Henrik Ibsen

https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/Henrik_Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen var en norsk forfatter. Han er kendt som grundlæggeren af det moderne drama med skuespil, der fremstiller mennesket drevet af skjulte psykiske kræfter, fuldt af hemmeligheder og en fortid, det er umuligt at flygte fra. Ibsens skuespil repræsenterer på en og samme gang en naturalistisk og symbolistisk drejning i international dramatik.

Henrik Ibsen blev født i Skien og oplevede som dreng familiens økonomiske fallit. I 1843 flyttede han til Grimstad for at blive apotekerlærling. Her begyndte han sin forfatterbane. Under indtryk af Februarrevolutionen 1848 skrev han sit første drama, Catilina (1850), oprøreren fra republikkens Rom. Det viser allerede nogle senere gennemgående temaer — konflikten mellem idealer og realiteter, kald og svig.......

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/2497/henrik-ibsen

• *

Wikipedia

• Henrik Ibsen in Wikipedia

Biography

Henrik Johan Ibsen (ˈhɛnɾɪk ˈɪpsən; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the god father" of modern drama and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition, alongside such other notable playwrights as Shakespeare.

Already in his lifetime, there was significant interest in Ibsen's biography and family history. Many Ibsen scholars have compared characters and themes in his plays to his family and upbringing. Ibsen himself confirmed that he both modelled and named characters in his plays after his own family.

Both of Ibsen's parents' belonged to the city's and county's elite. Ibsen's ancestors were primarily merchants and shipowners in cities such as Skien and Bergen, or members of the "aristocracy of officials" of Upper Telemark, the region's civil servant elite. Henrik Ibsen later wrote that "my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien", and that he was closely related to "just about all the patrician families who then dominated the place and its surroundings."

Additional material

The following is a collection of unedited material from merged profiles:

http://www.skiensatlas.org/content/download/2410/14793/file/HENRIK+...

https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen - På Dansk..

https://www.ibsen.uio.no/BREV_B1880-1889ht%7cB18820921GB.pdf -Brev fra Henrik Ibsen til Henrik Brandes

• Henrik Johan Ibsen (Norwegian pronunciation: ˈhɛnɾɪk ˈɪpsən; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the god father" of modern drama and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition, alongside such other notable playwrights as Sophocles and Shakespeare.

Family and youth

Ibsen was born to Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, a relatively well-to-do merchant family, in the small port town of Skien, Norway, which was primarily noted for shipping timber. He was a descendant of some of the oldest and most distinguished families of Norway, including the Paus family. Ibsen later pointed out his distinguished ancestors and relatives in a letter to Georg Brandes. Shortly after his birth his family's fortunes took a significant turn for the worse. His mother turned to religion for solace, and his father began to suffer from severe depression. The characters in his plays often mirror his parents, and his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as moral conflicts stemming from dark secrets hidden from society.

At fifteen, Ibsen left home. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, a liaison with a servant produced an illegitimate child, whom he later rejected. While Ibsen did pay some child support for fourteen years, he never met his illegitimate son, who ended up as a poor blacksmith. Ibsen went to Christiania (later renamed Oslo) intending to matriculate at the university. He soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit himself to writing. His first play, the tragedy Catiline (1850), was published under the pseudonym "Brynjolf Bjarme", when he was only 22, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful.

Life and writings

He spent the next several years employed at the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen, where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. During this period he did not publish any new plays of his own. Despite Ibsen's failure to achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing.

Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of Christiania's National Theater. He married Suzannah Thoresen the same year and she gave birth to their only child, Sigurd. The couple lived in very poor financial circumstances and Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway. In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He was not to return to his native land for the next 27 years, and when he returned it was to be as a noted playwright, however controversial.

His next play, Brand (1865), was to bring him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as was the following play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard Grieg famously composed incidental music and songs. Although Ibsen read excerpts of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and traces of the latter's influence are evident in Brand, it was not until after Brand that Ibsen came to take Kierkegaard seriously. Initially annoyed with his friend Georg Brandes for comparing Brand to Kierkegaard, Ibsen nevertheless read Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Ibsen's next play Peer Gynt was consciously informed by Kierkegaard.

With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgments into the drama, exploring what he termed the "drama of ideas". His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.

Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and published A Doll's House in 1879. The play is a scathing criticism of the acceptance of traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage.

Ibsen followed A Doll's House with Ghosts (1881), another scathing commentary on Victorian morality, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her then fiancé despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But she was not to receive the result she was promised. Her husband's philandering continued right up until his death, and the result is that her son is syphilitic. Even the mention of venereal disease was scandalous, but to show that even a person who followed society's ideals of morality had no protection against it, that was beyond scandalous.

