Henrik Ibsen is a Norwegian playwright and theater activist. Ibsen Henrik: biography, creativity, Christian quotes and plays

The topic of “Meyerhold and Ibsen” has not yet become the subject of special study, falling into the context of a conversation about the director’s interaction with the new drama. And here, in accordance with the historical realities of the director’s theatrical biography, next to Chekhov, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Blok, Ibsen retreated into the shadows. Meanwhile, Ibsen played a significant role in the development of Meyerhold's creative individuality; The director did not forget about Ibsen even when he no longer staged his plays. Here is later evidence from the memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein: “He adored Ibsen’s Ghosts. Played Oswald countless times.”* Or his - from lectures at VGIK in 1933: “Meyerhold has a great love for Ibsen’s play “Nora”, he staged it eight times”**. In both cases, Meyerhold's student exaggerated the number of these “times.” But the five stage versions of “Nora” carried out by Meyerhold are a worthy argument in favor of involuntary exaggeration. And Meyerhold really never ceased to “adore” “Ghosts”. “When I staged “The Lady with the Camellias,” he told A.K. Gladkov in the 1930s, “I was always pining for psychological mastery Ibsen.<…>It was after working on “The Lady” that I began to dream of staging “Ghosts” again and thoroughly enjoying Ibsen’s high art.”***. The phenomenon of Ibsen in Meyerhold's work is seen in the fact that stage communication with his dramaturgy sometimes became a kind of preliminary action of the next round of Meyerhold's path, a launching pad for the transition to new aesthetic positions. The founder of the new drama more than once opened the way for Meyerhold to a new theatrical language. The fifth stage version of “Nora,” staged in April 1922, five days before the famous “The Great Stuffy Cuckold,” a manifesto of theatrical constructivism, is extremely clear in this regard.

* Eisenstein on Meyerhold: 1919-1948. M., 2005. P. 293
** Ibid. P. 291.
*** Gladkov A. Meyerhold: In 2 vols. M., 1990. T. 2. P. 312.

But let's go in order. Having begun his independent activities in Kherson in 1902 as an actor, director and entrepreneur (together with A. S. Kosheverov), in the first season Meyerhold staged performances “based on the staging of the Art Theater,” which at that time was not considered plagiarism, but was marked quality. Later, Meyerhold correctly called this approach “a slavish imitation of the Art Theater,” justified by its short duration and the fact that, nevertheless, “it was an excellent school of practical directing”*. Meyerhold reproduced on the Kherson stage almost the entire repertoire of the first four seasons of the Moscow Art Theater, including productions of three plays by Ibsen. But if the reconstruction of Chekhov's performances was organic to Meyerhold's understanding of Chekhov's theater at that time, then with Ibsen the situation was different. Meyerhold did not like the production of his plays at the Art Theater, which he announced back in January 1899 in a letter to Vl. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko in connection with the rehearsals of “Hedda Gabler”, saying that the “play of tendencies” cannot be staged in the same manner as the “play of moods”. Later, in a programmatic article in 1907 “On the history and technology of the theater”, he formulated Ibsen’s problem of the Moscow Art Theater with the utmost clarity: the impressionism of “Chekhov’s images thrown onto the canvas” was completed in the creations of the Moscow Art Theater actors; this did not work with Ibsen. They tried to explain him to the public as if he was “not clear enough to them.” Hence the constant and disastrous desire of the Moscow Art Theater to enliven Ibsen’s supposedly “boring” dialogues with something - “food, cleaning the room, introducing laying scenes, wrapping sandwiches, etc.” “In Edda Gabler,” Meyerhold recalled, “in the scene of Tesman and Aunt Julia, breakfast was served. I remember well how deftly the performer of the role of Tesman ate, but I involuntarily did not hear the exposition of the play**.

* Meyerhold V. E. Articles, speeches, letters, conversations: In 2 hours. M., 1968. Part 1. P. 119.
** Meyerhold V. E. Heritage. Vol. 1. M., 1998. P. 390.

The structure of Ibsen’s drama did not consist, like Chekhov’s, of a thousand little things that make life warm (“Listen... he has no vulgarity,” Chekhov told Stanislavsky. “You can’t write such plays”). But the directors of the Moscow Art Theater believed that it was very possible if we added our own to this “vulgarity,” that is, everyday life flesh. That’s why, in staging the play “When We, the Dead, Awaken,” Nemirovich-Danchenko went so overboard with the everyday details of resort life—table d’hôtes, French cyclists and live dogs—that he forever discouraged Meyerhold from staging it. Although, after the premiere of “The Dead” at the Moscow Art Theater, he wrote down in his diary Rubek’s remark from the first act, full of his own symbolic premonitions: “There is some special meaning hidden in everything you say”*.

* Ibid. P. 573.

Of the three Ibsen performances of the Moscow Art Theater repertoire that appeared on the Kherson stage - “Hedda Gabler”, “Doctor Shtokman”, “Wild Duck” - only “Shtokman” was truly dependent on the Art Theater original - the only victory for Stanislavsky, an actor and director, in the production Ibsen. The Kherson version was also a triumph. Of course, Alexander Kosheverov-Shtokman could not keep up with Shtokman-Stanislavsky, whose comic character only spurred lyrical inspiration in his relentless pursuit of truth. But he tried his best, and the impression, according to the reviewer, was “huge, overwhelming, exciting”*. Just as in the Art Theater, the pinnacle of the performance was the fourth act, where Shtokman was confronted by “a very motley crowd,” assembled according to the Moscow Art Theater and Meiningen recipes: “Many sketch roles,” the reviewer wrote, “are entrusted to the best artists, and the rest are disciplined to the point of artistry.” *.

* Faculty Ya. [Feigin Ya. A.] Art theatre. "Wild duck". Drama in 5 acts by G. Ibsen // Moscow Art Theater in Russian theater criticism: 1898-1905. M., 2005. P. 222.

As for “Hedda Gabler” and “The Wild Duck”, they were dependent on the Art Theater only by the commonality of staging technique, adapted to convey a life-like situation, as, indeed, the stage directions of Ibsen himself. Meyerhold's feeling from these plays was already different, but he did not yet know how to embody it. Director Meyerhold had not yet found a way to convey such plays as “The Wild Duck”, so he reconstructed the Moscow Art Theater performance. But Meyerhold the actor, and therefore Meyerhold the artist, acutely sensed its impending need.

* Ibid. P. 572.

Thus, his Hjalmar Ekdal was created in, perhaps, an unconscious polemic with the performance of V. I. Kachalov, who limited himself to a satirical exposure of the hero, portraying him as a “petty braggart and liar” *, a characteristic figure that evokes bursts of disgusting laughter in the viewer. Such a sober realistic approach to this and other roles in Stanislavsky’s “The Wild Duck”, although it revealed, according to the critic Pyotr Yartsev, Meyerhold’s future collaborator at the Officers’ Theater, Ibsen’s drama “to the point of complete clarity,” but “killed the soul in it”** . Meyerhold contrasted the “type - a stupid, capricious parasite”*** (my italics - G.T.) played by Kachalov with a paradoxical set of properties of the hero. His Yalmar was “ridiculous, pitiful, outrageously selfish, weak-willed, charming and powerful,” virtuoso “in refined begging.” “At times it seemed that Hjalmar really was, just as Hedwig portrays him. He experienced the girl’s death tragically.”**** It was not a type or even a character, but a kind of vibrating combination of human essences, which ultimately led Meyerhold to abandon the theater of types in favor of a symbolic theater of synthesis in connection with the proposed production at the Studio Theater on Povarskaya (1905) of another Ibsen play “Comedy” love"*****.

* Yartsev P. Moscow letters // Ibid. P. 226.
** Ibid. P. 227.
***Verigina V.P. Memoirs. L., 1974. P. 79, 80. **** See: Meyerhold V. E. On the history and technology of theater (1907) // Meyerhold V. E. Articles... Part 1. P. 112.
***** See: Meyerhold V. E. Heritage. Vol. 1. P. 484.

