Volume 30, Number 11 · June 30, 1983
Ibsen's Secrets
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Ibsen, the Norwegian, the surly and stubborn inflamer of the sensibilities of Europe in the last half of the nineteenth century. The explosion of his arrival was in every way louder and more impressive than that of Strindberg and Chekhov, who were roughly his coevals. In a state of despair and disaffection, he moved away from Norway, moved to Dresden and to Rome, there to live in hotels, to receive honors, and to write his plays in the language of his poor country of fishing fleets and timber, the language of the sparsely populated little democracy that anxiously swayed between liberating ideas and the backward tug of local pieties.
Feature, 5469 words
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