A DOLL HOUSE BY HENRIK IBSEN

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2010/08/304236/hedda-gabler-home-shes-little-too-comfortable

Henrik Ibsen's ancestors were sea captains and businessmen, while his father was a to-well-do merchant, dealing chiefly in hobble. Ibsen was born in 1828 in Skien, a town in the south of Norway. Three brothers and a sister were born after him, but Henrik was the only member of his family to show promise. When he was eight years old, his father's business failed and the family retired to a country house. Ibsen bitterly recalled how their friends, eager to eat and drink as guests of the prosperous merchant, forsake all connections with the Ibsens when they lost their financial standing.

                                              http://www.panoramio.com/photo/42344088

       Although the young Ibsen showed talent as a painter, his family was too poor to allow him to study art. When he was fifteen, his father sent him to Grimstad, a small provincial town south of Skien. Here he became an apothecary's trainee, the next best thing to medicine. In the first three years of his Grimstad life, Ibsen lived entirely alone. Too uncommunicative to make friends and too poor to seek entertainments, he read rapaciously, particularly in contemporary poetry and in theology. Eventually he was the center of a small circle of young men, and during this time began to write poetry.

           

 After six dark years in the hostile atmosphere of this provincial Norwegian village, Ibsen, by extreme economy and privation, had saved enough money to leave for the capital, Christiania (Oslo). Hoping to study at the university, he enrolled in a "student factory," a popular name given to an irregular school which coached students for the entrance examinations. Here Ibsen first met his lifelong rival and contemporary, Björnstjerne Björnson, who was to be known in the future, along with Ibsen, as a national poet of Norway.

                   http://www.ub.uib.no/felles/utstillinger/bjoernson/bjoernson%20web/B.Bjoernson.htm

          At this period of Ibsen's youth, Norway experienced a nationalist arousing. The new literary generation, after four hundred years of Danish rule (1397–1818), sought after to revitalize the glories of Norwegian history and medieval literature. The middle age was glorified as well because the romantic movements were in full swing throughout Europe. Thus, when Ole Bull, the great violinist, founded a Norse theater at Bergen, the project met with keen endorsement from all the youthful idealists raring to go to destabilize the influence of Danish culture.

        

       At a benefit performance to raise money for the new venture, Ibsen presented the prologue — a poem glorifying Norway's past — which moved Ole Bull to appoint him theater poet and stage manager of the Bergen Theater. This position launched Ibsen on his dramatic career. Staging more than 150 plays, including works by Shakespeare and the French dramatist Scribe, Ibsen gained as much practical experience in stagecraft as that possessed by Shakespeare and Molière. In this same year, the twenty-eight year old Ibsen became engaged to Susannah Thoresen, a girl of strong personality and sovereign judgment, and the marriage took place two years later.

        Encouraged by the success of Ole Bull's Norse theater in Bergen, enthusiasts of nationalist poetry in the capital also founded a new theater in direct competition with the conservative, Danish-influenced Christiania Theater. Asked to direct this new venture, Ibsen's promised salary was twice the amount he received at Bergen, about six hundred specie dollars.

        Returning to the capital with a new play, The Vikings at Helgeland, Ibsen first submitted the manuscript to the old Christiania Theater where he would be free to collect royalties. At first the Danish director accepted the piece, but he returned it a few months later with a flimsy excuse. This gratuitous insult sparked a hot controversy between Ibsen, Björnson, and their followers on the one hand, and the adherents of the Danish influence on the other. After five years of public controversy, the conservative director was forced to resign, while The Vikings became one of the chief pieces performed under the theater's new management. Ibsen was disappointed to find that his poetic ideals were misunderstood by his gregarious contemporaries. In a poem, "On the Heights," he expressed the view that a man who wishes to devote himself to the arts must sacrifice the usual pleasures of life; a poet must view life apart in order to find in it models for his work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Norway

Ibsen suffered great depression during this part of his life. The varied responsibilities of his job allowed him no chance for his own creative work. In addition, the theater was doing so badly that his salary was severely reduced. Besides neglecting his work, he published no play from 1857 until Love's Comedy in 1862. This new anti-romantic satire received hostile reviews although it shows a maturing talent and the bold viewpoint which characterizes his later works. When the theater finally declared bankruptcy, Ibsen's despair was complete. However, Ibsen's fortunes changed in the following year when The Pretenders, a play glorifying the Norse heroes of the past, won an enthusiastic reception from both audience and reviewers. As a result of this success, the government awarded Ibsen a travelling scholarship to bring him in contact with the cultural trends in the rest of Europe.