Indicative of Meyerhold's dissatisfaction with Russian translations of Ibsen's plays. He was the first to stage “Hedda Gabler” in a new translation by A. G. and P. G. Ganzen, having previously entered into correspondence with P. G. Ganzen on this subject * (at the Art Theater the play was translated by S. L. Stepanova-Markova **). Also indicative is his desire to play Levborg*** in the spirit of Stanislavsky, whose manner here, quite unexpectedly, was not at all similar to the sharp character that the head of the Moscow Art Theater invariably instilled in his actors. In the 1921 article “The Loneliness of Stanislavsky,” Meyerhold, in support of the announced title, recalls the “sophisticated techniques of melodramatic acting” in his Levborg, echoing the late awareness of the adept of the acting technique of the Art Theater, critic Nikolai Efros (in the monograph “K. S. Stanislavsky” , 1918) the unusualness of such a performance of the “brilliantly dissolute and dissolutely brilliant Levborg,” before which everything else in the performance paled. It is also indicative that Meyerhold realized already in his first “Hedda Gabler” the inappropriateness of the pragmatically rejecting approach to the heroine of the play, which he insisted on in the mentioned letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko. Meyerhold did not yet know how to embody the metaphysics of Beauty on stage, but its significance in the paradigm of Ibsen’s drama was noted by him in an interview in 1902 in connection with the upcoming production of Hedda.****

* See: History of the Russian Drama Theater: In 7 volumes. M., 1987. T. 7. P. 545.
** See: Meyerhold V. E. Articles... Part 2. P. 31.
*** Efros N. K. S. Stanislavsky: (characterization experience). P., 1918. P. 88.
**** See: Meyerhold V. E. Heritage. Vol. 1. P. 565.

Before the start of the second Kherson season, Meyerhold announced that from now on the main attention of the team he led would be turned to a new drama, to a new direction, “splitting the shell of life, revealing the hidden core behind it - the soul, connecting the everyday with eternity”*.

* Meyerhold V. E. Heritage. Vol. 2. M., 2006. P. 48.

This meant a course towards theatrical symbolism, taken under the influence of Alexei Remizov, whose “mental influence” on the young Meyerhold led to the invitation of an old acquaintance to Kherson as a literary consultant (Remizov also took the initiative to rename the Kherson enterprise into the “New Drama Partnership”).

It is generally accepted to consider Meyerhold’s first symbolist experience to be the production of “Snow” by Art. Przybyszewski. By and large, this is undoubtedly true - the Kherson “Snow” had all the signs of a conventional director, including the scandal that accompanied the performance in the auditorium and in the press. But, as materials recently published in the 2nd volume of May Erhold’s legacy show, signs of a new theatrical language first appeared in the production of Ibsen’s “Women from the Sea.” She managed without a scandal, but the Kherson viewer, accustomed in the first season to a distinct life-like appearance, was dissatisfied. Reviewers too. The director's erasures in Ellida's remarks in her scenes with Vangel and the Stranger (Unknown) consistently cut off the explanatory everyday development of the dialogue, making the text of Matern and Vorotnikov's translation concise and mysteriously meaningful*. The critics did not like the “uncertainty of the actors’ play”, the images, which, in her opinion, were “in most cases poorly defined, unclear”**, and at the same time the geometric arrangement of individual mise-en-scenes - Ellida had to make her final choice in a small enclosed space in the center of the stage . During the 1903/04 season, the Partnership was going to stage many of Ibsen's plays. “The Builder Solnes” and “Brand”, “Rosmersholm”, “Peer Gynt” and even “Caesar and the Galilean” were announced. But Meyerhold's protracted illness and dissatisfaction with the translations prevented these plans. In reality, “Nora”, “Little Eyolf”, “Ghosts” were staged.

* Ibid. P. 74.
** Quoted from: Ibid. P. 75.

We will talk about Meyerhold’s first “Nora” a little later in connection with its second stage version for V.F. Komissarzhevskaya. As for “Ghosts,” their production was significant for Meyerhold primarily for the long-awaited role of Oswald, which became one of Meyerhold’s most significant creations as an actor.

“Ghosts” (as “Ghosts” were called in the first Russian translations) were also included in the plans for the first Kherson season, but were under a censorship ban, which was lifted only towards the end of 1903, and Meyerhold immediately staged the play, giving, after some time, the basis to compare his playing with the much more famous and famous Russian Oswalds - Pavel Orlenev and Pavel Samoilov, not to mention even more famous foreign performers. “Meyerhold is the best Oswald I have ever seen,” said Valentina Verigina. “He had the special elegance of a foreigner who lived in Paris, and he felt like an artist.” His sadness and anxiety grew without hysteria. His courtship of Regina did not bear the slightest shade of vulgarity. In the last action, cold despair was heard in the dry sound.”* Meyerhold, who actively used neurasthenia (Treplev, Johannes Fockerath) and pathology (Ivan the Terrible) in his previous roles, excluded them from the role, which, it would seem, they should have been included in one way or another in any interpretation of it, and this Most likely, he says that, unlike Ibsen’s hero, who was obsessed with a complex of bad heredity, Meyerhold was obsessed with a beauty complex.

* Verigina V.P. Decree. op. P. 79.

True, it should be borne in mind that the description of Meyerhold’s student does not refer to the production of 1904, but to the performance in the Poltava summer of 1906 - that is, after the symbolist experiments of the Studio on Povarskaya and in anticipation of the theater on Ofitserskaya. Treating the play in a symbolic key, Meyerhold here for the first time applied a coloristic approach to characterizing the characters, later used in Hedda Gabler. “Oswald was dressed all in black for all three acts, while Regina’s dress glowed bright red” - only “a small apron emphasized her position as a servant”*. The production was created under the sign of independence, self-sufficiency of a theatrical work.

* Volkov N. Meyerhold: In 2 vols. M., 1929. T. 1. P. 246.

The Poltava performance was staged for the first time “without a curtain*, a columned hall was used as a decoration”, “on the proscenium there was a piano, sitting at which Meyerhold Oswald conducted the last scene”*. The cold solemnity and tragic festivity of the production could already be interpreted as the “dwelling of the spirit” of the hero, which Yuri Belyaev soon did when depicting Meyerhold’s Hedda Gabler performed by Komissarzhevskaya.

With this “Hedda Gabler,” staged in November 1906, Meyerhold made his debut at the Officer’s Theater. The play, which was performed with constant success by Meyerhold's troupe in the provinces - in Kherson, and in Tiflis, and in Poltava - the capital's critics, as if by agreement, unanimously opposed the malicious attacks of the director. Fascinated by the fantastic beauty of the performance (“some kind of dream in colors, some kind of tale of a thousand and one nights”), having come to their senses, they invariably asked: “But what does Ibsen have to do with it?” *, “Ibsen has to do with it, I ask?!”**. The reasoning of the symbolist Georgy Chulkov, who supported Meyerhold’s quests, looks especially curious today. Trying to justify the “decadent atmosphere,” he asked his colleagues to pay attention to the fact that assessor Brakk, who arranged the Tesmans’ apartment, “knows Hedda’s tastes.”*** To say that the “apartment” was arranged by the director Meyerhold and the artist Nikolai Sapunov, who knew his tastes, is not made up his mind.

* Siegfried [Stark E. A.] Opening of the theater by V. F. Komissarzhevskaya // Meyerhold in Russian theater criticism: 1892-1918. St. Petersburg, 1997. P. 428.
** Azov V. [Ashkinazi V. A.] Opening of the theater by V.F. Komissarzhevskaya. “Hedda Gabler” by Ibsen // Ibid. P. 63.
*** Ch. [Chulkov G.I.] Theater V.F. Komissarzhevskaya: “Hedda Gabler” by Ibsen // Ibid. P. 65.

The perception of Meyerhold's productions at Ofitserskaya by the capital's critical workshop was subject to the evaluation criterion that had developed in the pre-director's theater. According to him, the content and form of a dramatic performance were causally dependent on the play. Thus, A.R. Kugel, although he believed, unlike other critics of the play, that the stylization that was becoming fashionable was quite applicable to the production of Hedda Gabler, he understood it exclusively in the spirit of Ibsen’s setting remarks, characterizing the everyday environment of the play. Now, if the director had depicted on stage a “tent of stylized philistinism”, contrasting with the ideal of the heroine, everything, in his opinion, would have stood in its place. But he “stylized not the environment in which Gabler lives. And the one that she supposedly already achieved in her dreams. The play therefore became completely incomprehensible, upside down; the ideal became reality. It came out catchy and loud, but the meaning disappeared. Here is an example of a correct artistic idea, placed upside down.”*

* Kugel A.R. Theater profiles. M., 1929. S. 84-85.

