an interesting short novel to read these days. The story takes place in the Ukraine, which was at the time was partly controlled by Poland, and talks about Cossacks making war on Poles (and Jews) — and, occasionally, Muslim Tatars too. It is mostly based on a real Cossack-Polish War that took place during 1648-1657. The Cossacks revolted against the Polish nobility that controlled the eastern part of Ukraine, giving advantages to the Catholics over the Russian Orthodox, and also using the Jews as “tax-farmers”, collecting revenue for profit and making many farmers poor.

While the novel is of course a romantic portrayal of the Cossacks (Gogol had Cossack ancestors), the author does not shy away of showing their extreme violence, not sparing even women nor children, flaying people and burning them alive. And yet the Cossacks are shown as a noble, courageous people, that love war and don’t know what to do when there is none. Other peoples, such as the Jews, are shown as cowardly and only interested in commerce (although it is more a comical portrayal, and not totally negative, as a Jew ends up helping the protagonist). Turks and Tatars are shown as cruel infidels constantly raiding the Cossack lands. The Poles are shown in a negative light because of their control over the Cossacks, and yet one of the Cossack characters, Tara’s own son, falls in love with a beautiful Polish noble lady, and switches sides.

In the novel, Taras Bulba dreams of a new tsar that will come to unify the lands. And in fact, after the Cossack revolt, the Cossacks obtained a territory independent from Poland, and swore loyalty to the Russian Tsar. Eventually, most of Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire.

Is Putin dreaming of creating a new Russian Empire, as some critics say? Or does he have fair security concerns, reacting to NATO encroaching Russia and trying to put American missile bases not just in Poland but in the Ukraine? And what do Ukrainians think?

The Western media oversimplifies the issue, but the situation is not that easy to understand. The Ukraine itself is roughly divided in half, with a more pro-Russian and Russian-speaking Eastern part, and an Ukrainian-speaking more nationalist Western part. The Ukrainian government, since 2014, has been in one way or another controlled by the West/Americans, favouring more the nationalist Eastern side at the expense of the more pro-Russian parts. Will the country eventually be divided along those lines? I suppose it’s too early to tell.

They say that “the first casualty of war is truth”, and in fact it is difficult to find many truthful or verifiable sources of information. Everyone has an agenda.

The war goes on, but hopefully it will remain limited and not turn into WWIII.

Can we trust the mainstream media on any of this?

One thing that annoys me about social media is the facile way in which people just comment on any issue that’s going on. So now you see people all over posting Ukrainian flags, or Putin-is-a-vampire memes, but do they actually know what’s going on? But also in the Western mainstream media, you see the same thing now, they just repeat the same superficial stories as some form of hypnosis.

With Covid, anything that was not the official narrative was just dismissed as “misinformation” or a “conspiracy theory”, or simply censored. I don’t think I saw so much censorship before. Even Youtube removed a lot of videos that simply presented a different opinion.

Now, whenever I want actual information, I rarely go to the mainstream media, because there’s nothing there. But then, how can we learn more about what’s going on in the Ukraine?

Well, for one, Putin’s February 24th speech is pretty good and explains some of the reasons behind the Russian operation in Ukraine (from the Russian point-of-view, sure). The Saker (a very pro-Russian blogger) provides some of his own comments on that site too.

Diane Johnstone, who is a left-wing American journalist, has a very interesting article about the US and NATO poking the Russian bear and how it lead to the current disaster. Pepe Escobar — who is a Brazilian journalist who started writing about pop music but now specializes in geopolitics — wrote something along similar lines (and even a similar title).

There is a blog describing the military advance of Russian forces, it appears to be written by someone on the front in Donetsk. It is in Russian, but Google translate works fine. No deep analysis there, just information about what’s happening on the ground.

The Off-Guardian did a good coverage of otherwise ignored Covid stories; now the editor Kit Knightly has an article recapping what happened in Ukraine since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

On the Ukrainian side, I couldn’t find much, but this explanation with illustrated maps of how Ukraine expanded its territory during Soviet times is interesting. I will see if I find more things from the Ukrainian side, especially civilian reports.

