Word: ibsens
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...Pair of Stories.?The popular im pression that Norwegian nature is a monotone in its cold indifference Ibsen somewhat dispelled by his twin studies of the two Norwegian extremes: Peer Gynt, shiftless, debonair; and Brandt, steadfast, bitterly serious-minded. To dispel another popular impression?that the Vikings were god-like blonds exclusively engaged in swift sea fights?Sigrid Undset in turn makes twin studies: the Kristin Lavrans datter trilogy of some 500,000 words, and The Master of Hestviken, unfinished tetralogy. Both concern marriage attained through unatoned sin, maintained despite suspicion and recrimination, resolved at last by death...
...trial grew to resemble a literary symposium. The names of Shakespeare, George Jean Nathan, Aristotle, Gorky, Ibsen, Bernard Shaw and many another were spoken. Author Nichols' "dramaturgical expert," Moses L. Malevinsky of O'Brien, Malevinsky, & Driscoll, proceeded to a comparison of every entrance and exit in Abie's Irish Rose with every entrance and exit in the cinema...
...Wild Duck. Before Shaw, Ibsen was the mightiest of modern playwrights. He learned about life in an apothecary's shop and looked down at it later with savage Nordic melancholy. In The Wild Duck he wrote about a man who was the enemy of most people because he told the truth, even when truth-telling was tantamount to telling tales. Gregers Werle, the son of a rich Norwegian mine-owner, suspected that his libertine father had disposed of an old mistress by marrying her to Hialmar Ekdal, the son of a man whom the libertine had ruined. Gregers Werle...
...peculiar significance of Ibsen in Norway cannot be realized unless it is remembered that he was of Danish, not Norwegian, stock and chose to pass much of his manhood and old age away from Norway on the Continent of Europe. Thus he came more readily to achieve international fame, but lost touch with Norwegians who were then flocking in rapturous admiration around a playwright-demagogue who is scarcely known outside of Norway, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, "The Old Bear...
...this day nine Norwegians out of ten still emotionally prefer Bjornson to Ibsen, while recognizing with gratitude that the fame of Ibsen has "put Norway on the map," for ignorant millions would otherwise scarcely differentiate it from Denmark or Sweden. Perhaps the most familiar tradition of Ibsen is that of an old man who would sit for hours at a bay window of the Grand Cafe in Oslo (then Christiania) staring with unseeing eyes at the bodies of his countrymen but piercing their souls with uncanny insight. His reward is that the theatre-goers of today, who constitute...