Not to mention the fact that Kugel’s interpretation of Ibsen’s play and its central image is not at all indisputable (the critic, unlike the director, does not seem to have felt that Hedda’s longing for Beauty is not at all ideal), Hedda’s immersion in a setting that she had already achieved “in their dreams,” might not “reverse” the meaning of the play, but universalize it through defamiliarization.

Recognizing in 1926 Meyerhold’s “The Government Inspector” as deeply corresponding to Gogol’s poetics, Kugel might have thought that translating comedy to a “metropolitan scale” and showing “bestiality in the graceful guise of Bryullov’s nature” is a method first used in “Hedda Gabler,” which he rejected. . Moreover, in staging it, Meyerhold had no intention of neglecting the problem inherent in the play and the “soul of the author” (V. Ya. Bryusov’s formula). In his own words, he just wanted to “take away the idea that she (Hedda) is restless from the narrowness of bourgeois life, an idea that would certainly appear if given an ordinary setting,” especially the “tent of stylized philistinism” proposed by Kugel. It was important for Meyerhold to show that “Hedda’s suffering is not the result of the environment, but of another, world longing” * that cannot be satisfied in any situation.

* [Explanation of Meyerhold’s speech at the evening of the Literary and Artistic Society at the Faculty of History and Philology] // Speech. 1906. 10 Dec.

And yet there was a critic who was able to evaluate Meyerhold’s performance as an independent, self-sufficient stage work. It was Yuri Belyaev. “The experience with Hedda Gabler,” he wrote, “struck me in its boldness. The director completely threw everyday life out of the play and symbolically stylized Ibsen. It was for this treatment that he suffered the most. But neither the cold indifference of the public nor the hot rebuke of the reviewers could kill the ideas. An idea, once released into the world, took on a mysterious life of fluid and somehow disturbed the imagination. They asked: “So, perhaps soon Ostrovsky and Gogol will be symbolized?” But why, in fact, not try to symbolize “The Thunderstorm” or “The Inspector General”?”*.

* Belyaev Yu. About Komissarzhevskaya // Meyerhold in Russian theater criticism. P. 79.

Thus, Ibsen revealed to the director the path of his future path. Meyerhold, using the key constant of modernity - stylization, as Yu. D. Belyaev prophesied, “symbolized” both “The Thunderstorm” and “The Inspector General”.

In December 1906, Meyerhold corrected “A Doll’s House” for Komissarzhevskaya, a play in which she had played with victorious success since 1904 in a domestic production by A.P. Petrovsky. Meyerhold, like most of his contemporaries, considered Nora Komissarzhevskaya one of her signature roles and, knowing that the actress had entered into an alliance with him because she always rejected everyday life, he intended to defuse it, giving room for Komissarzhevskaya to remain in the spiritual essence of the image. But the few reviewers of this performance again tried to separate the “former sorceress” from the director, who staged the play “at the end of the stage, in a draft wind, in some narrow passage,” and forced the actors who played “bas-reliefs” to leave “not through the doors, but into the folds of the green curtain"*. In vain G.I. Chulkov assured the audience and the actress herself that “in the new stage conditions” she felt “freer and more inspired”**. Komissarzhevskaya did not think so.

*Cit. by: Rudnitsky K.L. Theater on Ofitserskaya // Creative heritage of V. E. Meyerhold. M., 1978. S. 188, 189.
** Quoted from: Ibid.

In the summer of 1907, before the Moscow tour of the theater on Ofitserskaya, she asked the director to “change the color of the room and make it warm” so that the usual impression of “a cozy soft nest, isolated from the real world” would be created*. In other words, the actress returned to her original position: again the usual everyday pavilion and no deviations from the author’s remarks. “Remember,” she inspired, “when staging Hedda Gabler, I said that her stage directions must always be followed exactly. Now I can definitely say that there was more truth in my words then than I myself imagined. Every word of Ibsen's remarks there is a bright light on the path to understanding his things”** (italics mine. - G.T.). Leaving aside such a fundamental problem as the actress’s awareness of her inability to play outside of everyday life (“only walking on the ground,” she seemed “floating in the clouds”***), let’s try to figure out whether every word of Ibsen’s remarks illuminates the meaning of his plays.

*Cit. by: Volkov N. Decree. op. T. 1. P. 321.
** Quoted from: Ibid. P. 320.
*** S. Ya. Tours of V. F. Komissarzhevskaya. “Lights of Midsummer Night” // Russian Word. 1909. 16 Sep. Quote by: Kukhta E. A. Komissarzhevskaya // Russian acting art of the twentieth century. St. Petersburg, 1992. Issue. 1. P. 58.

The playwright’s stage directions for both “Hedda Gabler” and “Nora” and many of his other plays in this series undoubtedly leave them within the boundaries of everyday theater of the 19th century. Following them means giving up the manifold possibilities of directorial interpretation that these plays offered to the twentieth century. But “A Doll’s House” is also extremely rich in remarks of another kind - those that precede or accompany the heroine’s remarks and build the pattern of her movements and the score of her feelings. These remarks really cast a bright light not so much on the essence of the play as a whole, but on the role of Nora. That’s why actresses, including Komissarzhevskaya, found this role easy even in pre-director’s theater. The number of such remarks in A Doll's House is almost limitless. From the monosyllabic words that pepper Nora’s entire role—“jumping up,” “quickly,” “covering his mouth with her hand”—to lengthy, effective instructions to the performer: “Nora closes the door to the hallway, takes off her outer dress, continuing to chuckle with a quiet, contented laugh. . Then he takes out a bag of macaroons from his pocket and eats a few of them. He carefully walks to the door leading to his husband’s room and listens”; “busy with her thoughts, she suddenly bursts into quiet laughter and claps her hands”; “wants to rush to the door, but stops indecision”; “with a wandering gaze, staggering around the room, grabs Helmer’s domino, throws it over himself and whispers quickly, hoarsely, intermittently,” etc.

Even N. Ya. Berkovsky correctly noted the enormous importance that pause, facial expressions, gestures, and poses have in Ibsen’s dramas. For Meyerhold, this property of Ibsen, accumulated in “The Burrow,” became fundamental in comprehending the laws of theatrical composition proper during the period of traditionalism (1910s). “Will they soon write down the law on theater tablets: words in the theater are just patterns on the canvas of movements?”** he wrote in his 1912 programmatic article “Balagan.” Ibsen’s play fully corresponded to this law, as well as to the “primary elements of theater” identified by Meyerhold: the power of mask, gesture, Movement, intrigue”***. “Nora” can be staged in a domestic setting, as was the case in Meyerhold’s first edition in 1903; can be stylized, as was the case in the play with Komissarzhevskaya; or - without scenery at all, as in 1922 - the script (pantomimic), i.e., the actual theatrical structure of its action is inevitably preserved. After all, Nora’s “doll house” is not the soft ottomans of a cozy nest, which Komissarzhevskaya asked Meyerhold to return to her, but a fictional world where, according to the heroine, she was placed first by her father, then by her husband. Just like the masks of a doll-daughter and a doll-wife, which she wore to please them.

* See: Berkovsky N. Ya. Articles about literature. M.; L., 1962. P. 230.
** Meyerhold V. E. Articles... Part 1. P. 212.
*** Ibid. P. 213.

Already in the first Kherson edition of “Nora,” staged according to the rules of the Art Theater, outlining the usual life-like series of stage action, the director emphasized theatrically electrifying moments. Already here we can see traces of the perception of “Nora” as a certain model of a theatrical play proper, i.e. one that, if you “shake the words out of it” (Meyerhold), will retain a clear pattern of pantomimic action. Key moments were staged in the foreground. There was a fireplace there - the launching pad for the exposition of the play (Nora's conversation with Mrs. Linne) and for the denouement (when Helmer threw at him the promissory note returned by Krogstad). “Is it not possible to make a fire break out when Sazonov (performer of the role of Helmer - G. T.) throws paper there?” * Meyerhold asked himself in the director’s copy, and this, of course, is not a thirst for verisimilitude, but a need for theatrical effect.

* Meyerhold V. E. Heritage. Vol. 2. P. 182.

In Meyerhold’s first “Nora” there was also a “narrow passage”, which caused ridicule from the reviewer of the second edition, where the characters appeared. The director immediately felt that in this play the comings and goings of the characters - Fru Linne, Krogstad, Dr. Rank, Nora herself - were not parading around the stage, but key moments of stage intrigue, building up the field of theatrical tension - right up to Dr. Rank's death and the final Nora leaving the doll's house. Ibsen’s “Nora” is an ideal example of the “only correct”, according to Meyerhold, path of dramatic composition - “movement gives birth to an exclamation and a word”*. And finally, “Nora” corresponds to the support that the director considered necessary to reunite the primary elements of theater in a theatrical script - support on the subject. “So, a lost handkerchief,” he said, “leads to the Othello script, a bracelet to Masquerade, a diamond to the Sukhovo-Kobylin trilogy.”** The letter is to “Nora,” he forgot to add.

