Ibsen Henrik did something incredible - he created and opened Norwegian drama and Norwegian theater to the whole world. His works were originally romantic, having ancient Scandinavian sagas as plots (“Warriors of Helgelade”, “Struggle for the Throne”). Then he turns to the philosophical and symbolic understanding of the world ("Brand", "Peer Gynt"). And finally, Ibsen Henryk comes to sharp criticism modern life("A Doll's House", "Ghosts", "Enemy of the People").

Dynamically developing, G. Ibsen demands in his later works the complete emancipation of man.

Childhood playwright

In the family of a wealthy Norwegian businessman Ibsen, who lives in the south of the country, in the town of Skien, in 1828, the son of Henrik appears. But only eight years pass, and the family goes bankrupt. Life falls out of the usual social circle, they suffer hardships in everything and the ridicule of others. Little Ibsen Henryk painfully perceives the changes taking place. However, already at school, he begins to surprise teachers with his compositions. Childhood ended at the age of 16, when he moved to a nearby town and became an apothecary's apprentice. He has been working in a pharmacy for five years and all these years he has been dreaming of moving to the capital.

In Christiania

A young man, Ibsen Henrik, arrives in the big city of Christiania and, being financially poor, participates in political life. He manages to stage a short drama "Bogatyr Kurgan". But he still has the drama Catilina in reserve. He is noticed and invited to Bergen.

In the folk theater

In Bergen, Ibsen Henryk becomes a director and theater director. Under him, the theater's repertoire includes plays by classics - Shakespeare, Scribe, also Dumas the son - and Scandinavian works. This period would last in the playwright's life from 1851 to 1857. Then he returns to Christiania.

In the capital

This time the capital met him more cordially. Ibsen Henryk received the position of director of the theater. A year later, in 1858, his marriage to Susanna Thoresen will take place, which will be happy.

At this time, heading the Norwegian theater, he was already recognized as a playwright in his homeland thanks to the historical play "Feast in Sulhaug". His previously written plays are repeatedly staged. These are "Warriors of Helgelade", "Olaf Liljekrans". They are played not only in Christiania, but also in Germany, Sweden, Denmark. But when, in 1862, he presented to the public satirical play- “Comedy about love”, in which the idea of ​​​​love and marriage is ridiculed, the society is tuned in relation to the author so sharply negatively that after two years he is forced to leave his homeland. With the help of friends, he receives a scholarship and leaves for Rome.

Abroad

In Rome, he lives in solitude and in 1865-1866 writes the poetic play "Brand". The hero of the play, the priest Brand, wants to achieve inner perfection, which, as it turns out, is completely impossible in the world. He abandons his son and wife. But no one needs his ideal views: neither the secular authorities, nor the spiritual ones. As a result, without renouncing his views, the hero dies. This is natural, since his whole nature is alien to mercy.

Moving to Germany

Having lived in Trieste, Dresden, G. Ibsen finally stops in Munich. In 1867, another poetic work was published - the complete opposite of the play about the mad priest "Peer Gynt". This romantic poem takes place in Norway, in Morocco, in the Sahara, in Egypt, and again in Norway.

In a small village where a young guy lives, he is considered an empty talker, a fighter who does not even think about helping his mother. He liked the humble beautiful girl Solveig, but she refuses him because his reputation is too bad. Per goes into the woods and there he meets the daughter of the Forest King, whom he is ready to marry, but for this he needs to turn into an ugly troll. With difficulty escaping from the clutches of forest monsters, he meets with his mother dying in his arms. After that, he travels the world for many years and finally, completely old and gray-haired, returns to his native village. No one will recognize him, except for the wizard Buttonman, who is ready to melt his soul into a button. Per begs for a reprieve to prove to the sorcerer that he is a whole person, and not faceless. And then he, a tumbleweed, meets the aged Solveig, faithful to him. It was then that he realizes that he was saved by the faith and love of a woman who had been waiting for him for so long. This is an absolutely fantastic story that Henrik Ibsen created. The works, on the whole, are built on the basis that some kind of whole person struggles with the lack of will and immorality of insignificant people.

World fame

By the end of the 70s, G. Ibsen's plays began to be staged all over the world. Sharp criticism of modern life, dramas of ideas make up the work of Henrik Ibsen. He wrote such significant works: 1877 - "Pillars of Society", 1879 - "A Doll's House", 1881 - "Ghosts", 1882 - "Enemy of the People", 1884 - "Wild Duck", 1886 - "Rosmersholm", 1888 - "The Woman from the Sea", 1890 - "Hedda Gabler".

In all these plays, G. Ibsen asks the same question: is it possible in modern life to live truthfully, without lies, without destroying the ideals of honor? Or it is necessary to obey generally accepted norms and turn a blind eye to everything. Happiness, according to Ibsen, is impossible. Eccentrically preaching the truth, the hero of the "Wild Duck" destroys the happiness of his friend. Yes, it was based on a lie, but the man was happy. The vices and virtues of the ancestors stand behind the backs of the heroes of the Ghost, and they themselves are, as it were, tracing papers of their fathers, and not independent individuals who can achieve happiness. Nora from "A Doll's House" fights for the right to feel like a person, not a beautiful doll.

And she leaves home forever. And for her there is no happiness. All these plays, with the possible exception of one, are subject to a rigid authorial scheme and idea - the heroes are doomedly fighting against the whole society. They become rejected, but not defeated. Hedda Gabler fights against herself, against the fact that she is a woman who, having married, is forced to give birth against her will. Born a woman, she wants to act freely like any man.

She is impressionable and beautiful, but she is not free to choose her own life, nor to choose her own destiny, which is unclear to her. She can't live like that.

Henrik Ibsen: quotes

They express only his worldview, but maybe they will touch the strings of someone's soul:

  • "The strongest is the one who fights alone."
  • "What you sow in youth, you will reap in maturity."
  • "Thousands of words will leave less trace than the memory of one deed."
  • "The soul of a man is in his deeds."