Luckily, civilian casualties appear to be very low, and even military casualties are not that numerous for a conflict of this magnitude. However, today an apartment in Kiev was on fire, apparently because of a Russian missile that was shot down before reaching its target (a military base). So far the combat has mostly spared civilian areas. However, Russian troops are approaching Kiev now, so things might get worse.

Hopefully this war will not last more than a week, I don’t see it dragging for too long, but one never knows…

I have never been to the Ukraine, and I know very little about its history, so unfortunately, contrary to most people on social media, I cannot tell you much about the country or whatever is happening there right now.

It is interesting that this happens just after the Olympic Games and when most countries are scrapping their Covid regulations, at least for the time being. Putin met with Xi Yinping from China just before the games. It’s very likely that they talked about this already (“You support me on Ukraine and I support you on Taiwan”?)

There are many Ukrainians and Russian immigrants living in the eastern part of Germany. Most Russians I know seem to be pro-Putin, but I don’t know what Ukrainians who live here think, and I doubt they are very much pro-Putin (unless they come from the more pro-Russian part on the East). It is a complicated issue. The Ukraine has only been an independent country since 1991. It was part of the Soviet Union before it, and of the Russian Empire before that, although some parts belonged to Poland too.

A friend of mine, a Swiss writer and photographer, Anne Urech, lived in the Ukraine (Lviv) for several years. It seems a beautiful city. She wrote a short story about a mythical version of that city during Soviet times, which can be read here in Geist magazine number 2.

She is understandably worried about her Ukrainian friends. Many people are leaving Kiev and other cities. Since there is a mandatory military draft, adults are supposed to join the army and go to war now. Hopefully this will not last long. I doubt that they can do much against the Russian Army, and the current West-backed government is unlikely to last for very long at this rate. Of course, if NATO and the US enter into the conflict, it can become even worse, as it will become a world war instead of a local civil war. I hope for the sake of everyone that this does not happen.

Canada’s Trudeau already complained of “authoritarianism” (days after beating up his own peaceful protesters and freezing their bank accounts) and sent a few hundred soldiers and gave money and weapons to the Ukraine, but it seems to be just a symbolic measure. It’s not clear what Biden is doing. Hopefully he won’t escalate the situation even more.

Germany seems to have given up on Nordstream 2 as part of their sanctions. Gas and electricity prices already increased in the country and will increase more. Food prices are also increasing, not just in Germany, but worldwide. The stock market basically crashed. Things are not looking so great right now.

Nikolai Gogol is perhaps the most famous writer of Ukrainian origin (the Ukraine, at the time, was part of the Russian Empire). He had Cossack ancestors and identified with the Cossacks, who inhabited mostly in that region where for many years they had a protectorate, but he lived most of his adult life in Saint Petersburg. He was ambiguous about his identity: “I don’t know whether my soul is Ukrainian or Russian,” he wrote. “All I know is that I would never give preference to someone from Little Russia or to someone from Russia.” (“Little Russia” is a reference to the Cossack protectorate in central Ukraine.)

Perhaps the best we can do now is to hope and pray for peace to come shortly to the region, and for things to quiet down. I will leave you with some photographs by my friend Anne Urech, who lived in Lviv, but is currently very far away from it all, in Lima, Peru.

Note: is it Ukraine, or “the Ukraine“? It seems that originally Ukraine meant “borderland” in Russian, so that’s why it was called “the Ukraine”, as in “the Borderland”, but now that is no longer politically correct, and just “Ukraine” is more common.

P. S. Another famous Ukrainian-Russian writer is Anna Akhmatova (well, although she’s mostly seen as Russian, she was born in a small village near Odessa, which is now in Ukraine. But she grew up and lived near Saint Petersburg, and there she went through the Russian Revolution, the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) siege, and the Stalinist terror — she herself was censored and her son was arrested for 10 years in a Siberian gulag). She wrote many beautiful poems, but I will leave you with this one, which seems apropos, “How can you bear to look at the Neva? ” (Neva is a river in northwestern Russia near Saint Petersburg). The poem is from 1914, when World War I was starting.

