Roughly a hundred years ago, there was a Stockholm neighbourhood in western Kungsholmen, at the intersection of Mariebergsgatan and Fleminggatan close to what is today Saint Göran’s Hospital in Stadshagen, with barrack-like tenement housing known as Skogshyddan (‘Forest Cabin’). There were forty one-room apartments, occupied largely by widows or abandoned mothers and their children. It must have been in what was then the outskirts of town. In the same place today, there is a small park and an entrance to the underground (Fridhemsplan, the one going straight down to the blue line). I have often biked or walked past the place; it is a hilly and a slightly shabby area where the more genteel Kungsholmen turns into the concrete desert and busy roads of Stadshagen.

Maria Sandel (1870–1927) lived here in a tiny room with a tiled oven, first with her mother until her death in 1908, and then alone until her own death. She was completely deaf since the age of twenty-five; over time, her vision also became impaired and toward the end she was almost blind. Her impairment rendered her alone and isolated, even though she shared her residence with boozing men, quarrelsome neighbours and bugs. She supported herself with what was known as “cottage industry work”, knitting stockings. In middle age, she began to write short stories for Morgonbris [‘Morning Breeze’], a magazine for Stockholm’s general women’s club. Through this Social Democratic club, she received ideological inspiration and also came into contact with radical middle-class women who associated with Ellen Key. In 1906 she debuted with her collection of stories Vid svältgränsen [‘At the Brink of Starvation’].

Sandel’s works have not been explored much compared to many of the other great 20th century working-class writers. Perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because she was a generation older than those most often associated with the breakthrough of working-class writing in Swedish literature (Lundkvist, Lo-Johansson, Moa Martinson and Harry Martinson et cetera). Perhaps because her texts do not afford the same linguistic renewal. She is mentioned in overviews of Swedish literary history mainly in passing as a proletariat writer typical of the time and a kind of literary foremother to Moa Martinson.

But when I read what many consider Sandel’s finest work, Droppar i folkhavet [‘Drops in the Sea of People’] from 1924, I quickly realise that it is like nothing I had read before. I did not think it was possible to publish such an unvarnished depiction of the rawness, cynicism and sexual licentiousness of the city before 1930, when a wave of primitivism and sexual outspokenness (triggered in part by the attention given to D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover from 1928) shifted the boundaries of literature.

Droppar i folkhavet is about a young factory worker, Gerda, who because of her innocence and her body’s sexual desire winds up in the grips of the criminal swindler Ulrik Isberg. Isberg steals both her virginity and her savings and also makes her pregnant. After subjecting her to sexual humiliation for an entire night – “He forced her to let herself go in sexual debauchery, perverted expressions of an animal in heat” – he abandons her, empties their apartment of its possessions, cleans out the larder and throws the food in the garbage. Finally, he writes in chalk on the floor, “I have had enough of you, you bow-legged whore. Go drown yourself.”

The portrait of Ulrik Isgren must have been a distillation of urban decadence at the time. Hard-boiled, repulsive and completely without scruples, he makes his way through a world of prostitution, alcoholism and worn-out industrial labourers. Typical of the era’s xenophobia, he is also of foreign origin: he is a product of his mother’s fleeting affair with a “dirty trickster”, and his eyes glisten with the greed of a “vagrant Tatar”.

The antithesis is his half-brother Rudolf Isgren, who runs the family farm: “a tall country man, calm blue eyes, somewhat heavy movements, a voice that instilled security.” Rudolf had long ago distanced himself from his “dirty rat” of a brother, and his only weakness is that he is naive in his view of the prosperity of the city:

As a farmer, he was after all not in a position to really judge urban conditions, in that respect he fell short, despite spending some time at the local folk school. The inherited belief that money came to city folk just as manna in the desert came to the children of Israel when they grumbled flourished and was not allowed to be erased by any significant evidence to the contrary.

The two brothers, of course, despise one another, and Rudolf offers to help Gerda out of her misery, but she is firmly decided that she will manage on her own. The way to survival is through the gruff but upstanding Mrs Hägg, symptomatically called “Mum”, who takes in the pregnant, flat-out-broke factory labourer as a lodger and helps her to gradually get on her feet. She gives birth to a daughter, Tora, who must be boarded with others at first, but when their negligence becomes too obvious, Gerda takes her daughter home and makes her living sewing at home. She and Mum are distinguished by their hard work, penny-pinching and decency. Mum’s live-at-home son, the alcoholic consumptive Ansgar Hägg, is a constant worry in the first few years, but under the benevolent influence of the three women, he succeeds in giving up the bottle and recovering from his consumption.