* Meyerhold V. E. Articles... Part 1. P. 212.
** Meyerhold V. E. Theater sheets. I. // Ibid. Part 2. P. 28.

The director's initial awareness of the key significance of the letter dropped into the mailbox by Krogstad is quite obvious. In the just published mise-en-scène of the Kherson “Nora”, a “letter box” is perhaps the main requirement for the mount. For Ibsen, this box is an off-stage object, although it is clear that the climax of the play falls on the stage directions associated with the letter dropped into it: “the letter is heard falling into the box, then the steps of Krogstad are heard descending from the stairs, gradually the steps freeze below. Nora runs back into the room with a suppressed cry to the table in front of the sofa. Short pause. Letter!.. In the box! (He timidly sneaks again to the front door.) Lying there... Torvald, Torvald... now there is no salvation for us!

Meyerhold makes the mailbox a “character” and also a stage one. This lattice box was clearly visible from the living room to both the actors and the audience. He became almost the main character of the production, the center of gravity of all the effective lines of the play, in which the audience, together with Nora, “watched how the fatal letter was dropped into this box in the middle of the second act,” and continued, like Nora, to closely follow him, visible through the bars, until “at the end of the third act Helmer went to take out the mail”*.

* Meyerhold V. E. Heritage. Vol. 2. P. 180.

The third and fourth editions of “Nora” (in June 1918 and August 1920) are considered passing. The first of them was staged at the Petrograd Theater of the House of Workers by the young artist Vladimir Dmitriev, a student of the director according to Kurmastsepa, where, according to Meyerhold’s installation, future theater artists and directors studied together in order to equally master previously separated professional skills. Meyerhold supervised the work of his student. The second - in the First Soviet Theater named after. Lenin in Novorossiysk immediately after Meyerhold’s release from the dungeon of Denikin’s counterintelligence. In both cases, the choice of “Nora” was predetermined by its above-mentioned properties - the extremely clear theatrical structure made the play indispensable for both educational and mobile productions.

But Meyerhold’s fifth “Nora,” which has already been mentioned twice, became a theatrical legend, mainly thanks to the memoirs of S. M. Eisenstein. Listing on two pages some of the people and things that he had seen in his time, and naming the names of Chaliapin and Stanislavsky, Mikhail Chekhov and Vakhtangov, Shaw and Pirandello, Gershwin and Jackie Coogan, lunch with Douglas Fairbanks and a ride in the car with Greta Garbo, General Sukhomlinov in the dock and General Brusilov as a witness at this trial, Tsar Nicholas II at the opening of the monument to Peter I and much, much more, Eisenstein declared that none of these impressions would ever be able to erase from his memory and surpass according to the effect of three days of rehearsals by Meyerhold “Nora” in the gymnasium on Novinsky Boulevard:

“I remember the constant shaking.

It's not cold

it's excitement

These are nerves that have been strained to the limit.”*

* Eisenstein on Meyerhold. P. 288.

This is about rehearsals. No less impressive is the surviving information about the production itself. The fact is that Meyerhold, in connection with the unjustified closure of the RSFSR First Theater (by the way, immediately after the premiere of Ibsen’s “Youth Union”), worked in the frozen gymnasium of the former gymnasium, without having a stage platform to which he could practically prepared by the "Magnanimous Cuckold". And “Nora,” rehearsed in three days, was destined to capture this site (his former one on Sadovo-Triumfalnaya). Teaming up with the Nezlobinites, who were also sitting without a stage (the main roles were played by Nezlobinsky actors shivering from cold and fear), Meyerhold sent five of his students on the day of the unannounced premiere - S. Eisenstein, A. Kelberer, V. Lutse, V. Fedorov and Z. Reich - capture the stage and, guided by his plan, prepare the installation for the performance by evening. This installation stunned even seasoned theatergoers. Meyerhold simply turned the inside out of the scenery dumped in the back of the stage - parts of pavilions, grate rules, etc. - so that the inscriptions looked at the viewer - “Nezlobin No. 66”, “side 538”, etc. Quite trivial theater furniture was also used - dusty, broken chairs, in general, what was found in the pockets of the stage - for organizing playing points. Against the backdrop of a well-organized bedlam, to the friendly laughter of the audience, the performer of the role of Helmer with imperturbable calm uttered the famous line: “It’s good here, Nora, it’s cozy”*. Even the then Meyerhold adept, critic Vladimir Blum, could not resist asking: “Is this production a parody or quackery?”**.

* On the eve of the Cuckold // Poster TIM. 1926. No. 1. P. 3.
** Sadko [Blum V.I.] “Nora” in the “Actor’s Theater” // Izvestia. 1922.

Yes, Meyerhold’s fifth “Nora” was in some ways a parody, somewhere it bordered on quackery - the play was called “The Tragedy of Nora Helmer, or how a woman from a bourgeois family chose independence and work,” and she played this ultra-revolutionary the woman of Nezlobin's premier, Bronislava Rutkovskaya, is a luxurious diva of the Art Nouveau era, who interested Meyerhold no more than the reverse side of Nezlobin's scenery. But five days later, Meyerhold’s trio, which immediately became famous - Ilyinsky, Babanova, Zaichikov - “Il-ba-zai”, as A. A. Gvozdev called it, will appear on the battlefield stage, and in the incomparable production of “The Generous Cuckold” will demonstrate to the public, that the action of “undressing” the theater, undertaken in “Nora,” was a prelude to constructivism and was carried out for the actor, so that he, like Komissarzhevskaya once in the role of Nora, would again become the master of the stage.

Laura Cole / Monument to Henrik Ibsen at the National Theater of Norway in Oslo

Henrik Ibsen is the first association that arises when talking about Norwegian literature. In fact, the work of the great Norwegian playwright has long become the property of not only Norwegian, but also world culture.

Ibsen's life and work are full of the most amazing contradictions. Thus, being a passionate apologist for national liberation and revival national culture Norway, he nevertheless spent twenty-seven years in self-imposed exile in Italy and Germany.

Passionately studying national folklore, in his plays he consistently destroys romantic halo folk sagas The plot structure of his plays is built so rigidly that at times it borders on tendentiousness, but they are not at all sketchy, but lively and multifaceted heroes.

Ibsen's underlying moral relativism, combined with the “iron” and even tendentious logic of plot development, allows his plays to be interpreted in an extremely diverse way. Thus, Ibsen is recognized as a playwright of the realistic movement, but symbolists consider him one of the most important founders of their aesthetic movement.

At the same time, he was sometimes called “Freud in dramaturgy.” The gigantic power of his talent allowed him to organically combine in his work the most diverse, even polar, themes, ideas, problems, and means of artistic expression.

He was born on March 20, 1828 in the small Norwegian town of Skien into a wealthy family, but in 1837 his father went bankrupt and the family’s position changed. The abrupt transition to the lower social classes became a severe psychological trauma for the boy, and this was one way or another reflected in his further work.

Already at the age of 15, he was forced to start earning his own living - in 1843 he left for the tiny town of Grimstad, where he got a job as a pharmacist's apprentice. The almost miserable life of a social outcast forced Ibsen to seek self-realization in another area: he writes poetry, satirical epigrams on the respectable bourgeoisie of Grimstad, and draws caricatures.

This bears fruit: by 1847 he becomes very popular among the radical youth of the town. He was greatly impressed by the revolutionary events of 1848, which engulfed a significant part of Western Europe.

Ibsen complements his poetic work with political lyrics, and also writes the first play Catiline (1849), imbued with tyrant-fighting motives. The play was not a success, but it strengthened his decision to engage in literature, art and politics.

In 1850 he moved to Christiania (from 1924 - Oslo). His goal is to enter the university, but the young man is captivated by political life capital Cities. He teaches at the Sunday school of the workers' association, participates in protest demonstrations, collaborates with the press - a workers' newspaper, a student society magazine, and takes part in the creation of a new social and literary magazine, Andhrimner.