        Retiring with his family to a little town in the hills, Ibsen wrote with an inspired pen. Affected by the events of the Prusso-Danish war over Schleswig-Holstein, his interests turning from the esthetic to the ethical, Ibsen produced the colossal Brand. Considered "the most stirring event in Norway's literary history of the nineteenth century," this drama won nationwide fame for its composer. The protagonist of the play, a mystical clergyman, is a courageous idealist of noble stature whose lack of love or humanity destroys his own wife and child in an uncompromising commitment to his ethical principles.

       

                           http://www.jpc.de/jpcng/books/detail/-/art/Henrik-Ibsen-Brand/hnum/9270238

       Published in the following year, Peer Gynt established Ibsen's international fame. This enthusiastic, fantasy-filled drama is the direct opposite of Brand. In 1867, the king awarded Ibsen for his success. Almost completely self-inspired, Ibsen was an atypical genius who vital no outside influence for his work. Ibsen likes to keep himself as much as possible. Constantly working and reworking his dramas throughout each two year period, seldom exposing, even to his family, the nature of his current writing, he overenthusiastically pursue his art.

                                      https://www.maineboats.com/online/maine-events/february-2009

       

        Callous self-analysis was one of his life principles. In each play he expresses this constant introspection, always underscoring a thesis based on egocentric. In the novel entitled ‘Emperor’ and ‘Galilean?’ Ibsen himself once wrote in a poem that "to live is to fight with trolls in heart and brain. To be a poet is to pronounce a final judgment upon oneself." Ibsen died in 1906. His tombstone, inscribed only with a hammer, the miner's symbol, alludes to a poem Ibsen wrote as a youth. Ending with "Break me the way, you heavy hammer”, “To the deepest bottom of my heart," the verse is a brief statement of the passion of Ibsen's personal idea and of his dramatic art.

One of his famous novels " A Doll House".

http://www.blogger.com/blogin.g?blogspotURL=http://dwell-in-possibility.blogspot.com/2009/01/book-review-dolls-house-by-henrik-ibsen.html

Henrik Ibsen cognate.

http://www.henrikibsen.com/Vision

WAITING FOR GODOT BY SAMUEL BARCLAY BECKETT

http://arttattler.com/archivebeckett.html

Samuel Beckett was born in 13 April 1906. Born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock on Good Friday, 1906, Samuel Barclay Beckett was the younger of two sons born to William Frank Beckett and May Barclay. The area surrounding his family home featured in his prose and poetry later in life. He was an Irish avant-garde playwright, poet and novelist best known for his play Waiting for Godot. Strongly influenced by fellow Irish writer, James Joyce, Beckett is sometimes painstaking the last of the Modernists, however, as his body of work influenced many subsequent writers, he is also considered one of the fathers of the Postmodernist movement. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, for his writing, which in new forms for the novel and drama in the impoverishment of modern man acquires its elevation.

        Irish poet and Beckett biographer Anthony Cronin said of Samuel Beckett’s childhood, “if anything, an outdoor type rather than an indoor one. He enjoyed games and was good at them. He roamed by himself as well as with his cousin and brother; and though he often retreated to his tower with a book and was already noticeable in the family circle for a certain moodiness and taciturnity, he could on the whole have passed for an athletic, extrovert little Protestant middle-class boy with excellent manners when forced to be sociable.”