At the end of the novel, this security and stability are turned upside down when Gerda catches Ulrik Isgren stealing from the wash house. He knocks her about and/or rapes her – the description here is somewhat blurred – and when Ansgar breaks down the door to save Gerda he is beaten to death. In the epilogue, which is written in the present tense, we learn that Ulrik has been arrested and that Gerda has recovered. She still lives with Tora at Mum’s in a one-room flat, where the three continue to build up their own “simple fortune”, preferably without the intrusion of any outsiders and definitely without any men.

Mum’s hair is almost white, yet she is still sound of mind, despite the ceaseless pain of her son’s death. But she belongs to the kind of people who understand they should let sadness ennoble their spiritual life. Perhaps she and Gerda are both a little old-fashioned in their need to be truly free and independent, think their own thoughts, live life at their own discretion, strictly upholding integrity in every aspect of life.

As a depiction of the city, Droppar i folkhavet is a distinctively feminist morality play: woman is by nature good and honourable; man – at least the urbanised version – is driven by animal instincts and only capable of contributing to society under the patient guidance of a woman. Women manage best on their own, remote from everything that could be called manliness, in the form of liquor, violence and dark sexual motives. It is also an image of the world that would later be criticised on the left because it places social responsibility on the individual (woman) instead of criticising poverty or industrialism from a class perspective. Problems are shifted to the private sphere, collective perspectives are swept under the rug, based on a moralising discourse that bears clear traces of middle-class currents of thought of the era – Droppar i folkhavet is in that sense more of a traditional middle-class coming-of-age story than a working-class novel.

This ideologically tinged critique risks missing something vital: that the novel also shows how urban women have an opportunity to create a Lebensraum beyond the heteronormative structure. A kind of variant on the fine upright woman’s collective of Gerda, Mum and Tora is the pair Naima and Sonja, two high-class prostitutes who share an apartment. The two women live in what our era’s vocabulary would be defined as a lesbian-feminist relation in a world that is both dependent on and liberated from the world of men. Using terminology that feels strangely contemporary today, they call men “animals” but also “vultures” (in the same way that Mum calls “chaps” “the weeds of the earth”). Their erotic life is described quite explicitly:

Mouth against mouth, they lay intertwined in bed. The gaudy green silk coverlet was crumpled at the base of the bed among the snow-white linen and lace. Naima’s flaxen plaits spread across the white fluff of the mattress.

The city is not just degradation but also an opening to life beyond the nuclear family, a kind of freedom amid the dirt and poverty. At least for women.

In the same period that Maria Sandel was writing her novels in Skogshyddan, Vilhelm Moberg was becoming established as a freelance writer down in Alvesta in rural Småland. After his breakthrough with Raskens in 1927, a fairly genial depiction of street life of the last generation of local soldiers around the turn of the 20th century, he wanted to secure his position as a serious author with a darker and more coherent narrative form. What he first planned as a big novel, Världens ände [‘World’s End’], came to be published in two parts, Långt från landsvägen [‘Far from the Main Road’] (1929) and De knutna händerna [‘Fists Clenched’] (1930). These novels are today among the least well known and circulated of Moberg’s works and have not been reprinted in regular editions since the 1970s. But read alongside Droppar i folkhavet, they give an interesting perspective on how the oppositions between city and country could be portrayed by a male author of the same era.

The first volume takes place during the last two decades of the 19th century, with readers following Adolf as he grows up on the isolated farm of Ulvaskog – which has been nicknamed “World’s End” by the locals – where his family has cultivated the soil for 300 years. The two novels cover 50 years, up until the late 1920s. The timeframe is vague; along with references to the First World War and technological achievements, there is little specific mention of time in the text. This may be interpreted as part of the composition of the narrative, that the ever-increasing isolation of Ulvaskog and Adolf from the outside world is conspicuous by the absence of time in these books – time has stood still. Adolf in Ulvaskog is a remnant of the past, of the existence of the peasant class before the age of agricultural mechanisation, a person not of his era.

The threat to Adolf’s existence comes from the city. His children disappear, one by one, away from the toil and isolation on the farm to seek out a more comfortable life in the city, to work in shops, perform menial tasks in town. The only one who stays is his beloved daughter Mari, who sacrifices her youth and tempting offers of marriage out of loyalty to her father.

But in the end Mari too decides to leave Ulvaskog and live with her cousin Gärda (!) in Stockholm. Adolf comes to learn elsewhere that Gärda makes her living as a prostitute. The description of Adolf’s nightmare about his daughter’s future as a whore in the city is one of the most gripping in Moberg’s body of work. In the dream, he has left the farm and gone to a foreign city, where he meets a strange woman:

He observes her more closely, and now he can see that the woman is so pale with a tiny face; only her mouth, so red, taunts him. It glares there, a vivid red, like a clot of blood.
But her eyes – what is wrong with them? She holds her hands in front of her eyes as if she were ashamed. Or why is she holding them that way…
But when she comes right in front of him, she stops and takes her hands from her face. Right away he understands why she first tried to conceal her eyes. Because they are not her own eyes. She has taken a pair from someone else to fill her empty sockets. And then she has taken a pair that do not fit this face at all.
Because this woman, with the whitewashed cheeks and the blood-red mouth with its repugnant, rigid smile, this being has a pair of children’s eyes large and wide open, which shine bright blue and pure at him. She has a pair of true, pure eyes, which clash with everything else.
And a pain shoots through his chest – whose are they? Doesn’t he recognise them? Doesn’t he see them each and every day at home?
“They are hers!” he screams, filled with pain. “They are the eyes of my child!” The woman runs from him.
“Give her back!” he screams. “Give her back – you trollop, you trollop!”

The anxiety of losing his last and most beloved child to the decadence of the city pushes Adolf to take his daughter’s life, the night before she is to leave. It is most likely one of the most nuanced depictions of an honour killing in older Swedish prose and a useful reminder of the culture of honour in pre-modern Swedish society:

She would leave her young life, while it was still without blemish and without sin. Her father, who would do anything to protect her, who relinquished everything else, he would save her from the cruelties of life. He would ultimately sacrifice himself for what was pure and enduring, something that would not collapse like the ground beneath him.

In Moberg’s version, the city, as with Sandel, is deceitful and dangerous, the country dependable and safe. But there is no room here, as there is with Sandel, for a vision of the city as a place for alternative forms of community. Instead, humiliation is unavoidable and absolute. The urban novels produced by Moberg – especially A.P Rosell, bankdirektör [‘A.P. Rosell, Bank Director’] (1932), which takes place in the town of Allmänninge [‘Common Land’], modelled on real-life Alvesta, and his depiction of Stockholm in the Toring trilogy (Sänkt sedebetyg [‘Memory of Youth], 1935; Sömnlös [‘Sleepless Nights’], 1937; Giv oss jorden! [‘The Earth is Ours’], 1939) – are a categorical savaging of life amid tram rails and rented tenements, even though Moberg himself, who moved to the Stockholm suburb of Råsunda in the late 1920s, lived in fairly middle-class circumstances. The women in his cities are either cynical materialists or migrating country girls who become easy victims of exploitation in the concrete of the city.

Descriptions of prostitution, both as an explicit phenomenon and as a metaphor, are oddly recurrent in Moberg’s novels. Being a prostitute, in a literal or metaphorical sense, is consistently portrayed as the ultimate degradation in modern society. The local reporter Valfrid Sterner’s humiliating grovelling for classified ads in A.P Rosell, bankdirektör is a kind of prostitution, as is Knut Turing’s job as editor of a light-weight weekly. In Sänkt sedebetyg Toring passes young prostitutes in the Stockholm night, remembers his own experiences as a customer and compares his own humiliation (a bit self-centredly) with theirs:

Selling your body could not be as humiliating as selling your soul, because the soul counts more than the body. And the world is full of whores of the spirit, whose ignominious behaviour is generally held in esteem. Compared with them you who walk the streets here and sell bodily pleasure for a bit of copper are simply naive, clumsy little novices in sin.

Whereas Maria Sandel’s Naima and Sonja achieve a kind of freedom in their lives as prostitutes, prostitution in Moberg’s depictions of the city is a life without human value. The only way to dignity – at least for his protagonists – is to move back to the country. The author himself left the suburbs of Stockholm after a few years and bought a farm near Grisslehamn.

