Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask

by Ivo de Figueiredo

Overview

A magnificent new biography of Henrik Ibsen, among the greatest modern playwrights

"A superb account of the social and political atmosphere of Scandinavia in Ibsen’s time, and of Ibsen’s peculiar and inconsistent place within it.”—Andrew Katzenstein, Harper’s

“A stellar life of the celebrated father of modern European drama.”—Choice

Henrik Ibsen (1820–1908) is arguably the most important dramatist of the nineteenth century. Globally he remains the most performed playwright after Shakespeare, and Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, Peer Gynt, and Ghosts are all masterpieces of psychological insight.

This is the first full-scale biography to take a literary as well as historical approach to the works, life, and times of Ibsen. Ivo de Figueiredo shows how, as a man, Ibsen was drawn toward authoritarianism, was absolute in his judgments over others, and resisted the ideas of equality and human rights that formed the bases of the emerging democracies in Europe. And yet as an artist, he advanced debates about the modern individual’s freedom and responsibility—and cultivated his own image accordingly. Where other biographies try to show how the artist creates the art, this book reveals how, in Ibsen’s case, the art shaped the artist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300208818
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Pages:	704
Sales rank:	1,142,331
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.40(d)

About the Author

Ivo de Figueiredo is a prize-winning Norwegian historian, biographer, and literary critic. He is the author of numerous books and is working on a major new life of Munch. Robert Ferguson is an author and translator.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Foreword x

Prologue 1

I Skien 7

The House of Ibsen

The Fall

The puppet-master

Venstøp

Trying your luck

II Grimstad 23

A young man goes ashore

In the night

The steadfast and true

The spirit of 1848

'Scandinavians Awake!'

The art of becoming a writer

A stroll on Kapitelbjerget

III Christiania 57

The Vika boy

Student and writer

The generation of 1848

Ha!

Poverty and success

The Man

Summer with Oscar

The prisoner of Akershus

A fortuitous encounter

IV Bergen 85

The city by the sea

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

From Bergen to the world

The new European theatre

The director

Impish fun on St John's Night

'Flowers of the Field and Potted Plants'

The big let-down

Lying to Blytt

The feast in Bergen

The eagle

Cousin Napoleon

Last dance with Olaf Liljekrans

'Get me a publisher!'

V Christiania 127

Master of Møllergaten

A dreadful burden

A nation's warrior

A 'Vein of silver running through a mountain'

'Up, get up Ibsen!'

Art and commerce

Freedom of art, obligations of the state

'No arse and no chest'

'Damn that Dutchman!"

Scandinavianists and nationalists

Towards the final curtain

Bankrupt

On the heights

Air and love

Either/or

The pretender

Out, leave, go

VI Rome 189

Over the Dybbøl ramparts

The 'Scandinavian

Summer in Genzano

Dreamland

Il Cappellone

'You won't bloody well die'

The revelation

The scorpions sting

Henrik Halfbeard

A state-appointed satirist

A new working day

An unprincipled scoundrel

The wad of cotton wool

'Hey, Jacob Shoemaker!'

The buck ride

The minds silver veins

'My book is poetry'

The end of a dream

VII Dresden 251

Silence

Changing of the guards

'Something green in the buttonhole'

The guest of the khedive

Pans 1869

Steensgaard and company

'Du trittst auf deine Hose!'

Letter in rhyme to Fru Heiberg

The revolt of the human spirit

The spiritual aristocracy

'I must, I must'

Poetry and lies

'You provoke the Danes …'

The European

A horseman rides

The World's Exhibition in Vienna

Love and rights

The Third Kingdom

'Cowpats, Norwegian Norwegianness and smug self-satisfaction!'

Norway 1874

The break

VIII Munich 355

Life below the Alps

The Mountain King revisited

Among artists and crocodiles

Like a skald at the foot of his prince

Late summer in Tyrol

The long winter

Laurel wreaths and new leather gloves

Pillar or pillory?