At home

In 1891, G. Ibsen, after a 27-year absence, returned to Norway. He will still write a number of plays, his anniversary will still be celebrated. But in 1906, a stroke will forever end the life of such an outstanding playwright as Henrik Ibsen. His biography is over.

Laura Cole / Monument to Henrik Ibsen at the National Theater of Norway in Oslo

Henrik Ibsen is the first association that arises when talking about the literature of Norway. In fact, the work of the great Norwegian playwright has long become the property of not only Norwegian, but also world culture.

Ibsen's life and work are full of the most amazing contradictions. Thus, being a passionate apologist for national liberation and rebirth national culture Norway, he nevertheless spent twenty-seven years in self-imposed exile in Italy and Germany.

Enthusiastically studying national folklore, he consistently destroys the romantic halo of folk sagas in his plays. Story structure his plays are built so rigidly that sometimes they border on tendentiousness, but they are by no means sketchy, but lively and multifaceted characters.

The latent moral relativism of Ibsen, combined with the "iron" and even tendentious logic of the development of the plot, makes it possible to interpret his plays in an extremely diverse way. So, Ibsen is recognized as a playwright realistic direction, however, the Symbolists consider him one of the most important founders of their aesthetic movement.

At the same time, he was sometimes called "Freud in dramaturgy." The gigantic power of talent allowed him to organically combine in his work the most diverse, even polar, themes, ideas, problems, means of artistic expression.

Born March 20, 1828 in the small Norwegian town of Skien in a wealthy family, but in 1837 his father went bankrupt and the situation of the family changed. A sharp transition to the social lower classes became a severe psychological trauma for the boy, and this was somehow reflected in his future work.

From the age of 15 he was forced to start earning his living - in 1843 he left for the tiny town of Grimstad, where he got a job as an apprentice pharmacist. The practically beggarly life of a social outcast forced Ibsen to seek self-realization in a different area: he writes poetry, satirical epigrams on the respectable bourgeois of Grimstad, and draws cartoons.

This is bearing fruit: by 1847 he is becoming very popular among the radical youth of the town. He was greatly impressed by the revolutionary events of 1848, which engulfed a significant part of Western Europe.

Ibsen complements his poetic work with political lyrics, and also writes the first play Catiline (1849), imbued with tyrannical motives. The play was not successful, but strengthened his decision to engage in literature, art and politics.

In 1850 he left for Christiania (since 1924 - Oslo). His goal is to enter the university, but the young man is captured by the political life of the capital. He teaches at the Sunday school of the workers' association, participates in protest demonstrations, collaborates with the press - the workers' newspaper, the journal of the student society, takes part in the creation of a new socio-literary magazine "Andhrimner".

And he continues to write plays: Bogatyrsky Kurgan (1850, started back in Grimstad), Norma, or Love of Politics (1851), Midsummer Night (1852). In the same period, he met the playwright, theater and public figure Bjornstjerne Bjornson, with whom he found a common language on the basis of the revival of the national identity of Norway.

This stormy activity of the playwright in 1852 led to his invitation to the position artistic director newly created first Norwegian national theater in Bergen. He remained in this post until 1857 (he was replaced by B. Bjornson).

This turn in Ibsen's life can be considered an extraordinary stroke of luck. And it's not just that all the plays he wrote during the Bergen period were immediately staged on the stage; practical study of the theater "from the inside" helps to reveal many professional secrets, which means it contributes to the growth of the playwright's skill. During this period, the plays Fru Inger of Estrot (1854), Feast at Sulhaug (1855), Olaf Liljekrans (1856) were written.

In the first of these, he first switched to prose in his dramaturgy; the last two are written in the style of Norwegian folk ballads (the so-called "heroic songs"). These plays, again, were not particularly successful on the stage, but played a necessary role in Ibsen's professional development.

In 1857–1862 he headed the Norwegian Theater in Christiania. In parallel with the leadership of the theater and drama work, he continues to actively social activities, aimed mainly at combating the operating Christian theater of the pro-Danish direction (the troupe of this theater consisted of Danish actors, and the performances were in Danish).

This stubborn struggle was crowned with success after Ibsen left the theater: in 1863 the troupes of both theaters were united, the performances began to go only in Norwegian, and the program developed with his active participation became the aesthetic platform of the united theater. At the same time he wrote the plays The Warriors in Helgeland (1857), The Comedy of Love (1862), The Struggle for the Throne (1863); as well as the poem On the Heights (1859), which became the forerunner of the first truly principled dramatic success - the play Brand (1865).

The diverse activities of Ibsen in the Norwegian period were more likely due to a complex of the most complex psychological problems than a principled public position. The main one was the problem of material prosperity (especially since he married in 1858, and a son was born in 1859) and a worthy social position - his children's complexes undoubtedly played their role here.

This problem naturally connected with the fundamental issues of vocation and self-realization. Not without reason, in almost all of his further plays, one way or another, the conflict between the life position of the hero and real life is considered. And another important factor: the best plays by Ibsen, which brought him worldwide well-deserved fame, were written outside of his homeland.

In 1864, having received a writing scholarship from the Storting, which he sought for almost a year and a half, Ibsen and his family left for Italy. The funds received were extremely insufficient, and he had to turn to friends for help. In Rome, for two years, he wrote two plays that absorbed all the previous life and literary experience- Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1866).

In theater studies and ibsenism, it is customary to consider these plays in a complex way, as two alternative interpretations of the same problem - self-determination and the realization of human individuality.

The main characters are polar: the inflexible maximalist Brand, who is ready to sacrifice himself and his loved ones for the sake of fulfilling his own mission, and the amorphous Peer Gynt, who readily adapts to any conditions. Comparison of these two plays gives a clear picture of the author's moral relativism. Separately, they were regarded by critics and the audience as very contradictory.

The situation with Peer Gynt is even more paradoxical. It is in this play that Ibsen demonstrates his break with national romance. In it, the characters of folklore are represented as ugly and vicious creatures, the peasants as cruel and rude people.