And he continued to write plays: Bogatyrsky Kurgan (1850, begun in Grimstad), Norma, or the Love of Politics (1851), Midsummer Night (1852). During the same period, he met the playwright, theater and public figure Bjornstjerne Bjornson, with whom he found a common language on the basis of the revival of Norway's national identity.

This vigorous activity of the playwright in 1852 led to his invitation to the post of artistic director of the newly created first Norwegian National Theater in Bergen. He remained in this post until 1857 (he was replaced by B. Bjornson).

This turn in Ibsen's life can be considered extraordinary luck. And it’s not just that all the plays he wrote during the Bergen period were immediately staged on stage; practical study of theater “from the inside” helps to reveal many professional secrets, and therefore contributes to the growth of the playwright’s skill. During this period, the plays of Fru Inger from Estrot (1854), The Feast in Solhaug (1855), and Olav Liljekrans (1856) were written.

In the first of them, he switched to prose in his dramaturgy for the first time; the last two were written in the style of Norwegian folk ballads (the so-called “heroic songs”). These plays, again, did not enjoy much stage success, but played a necessary role in Ibsen’s professional development.

From 1857 to 1862 he headed the Norwegian Theater in Christiania. In parallel with the management of the theater and dramaturgical work, he continues to be active social activities, aimed mainly at combating the pro-Danish Christian Theater (the troupe of this theater consisted of Danish actors, and the performances were performed in Danish).

This persistent struggle was crowned with success after Ibsen left the theater: in 1863 the troupes of both theaters were united, performances began to be performed only in Norwegian, and the aesthetic platform of the united theater was the program developed with his active participation. At the same time, he wrote the plays Warriors in Helgeland (1857), Comedy of Love (1862), Struggle for the Throne (1863); as well as the poem On the Heights (1859), which became the forerunner of the first truly fundamental dramatic success - the play Brand (1865).

Ibsen's varied activities during the Norwegian period were rather due to a complex of complex psychological problems rather than a principled social position. The main one was the problem of material wealth (especially since he got married in 1858, and a son was born in 1859) and a decent social position - here, undoubtedly, his childhood complexes also played a role.

This problem naturally connected with the fundamental questions of vocation and self-realization. No wonder in almost all of it further plays one way or another, the conflict between the hero’s life position and real life. And another important factor: Ibsen’s best plays, which brought him well-deserved worldwide fame, were written outside his homeland.

In 1864, having received a writing scholarship from the Storting, which he sought for almost a year and a half, Ibsen and his family left for Italy. The funds received were extremely insufficient, and he had to turn to friends for help. In Rome, for two years, he wrote two plays that absorbed all previous life and literary experience - Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1866).

In theater studies and Ibsen studies, it is customary to consider these plays comprehensively, as two alternative interpretations of the same problem - self-determination and the realization of human individuality.

The main characters are polar: the unbending maximalist Brand, ready to sacrifice himself and his loved ones for the sake of fulfilling his own mission, and the amorphous Peer Gynt, readily adapting to any conditions. A comparison of these two plays gives a clear picture of the author's moral relativism. Individually, they were regarded very controversially by critics and audiences.

The situation with Peer Gynt was even more paradoxical. It is in this play that Ibsen demonstrates his break with national romance. In it, folklore characters are presented as ugly and evil creatures, peasants as cruel and rude people.

At first, in Norway and Denmark the play was perceived very negatively, almost as blasphemy. H.H. Andersen, for example, called Peer Gynt the worst work he had ever read. However, over time, the romantic flair returned to this play - of course, mainly thanks to the image of Solveig.

This was greatly facilitated by the music of Edvard Grieg, written at the request of Ibsen for the production of Peer Gynt, and later gaining worldwide fame as an independent musical composition. It’s paradoxical, but true: Peer Gynt, in the author’s interpretation as a protest against romantic tendencies, still remains in the cultural consciousness the embodiment of Norwegian folk romance.

Brand and Peer Gynt became transitional plays for Ibsen, turning him towards realism and social issues (it is in this aspect that all of his further creativity). These are The Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), The Public Enemy (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Woman from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), Solnes the Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), Jun Gabriel Borkman (1896).

Here the playwright raised pressing issues of contemporary reality: hypocrisy and women's emancipation, rebellion against the usual bourgeois morality, lies, social compromise and loyalty to ideals. Symbolists and philosophers (A. Blok, N. Berdyaev, etc.) much more, along with Brand and Peer Gynt, appreciated other plays of Ibsen: the duology Caesar and the Galilean (The Apostasy of Caesar and the Emperor Julian; 1873), When We, the Dead , We Awaken (1899).

An impartial analysis makes it possible to understand that in all these works Ibsen’s individuality remains unified. His plays are neither tendentious social ephemera nor abstract symbolic constructions; they fully contain social realities, extremely semantically loaded symbolism, and the surprisingly multifaceted, whimsical psychological complexity of the characters.

The formal distinction between Ibsen's dramaturgy into “social” and “symbolic” works is rather a matter of subjective interpretation, the biased interpretation of the reader, critic or director.

In 1891 he returned to Norway. In a foreign land, he achieved everything he strived for: world fame, recognition, material well-being. By this time, his plays were widely performed on the stages of theaters all over the world, the number of studies and critical articles devoted to his work was incalculable and could only be compared with the number of publications about Shakespeare.

It would seem that all this could cure the severe psychological trauma he suffered in childhood. However, the very last play, When We Dead Awaken, is filled with such piercing tragedy that it is hard to believe.

"New Drama" (Ibsen, Shaw, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck)

The formation at the turn of the century of the so-called “new dra-

we" in the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Hauptmann, Me-

terlinka, etc.).

Characteristic features of the “new drama”:

desire for authenticity of the image;

relevance and topicality of the issue;

social nature of the conflict;

the influence of various ideological and stylistic movements and schools.

Main genres. Evolution.

"New Drama" as the beginning of the dramaturgy of the twentieth century.

Ibsen as the founder modern philosophical and

psychological drama.

Periodization of Ibsen's work.

“Drama of Ideas” and the principle of retrospective (“analytical”) composition; the problem of Ibsen’s artistic method (synthesis of the principles of realism, naturalism, symbolism).

The ideological and artistic originality of the plays “A Doll’s House (Nora)”, “Ghosts”, “The Builder Solnes”.

Aesthetic theory symbolist theater Maeterlinck(book

"Treasures of the Humble"):

understanding the essence of the tragic;

the concept of dual worlds and the principle of “second dialogue”;

the idea of ​​Rock;

"theater of silence"

The motive of expectation in one-act plays-parables

Maeterlinck “The Blind”, “Uninvited”, “There, Inside”.

B. Shaw. Periodization of creativity. Literary critical

the activities of the young Shaw, the influence of Fabianism on the writer.

Shaw and Ibsen (“The Quintessence of Ibsenism”). Features drama-

turgy Show of the 90s. (“Unpleasant Pieces”, “Pleasant Pieces”).

Theme of emancipation ("Mrs. Warren's Profession"). Innovation

Shaw's dramatic method: the genre of social-intellectual-

drama-discussion (“The Chocolate Soldier”, “Caesar and Cle-

opatra", "Pygmalion"). Shaw and the First World War. Problem

intelligentsia in the play “Heartbreak House.”

Hauptmann's creative method, periodization of creativity.

The naturalism of early Hauptmann (“Before Sunrise”).

The image of a “mass hero” in the drama “Weavers”, the innovation of the play. Neo-romanticism and symbolism in the works of Hauptmann (“The Sunken Bell”) and K. Hamsun (“Hunger”, “Pan”, “Victoria”, “Mysteries”).

Example of a new drama: (if you have not read this work, you may not understand something, so remember what is in bold)

Ibsen's "A Doll's House" - "drama of ideas"

The first drama in which the new principles were most fully reflected was A Doll's House. 1879 (the year of birth of the “drama of ideas”, that is realistic socio-psychological drama with intense ideological clashes).

The issue of women's rights is growing into a problem social inequality All in all

retrospective composition creates an opportunity to penetrate into the real essence of social and moral relationships, hidden from prying eyes, when a woman is afraid to admit that she is capable of independent noble actions (saving her sick husband and protecting her dying father from unrest) and state laws and official morality qualify these actions only as a crime.

The forged signature on the bill represents the “secret” characteristic of Ibsen’s method. Clarification of the social and moral essence this "secret" is the real content of the drama.

The conflict arose eight years before the start of the stage action, but was not realized. The events that pass before our eyes turn into clarifying the essence of a disagreement that arose in the past. Conflict official views and natural human needs.