In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual households. In An Enemy, controversy became the primary focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. The Victorian belief was that the community was a noble institution that could be trusted, a notion Ibsen challenged. In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen chastised not only the right wing or 'Victorian' elements of society, but also the liberalism of the time. He illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving. An Enemy of the People was written as a response to the people who had rejected his previous work, Ghosts. The plot of the play is a veiled look at the way people reacted to the plot of Ghosts. The protagonist is a doctor, a pillar of the community. The town is a vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water used by the bath is being contaminated when it seeps through the grounds of a local tannery. He expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism. It is obvious to the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor, due to the community's unwillingness to face reality.

As audiences by now expected of him, his next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions; but this time, his attack was not against the Victorians, but against overeager reformers and their idealism. Always the iconoclast, Ibsen was equally willing to tear down the ideologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own.

The Wild Duck (1884) is considered by many to be Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. Furthermore, while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the household income.

Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until he realizes the truth; Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, he disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.

Letter from Ibsen to his English reviewer and translator Edmund Gosse: "30.8.[18]99. Dear Mr. Gosse! It was to me a hearty joy to receive your letter. So I will finally personal meet you and your wife. I am at home every day in the morning until 1 o'clock. I am happy and surprised of your excellent Norwegian! Yours friendly obliged Henrik Ibsen."

Interestingly, late in his career Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of Victorian morality. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of Victorian conventions. Many modern readers, who might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic, and even clichéd, have found these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration of interpersonal confrontation. Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive and destructive for those around them. Hedda Gabler is probably Ibsen's most performed play, with the title role regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day. Hedda has a few similarities with the character of Nora in A Doll's House, but many of today's audiences and theater critics[who?] feel that Hedda's intensity and drive are much more complex and much less comfortably explained than what they view as rather routine feminism on the part of Nora.

Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the theater, but across public life.

Death

On 23 May 1906, Ibsen died in Christiania (now Oslo) after a series of strokes. When his nurse assured a visitor that he was a little better, Ibsen sputtered "On the contrary" and then died.

Ibsen was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Savior") in central Oslo.

Centenary

In 2007, the 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death was commemorated in Norway and many other countries, and the year was dubbed the "Ibsen year" by Norwegian authorities.[citation needed]

On 23 May 2006, the occasion of the hundred-year commemoration of Ibsen's death, the Ibsen Museum reopened a completely restored writer's house with the original interior, colors, and decor.[citation needed]

Also in May 2006, a biographical puppet production of Ibsen's life named The Death of Little Ibsen debuted at New York City's Sanford Meisner Theater.

Works

• 1850 Catiline (Catilina)
• 1850 The Burial Mound also known as The Warrior's Barrow (Kjæmpehøjen)
• 1851 Norma (Norma)
• 1852 St. John's Eve (Sancthansnatten)
• 1854 Lady Inger of Oestraat (Fru Inger til Østeraad)
• 1855 The Feast at Solhaug (Gildet paa Solhoug)
• 1856 Olaf Liljekrans (Olaf Liljekrans)
• 1857 The Vikings at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland)
• 1862 Digte - only released collection of poetry, included "Terje Vigen".
• 1862 Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie)
• 1863 The Pretenders (Kongs-Emnerne)
• 1866 Brand (Brand)
• 1867 Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt)
• 1869 The League of Youth (De unges Forbund)
• 1873 Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer)
• 1877 Pillars of Society (Samfundets Støtter)
• 1879 A Doll's House (Et Dukkehjem)
• 1881 Ghosts (Gengangere)
• 1882 An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende)
• 1884 The Wild Duck (Vildanden)
• 1886 Rosmersholm (Rosmersholm)
• 1888 The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra Havet)
• 1890 Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler)
• 1892 The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness)
• 1894 Little Eyolf (Lille Eyolf)
• 1896 John Gabriel Borkman (John Gabriel Borkman)
• 1899 When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vaagner)

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http://www.snl.no/.nbl_biografi/Henrik_Ibsen/utdypning

http://www.hf.uio.no/ibsensenteret/

Henrik Ibsen (født Henrik Johan Ibsen 20. mars 1828 i Skien, død 23. mai 1906 i Kristiania) var en norsk dramatiker av stor internasjonal betydning. Ibsen er omtalt som det moderne dramas far, og har påvirket en rekke kunstnere, fra George Bernard Shaw og Oscar Wilde, til James Joyce. Han er kjent for storverk som Peer Gynt, Kejser og Galilæer og Gengangere. Ibsen antas å være den nest mest spilte dramatikeren i verden, etter William Shakespeare. Han utga bøkene sine på Gyldendal forlag. Ibsen var også ansatt som sceneinstruktør ved Det norske Theater i Bergen fra 1851 til 1857 og som artistisk direktør ved Kristiania norske Theater i Møllergaten 1 inntil konkursen i 1862. I 1863 frem til utenlandsreisen i 1864 var han konsulent for Christiania Theater i Oslo.

