%0 Journal Article %T The Ways of Truth. Regarding Anne Charlotte Leffler’s – and August Strindberg’s – Debt to Chernyshevsky %A Kalinowski, Mariusz %J The Smorgasbord of Scandinavian Philology %V 2018 %N 3 (2018) %P 107-124 %K Anne Charlotte Leffler, Sonja Kovalevsky, Sofia Kovalevskaya, August Strindberg, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, Vera Pavlovna’s dreams, Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, Nihilist Girl, Vera Vorontzoff, A Dream Play, Underground Russia, Russian nihilism %D 2023 %U https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/filologiskt-smorgasbord/article/sanningens-vagar-om-anne-charlotte-lefflers-och-august-strindbergs-skuld-till-tjernysjevskij %X In her book from 2011 and article from 2013 Lynn R. Wilkinson points out striking parallels between Anne Charlotte Leffler’s play The Ways of Truth (Sanningens vägar) from 1892 and August Strindberg’s A Dream Play from 1901. I find, as I hereby show, that Leffler’s play has its roots not only in Nihilist Girl (1892), a novella by Sofia Kovalevskaya, but also – and essentially – in the novel What Is To Be Done? (1863) by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Kovalevskaya’s whole life was determined by the ”nihilist” Chernyshevsky’s ideas, and Leffler’s writing was to a large degree determined by Kovalevskaya. In the 1880s the nihilist movement and Russian literature were the hottest intellectual fashion in Sweden. Thus: Strindberg does not borrow from Leffler. Analogies between Leffler’s The Ways of Truth and Strindberg’s Dream Play confirm indirectly A Dream Play’s ”literary dependence” on Chernyshevsky’s novel – particularly on the famous ”Vera Pavlovna’s Dreams”. The power of Russian dreams should never be underestimated.