Nevertheless, the ending of the drama does not give, as was typical of drama before Ibsen, resolution of the conflict: Nora leaves her husband's house without finding a positive solution, but hoping to calmly understand what happened and realize it. The incompleteness of the action is emphasized by the fact that Helmer, her husband, remains waiting for the “miracle of miracles” - the return of Nora, their mutual rebirth.

Incompleteness of action, “open ending”“is a consequence of the fact that Ibsen’s conflicts are not isolated differences that can be set aside within the framework of dramatic time, but the playwright turns his works into a forum in which the most important problems are discussed, which can only be solved through the efforts of the whole society and not within the framework of a work of art.

A flashback drama is a climax that has occurred after the events that preceded it, and will be followed by new events.

A characteristic feature of Ibsen's drama is transforming inherently social disagreements into moral ones and resolving them in a psychological aspect. Attention is focused on how Nora perceives her actions and the actions of others, how her perception of the world and people changes. Her suffering and painful insight become the main content of the work.

Will play a significant role in Ibsen's psychological drama symbolism. The little woman rebels against society; she doesn't want to be a doll in a doll's house. The title of the play, “A Doll’s House,” is also symbolic.

The "doll's house" symbol indicates the main idea of ​​the drama - the desolation of the human in man.

The playwright achieved that the viewer became his “co-author”, and his characters solved the very problems that worried the audience and readers.

21. Ibsen's drama "Peer Gynt". The main character and peasants, trolls. BIOGRAPHY Henrik Johan Ibsen

the language in which Bokmål wrote (this is Norwegian type) Directions in which he wrote: symbolism, naturalism

Heinrich Ibsen comes from an ancient and wealthy Danish family of shipowners who moved to Norway around 1720. The playwright's father, Knud Ibsen, was an active and healthy person; her mother, German by birth, the daughter of a wealthy Skiene merchant, was a person of strict, dry disposition and extremely pious. In 1836, Knud Ibsen went bankrupt, and the life of a rich, well-established family changed dramatically. Former friends and acquaintances little by little began to move away, gossip, ridicule, and all kinds of deprivation began. Human cruelty had a very hard impact on the future playwright. Already unsociable and wild by nature, he now began to seek solitude even more and became embittered. In the 16th year of his life, Ibsen had to. Apprentice at a pharmacy in the nearby town of Grimstadt, with a population of only 800 inhabitants. I. having left Skien without any regret, he never returned there again. In the pharmacy, where he stayed for 5 years, the young man secretly dreamed of further education and obtaining a doctorate. The revolutionary ideas of 1848 found an ardent follower in him. In his first poem, an enthusiastic ode, he glorified the Hungarian patriotic martyrs. Ibsen's life in Grimstadt became more and more unbearable for him. He aroused the public opinion of the town against himself with his revolutionary theories, freethinking and harshness. Finally, Ibsen. decided to quit the pharmacy and went to Christiania, where at first he had to lead a life full of all sorts of hardships. In Christiania, Ibsen met and became close friends with Bjornson, who later became his bitter opponent. Together with Bjornson, Vigny and Botten-Hansen, Ibsen founded the weekly newspaper Andhrimner in 1851, which existed for several months. Here Ibsen placed several poems and a 3-act dramatic satirical work “Norma”. After the publication of the magazine ceased, Ibsen met the founder of the folk theater in Bergen, Ola-Bulem, who gave him the position of director and director of this theater. He stayed in Bergen for 5 years and in 1857 returned to Christiania, also to the position of director of the theater. Here he remained until 1863. Ibsen married. in 1858 and was very happy in his married life. In 1864, after much trouble, Ibsen received a writer's pension from the Storting and used it to travel south. He first settled in Rome, where he lived in complete solitude, then moved to Trieste, then to Dresden and Munich, from where he traveled to Berlin, and was also present at the opening of the Suez Canal. The most famous are romantic dramas based on Scandinavian sagas and historical plays, philosophical and symbolic dramatic poems “Brand” (1866) and “Peer Gynt” (1867), highly critical social realistic dramas “A Doll’s House” (“Nora”, 1879), “Ghosts” "(1881), "Enemy of the People" (1882).

MAIN CHARACTER Peer Gynt is an image borrowed by Ibsen from the folk tale about the skillful entertainer and rogue Peer Gynt. But only taken from folklore main character and some plot collisions. In the drama, Gynt embodies all the features of a contemporary Norwegian, in other words, a typical person of bourgeois society. Per is deprived of all integrity, all stability in life. A brave and daring guy who loves his mother, who is able to challenge the rich man, suddenly turns into an opportunist who deliberately reverses the mottos “be yourself” and “be happy with yourself.” With the same ease, he changes his appearance: with trolls he is ready to be a troll, with American slave owners - a slave owner, with monkeys - a monkey, etc. Per often demonstrates his inner weakness and spinelessness. His insignificance appears in a grandiose guise. Its emptiness and emptiness create a special, “Gyntian” philosophy. The small man is given in a symbolic image of a large scale. Per strives for success, dreams of fame, power, wants to be a king. Ibsen's entire play is devoted to exposing this program. Peer Gynt is a ruthless egoist, concerned only with his own person. The seeds of evil sown in his soul by the “trolls” are sprouting: Per stubbornly goes forward and does not disdain any means in order to achieve his goal. However, the egoism of the protagonist receives some kind of “philosophical justification.” Gynt commits his crimes in order to more fully demonstrate his individuality, his Gyntian “I.” In a scene depicting a mental asylum in Cairo, the philosophy of Gynt's self is mercilessly ridiculed. Ibsen's hero turns out to be less valiant than his fairy-tale prototype. So, at least in the episode with the Great Crooked, the fairy-tale Gynt turns out to be the winner, while in the play he is saved only thanks to the intercession of his mother and the girl Solveig who loves him. In the image of Solveig, who waited for her beloved for many years, the author creates a special world sublime feelings, some sacred reserved area in which the hero of the drama will be saved. Only sometimes does a person wake up in Gynt - when meeting Solveig, at the hour of his mother’s death. But every time he lacks the determination to make the right choice. In the fourth act of the play, Per becomes a major speculator, having enriched himself using the most shameless means of capitalist acquisitiveness. He makes his fortune by trading in slaves, selling idols to the Chinese, and the Bible and bread to missionaries who intend to convert the Chinese to the Christian faith. Per has four companions, among whom Mr. Cotton stands out, who embodies English utilitarianism and practicality. The whole world for him is just an object for speculation, for extracting profit. The image of von Eberkopf is also clear. Eberkopf is the bearer of the spirit of Prussian aggression. Despite the fact that Eberkopf flaunts abstract philosophical terminology, he is always ready for any violent action for his own benefit. It is Eberkopf who decides to rob the sleeping Gynt and, by bribing his crew, seize his yacht. These are Gynt's companions, but he hardly deserves better surroundings. Ibsen, telling about the moral degradation of the main character, likens him to an empty wild onion: “There is not a piece inside. What's left? One shell." And yet the author does not deny Gynt the possibility of moral purification. Solveig meekly and patiently waits for her lover. She is salvation for Per. The image of Solveig merges in the play with the image of Gynt's homeland. PEASANTS don't know what to say about them. Found it The appearance of the peasant crowd that Peer Gynt encounters at the wedding in Hagstad is least reminiscent of the depiction of modern peasant life, not only in the early Norwegian romantic dramaturgy of Bjeregard or Riis, but also in Bjornson's peasant novella.

The peasant boys are envious and angry. Their leader, the blacksmith Aslak, is a rude and bully. Girls are devoid of pity and compassion. Both young people and old people are not averse to laughing at a lonely and unhappy person who is not like the others. The guys get Per drunk to make fun of him. The desire for money, for wealth, for the crudest material pleasures dominates everywhere. Ingrid is married off to a degenerate lout because his parents are rich peasants. The appearance of the crowd in the fifth act, in the auction scene, is equally unattractive. Poverty and squalor, lack of honor and at least some understanding of the sublime aspects of life - this is what characterizes old Mas Mon and Aslak, the guys and onlookers crowding the auction. The contemptuous assessment that Peer Gynt gives to this crowd in his parable of the devil and the pig is completely justified.

Ibsen is equally merciless towards the folklore motifs and images richly presented in the play. He uses them in two ways to discredit romantic ideology.

