Word: rubek
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like Exiles, the great play which his young reviewer would later create, Ibsen's last work is a story of homelessness. The aging sculptor Arnold Rubek has returned with his young wife Maja to a coastal resort in his "homeland." But Rubek's life and work have subsided into boredom and mediocrity. His master-piece, a representation of the idea of resurrection in the form of a beautiful young woman, is finished, and its model, the only woman he could ever have loved, has left him. His new wife, his new house, and all the belated rewards which bourgeois society...
After Hedda, social problem yields the stage to religious search. John Gabriel Borkman and Arnold Rubek, the heroes of John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), Ibsen's last two plays, are close portraits of the artist as an old man battling desperately to make some central sense of his life before it ends. Borkman, the industrialist, loses the battle. "Those mountains far away . . . those veins of iron ore, stretching their twisting, branching, enticing arms towards me . . . wanted to be freed. And I tried . . . But I failed." But Rubek, the artist, in the last scene...