Laura Kieler's marriage

IX Rome - Munich - Rome 391

Scandal among the Scandinavians

Intermezzo in Munich

Where did Nora spring from?

The death of the lark

Portrait of Ibsen

Saturday evening at the Lies

'I never drink tea'

A 'farrago of syphilis and filth'

Society's silver veins

For the businessmen and their wives

An Enemy of the People

First meetings

Lindberg's stroke of genius

'In the event of an accident …'

Reunion with Bjørnson

The dark loft

Norway 1885

Face to face

The rage of resignation

X Munich 489

'Dieser Platz ist dem Herrn Doktor Ibsen vorbehalten!'

Home and away

The white horses

Directing by post

A new spring in Germany

Der Wassermann

The poet and the ladies

The angriest man in Europe

Lady of the fjord

The little love

Emilie and Helene

Slippers and pistols

The death of beauty

'Too far from Piccadilly'

Théâtre Libre

Europe - and beyond

A diva at the end of the tour

XI Kristiania 561

Imagine being frozen

Hildur and Hamsun

The loss of a son

The tower

A Frenchman in Kristiania

The law of change

Ibsen's body

Incipient madness

Henrik Ibsen superstar

Footsteps from, the first floor

The poetry of impotence

A university chair for Sigurd

Pride and papier-mâché

The man and the mask

Resurrection day

The sphinx's silver veins

XII Arbins Gate 637

Can Ibsen die?

The mask

Afterword and Acknowledgements 647

Archives and Abbreviations 650

Notes 652

Bibliography 670

Index 677

Editorial Reviews

The established facts of his life, as well as some fruitful speculations, are responsibly laid out . . . Mr. de Figueiredo does a fine job of chronicling how, in their differing ways, country after country fell under Ibsen’s spell.”—Brad Leithauser, Wall Street Journal

“[A] comprehensive portrait . . . [with] authority and scope.”—Lew Whittington, New York Journal of Books

“Ivo de Figueiredo provides a stellar life of the celebrated father of modern European drama.”—H.I. Einsohn, Choice

“Literarily and artistically, Ibsen’s greatness is undeniable, and de Figueiredo writes with commanding intelligence on the plays: all of the critical material in this book is fascinating.”—Brooke Allen, New Criterion

 “Figueiredo has given English readers a superb account of the social and political atmosphere of Scandinavia in Ibsen’s time, and of Ibsen’s peculiar and inconsistent place within it.”—Andrew Katzenstein, Harper’s

“Illuminating . . . de Figueiredo displays a clear sense of why any biography of Ibsen must also, on some level, be a biography of European culture and society—so representative was the playwright of the age in which he lived.”—Morten Høi Jensen, New York Review of Books

Listed on Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles List for 2019
 

"Ivo de Figueiredo's luminous prose reveals the myth, the mask and the reality of the "Norwegian sphinx." Tracing Ibsen's deliberate construction of his public persona, and his careful management of his career, de Figueiredo also deftly conveys the social and cultural tensions of Ibsen's Norway while keeping his plays and their reception in close focus. An enthralling read.”—Toril Moi, author of Henrik Ibsen and The Birth of Modernism

“de Figueiredo approaches Ibsen, so elusive as both man and writer, in a spirit of intense, scrupulous inquiry in which he involves his readers. His Ibsen is therefore refreshingly freed from any conventional compartmentalisation and allowed to develop, throughout his long life, in all his seeming inconsistencies and unique self-vindicating creations. Robert Ferguson’s supple English prose matches the narrative movement and the emotional varieties of the Norwegian original.”—Paul Binding, author of Hans Christian Andersen

"de Figueiredo’s splendid biography of Ibsen ranks with those of Koht, Meyer, and Ferguson — with this difference: that he treats the man and the work as independent historical subjects so that the plays become a study of the zeitgeist, with an emphasis on their reception and transformation of European society.”—Errol Durbach, author of Ibsen the Romantic

From the Publisher