The Red Room is considered the first naturalistic novel in Sweden. This novel, written in 1879, put August Strindberg among the leading writers of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Strindberg became the founder of modern Swedish literature and modern theater; his plays anticipated the emergence of expressionism and the theater of the absurd. The conflict between external appearance and the inner essence of people and phenomena, the “war of the sexes,” man’s opposition to evil—these themes are saturated in the works of the writer and playwright.