TROLLS the author brings Per to the Trolls - fantastic, ugly creatures, hostile to people - and sees him internally ready to accept their formula for the rest of his life - “be satisfied with yourself,” which is the opposite of Brand’s life motto - “be yourself.” The motto of people is an incentive for personal improvement. The troll formula is an excuse for stagnation, petty-bourgeois complacency, stupid submission to circumstances, and the death of the individual.

Henrik Ibsen is the first name that every cultured person remembers when talking about Norwegian literature. But Ibsen’s work is no longer Norwegian, but world heritage. Advocating for the revival of Norwegian culture and treating folklore with trepidation, the playwright left his homeland for twenty-seven years. The plays, after which Ibsen received worldwide recognition, were created in Germany and Italy. And Ibsen’s characters, driven by the author into the strict framework of the plot, were always alive.

Childhood and youth

On March 20, 1828, a boy was born into the wealthy Ibsen family, to whom his parents gave the name Henrik. In 1836, the Ibsen family went bankrupt and had to mortgage all their property to pay off creditors.

This change in social status hit little Henryk hard. Having never been sociable before, the boy completely closed himself off in his own little world. The more clearly his talent manifested itself - even in the gymnasium, Ibsen began to put his fantasies, sometimes eerie and fabulous, into words.

In Norway, even though it was a Danish colony for 400 years, even the poor could study. But Henrik had to earn a living instead of studying. The fifteen-year-old boy's parents sent him to the neighboring town of Grimstad in 1843, where he became a pharmacist's apprentice.

Working in a pharmacy did not interfere with creativity; on the contrary, the soul demanded self-realization. Thanks to poems, epigrams and caricatures of townspeople, by 1847 Henrik had gained popularity among the radical youth of Grimstad.

After the revolutionary events in Europe in 1848, Ibsen took up political poetry and wrote his first play, Catiline, which was not popular.

Literature

In 1850, the young man went to Christiania (as Oslo was called until 1924) to enter the university, but his studies were replaced by near-political activities: teaching at the Sunday school of the workers' association, protest demonstrations, collaboration with the workers' newspaper and student magazine.

Three plays were written in three years, and at the same time I met Björnstjerne Björnson, a playwright, theater and public figure. Ibsen quickly became friends with him, since both believed in the need for national self-awareness of the Norwegians.

In 1852, luck turned to the young playwright - Ibsen was invited to Bergen, to the first Norwegian National Theater, where he served as artistic director until 1857. Ibsen’s fresh plays immediately found stage embodiment, and there was also the opportunity to study theatrical cuisine, which definitely allowed him to grow dramaturgical skills.

From 1857 to 1862, Ibsen directed the Norwegian Theater in Christiania and fought against the Christian Theater, in which plays were staged in Danish and the actors were entirely Danish. And, of course, he did not stop creating, taking Norwegian sagas as a basis when writing plays. In 1863, when Henrik Ibsen had already left his post as director, the two theaters merged into one, and performances were now performed only in Norwegian.

The playwright's vigorous activity was based on the desire to live in abundance, possessing the proper social level, including public recognition. A difficult childhood undoubtedly took its toll here. For a year and a half, Ibsen sought a writing scholarship from the Storting (Norwegian Parliament).

Finally getting what he wanted in 1864, with the help of friends, Ibsen and his family left their homeland and settled in Italy. There, in two years, he created two plays, “Brand” and “Peer Gynt,” putting his whole soul and all his accumulated experience, both life and literary, into them.

The Danes and Norwegians perceived Peer Gynt negatively. spoke of the play as the worst work I had ever read. Solveig saved the situation. And also, who wrote the music for the play “Peer Gynt” at the request of the playwright.

Ibsen's further work fell from the networks of the Norwegian sagas into the mainstream of realism. ABOUT social problems say the masterpieces of drama “A Doll’s House”, “Ghosts”, “Wild Duck”, “Solnes the Builder” and other plays.

For example, the drama "A Doll's House" was based on real events. The main theme of the work is the “women's issue,” but not only the position of women in society is affected. We are also talking about personal freedom in general. And the prototype of the main character was Laura Keeler, a writer who was friends with Ibsen, who, in fact, advised the young 19-year-old girl to study literature.

In Henrik Ibsen's bibliography, the reader will not find either novels or short stories - only poems, verses and plays. The playwright did not leave his diaries. But the plays were included in the “golden fund” of world drama. Books with Ibsen's works are published on different languages, and his aphorisms have long gone among the people.

Personal life

Young Ibsen was timid with women. However, Henrik was lucky to meet Susanne Thoresen. The energetic daughter of a priest became the playwright's wife in 1858, and in 1859 gave birth to Ibsen's only son, Sigurd.

Henrik Ibsen was never involved in scandals related to his personal life. Creative people are passionate and amorous people, and Ibsen is no exception. But despite this, Suzanne remained his only woman until her death.

Death

In 1891, having become famous in Europe, Ibsen returned from a voluntary exile that had lasted 27 years. Henrik lived in Christiania for 15 years, managing to write his last four plays. On May 23, 1906, after a long serious illness, the biography of the Norwegian playwright was completed.

Interesting fact said Dr. Edward Bull. Before Ibsen’s death, relatives gathered in his room, and the nurse noted that the patient looked better today. The playwright said clearly:

“On the contrary!” - and died.

Quotes

“Most people die without really living. Luckily for them, they just don’t realize it.”

“To truly sin, you have to take this matter seriously.”

“The strongest is the one who fights alone.”

“...you love some people more than anything in the world, and somehow you want to be with others most of all.”

Bibliography

• 1850 – “Catilina”
• 1850 – “Bogatyrsky Kurgan”
• 1852 – “Norma, or Love of Politics”
• 1853 – “Midsummer’s Night”
• 1855 – “Fru Inger of Estrot”
• 1856 – “Feast in Solhaug”
• 1856 – “Warriors in Helgeland”
• 1857 – “Olav Liljekrans”
• 1862 – “Comedy of Love”
• 1863 – “The Struggle for the Throne”
• 1866 – “Brand”
• 1867 – “Peer Gynt”
• 1869 – “Youth Union”
• 1873 – dilogy “Caesar and the Galilean”
• 1877 – “Pillars of Society”
• 1879 – “A Doll’s House”
• 1881 – “Ghosts”
• 1882 – “Enemy of the People”
• 1884 – “Wild Duck”
• 1886 – “Rosmersholm”
• 1888 – “Woman from the Sea”
• 1890 – “Hedda Gabler”
• 1892 – “The Builder Solnes”
• 1894 – “Little Eyolfe”
• 1896 – “June Gabriel Borkman”
• 1899 – “When We Dead Awaken”

Henrik Ibsen- one of the most interesting playwrights of the nineteenth century.His dramaturgy is always in tune with modernity.Love for Ibsen in Norway is, if not an innate feeling, then probably arising in early childhood.

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828 in the small Norwegian town of Skien in the family of a merchant. After leaving school, Henrik became an apprentice at a pharmacy in the town of Grimstadt, where he worked for five years. Then he moved to Christiania (Oslo), where he began to study medicine. In his free time, he read, drew and wrote poetry.

Ibsen became a playwright by accident when he was offered to work as a “play writer” for a Norwegian theater in the city of Bergen. INIn 1856, Ibsen's first play was successfully staged at the theater. That same year he met Suzanne Thoresen. Two years later they got married, the marriage turned out to be happy. In 1864, Ibsen received a writing pension. In 1852-1857 he directed the first national Norwegian theater in Bergen, and in 1857-1862 he headed the Norwegian Theater in Christiania. After the Austro-Prussian-Danishth war, Ibsen and his family went abroad - he lived in Rome, Dresden, Munich. His first world-famous plays were the poetic dramas “Brand” and “Peer Gynt”.
IbsenHe was 63 years old when he returned to his homeland, he was already world famous. May 23, 1906 Ibsendiedfrom a stroke.

First workIbsen- application to pronounce the Word - the play “Catiline”. This character from Roman historyin the generally accepted opinion, appearing as a symbol of the worst depravity, in Ibsen’s portrayal he is not a scoundrel, but, on the contrary, a noble, tragic hero. This first play created the path for Ibsen, the path of the individualist, rebel and rule breaker. Unlike Nietzsche, Ibsen's rebellion wasnot to the glorification of instinct, but to the leap to the spirit, to transgression.An important difference between the position of Ibsen and Nietzsche in relation to women. The infamous “if you go to a woman, take a whip” and “a man for war, a woman for a man” are quoted even by those who are far from philosophy. Ibsen, on the contrary, professes a kind of cult of women; he believes that a woman will throw off the shackles of unconsciousness before a man and that her path is no less individual.