At first, in Norway and Denmark, the play was perceived very negatively, almost as blasphemy. G.H. Andersen, for example, called Peer Gynt the worst work he had ever read. However, over time, the romantic flair returned to this play - of course, mainly thanks to the image of Solveig.

This was largely facilitated by the music of Edvard Grieg, written at the request of Ibsen for the production of Peer Gynt, and later gained world fame as an independent musical composition. Paradoxically, but true: Peer Gynt, who in the author's interpretation protests against romantic tendencies, still remains the embodiment of Norwegian folk romance in the cultural consciousness.

Brand and Peer Gynt became for Ibsen transitional plays that turned him towards realism and social issues (it is in this aspect that all his further work is mainly considered). These are Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), Enemy of the People (1882), Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), Woman from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), Solness the Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), Joon Gabriel Borkman (1896).

Here the playwright raised topical issues of contemporary reality: hypocrisy and female emancipation, rebellion against the usual bourgeois morality, lies, social compromise and loyalty to ideals. Symbolists and philosophers (A. Blok, N. Berdyaev and others) much more, along with Brand and Peer Gynt, appreciated other plays by Ibsen: the dilogy Caesar and the Galilean (Caesar's Apostasy and the Emperor Julian; 1873), When we, the dead Awakening (1899).

An impartial analysis makes it possible to understand that in all these works Ibsen's individuality remains the same. His plays are not tendentious social ephemera, and not abstract symbolic constructions; they fully contain social realities, and extremely semantically loaded symbolism, and surprisingly multifaceted, whimsical psychological complexity of the characters.

The formal distinction between Ibsen's dramaturgy into "social" and "symbolic" works is rather a matter of subjective interpretation, a biased interpretation of the reader, critic or director.

In 1891 he returned to Norway. In a foreign land, he achieved everything he aspired to: world fame, recognition, material well-being. By this time, his plays were widely played on the stages of theaters around the world, the number of studies and critical articles devoted to his work could not be counted and could only be compared with the number of publications about Shakespeare.

It would seem that all this could cure the severe psychological trauma he suffered in childhood. However, the very last play, When We, the Dead, Awaken, is filled with such a poignant tragedy that it is hard to believe in it.


The end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th century is characterized by interesting creative searches in world literature. These searches led to the emergence of new genres and forms of works. Dramaturgy is no exception. The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen not only occupied one of the first places in the literature of our century. And it's not just that he raised a question that worried his contemporaries. The talent and innovation of Ibsen as a playwright lay in the fact that the viewer was forced to seek answers to these questions. Ibsen revealed the complexity and inconsistency of life, forced his viewers to abandon the traditional division of heroes into positive and negative, to perceive them holistically, with all their differences.

The brightest innovation of Ibsen manifested itself in the structure of his plays. Ibsen used composition, which is commonly called analytic. In such a composition, mystery will play an important role, events that took place long before those presented on the stage, but it was these events that caused the situations in which the characters found themselves. This composition was known in ancient Greece and was used to create plot tension. After all, the denouement brings with it the disclosure of the inner essence of all events, namely their real understanding. Therefore, such a composition required the internal development of the characters. Under the influence of the events that take place on the stage, the comprehension of these events, the discovery of the secret that affects these events, changes the characters. And these changes become decisive in the development of the plot. In the play A Doll's House, Noria's final disappointment in her marriage, the realization of the need to start new life to become a complete person, prepared by the whole development of the action.

Ibsen's innovation in this play was that it is not a coincidence of circumstances, but precisely the understanding of everything that happened, that resolves the conflict. The denouement of the drama is a conversation between Nora and Helmer - the first in their entire married life, in which Nora makes a real analysis of their relationship. Both Nora and Helmer, and their whole life, appear in this conversation in a completely new way - and it is this new look that provides such drama to the final scene of A Doll's House, which contemporaries accused as very cold. But the innovator Ibsen only endures the growing intellectual tension of the plot, the tension of thought, from which a decisive plot change grows - Nori's decision to leave the seed, which completes the development of the action in the play.

Nevertheless, Ibsen's heroes are not the embodiment of only certain ideas of the author. They are inherent in all human passions, inherent in everything that makes a person a person. In this Ibsen differed from many writers of the late nineteenth century, who did not believe in the possibilities of the human mind, in its ability to control human behavior. In Ibsen's plays, it is the mind, the ability to comprehend reality, that gives the hero the opportunity to change his fate. And when a person does not find the strength to transform a thought, she pays cruelly for it. The “doll house” in which Helmer and Nora live collapsed, because the hero could not rise above his own egoism, could not overcome the prejudices of society.

Ibsen's innovation lies in the fact that the playwright opened up new possibilities of analytical composition and filled them with new content. The language of the author played an important role in this. Each phrase that is presented in the text is presented only because it is really necessary - for the implementation of one or even several artistic tasks. Sometimes in some episodes characters appear as if they are overly verbose, talkative. For example, the heroine of "A Doll's House" Nora in the second act of the play says much more than usual. But this flow of words, sometimes really superfluous, hides the inner concern of the heroine, her tension. Ibsen's intellectual plays demanded from the viewer special attention to what and how the characters say. It uses the multi-valued possibilities of the word. In the play "A Doll's House" in separate segments of the text there are hidden indications of what has already happened, or what should happen, although this is still incomprehensible even to the heroes themselves. Sometimes it seems that the characters are just talking, but something makes you listen very carefully to every word, and with each phrase the tension increases. These creative achievements of G. Ibsen found their development in the work of other masters of the word, laid the foundation for a new dramaturgy of the new theater in the 20th century. Even during the life of the playwright, the plays of G. Ibsen were recognized as innovative, and their author was rightly called the creator of the analytical drama of the 19th century, which revived the traditions of ancient drama.

The composition of Ibsen's plays was connected with the structure of the tragedy of Sophocles "Oedipus Rex", the entire action of which is subordinated to the disclosure of secrets - the clarification of events that once occurred. Gradual approach to the mystery creates plot dressing, and the final disclosure - the denouement, which determines further fate heroes. Such a structure makes it possible to create a very tense plot. The viewer (or reader), who is presented with a certain life situation, must think not only about what will happen next, but also about what happened in the past, which caused this situation. Such a composition is called analytical.

