Born Mar. 20, 1828, in Skien; died May 23, 1906, in Christiania. Norwegian dramatist.
Ibsen was the son of a rich merchant who went bankrupt in 1836. In 1844 he began work as a druggist’s apprentice. During this time he wrote his first verses and the drama Catiline (1850), whose theme of struggle against tyranny was inspired by the revolutionary events of 1848 in Europe. In 1850 his play The Warrior’s Barrow was staged in Christiania. From 1852 to 1857, Ibsen directed in Bergen the first national Norwegian theater. From 1857 to 1862 he headed the Norwegian Theater in Christiania. Between 1864 and 1891 he lived in Rome, Dresden, and Munich.
In the late 1840’s and early 1850’s, Ibsen turned to satire and the grotesque. Ibsen contrasted the heroic national past, the harmony of patriarchal peasant life, and the loftiness of human feelings to the contemporary bourgeois period. In Love’s Comedy (1862), in which a realistic tendency is apparent, he presents a sharply satirical picture of Norwegian petit bourgeois bureaucrats. In his historical drama The Pretenders (1864), Ibsen shows the victory of a hero fulfilling his progressive historical mission. The hero of the dramatic poem Brand (1866) is a man of integrity who will accept any sacrifice for the realization of his ideal. Despite the abstract nature of his goal (the attainment of inner perfection and full intellectual freedom), Brand is heroic and withstands the triviality of his environment. The broad scope of philosophical and symbolic drama is preserved in Peer Gynt (1867); the hero of this play, however, in contrast to Brand, is capable of compromise and timeserving.
In the late 1860’s and the early 1870’s, during the intensification of social and political contradictions, Ibsen expected a collapse of the old world and a “revolution of the human spirit.” In his drama on Julian the Apostate, Emperor and Galilean (1873), he affirms the imminent synthesis of the spiritual and physical aspects of man. The basic theme of the plays Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and An Enemy of the People (1882) is the discrepancy between the ostentatious brilliance of bourgeois society and its hypocritical essence. The plays are constructed analytically: the dramatic tension is created not by external events but by a gradual disclosure of further information and a development of the implications of the plot. The basic element in the finale of the play is not the development of the story but rather the decision of the hero, which is dictated not only by his emotions but also by his intellect.
After the mid-1880’s, social criticism in Ibsen’s work becomes less pronounced (Wild Duck, 1884). In his later plays, indirect suggestion becomes more complex, the subtlety of the psychological characterization increases, and symbolic elements are intensified. The theme of the “strong man” comes to the fore. Ibsen, however, is merciless toward his heroes when they carry out their mission at the expense of the life and happiness of other people, as in Rosmersholm (m6),Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), and John Gabriel Borkman (1896).
Since the 1880’s, Ibsen’s name has served throughout the world as a symbol of the struggle for realistic art, for the integrity and inner freedom of man, and for renewal of spiritual life. In Russia in the early 20th century, Ibsen exerted the dominant influence on the intelligentsia; his plays ran in many theaters. His most frequently presented plays on the Soviet stage are A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and Peer Gynt (in a concert performance with E. Grieg’s music).
V. G. ADMONI