How can you bear to look at the Neva?

How can you bear to look at the Neva?
How can you bear to cross its bridges?
Not in vain am I known as the grieving one
Since the time you appeared to me.
The black angels’ wings are sharp,
Judgment Day is coming soon,
And raspberry coloured bonfires bloom,
Like roses, in the snow.

Are there supernatural or occult elements in this whole “corona” thing?

I don’t know if I am imagining things, but since I came back from mask-less, restriction-less Sweden into still masked and restricted Germany, I noticed a change in people attitudes and even in the air, so to speak. Instead of cheerful and polite as in Sweden, everybody seemed tense or disagreeable, and even in friends and acquaintances I noticed a strange mood. Some people appeared to suddenly become depressed, or angry, or moody, sometimes for no apparent reason.

I am now convinced that masks, by removing people’s smiles and facial expressions and making them look as robots or automatons, generate an evil effect. Just seeing less smiles and facial communication makes us feel grumpier or sadder. And of course the vaccine/test restrictions that impede normal human mingling also cause people to eventually feel bad — even if they show the pass and follow all the rules. Being “vaccinated” and having a “pass” doesn’t really save you from the mental health effects of all this.

I suppose that there are studies showing that mental health problems are increasing with masks, lockdowns and restrictions, even though no study should be necessary to point something so obvious, but I am also looking at something else here: at some form of negative energy, some kind of supernatural evil, if you will, that feeds on the lack of smiles and on the prevention of normal human interaction.

I am not a very religious man (I am a Christian, but not a very good one), but more and more I feel that there is something beyond the mere material universe that accounts for people’s feelings and moods. That how we feel inside affects the world outside, and vice-versa. So it is not surprising to discover that this incredible social change that we have seen over the past two years has affected people’s minds and behaviour in increasingly negative ways. Perhaps it is just that these restrictions take a toll on people’s mental health and eventually translate into depression or mood swings. But it could also be something else.

What do masks do? They render us anonymous, thus soulless. People without faces who cannot properly communicate or even be seen. Automatons. Slaves. We are not talking about festive Carnival masks here, which transform us into cheerful characters for a night — but about sterile, usually all-white “FP2” masks, that just erase part of our face. White masks are also scary, of course — think Jason, or the killer from “Halloween”, or even the usual anthropomorphic image of Death — and I suppose that’s part of their point.

And the passes? Passes are by definition a system of exclusion, where some “elect” are able to perform activities or go to places, and others are not. Think Soviet Politburo identification cards, or, conversely, think Yellow Stars. But the current QR-Codes, unreadable by men but only understood by machines, are scary and ugly in themselves, because we cannot by ourselves “read” what they say. It is as if they were also transforming us into machines. And if some technocrats get their way with their ideas, and find a way to install similar codes into some type of microchip under our skin, then we will be.

I will talk a bit more about this later, or not.

O Canada, we cry with shame for thee

Peaceful protestors in Ottawa have been removed by force by the local police. A woman was trampled by a police horse, others were beaten or tear-gassed. Three leaders were arrested and the bank accounts of many people who merely donated money to the cause were frozen. Now the government has the power of freeze the account and arrest anyone they don’t like. This in a supposed democracy.

Since the pandemic started, governments worldwide had assumed powers no one knew they had. People were denied assembly, freedom to move and even the right to protest. Supposedly this is all in the name of our health, but it beats me it can be healthy to lock people in their homes, force-close their businesses and make them poor, deny them the right to visit friends or family, force them to wear a mask that is basically useless and may cause respiratory issues in itself, force them to take a vaccine that did not complete formal testing and can have scary side-effects and does not even stop anyone from having the disease, and then beat up anyone who dares to protest — I must be dumb, but none of this strikes me as particularly good for anyone’s health.

But that’s not what’s scary. What’s scary is that after all this, a lot of people still seem to believe all these lies. They seem to believe that being forced to wear a mask and being forced to take a vaccine every three months in order to be able to work is normal and is “making us safe”. They seem to accept “vaccine passports” as something fine and dandy and not an abuse that’s not supported by any law. They don’t even seem to care that their own government is trampling on the Constitution (not to mention old ladies) and now can just make up any new laws they want, all in the name of “safety”. Even their money can be taken away, if they support a “wrong cause”! No one cares.