G. Ibsen uses analytical composition to show the discrepancy between the external manifestations of life and its true essence. He knew well the problems that arise before a person in life, he understood that external well-being hides many tragedies. Analytical composition, for Ibsen, meant the disclosure of the inner tragedy that is hidden behind the outwardly calm reality. The play "A Doll's House" constructed in this way, which reveals the essence of an outwardly calm family life lawyer Helmer, in fact, built on deceit and selfishness. The analytical composition is also determined by the role that events that took place long before the beginning of the action will play in the fate of the characters. In the play "A Doll's House" these plot secrets become the driving forces in the development of the action, in the development of the characters' characters.

At the beginning of the play, the main character Nora, the wife of the lawyer Helmer, seeks the impression of a woman who is not able to make independent, bold decisions, that she submitted to the authority of her man, whom she considers a model of all virtues. It seems that all her vital interests, all the forces given to the family, man, children. But gradually the reader realizes that such an impression is deceptive. It turns out that Nora is hiding from her man something very important for her and their married life, something that Helmer will not forgive her, which he will perceive as a shame. The external action of the play organizes an approach to this mystery: Nora is constantly under the threat of exposure, she makes attempts to delay the moment when her man reads the letter from the pawnbroker, which lies in the mailbox. Already in the external action, the reader finds certain authorial hints that the essence of Nori and Helmer, and therefore their marriage, is not at all what it seems. This essence, inner trouble, is outlined in detail, in separate, at first glance, random expressions. And the reader seems to be enraged by Helmer's monologues, a little demagogic and long, in which he seems to admire his virtues.

His dismissive attitude towards his wife, misunderstanding of her inner pledge is alarming. Nora, on the contrary, strikes with the accuracy of some expressions, the ability to control herself. Gradually, the secret that Nora was hiding is revealed. She forged her father's signature to get money. Helmer perceives this as a shameful act, does not even want to think about the reasons for this act. Nora is amazed how Helmer thinks only about what consequences this act of Nori will have for him, how all his virtues turn into mere selfishness. Neither the fact that Nora had no other way to get money for the treatment of him, Helmer, nor the fact that she did not harm anyone by her act, are not taken into account by him. A few years ago, Helmer fell seriously ill, the treatment required a lot of money. Nora did not have anyone to turn to, since the only person, except for a man, who was close to her - her father, was on the verge of death and could no longer sign any documents. Nora was the sole heir. She forged her father's signature and saved her man.

Revealing the secret - the denouement of the play - finally dispels the illusions about the well-being and happiness of the Helmers, rips off the masks from the heroes. Nora appears as a strong, holistic nature, which can decide its own fate. Her break with a man in whom she has lost faith, her unwillingness to remain a "doll" is clear evidence of this. The analytical composition of the play made it possible for the author to raise the question of the position of a woman in the family, of the responsibility of the individual to himself and the world and society to the individual.

INNOVATION OF G. IBSEN'S DRAMA

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"New Drama"- a symbol of those innovations that have declared themselves in the European theater 1860-1890s years. This is mainly socio-psychological dramaturgy, which, at the time of its inception, was oriented toward naturalism in prose, for discussion in the theater of civilly significant " topical» problems. However, despite the importance of naturalism and naturalistic literary theory (“Naturalism in the Theater” by E. Zola), as well as the attempts of a number of naturalists to transfer their novels to the stage, the “new drama” is hardly reducible to something unambiguous, so to speak, programmatic . She turned out to be sensitive to a variety of literary trends and offered her own, in this case specifically theatrical, reading not only of naturalism, but also of impressionism, symbolism, which was influential throughout the 19th century. lines of romantic drama (to the prize-winner, R. Rolland, E. Rostand).

The "new drama" arose during the reign of " well done”, but far from the life of plays, from the very beginning tried to draw attention to its most burning, burning problems. "New Drama" shifts attention from external action, twisted intrigue to the inner world of a person, the conflicts of his consciousness and conscience. Is in focus not action, but conversation, assessments, reflection, analysis.

"New Drama" is new type conflict. The collision of man and reality, hostile to him, which distorts the essence of his spirit. In the new drama, remarks play a special role, which, from an exclusively auxiliary means, turn into constitutive elements of a dramatic text, functionally interconnected with dialogue. The new drama actively uses remarks such as "silence", "silence", "pause", which mark key moments in the development of dialogues and stage action and allow the formation of subtext. This feature is also called "undercurrent" or "double dialogue". In the text of the new drama, there seem to be two planes, when the spoken words are far from directly or even not at all expressing the relationship of the characters or revealing the essence of the ongoing actions. According to A.P. Chekhov, “ people have lunch, drink tea, and at this time their destinies are broken».

Another characteristic feature of the new drama is the erasure of the opposition "monologue - dialogue", the main thing is opposition remark dialogue. Appears in the new drama " principle of analytical composition”, when the plot of the action is the event of the day, which has already happened before the start of the play, and the content of the drama is an analysis of the causes. The language of the new drama is close to colloquial. Symbols are used to understand that something is wrong (the sound of a broken string, rustle). The problematic of the new drama touches on those moments of social life that are usually hushed up and hidden. Theater, according to the theoreticians of the new drama, should not serve as entertainment, it should reflect social problems, call for thinking.

At the origins of the "new drama" - a monumental figure Henrik Ibsen, reformer European theater of the 19th century (which bridged the gap between Schiller-type dramaturgy and analytical drama), on the one hand, and “ iconoclast”, which contemporaries in terms of the degree of rejection of Christianity and militant individualism, not without reason, compared with F. Nietzsche - on the other.

