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bureaucracy with Berns Salonger^[1] as rendez-vous. Already the name At the Sign of the Black Pig symbolizes this Berlin sojourn. In the little wine room in The Sign of the Black Pig at the corner of Unter den Linden and Potsdamerstrasse, where Strindberg passed the evenings that winter, the questions of the day were discussed, and everything that seemed in the least antiquated became the object of sharp attacks.

Among the friends with whom Strindberg associated there and who seem to have had some influence on him, the most important was the Polish author Stanislaw Przybyszewski whom Strindberg in Inferno (pp. 66—67) calls “my friend, my disciple who called me ‘father’, because he had learned of me, my Famulus, who gave me the name of master and kissed my hands because his life began where mine ended.”

Of none of his literary friends have I heard Strindberg speak with such enthusiasm as of this Stachu (an abbreviation of Stanislaw). In the beginning of their acquaintance, Strindberg spoke of him as a universal genius and called him “the great Pole”. But Stachu belonged to those all-embracing minds who try to encompass so much that no systems suffice, and whose sphere of thought—except within well-arranged special fields—is a never-ceasing, billowing chaos.

Besides this, Stachu was one of those who have a need of deadening the increasing Weltschmerz with continual