Swedish Enlightenment

Swedish Enlightenment, period of rich development in Swedish literature during the second half of the 18th century in which Neoclassicism reached its highest expression and gradually graded into Romanticism. It was a local embodiment of the broader European Enlightenment.

The activity of the Swedish Enlightenment occurred during—and owed much to—the reign (1771–92) of King Gustav III. He was a patron of the arts and attracted the best writers of the time to his court; by founding the Swedish Academy (1786) he gave them official status. Gustav was especially interested in drama and opera; he invited German and French actors to perform in Stockholm and encouraged the leading Swedish poets to produce texts for performance. Gustav himself sketched out some of these works, the best of which is the historical opera Gustaf Vasa (1786), the result of the collaboration between the poet Johan Henrik Kellgren and the composer J.G. Naumann.

Kellgren was the dominant literary figure of the period. As the period’s arbiter of literary taste, he ruled that comedies should be modeled on those of the French and that tragedies should be Neoclassical. He was a rationalist and satirist who used his polemical wit against Thomas Thorild, the truculent pre-Romantic champion of individual genius. After Kellgren’s death the controversy was carried on by Carl Gustaf af Leopold, who imposed pseudo-Classical standards on the Swedish Academy and applied them in his own rhetorical odes and tragedies. Carl Michael Bellman, the outstanding Swedish lyric poet of the 18th century, stood apart from the controversies of the time.

The ideals of the Gustavian epoch were expressed in the dissertation Om upplysning (1793; “On Enlightenment”) by Nils von Rosenstein, the first secretary of the Swedish Academy. Various memoirs, by G.J. Adlerbeth, G.J. Ehrensvärd, Fredrik Axel von Fersen, Hedvig Elisabet Charlotta, and others, evoke the witty but artificial atmosphere of Gustav III’s court.