It should be noted that the range of search for both Ibsen and the most significant European playwrights at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. very varied. So, for example, the early Ibsen is almost a contemporary of the era of "storm and onslaught", the work of V. Hugo in the 1830s, he is passionate about the problem Norwegian national identity. Then comes the infatuation period S. Kierkegaard, then K. F. Goebbel, then R. Wagner, then Hegel. Late Ibsen, without changing the main theme of his work (the tragedy of an individualist trying to become "himself"), paves the way for post-naturalistic theater, unexpectedly in the interpretation of a number of motives approaches his, it would seem, antipode M. Maeterlinck

The son of a bankrupt merchant from the town of Skien, Ibsen began to write early. At the age of fifteen, he began to compose poetry, and completed his first dramatic work, a play in a romantic spirit called Catiline, when he was only twenty. Although Catiline did not bring success to Ibsen, the young author, having moved to Christiania, firmly decided to link his future with the theater. The early period of Ibsen's work is devoted to national romantic dramas, glorifying the heroic past of the country: "Bogatyrsky barrow," Fru Inger of Estrot», « Feast in Sulhaug», « Olaf Liljekrans". Passion for antiquity is explained by the fact that from 1852 to 1857. Ibsen served as playwright and artistic director of Norway's first national theater in Bergen, whose organizers saw ancient Icelandic sagas and Norwegian folk ballads as material that could displace French salon plays from the Norwegian stage. However, even then Ibsen was more interested in living people, and not in the idealized heroes of the Middle Ages: “... my intention was to depict our life in ancient times, and not our world of sagas,” he wrote in the preface to the play “Warriors in Helgeland” . But that was the end of his career as a director and playwright working directly for the theatre.

In the 1850s, Ibsen was not only a militant Norwegian patriot, but also an ardent supporter of the movement panscandinavism. He writes poetry and articles on political topics, calling for a fight against England, the main importer of capital to Norway (later K. Hamsun would also take anti-English positions), on the one hand, and Prussia, on the other. The indifference shown by Sweden and Norway during the defeat of Denmark by Prussia and Austria-Hungary showed the futility of Ibsen's romantic hopes for the unification of Scandinavia, drew a line under his national-romantic period of creativity.

European fame brought him a poetic drama " Brand”(Brand, 1865, post. 1885), written in Rome and dedicated to the problem of the heroic individual, a fighter against any form of public and personal falsehood, who, in order to take place in life, learns the art of renunciation (from the church, fatherland, family, even himself ).

Peer Gynt (1867, post. 1876) followed this dramatic portrait of a hero serving "unknown gods" of his deeply individual, almost anarchic-heroic destiny. This is a kind of anti-Brand, the story of a disastrous rejection of Brand's call to "be who you are" for the comfort of "petty-bourgeois life." " Per Gyun t ”, unlike“ Brand ”, was transferred to a fabulous, fantastic world.

In 1873 was created " Caesar and the Galilean"(Kejser og galilaser, post. 1896) - Ibsen's last poetic drama with an emphatically philosophical intent; it is dedicated to Julian the Apostate, the tragic struggle of the Roman emperor with the course of history (in this case, with Christianity that non-violently conquered Rome). Trying to fight Christianity and restore the old pagan beliefs sanctified by "tradition" and material beauty, Julian unwittingly paves the way for the Galilean...

Ibsen's most popular play in Russia was " Dollhouse» (Et Dukkehjem, 1879). The scenery of the apartment of Helmer and Nora immerses the viewer in a bourgeois idyll. It is destroyed by attorney Krogstad, who reminds Nora of the bill she forged. Thorvald Helmer quarrels with his wife and blames her in every possible way. Unexpectedly, Krogstad is re-educated and sends a bill to Nora. Helmer immediately calms down and invites his wife to return to normal life, but Nora has already realized how little she means to her husband. She denounces the petty-bourgeois family system. The play ends with Nora leaving. However, it should not be perceived as social, the play is written on real events, and for Ibsen the universal problems of freedom are important.

The first drama written by Ibsen after "A Doll's House" - " ghosts(Gengangere, 1881). She uses many of Brand's motifs: heredity, religion, idealism (embodied in Fra Alving). But in "Ghosts" critics note a significant influence of French naturalism.

Written under the influence of impressionism and Shakespeare, the drama " Wild duck”(Vildanden, 1884), the idealist Gregers is opposed to the humanist doctor, who believes that people should not be revealed to everything that happens in their lives. "New Hamlet" Gregers does not heed the doctor's advice and declassifies his family's secrets, which ultimately leads to the suicide of his sister Hedwig.

In his later plays, the subtext becomes more complicated, the subtlety of the psychological drawing increases. The theme of "strong man" comes to the fore. Ibsen becomes merciless to his heroes. Examples of these plays are " Builder Solnes"(Bygmester Solness, 1892)," Yun Gabriel Borkman(John Gabriel Borkman, 1896).

Solness the Builder is the most significant of Ibsen's later dramas. Solness, like Ibsen, is torn between a high calling and life comfort. Young Hilda, reminiscent of Hedwig from The Wild Duck, demands that he return to building towers. The play ends with the fall of the builder, who has not yet been interpreted by literary critics. According to one version, creativity and life are incompatible, according to another, this is the only way a true artist can end his journey.

Henrik Ibsenone of the most interesting playwrights of the nineteenth century.His drama is always in tune with the present.Love for Ibsen in Norway is, if not an innate feeling, then probably arising in early childhood.

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828 in the small Norwegian town of Skien in the family of a businessman. After leaving school, Henryk entered the pharmacy town of Grimstadt as an apprentice, where he worked for five years. Then he moved to Christiania (Oslo), where he began to study medicine. In his spare time he read, drew and wrote poetry.

Ibsen became a playwright by chance when he was offered to work as a "writer of plays" for the Norwegian theater in the city of Bergen. ATIn 1856, Ibsen's first play was successfully staged at the theater. In the same year he met Susanna Thoresen. Two years later they got married, the marriage was happy. In 1864, Ibsen received a writer's pension. In 1852-1857 he directed the first national Norwegian theater in Bergen, and in 1857-1862 he headed the Norwegian theater in Christiania. After Austro-Prussian-Danishth war, Ibsen and his family went abroad - he lived in Rome, Dresden, Munich. His first world-famous plays were the poetic dramas "Brand" and "Peer Gynt".
Ibsenhe was 63 when he returned to his homeland, he was already world famous. May 23, 1906 Ibsendiedfrom a stroke.