How can anyone believe that we are living in a “democracy”, after all this, is beyond me.

But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s better like this, that we finally know where we stand, that we know now that there’s no longer even any semblance of freedom or democracy in the West, instead of pretending that all this that has been going on for over two years is only about a “virus” and that governments and bankers are worried about our “health” and want to “end the pandemic”.

“You will own nothing and you’ll be happy”, said Klaus Schwab, from the WEF and mentor of Mr. Trudeau. Well, I guess at least the first part is right.

I like to write about travel (even though most people seem to prefer to read about politics), but since at the moment I am not traveling, and talking about politics in this time can be depressing, I will write about the city where I am temporarily residing, which is not a city I like. The city was named Karl-Marx-Stadt (Karl Marx Town) during the Communist period, and I don’t know why they didn’t keep the name, since they still keep an horrendous, gigantic statue of Karl Marx as their main landmark. The name would fit well with its grey atmosphere, as the town feels like an open-air prison sometimes, especially during current “vaccine passport” times, almost as if the Berlin Wall had not fallen long ago.

It is not a beautiful city. It still has a few old buildings that are beautiful or interesting, such as a few churches or the City Hall, but they are surrounded either by ugly functional modern architecture or by remnants of Soviet-Style architecture; I’m still not sure if the modern soulless malls or the Soviet-style offices are worse. It’s not completely the city’s fault, as it was bombed during WWII then became part of Eastern Germany. On the other hand, Dresden was almost completely destroyed and also became part of Eastern Germany, but they did a good job of rebuilding and recreating its old town in the last decades, and it looks pretty good today.

To be fair, the city was more an industrial town than anything else, for decades, so perhaps it was never really beautiful. Then in the 1990s it lost a large part of its population as the old system crumbled. That’s why there are in the city a lot of abandoned buildings in complete disrepair which give it an even more depressing look (however, in recent years, you saw much more construction and renovation work going on, so perhaps it’s improving slightly on that front.)

It is, in any case, mostly a city for old people, as many of the young leave to study or work somewhere else, usually Leipzig, Dresden or Berlin.

There’s a lot of graffiti on the walls and buildings everywhere, which doesn’t improve their look. Young people wear ugly clothes and strange haircuts and listen to German rap in portable speakers. Then again, if I was young in this city I would be depressed too.

It is a weird town, that seems at the same time big and small. Like a shoe too big to wear, it feels larger than the population it contains. Walking distances between places can be long, but there are a lot of empty spaces, and the city appears mostly deserted, especially on Sundays. In most neighbourhoods, there are hardly any bars or cafes, and if there are, they are usually empty, except perhaps for a few ethnic bars frequented by the local immigrant Arab population. Perhaps a few neighbourhoods are slightly livelier, but not much. If New York is the “city that never sleeps”, this is the city that is always sleeping.

People can occasionally be polite or even sympathetic, but of course they are nowhere near as polite as in Sweden. Some people have a funny way of smiling, with the corners of the mouth going down instead of up. This happens in particular with Deutsche Bahn employees, who perhaps should be sent to Swedish Railways for a express course in politeness to customers.

Contrary to Sweden, not too many people here speak English, so they won’t understand you if you speak to them in that language, or, in many cases, pretend that they don’t. They really like their German language here. It comes from birth, I believe. I even heard a child complaining about foreigners speaking a foreign language instead of proper “Deutsch”. I suppose they are right, but it’s not an easy language to learn.

Politically, the city appears to be equally divided between Antifas and Nazis, or so it appears from the stickers you see placed everywhere around, however I am not so familiar on that subject. The current mayor is form a large centre-left party (SPD).

The main entertainment for many in town is to go to the stadium and watch the local football team and chant and get drunk, not necessarily in that order.

