By Giorgio Fontana, Italian writer, essayist
Excerpt from Arivista anarchica February 2020

Dagerman was a convinced unionist and libertarian socialist. It was not an adolescent or aesthetic ardor—a mannered rebelliousness, an individualism mistaken for anarchic faith—that maturity would later quell. On the contrary: he adhered to anarchism without ever disowning it, and his work as a political intellectual remains very valuable even today—especially because it’s corrected by a “critical pessimism” (as he himself calls it): a form of anti-optimism, the inescapable memory of evil and tragedy. Also, one can find extremely acute reflections about the writer’s role in our society: which is precisely what interests me most. Now Dagerman’s essential theme, as Swedish writer Lotta Lotass pointed out in her study Friheten meddelad, is freedom. He himself wrote that he hoped for a literature fighting for “the three inalienable rights of the human being imprisoned in political and mass organizations: freedom, escape and betrayal.” (SOURCE: Stig Dagerman, Response to Interview Question “What Do You Hope For” New Year 1949. Read full quote below.)
Closely connected to freedom, I would add self-interrogation: there are never any squared-off certainties in Dagerman’s novels; his protagonists often aspire to a superior purity but can also be rather irritating: so is Bengt, the “burnt child” in the homonymous novel, locked in his adolescent certainties; so is Lucas Egmont in The Island of the Doomed. And also a certain omnipresent anguish, the awareness of the harsh reality of pain that no utopian dream can remove: just read the astonishing, cruel short story To Kill a Child.
So, any individual who aims to improve the world—and who is truly, concretely committed to an idea, like Dagerman—cannot help but tragically experience the split between the autonomy of art and social militancy. It is not always easy to put on the artist’s clothes and then take them off by pretending nothing happened.

Dagerman could not reconcile this contradiction: reading one of his most famous works, Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable, we can utterly feel the tragic weight of this and other struggles; one of the final lines states: “on that day when all that remains to safeguard my integrity is my own silence, then my power will have no bounds, for no axe can penetrate the living silence.”
But being silent is the end of all writing, and possibly the end of everything. And that terrible day of November, when Dagerman killed himself, must remain as a very serious warning for anyone who acknowledges the problematic nature of writing. The dilemma between so well expressed by Albert Camus, finds radical expression in Dagerman’s life and death. Solitude is indispensable for the artist; but solidarity is indispensable for the militant. The classical move to solve the conflict, that is “engaged literature”, doesn’t solve anything at all: once we have convinced all writers to write engaged stuff, will the world really be better? I think it will only be populated with bad novels and unhappy authors.
Stig Dagerman, Response to Interview Question “What Do You Hope For?” New Year 1949: ”A literature fighting for the three inalienable rights for the human being imprisoned in political and mass organizations: freedom, escape and betrayal. I mean the freedom from choosing between annihilation and extinction; I mean the escape from a battle field that prepares the ground for our destruction, and the betrayal against systems that criminalize conscience, fear and love of our fellow humans.”
For more on Stig’s argument, read BLOG “Writer’s Role: To Build Bridges and Break Glass” (excerpts from The Snake)
Essays by Stig Dagerman on the dilemma of the socially conscious writer (not yet in English translation):
“The Writer and His Conscience”(1945)
“My View on Anarchism” (1946)
“The Role of the Writer is to Show the Meaning of Freedom” (1947)
Other references:
Lotta Lotass, “Freedom Conveyed”, Abstract
J.M.G. Le Clézio, quoting Stig Dagerman, “In the Forest of Paradoxes” Nobel lecture 2008; extract in BLOG