First workIbsen- an application for the pronunciation of the Word - the play "Catilina". This character of Roman history,in the generally accepted opinion, appearing as a symbol of the worst depravity, in the image of Ibsen he is not a scoundrel, but, on the contrary, a noble, tragic hero. This first play created the path for Ibsen, the path of the individualist, the rebel and the breaker of the rules. Unlike Nietzsche, the Ibsen rebellion wasnot to the glorification of instinct, but to the leap towards the spirit, towards transgression.An important difference between the position of Ibsen and Nietzsche in relation to women. The infamous “you go to a woman - take a whip” and “a man for war, a woman for a man” are quoted even by those who are far from philosophy. Ibsen, on the contrary, professes a kind of cult of a woman, he believes that a woman will throw off the shackles of unconsciousness before a man and that her path is no less individual.

This was especially vividly reflected in his works - "Woman from the Sea" and "A Doll's House". In the first, a successful couple of spouses are faced with the fact that the wife's longtime lover, "from the sea", is coming, who wants to take her away. This lover is a typical "man of instinct", a "barbarian", the exact opposite of her intellectual husband. The usual dynamics of such plots, as a rule, is unreasonably tragic, and as a result, the woman is either doomed to die or leave with a valiant conqueror. Her throwing, which is perceived as the horror of inevitability, suddenly turns out to be a search for her unrevealed individuality: as soon as the husband is ready to accept her choice and give her complete freedom, it turns out that the "man from the sea", that is, the unintegrated animus, is nothing more than a myth, and she stays with her husband. The plot, with such a cursory description, may seem banal, but its unexpectedness and rebelliousness is that it is the individuality of the wife who must be released in every way that is emphasized, and her opportunity to stay with her husband appears only after he consciously lets her go. The key to the play is that he finds the strength in himself to overcome the "patriarch complex", that is, his social and biological rights of the owner, which have sprouted like poison from the Osirian aeon.

"" (1879) is one of Ibsen's most popular, interesting plays. In it, for the first time, a woman in world literature says that, in addition to the duties of mother and wife, “there are other equally sacred duties” - “duties to herself.” main character Nora stated: “I can no longer be satisfied with what the majority says and what the books say. I need to think about these things myself.” She wants to reconsider everything - both religion and morality. Nora actually asserts the right of an individual to create their own moral rules and ideas about life, different from the generally accepted and traditional ones. That is, Ibsen asserts the relativity of moral norms.Ibsen is actually the first to put forward the idea of ​​a free and individuating woman. Before him, there was nothing like this, and the woman was tightly inscribed in the patriarchal context of complete biological subordination and practically did not rebel against this.

The play "Ghosts" is, in fact, a family drama. It is about the fact that parental mistakes, as in a mirror, are reflected in the behavior of children, and, of course, about ghosts. But not those who live on the roof, but completely different. In Ibsen, these are living people who are not really trying to live, but simply exist in the proposed circumstances.

The main character is Mrs. Alving, the mistress of a large house, who has long been in love with the local pastor, but sacredly keeps the memory of her husband, the captain. And just as earnestly protects from the great feeling of the artist's son, who is seriously carried away by a pretty maid. Force maternal love will turn him into the same as herself, a living ghost.

« Peer Gynt"one of Ibsen's major playswhich has becomeclassicalthanks to Grieg.

Mark Zakharov:"Peer Gynt is a dramatic piece of news at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which affirmed the foundations of existentialism. Simplifying the problem a little, let's say that Peer Gynt does not interact with individual characters - he interacts with the Universe. The whole world around him is Peer Gynt's main partner. The world, constantly changing, it attacks his consciousness in different ways, and in this cheerful whirlpool he is looking for only one, the only one that belongs to him.
I am interested in Peer Gynt, perhaps because I passed the “point of no return” and really felt that life is not endless, as it seemed to me in childhood and even after graduating from the Theater Institute. Now you can look at own life, like on a chessboard and understand what squares my path passed through, what I went around and what I got into, sometimes regretting what happened later. The main thing is to start correctly, and most importantly, to understand where it is, your Beginning. How to guess your only possible path through the labyrinths of life circumstances and your own beliefs, if you have them ... And if not? To find! Form! Reveal from the bowels of the subconscious, catch in the cosmic dimensionlessness. . . But sometimes what has already been found slips out of hands, leaves the soul, turning into a mirage, and then a new painful search awaits in the chaos of events, hopes, smoldering memories and belated prayers.
Our hero was sometimes written about as a bearer of the idea of ​​compromise. This is too flat and unworthy of the unique, at the same time, ordinary and even recognizable eccentric hero created by G. Ibsen. In Peer Gynt there is not only nonsense, and he is alive not only with folklore echoes, there is courage and audacity, there is rudeness and gentle humility. G. Ibsen presented to the world the image of a man about whom, as a Chekhov hero, it is very difficult to say who he is.
I started my directorial path when the “simple person” was highly valued and praised. It seems that now almost all of us, together with Dostoevsky, Platonov, Bulgakov and other seers, have realized the truth or come close to it - there are very difficult people around us, even if they pretend to be cogs, one-celled creatures or monsters.
So I wanted to talk about Peer Gynt and some other people, without whom his unique life could not have taken place. Just tell it in your own way, not too seriously, as best we can. And thinking about the most serious things, to avoid claims for obligatory profundity ... The idea is dangerous. Composing a play today is a risky business." MARK ZAKHAROV
In 1874, the leading Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen conceived the idea of ​​staging a new play. He invited to work together on a new production of the young, but already famous composer Edward Grieg. The music for the performance was written in six months. This piece of music consists of 27 parts. This production is called Peer Gynt.

At the premiere in 1886, Ibsen's drama and Grieg's music were equally successful. This was the second birth of Ibsen's play. Then the music became more popular, and its separate concert life began.



"Peer Gynt" - a play about young man. Per left the house and his girlfriend and went in search of happiness. He met many things along the way. He wandered the world, meeting evil trolls and frivolous women, strange hunchbacks and robbers, Arab sorcerers and much more. One day, Gynt enters the cave of the mountain king.The author in a single image showed two elements: the mountain king himself and his evil forces. Among them was the princess, who, with her dance, is trying to attract the attention of Per.

Peer Gynt, the hero of our time

Peer Gynt is an odious figure. A reason for people to have fun and gossip. Everyone considers him a slacker, a liar and a talker. This is how he is perceived even by his mother, who was his first inspirational muse (from her fairy tales, with which she overfed him in childhood, Per's imagination gained freedom and constantly walks up and down):
Peer Gynt hardly distinguishes reality from dreams, reality for him is ready to turn into fiction at any second, and fiction to become truth.

In the village, Pera is hated, laughed at, and feared (because they don't understand). Some consider him a sorcerer, although they speak of it with a sneer.
Nobody believes him. And he continues to brag and tell stories about himself that have long been known to everyone.
In fact, all these tales of Gynt are just a free presentation of ancient legends. But in this "lie" the poet's ability to reincarnate is manifested. Like Hoffmann's cavalier Gluck (either a madman or an artist who gets used to the image), Gynt recreates legends. He is not just a spectator, listener or performer, but a re-creator, giving new life to seemingly dead images and myths. “The whole history of the earth is a dream of me,” Peer Gynt might have exclaimed.
So in "Peer Gynt" the traditional problem (misunderstanding by society of the artist who creates new reality and forming new cultural forms) develops into a manifesto of all people of art who go in their search to the end, regardless of any boundaries, conventions and establishments.
That is why this text was so loved, for example, by symbolists. After all, as Khodasevich said in his keynote article, symbolism was “a series of attempts, sometimes truly heroic, to find a fusion of life and creativity, a kind of philosophical stone of art. Symbolism stubbornly sought in its midst a genius who would be able to merge life and creativity together.
And, in particular, this is why Ibsen's Peer Gynt is still relevant today.

Fear of being creative

On the other hand, it is his narcissism and laziness that make Peer Gynt a universal and timeless type. Ibsen attributes narcissism to the nature not of a person, but of a troll. But the troll is a symbol. The concentrated embodiment of everything lower in a person - vanity, selfishness, lust and other vices.
20-year-old Per wanders around the outskirts of his village, fighting, drinking, seducing girls, telling stories about his adventures. And as soon as narcissism takes possession of him, he meets trolls: the Woman in Green and the Dovre Elder. From them, he learns the difference between a troll and a human. And he prefers to remain a man - an outcast among people, and not a king among trolls.
This whole scene with the trolls (and the rest of the scenes in which fabulous, mythical characters take part) takes place in the imagination of the hero, and not in the outside world. And if you notice quite clear indications of this in the text, then Peer Gynt can be read as a completely realistic work in which trolls, like other mythical characters, only represent various functions inner peace Gunt.

The catch is that it never occurs to Per Gynt to write down his daydreams. This allows literary scholars to speak of him as a hero, in which Ibsen expressed, they say, the entire inconsistency of a person of the 19th century - a person who has forgotten about his destiny. Buried talent in the ground.
Peru seems to be just too lazy to write down his dreams. Although it’s more likely not even laziness, but “fear of a clean slate.”
When Peer Gynt sees how someone cuts off his finger so as not to go into the army (that is, in fact, out of cowardice), he comes from this act in genuine admiration (Ibsen's italics):
You can think, you can wish
But to do? An incomprehensible thing...
This is the whole Peer Gynt - he fantasizes, wants to do something, but does not dare (or is afraid) ...
However, returning to the mentioned article by Khodasevich and the Symbolists, one can look at Gynt as a poet who does not write, but only lives his poetry. On the artist who creates a poem not in his art, but in life. It's the same reason poets Silver Age revered Ibsen as one of their gurus.
But is it enough for an artist to create his own life without creating any other works? The answer to this question is precisely given by Peer Gynt.

Mythology of Gynt

Solveig renounced everyone to be with Peer Gynt. Per goes to build the royal palace, happy and proud of the appearance of Solveig. But suddenly he runs into an Elderly woman in green rags (she is dreaming of him, apparently because he is too proud of his “victory” over Solveig, because the trolls appear just at those moments when Per is overcome by vanity). The old woman demands that he kick Solveig out, presents him with a freak son as her rights to his house, but he answers her to this: “Get out, witch!”. She disappears, and then Peer Gynt begins to reflect:

"Bypass!" - the crooked one told me. And, she-she
That's right. My building collapsed.
Between me and the one that seemed mine
From now on, the wall. There is no reason to be excited!
Bypass! You have no way left
Which you could go straight to her.
Directly towards her? There would also be a way.
But what? I lost the Holy Scripture.
I forgot how repentance is interpreted there.
Where can I get edification in the forest?
Remorse? Years will pass by,
As long as you are saved. Life will become ugly.
Break the world into pieces, immensely dear to me,
And put together worlds from fragments again?
You can hardly glue a cracked bell,
And what blooms, you dare not trample!
Of course the devil is just a vision
She disappeared from sight forever.
However, bypassing ordinary vision,
An unclean thought entered my soul.