There are some good things. There are a few interesting cultural spots, such as an alternative theatre and an art cinema. A couple of art museums. There is a lot of green too. The local forest, Zeisigwald, is a very agreeable place to walk, and can be enchanting during any season, from summer to winter. There’s also a nice large park near the old castle, the Schlossteich, which is also good for walks.

During the winter season there used to be a traditional Christmas Market, which is always a nice thing, but that was cancelled for the last two years. (Perhaps this year people will be finally allowed to go if they can prove they took their X vaccines and their Y booster shots and wear masks and have tests. You gotta be safe, you know, the politicians and the people at Davos are worried about your health.)

A few small villages around, such as Augustusburg, just 15 km away, with a castle and a large garden, are pretty. The zone of the Erzgebirge mountains, towards the South, near the Czech border, is very famous for their handcrafted Christmas decorations such as nutcrackers, and it is a beautiful region. There are a lot of bike paths outside the city, in the countryside, so you can cycle around and go almost anywhere. It is a good program when the weather is sunny and warm, which unfortunately does not happen very frequently.

Rent is relatively cheap, at least compared to other cities in Germany. It has good schools and one good university, although more for technical courses, with almost zero options for the humanities or the arts. I suppose it could be a good, cheap, quiet place for families to raise children, if you don’t care much about living in a beautiful, lively town.

With time, however, it can become a bit depressive. Even good people who lived here for a long time tend to become grumpier or moodier as time passes. “This town has dragged you down”, as a song by The Smiths once said.

My advice would be to avoid it. Leipzig seems a much better alternative; if you prefer smaller places, then there are nice little villages around which seem to have a healthier atmosphere.

The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whom I mentioned in my last post, lived here for a year or two. Perhaps it was this city who inspired him to paint “The Scream”.

As you may by now know, one of my activities at Björkö Konstnod was to write a screenplay which ended up becoming a sort of one-act play. It was about Scandinavian playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg meeting in the Afterlife, which in this case was a desert island covered with ice and snow (a little bit like Björkö, I suppose).

Ibsen and Strindberg were rival playwright in many ways, and it is known that on occasions they criticized the work of one another, even if admitting to have been mutually influenced too. But they never met in person in life, and so I thought it was interesting to write about their rivalry, but also about their possible friendship.

You can watch a reading of the play here, although the whole thing was very improvised and I think both the text and the performance would have been much improved by having time to rehearse and rewrite. As it is now, it is still an unfinished piece of work.

One interesting fact is that, although they never met personally, both authors were personal friends of the famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, who painted their portraits more than once. Munch also appears to have been involved in the stage design for a few of Ibsen’s plays, drawing preparatory sketches for them, and even painting the background screen for one performance.

I never worked with theatre before, so that was an added difficulty in creating this piece. I don’t even go to the theatre all that much, and of course since 2020 my visits have been even more limited, but I always liked to read plays. In fact, reading plays is much easier than reading novels, as they are just dialog, and I enjoy reading dialogs. So writing a dialog between Ibsen and Strindberg seemed a fun thing to do. Of course, in the end, it wasn’t as easy as that.

I think one of the difficulties I had was that I did not know as much about those dramatists as I thought, so it was difficult to write about them. Also, it was a bit intimidating. See, before coming to Sweden, Strindberg was for me just an obscure but interesting author whom I heard quoted in one or two films by Ingmar Bergman. But in Sweden, August Strindberg is a major national author whose books are mandatory reading in high schools and who most people have at least heard about. I suppose Ibsen’s status in Norway is even higher, as he is well-known worldwide.

But I think that it was a nice experience in the end, and I learned a lot about their lives and their work in the process.

One interesting aspect about Strindberg in particular is that he was not only a great playwright, but also a talented novelist — “The Red Room”, which I started to read at Björkö, is a funny satirical novel about Stockholm — and essayist — his “Inferno” and his “Blue Book” are interesting collections of thoughts and personal memories, the latter one very much influenced by another famous Swede, the mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Besides writing, he was also a talented painter and photographer. In photography, he even invented a new technique which he called “celestographs“. His paintings are also interesting and some of them can be seen at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm.