Lucidor

Lars (Lasse) Johansson (1638 - August 13, 1674), usually referred to under his pseudonym Lucidor, was a Swedish baroque poet. He is remembered for his burlesque poetry that is seen as foreshadowing that of Johan Runius and, especially, Carl Michael Bellman, and for his dramatic death in a tumultuous brawl at the Fimmelstången tavern in Gamla stan in Stockholm. Lasse Johansson wrote under several different pseudonyms, but of these "Lucidor" (or "Lucidor den olycklige", "Lucidor the Unfortunate", as he called himself on occasion) is the one under which he is commonly known today.

Lars Johansson was born in . His father was a naval officer and his grandfather was admiral Lars Strusshielm, who was appointed head of a Swedish naval shipyard in Pomerania in 1638. A few years later, Strusshielm's daughter and son-in-law followed him to Pomerania, where Lars Johansson and his four siblings grew up. Both parents were dead by 1650, and the grandfather died in 1653. Lasse spent four years, from 1655 to 1659 at the university of Greifswald and from early 1659 at the university in Leipzig, where he was expelled just before Christmas 1659, after a brawl with the town guards. His biography during the following years is unclear, but he travelled to France, possibly as a tutor, and is said to have lived in poverty in Stockholm. He may have spent time with a travelling group of comedians, and is reported to have returned to Stockholm with these in 1668. During the winter 1668/69, he was enrolled as a student in Uppsala, but appeared to have spent his time there as a language tutor for students; an appointment as a teacher of modern languages fell through.

A significant part of his modest income appears to have come from writing occasional poetry for weddings and burials. One piece brought him in trouble: "Giliare Kwaal" ("A suitor's sufferings"), a poem for the wedding in November 1669 of the powerful nobleman Conrad Gyllenstierna to Märta Christina Ulfsparre. Lucidor had previously written a well-received poem for the wedding of Conrad's brother Christoffer Gyllenstierna. "Giliare Kwaal", however, was received as libel by Conrad Gyllenstierna, who reported the author to Svea hovrätt, the appeal court. The poet was arrested and spent several months in prison until the process was finally at an end in the summer of 1670. Neither the town court in Stockholm nor the appeal court found the poem libellous, but the sentence still warned the poet to "use his pencil more carefully hereafter". The Lucidor scholar Stina Hansson explains the problems with the poem in that the author did not follow the conventions for which motifs were conventional for addressee of a particular social standing, and had broken the rules by using a style more suitable for occasional poetry in a bourgeois setting. After his run-in with the Gyllenstierna, Lucidor became much more careful in exactly following the conventions in this respect.

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