This is how Per addresses himself before leaving Solveig until old age.
To use the terminology of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (close in spirit to Ibsen), Per is trying at this moment to move from the aesthetic stage of existence to the ethical one, to take responsibility. And this is the guarantee of his future salvation. After all, throwing Solveig, he does the only great thing he is capable of - forever "keeps himself in her heart." Then he can already live as he pleases (which, in fact, he does). The deed of his life is complete. Purpose fulfilled. The poem has been written.
Solveig is the muse of Peer Gynt, a woman who "lives while waiting", remembering him as young and handsome. Great Mother, Soul of the world, Eternal femininity (both in Goethe's and in the symbolist meaning of this mythologeme). She kept the image of Peer Gynt in her heart and, in the end, thereby saved Peer.
Gynt is always under the patronage (under cover) of the Eternal Femininity. At the end of the battle with the trolls, he shouts: "Save me mother!" And after that, the conversation with Crooked, in a blurry formless voice from the darkness, ends with the words of the barely breathing Crooked: “Women keep him; Dealing with him is difficult."
The curve is just a symbol of “laziness”, “fear”, “inactivity” of Per (“The great curve wins without a fight”, “The great curve awaits victories from peace”). On the one hand, it is a function of the psyche, and on the other, it is the Norwegian god of the underground (the god of the underground depths, embodied most clearly in the hero of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, in Slavic mythology, this is Ovinnik).

Mythology bubbled through Ibsen. Perhaps he thought that he was writing about the decline in which contemporary Norway found itself, about the smaller Norwegians (this is how Peer Gynt and other Ibsen texts are often interpreted). But he got a manifesto to overcome Christianity and return to paganism. (Symbolism is a special case of such overcoming.)

If you look at the works of Ibsen as a reflection of his time, then only in the sense in which Carl Gustav Jung in his work "Psychology and Poetic Creativity" spoke of works of the visionary type. Those in which (often bypassing the will of the author) expressed the spirit of the times. At the time of writing a visionary work, the author becomes a kind of mouthpiece of the collective unconscious, passing through himself information coming from the most reserved depths of human experience.
“For this reason, it is quite understandable when the poet turns again to mythological figures in order to find an expression corresponding to his experience. To imagine that he is simply working with this material that he inherited would be to distort everything; in fact, he creates on the basis of first-experience, the dark nature of which needs mythological images, and therefore eagerly reaches for them as something related in order to express himself through them, ”writes Jung.
Undoubtedly, the works of Ibsen (especially Peer Gynt) belong to this visionary type.
Christianity, paganism and Nietzscheanism

Starting from the Fourth act, everything in Peer Gynt takes place on a different level - there are no mythical monsters and voices from the darkness. Peer Gynt (now a wealthy slave trader) who has matured and outwardly settled down teaches:

Where does courage come from?
On our life path?
Without flinching, you must go
Between the temptations of evil and good,
In the struggle, take into account that the days of struggle
Your age is by no means completed,
And right ways back
Save for a late rescue
Here's my theory!

He informs his drinking companions that he wants to become the king of the world:

If I did not become myself, - the lord
A faceless corpse will become over the world.
Something like this was the covenant -
And I don't think it's better!

And to the question “What does it mean to “become yourself?” replies: to be unlike anyone, just as the devil is unlike God.
The question of what it means to “be yourself” torments Peer Gynt, haunts him. It's generally main question plays. And in the end, a simple and exhaustive answer is given to it. An indication of the only opportunity for a person to “be himself” ... (And the only opportunity for an artist to truly connect poetry with life.)

In literary criticism, Peer Gynt is often contrasted with another Ibsenian hero, the priest Brand (from the drama of the same name). And they say that it was Brand who always remained “himself”.
If Gynt for the literary tradition is a typical “neither fish nor fowl” person, some kind of rare egoist who shied away from his destiny all his life, as a result of which his personality (and his life) fell into pieces, then Brand is usually interpreted as a beloved the hero of Ibsen, they see in him a kind of ideal of a person - whole and complete.
And indeed, he is not at all tormented by the search for his own Self. But if you look closely, it turns out that Brand is not even a person at all. He is a kind of superhuman soulless function. He pushes to fall all the weak that surrounds him, he is ready to sacrifice his life and the lives of others, because ... he considers himself (so he decided!) The chosen one of God. These Brandian sacrifices are no longer even Abraham's sacrifices, not "faith by the power of the absurd" that Kierkegaard spoke of, but the rational decision of a strong-willed proud man. Crowleyan arbitrariness. Nietzschean pride.
Therefore, it is logical that Brand perishes, unlike Peer Gynt, who is completely Christian, although in a pagan entourage, saved.
This salvation occurs already in the fifth act, which again turns out to be filled with symbolic visions. When Peer Gynt escapes into the forest (into the depths of the unconscious), he merges with nature so much that the element, personified by the poet's imagination, begins to tell him his own thoughts about himself:

We are songs, you are us
Didn't sing at the top of my lungs
But a thousand times
Silenced us stubbornly.
In the soul of your right
We are waiting for freedom.
You didn't let us go.
You have poison.

Biblical parable of the talents. A slave who buries his talent in the ground and does not increase his master's wealth falls into disfavor. The button maker (a mythological character whose function is to take the soul of Peer Gynt, which is not worthy of either hell or heaven) for melting down, says:

To be yourself means to be
The fact that the owner has revealed in you.

Per in every possible way wriggles, excuses himself, dodges. But the accusation (self-accusation) looks quite impressive: he is a man who has not fulfilled his destiny, buried a talent in the ground, who did not even know how to sin properly. All he has created is an ugly troll who has spawned his own kind. Meltdown or hell - punishment seems inevitable anyway...

Per wants Solveig to condemn him, as he believes that it is to her that he is most to blame. But in the face of Solveig, the convict meets the Vestal Virgin. Solveig names Peru the place where he always remained himself:
In faith, in my hope and in love!
End. The rescue. The button maker is waiting behind the hut...

“I spoke above about the attempt to merge life and work together as about the truth of symbolism,” Khodasevich writes. - This truth will remain with him, although it does not belong to him alone. This is the eternal truth, only most deeply and vividly experienced by symbolism. Like Goethe's Faust, Peer Gynt avoids retribution at the end of Ibsen's drama, because the main creation of his life was love.

Saved a high spirit from evil
God's work:
"Whose life in aspirations has passed,
We can save him."
And for whom love itself
The petition does not freeze
He will be a family of angels
Welcomed in heaven.

And as a final point:

Everything is fast-
Symbol, comparison.
The goal is endless
Here is achievement.
Here is commandment
All truth.
Eternal femininity
Pulls us to her.


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