På jakt etter etterkommere av Ibsen:

http://digitalarkivet.uib.no/cgi-win/WebDebatt.exe?slag=listinnlegg...

Som barn var Henrik Ibsen ensom og stille. Faren hadde mistet det meste av sin formue, selv om han fortsatt eide Venstøp som var en ganske verdifull eiendom. Familiens anseelse innenfor overklassen i Skien som de hadde tilhørt og som mange av slektningene tilhørte var, relativt sett, lav. Så fort han ble voksen nok flyttet han derfor vekk fra familien og til Grimstad. Men de sosiale forholdene ble ikke bedre der; Ibsen følte seg venneløs og lite ansett. Det gjorde ikke situasjonen bedre at han fikk barn med en 10 år eldre tjenestejente. Han arbeidet på apotek i flere år mens han leste til artium, og planen var å bli lege. 22 år gammel debuterte han imidlertid som dramatiker med <Catilina>. Visse strukturer fra dette første stykket går igjen i de fleste av Ibsens senere skuespill: forholdet mellom en mann og to kvinner, <hustruen> og <den andre>, eller omvendt: en kvinnes forhold til <ektemannen> og <den andre>. Barnet er også ofte tilstede – levende eller

dødt.

Ibsen arbeidet som forfatter for Bergens norske teater og som kunstnerisk leder for Christiania norske Theater. I 1864 startet han det som skulle bli et 27 år langt utenlandsopphold, og mange av

hans mest kjente verker ble til utenfor Norges grenser. Med <Brand> og <Peer Gynt> ble Ibsen den mest kjente og mest omstridte dikteren i Skandinavia. De borgerlige dramaene <Samfundets Støtter> og <Et Dukkehjem> gjorde ham kjent videre utover verden. Ingen nordisk forfatter har klart å oppta sin samtid på samme måte, eller påvirket åndslivet verden over i samme grad. Han er oversatt til utallige språk og fremføres fremdeles på scener over hele verden. Han var gift med Susannah Ibsen. Hammeren på gravmonumentet er et symbol hentet fra diktet <Bergmanden

:

Hammerslag på hammerslag

indtil livets siste dag.

Byd mig vejen, tunge hammer,

til det dulgtes hjertekammer!

Relaterte linker:

http://www.arkivverket.no/kristiansand/smakebiter/kjente/forfattere...

http://www.ibsen.net/

http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen

http://fuv.hivolda.no/prosjekt/atlebolsen/henriki.html

http://www.hf.uio.no/ibsensenteret/

http://www.nb.no/nationaltheatret/

http://www.hf.uio.no/ibsensenteret/

http://www.dagbladet.no/ibsen/

http://www.bt.no/meninger/kronikk/article.jhtml?articleID=394271

http://runeberg.org/authors/ibsen.html

http://runeberg.org/ibsen/

http://www.skien.kommune.no/ITF-SKI/add/KnGWebsider.nsf/.XAppWPLook...

http://kh.hd.uib.no/ibsen/hele.htm

Henrik Johan Ibsen ( 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright of realistic drama and poet. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama" and is one of the founders of modernism in the theatre.Alongside Knut Hamsun, Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors, celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians, and one of the most important playwrights of all time.

His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe and any challenge to them was considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many contemporaries.

Ibsen introduced a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality.

Family and youth:

Henrik Ibsen was born to Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, a relatively well-to-do merchant family, in the small port town of Skien, Norway, which was primarily noted for shipping timber. He was a descendant of some of the oldest and most distinguished families of Norway, including the Paus family. Ibsen later pointed out his distinguished ancestors and relatives in a letter to Georg Brandes. Shortly after his birth his family's fortunes took a significant turn for the worse. His mother turned to religion for solace and his father began to suffer from severe depression. The characters in his plays often mirror his parents and his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as moral conflicts stemming from dark secrets hidden from society.

At fifteen, Ibsen left home. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, a liaison with a servant produced an illegitimate child, whom he later rejected. While Ibsen did pay some child support for fourteen years, he never met his illegitimate son, who ended up as a poor blacksmith. Ibsen went to Christiania (later renamed Oslo) intending to matriculate at the university. He soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit himself to writing. His first play, the tragedy Catiline (1850), was published under the pseudonym "Brynjolf Bjarme," when he was only 22, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful.

Life and writings:

He spent the next several years employed at the Norwegian Theater in Bergen, where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. During this period he did not publish any new plays of his own. Despite Ibsen's failure to achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing.

Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of Christiania's National Theater. He married Suzannah Thoresen the same year and she gave birth to their only child, Sigurd. The couple lived in very poor financial circumstances and Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway. In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He was not to return to his native land for the next 27 years, and when he returned it was to be as a noted playwright, however controversial.