        He attended Trinity College from 1923 to 1927, earning a Bachelor’s degree in French and Italian. He took a teaching position at Campbell College in Belfast before moving to Paris to become a lecteur d’anglais at the École Normale Supérieure. In Paris, Beckett was introduced to Irish novelist James Joyce that had a thoughtful effect on Beckett’s life. Samuel Beckett biographer James Knowlson writes, of the relationship between James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.  Around this time Samuel Beckett aided Joyce in his research for what would one day become Finnegan’s Wake, he also wrote a critical essay entitled, “Dante…Bruno… Vico…Joyce,” in which Samuel Beckett defended James Joyce’s exertion and technique.

http://www.atlanticbridge.com/med/schools/tstcd/

        Samuel Beckett’s first published work, a short story entitled, “Assumption,” appeared in transition, a highly influential avant-garde serial edited by Franco-American writer Eugene Jolas. He won his first literary prize the next year with the poem, “Whoroscope,” which imagined Réné Déscartes meditating on the nature of time while waiting to be served an egg at a restaurant. Following his first two published works, Beckett returned to Dublin from Paris to accept a lecturing position at Trinity College. He became cynical with academia shortly thereafter and resigned from his position by playing a practical joke on the college. Samuel Beckett invented a French author named Jean du Chas who had founded a literary movement called “concentrism” and presented a lecture on Chas and Concentrism to scoff at the laboriousness in the academic world.

        Resigning from his position at Trinity College, he traveled through Europe and Britain, stopping in London to publish Proust, a critical study of Marcel Proust’s work and Beckett’s only published work, long-form work of criticism. During his travels, Beckett met many vagabonds and wanderers, which he would use as the bases for several of his most memorable characters. Throughout his European wanderings, Samuel Beckett also became interested in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and decided to devote himself entirely to writing, beginning to work on his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which he subsequently abandoned after little interest from publishers.

               

        Beginning what would become his first published novel, Murphy, in 1935, Samuel Beckett traveled once again to Europe, this time to Germany where he documented with revulsion the rise of the Nazi party. Returning to Ireland in 1937 to keep an eye on the publication of Murphy, he had a big fight with his mother, which contributed to his desire to leave Ireland and settle permanently in Paris. At the outset of 1938, Beckett had installed himself on the Left Bank of Paris where he renewed his friendship with James Joyce and became friends with artists like Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Called_Ulysses

               

        He also began writing in French instead of his native English because he found it easier to write, their literary work is “without style.” His first novel in French was entitled “Mercier Et Camier” which was written in 1946 but not published until 1970. Immediately after the novel, he wrote what many believe to be his best prose in the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/333329.Mercier_And_Camier

        Following this new path to full fruition, Samuel Beckett released his most famous work in 1953, the minimalist play, “Waiting for Godot”. This play was very successful albeit controversial in the theaters of Paris but was not as well received in London and in the US. As time progressed, however, Godot garnered critical acclaim, which ultimately saw Samuel Beckett awarded the International Publisher’ Formentor Prize in 1961. During this period Samuel Beckett also wrote the plays Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Endgame and Play.

http://www.betterworldbooks.com/waiting-for-godot-id-0802130348.aspx

http://www.timetoast.com/timelines/ape4-modern-era

        This period also saw changes in Samuel Beckett’s personal life. His mother, with whom he had many difficulties, died in 1950 and his brother, Frank, died in 1954, both of these deaths affected Beckett’s later meditations on life and death in his work. He also married Suzanne in a private ceremony in England in 1961. The success of his plays not only offered him the ability to experiment with his writing but also enabled him to begin a career as a theater director as well as to branch out into other mediums. In 1956 he was commissioned by the BBC to write the radio play All that Fall and continued to expand his scope into television and cinema.

      His later work, which focused on themes of entrapment and frequently featured characters whose were literally trapped from the neck down, went through many phases, culminating in three “closed space stories” in which he interrogates the nature of memory and its effect on the confined and observed self. His final work, written in 1988, was a poem entitled “Comment Dire (What is the Word),” which deal with the powerlessness to find the words to express oneself. Samuel Beckett died on the 22nd of December, 1989, just five months after his wife, Suzanne. They are interred together at the Cimitiére de Montparnasse in Paris in a tomb of simple granite, following Samuel Beckett’s instruction that it should be, “any color, as long as it is gray.”

http://riceonhistory.wordpress.com/page/6/