The similarities and differences between Sandel’s and Moberg’s views of the conditions offered by the city – degradation and community, decadence and industry, prostitution and alternative roles for women – are interesting in terms of a broader discussion about men’s and women’s relation to urbanisation.

This pattern is relevant even today: women are drawn to cities, where they risk both being exploited and being given an opportunity to pursue a career and receive an education, whereas men remain back in their cabins wringing their hands, or turn to TV reality programmes to find wives. The social anthropologist Lissa Nordin’s dissertation on single men in Västernorrland demonstrates that there is still great grief among the “bachelor farmers” who stayed, but also a disdain for the city and its people – a disdain, as one of Nordin’s respondents describes it, for “gays in Stockholm who can’t do anything except push buttons.”

When, for instance, one reads a writer like Per Hagman (born in 1968), originally from rural Skövde but after many years in Stockholm now residing in Nice, one is struck by how the relation between city and country is often given sexual dimensions. The country boy whose sweetheart is lost to the decadence of the city, often in the guise of modelling jobs, cocaine, nightclubs and a debauched love life, is a recurring theme in his books. But the perspective shifts: in his short story “Hon kom från Borås, hon kom från Goa” [‘She Came from Borås, She Came from Goa’] in his collection Skugglegender [‘Shadow Legends’] from 2000, the protagonist is the 17-year-old Jenny from Borås, who has dropped out of school and finds love on holiday in Goa:

Suddenly she thought she loved life and that life loved her and she was filled with all kinds of things when she met a guy from Stockholm in purple batik who took her to the most romantic beach one night and she fell in love with him and thought he was at the same time soft and exciting and he was older and he was after all from Stockholm and she thought that because she had had sex with him there on the beach the first night they met it must mean that she really was in love and so she went back home and Borås felt so small and she did love Goa and she did love this guy in the purple batik who said he was waiting for her and she decided to move up [to Stockholm].

Up in Stockholm in the city night, it does not take long before the man in the purple batik is revealed to be the Ulrik Isgren of our age, a swindler and a seducer who drags Jenny into the squalor of drugs and exploits her in group orgies with his companions. Broken and on drugs, she seeks out the narrator (who seems here to be identical to the author) in his apartment in Kungsholms Strand, just a few hundred metres from the tenements, long-demolished, where Maria Sandel lived and wrote a few generations ago. The story ends with Hagman/the narrator informing the reader that he has decided to force Jenny to take a train back Borås.

For Hagman, as for Moberg, the only redemption is a return home. His most recent novel, Vänner för livet [‘Friends for Life’], published in May, is about Erik and Sophie, a mismatched couple who both have roots in the Swedish countryside. After many years of fleeting liaisons and prostitution in Paris, Nice, Monaco and Dubai, they find each other and harmony in the end in a 1970s house on the plains of Västgötaslätten.

Compared with another book released this spring, the autobiographical Fosterland [‘Fatherland’] by Dilsa Demirbag-Sten (born in 1969), the difference is clear. In this story of a girl’s departure from home in the Kurdish mountains and her path, growing up in the Uppsala suburb of Flogsta, to studies in Stockholm, there is a constant threat from her home and her own cultural heritage. The protagonist’s parents are our era’s Adolf in Ulvaskog, representatives of an honour culture that will not let its children head for life the city at any cost. On one occasion, when Dilsa returns to Turkey to meet the fiancé her mother has chosen for her, she realises that the romance of the home she grew up in was only a myth: I saw no happy marriages around me.

I saw unhappy hearts and raped bodies. The myth of the mountains had given hope that here was freedom in my heritage. Defiance and freedom. Which was missing in my home in Uppsala, in Sweden. But it wasn’t in the mountains where I stood either. The mountains were a myth.

This time, the story ends happily; the past slowly releases its grip on the family and the daughters can soon take their place as mothers without fear, creative individuals in Western urbanity. For anyone who dares enter the unknown, the city is full of opportunities:

The building felt foreign and chilly. The door handle was cold. I put my hand on the shiny metal. Warm steam collected under my hand. I had done this before. Stepped into the unknown. Encountered the difficult. It would be alright. Even this.