His next play, Brand (1865), was to bring him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as was the following play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard Grieg famously composed incidental music and songs. Although Ibsen read excerpts of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and traces of the latter's influence are evident in Brand, it was not until after Brand that Ibsen came to take Kierkegaard seriously. Initially annoyed with his friend Georg Brandes for comparing Brand to Kierkegaard, Ibsen nevertheless read Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Subsequently, Ibsen's next play Peer Gynt was consciously informed by Kierkegaard.[3][4]

With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgments into the drama, exploring what he termed the "drama of ideas." His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.

Portrait from around 1870Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and published A Doll's House in 1879. The play is a scathing criticism of the blind acceptance of traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage.

Ibsen followed A Doll's House with Ghosts (1881), another scathing commentary on Victorian morality, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her then fiancé despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But she was not to receive the result she was promised. Her husband's philandering continued right up until his death, and the result is that her son is syphilitic. Even the mention of venereal disease was scandalous, but to show that even a person who followed society's ideals of morality had no protection against it, that was beyond scandalous. Hers was not the noble life which Victorians believed would result from fulfilling one's duty rather than following one's desires. Those idealized beliefs were only the Ghosts of the past, haunting the present.

In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual households. In An Enemy, controversy became the primary focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. The Victorian belief was that the community was a noble institution that could be trusted, a notion Ibsen challenged. In An Enemy of the People Ibsen chastised not only the right wing or 'Victorian' elements of society but also the liberalism of the time. He illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving. An Enemy of the People was written as a response to the people who had rejected his previous work, Ghosts. The plot of the play is a veiled look at the way people reacted to the plot of Ghosts. The protagonist is a doctor, a pillar of the community. The town is a vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water used by the bath is being contaminated when it seeps through the grounds of a local tannery. He expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism. It is obvious to the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor, due to the community's unwillingness to face reality.

As audiences by now expected of him, his next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions—but this time his attack was not against the Victorians but against overeager reformers and their idealism. Always the iconoclast, Ibsen was equally willing to tear down the ideologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own.

The Wild Duck (1884) is considered by many to be Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. And while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the household income.

Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until he realizes the truth; Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, he disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.

Letter from Ibsen to his English reviewer and translator Edmund Gosse: "30.8.[18]99. Dear Mr. Gosse! It was to me a hearty joy to receive your letter. So I will finally personal meet you and your wife. I am at home every day in the morning until 1 o'clock. I am happy and surprised of your excellent Norwegian! Yours friendly obliged Henrik Ibsen."Interestingly, late in his career Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of Victorian morality. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892) Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of Victorian conventions. Many modern readers, who might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic and even clichéd, have found these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration of interpersonal confrontation. Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive and destructive for those around them. Hedda Gabler is probably Ibsen's most performed play, with the title role regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day. There are a few similarities between Hedda and the character of Nora in A Doll's House, but many of today's audiences and theater critics feel that Hedda's intensity and drive are much more complex and much less comfortably explained than what they view as rather routine feminism on the part of Nora.

Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the theater, but across public life.

Death:

Ibsen died in Christiania (now Oslo) on May 23, 1906 after a series of strokes. When his nurse assured a visitor that he was a little better, Ibsen sputtered "On the contrary" and died.

He was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Savior") in central Oslo. In 2006 the 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death was commemorated in Norway and many other countries, and the year dubbed the "Ibsen year" by Norwegian authorities. On May 23, 2006 - the occasion of the hundred-year commemoration of Ibsen's death - the Ibsen Museum reopened a completely restored writer's home with the original interior, original colors and decor. Also in May 2006, a biographical puppet production of Ibsen's life named 'The Death of Little Ibsen' debuted at New York City's Sanford Meisner Theater.

DNA-analyse tar livet av Ibsen-rykter:

http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/11/22/kultur/ibsen/teater/farskap/bok/...

Henrik Ibsen var en norsk dramatiker, regnet som en av verdenslitteraturens største dramatikere.

Han vokste opp innen slektskretsen Ibsen–Altenburg–Paus i Skien, en storfamilie som bestod av søskenparet Ole og Hedevig Paus og deres familier, som var tett sammenvevd. Begge Ibsens foreldre hadde røtter i eliten i Skien og Telemark, dels i kjøpmannseliten i Skien/Grenland, og dels i «embetsaristokratiet» av prester og jurister i Øvre Telemark. Ibsen skrev selv at «mine forældre tilhørte både på fædrene og mødrene side datidens mest ansete familjer i Skien» og at han var nært beslektet med «omtrent med alle de patricierfamiljer, som dengang dominerede stedet og omegnen».

Ibsens barndom og familie har vært et mye studert emne. Allerede i Henrik Ibsens levetid var interessen for hans biografi og slektshistorie betydelig. Ibsen brukte også familiemedlemmer og oppvekstminner som modeller for personer og miljøer i sine skuespill.

Litteratur

• Wikipedia: Henrik Ibsen