This was especially clearly reflected in his works - “The Woman from the Sea” and “A Doll’s House”. In the first, a successful couple of spouses is faced with the fact that the wife’s long-time lover, “from the sea,” arrives and wants to take her away. This lover is a typical “man of instinct”, a “barbarian”, the complete opposite of her intellectual husband. The usual dynamics of such plots are, as a rule, unreasonably tragic, and in the end the woman is either doomed to die or leave with the valiant conqueror. Her tossing, which is perceived as the horror of inevitability, suddenly turns out to be a search for her undiscovered individuality: as soon as her husband is ready to come to terms with her choice and give her complete freedom, it turns out that the “man from the sea,” that is, the unintegrated animus, is nothing more than a myth, and she stays with her husband. The plot, with such a cursory description, may seem banal, but its surprise and rebellion lies in the fact that it is the individuality of the wife who must be freed that is emphasized in every possible way, and her opportunity to stay with her husband appears only after he consciously lets her go. The key to the play is that he finds the strength to overcome the “patriarch complex,” that is, his social and biological rights as a master, which have sprouted like poison from the Osiric eon.

"" (1879) - one of the most popular, interesting plays Ibsen. In it, for the first time in world literature, a woman says that in addition to her responsibilities as a mother and wife, “she has other, equally sacred responsibilities” - “duties to herself.” main character Nora stated: “I can no longer be satisfied with what the majority says and what the books say. I need to think about these things myself.” She wants to reconsider everything - both religion and morality. Nora actually asserts the right of an individual to create his own moral rules and ideas about life, different from the generally accepted and traditional ones. That is, Ibsen asserts the relativity of moral norms.Ibsen was actually the first to put forward the idea of ​​a free and individuating woman. Before him, there was nothing like this, and the woman was tightly integrated into the patriarchal context of complete biological subordination and practically did not rebel against this.

The play "Ghosts" is essentially family drama. It is about how parental mistakes, like in a mirror, are reflected in the behavior of children, and, of course, about ghosts. But not those who live on the roof, but completely different ones. For Ibsen, these are living people who are not really trying to live, but simply exist in the given circumstances.

The main character is Mrs. Alving, the mistress of a large house, who has long been in love with the local pastor, but sacredly preserves the memory of her captain husband. And just as earnestly he protects his artist son, who is seriously infatuated with a pretty maid, from great feelings. Force mother's love will turn him into a living ghost just like herself.

« Peer Gynt"- one of Ibsen's main playswhich has becomeclassical, thanks to Grieg.

Mark Zakharov:"Peer Gynt is dramatic news at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which affirmed the foundations of existentialism. Simplifying the problem a little, let's say that Peer Gynt does not interact with individual characters - he interacts with the Universe. The entire world around him is Peer Gynt's main partner. The world, constantly changing, it attacks his consciousness in different ways, and in this cheerful whirlpool he is looking for only one, the only Road that belongs to him.
Peer Gynt is interesting to me, perhaps because I passed the “point of no return” and really felt that life is not endless, as it seemed to me in childhood and even after Theater Institute. Now you can look at own life, like a chessboard and understand what squares my path went through, what I avoided and what I got into, sometimes regretting what happened later. The main thing is to start correctly, and the most important thing is to understand where it is, your Beginning. How to guess your only possible path through the labyrinths of life circumstances and your own beliefs, if you have them... And if not? Find! Form! Reveal from the depths of the subconscious, catch in cosmic dimensionlessness. . . But sometimes what has already been found slips out of your hands, leaves the soul, turning into a mirage, and then a new painful search awaits in the chaos of events, hopes, smoldering memories and belated prayers.
Our hero was sometimes written about as a bearer of the idea of ​​compromise. This is too flat and unworthy of the unique, at the same time, ordinary and even recognizable eccentric hero created by G. Ibsen. There is more than just stupidity in Peer Gynt, and he lives not only by folklore echoes, there is courage and audacity, there is rudeness and gentle humility. G. Ibsen presented to the world the image of a man about whom, like Chekhov’s hero, it is very difficult to say who he is.
I began my directorial journey when the “common man” was highly valued and glorified. It seems that now almost all of us, together with Dostoevsky, Platonov, Bulgakov and other visionaries, have realized the truth or have come closer to it - there are very difficult people around us, even if they pretend to be cogs, single-celled creatures or monsters.
So I wanted to talk about Peer Gynt and some other people, without whom his unique life could not have happened. Just tell it in our own way, not too seriously, as best we can. And, thinking about the most serious things, avoid pretensions to obligatory profundity... This is a dangerous idea. Composing a play today is a risky endeavor." MARK ZAKHAROV
In 1874, leading Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen conceived the production new play. He invited the young but already famous composer Edvard Grieg to collaborate on a new production. The music for the performance was written in six months. This is a piece of music consisting of 27 parts. This production is called "Peer Gynt".

At the premiere in 1886, Ibsen's drama and Grieg's music were equally successful. This was the rebirth of Ibsen's play. Then the music became more popular, and her separate concert life began.

"Peer Gynt" is a play about a young man. Per left his house and his girlfriend and went in search of happiness. He met a lot on his way. He wandered around the world, meeting evil trolls and frivolous women, strange hunchbacks and robbers, Arab sorcerers and much more. One day Gynt finds himself in a cave mountain king. The author showed two elements in a single image: the mountain king himself and his evil forces. Among them was the princess, who with her dance is trying to attract the attention of Per.

Peer Gynt, hero of our time

Peer Gynt is an odious figure. A reason for people to have fun and gossip. Everyone considers him a slacker, a liar and a talker. Even his mother, who was his first inspirational muse, perceives him this way (from her fairy tales, with which she overfed him as a child, Per’s imagination gained freedom and constantly wanders up and down):
Peer Gynt hardly distinguishes reality from dreams; reality for him is ready at any second to turn into fiction, and fiction to become truth.

In the village they hate Per, laugh at him and fear him (because they don’t understand him). Some consider him a sorcerer, although they talk about this with mockery.
Nobody believes him. And he continues to brag and tell stories about himself that have long been known to everyone.
In fact, all these tales of Gynt are just a free presentation of ancient legends. But this “lie” reveals the poet’s ability to transform. Like Hoffmann's Chevalier Gluck (either a madman or an artist getting into character), Gynt recreates legends. He is not just a spectator, a listener or a performer, but a re-creator, a giver. new life already seemingly dead images and myths. “The whole chronicle of the earth is a dream about me,” Peer Gynt might have exclaimed.
So in “Peer Gynt” the traditional problem (society’s misunderstanding of the artist who creates a new reality and shapes new cultural forms) develops into a manifesto of all people of art who go to the end in their search, regardless of any boundaries, conventions and institutions.
That is why this text was so loved, for example, by symbolists. After all, as Khodasevich said in his programmatic article, symbolism represented “a series of attempts, sometimes truly heroic, to find an alloy of life and creativity, a kind of philosophical stone of art. Symbolism persistently sought in its midst a genius who would be able to merge life and creativity into one.”
And, in particular, this is why Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is still relevant today.

Fear of being a creator

On the other hand, what makes Peer Gynt a universal and timeless type is his narcissism and laziness. Ibsen attributes narcissism to the nature not of man, but of the troll. But the troll is a symbol. The concentrated embodiment of everything lower in a person - vanity, selfishness, lust and other vices.
20-year-old Per wanders around the outskirts of his village, fights, drinks, seduces girls, and tells stories about his adventures. And as soon as narcissism takes possession of him, he meets trolls: the Woman in Green and the Dovra Elder. From them he learns the difference between a troll and a human. And he prefers to remain a human - an outcast among people, and not a king among trolls.
This entire scene among the trolls (and other scenes in which fairy-tale, mythical characters take part) takes place in the hero’s imagination, and not in the outside world. And if you notice quite clear indications of this in the text, then “Peer Gynt” can be read as a completely realistic work in which trolls, like other mythical characters, simply represent various functions inner world Gynt.

The catch is that Peer Gynt never once thought to write down his dreams. This allows literary scholars to talk about him as a hero, in whom Ibsen expressed, they say, all the failure of a man of the 19th century - a man who had forgotten about his destiny. Buried talent in the ground.
Peru seems to be simply too lazy to write down his dreams. Although it’s more likely not laziness, but “fear of a blank sheet.”
When Peer Gynt sees how someone cuts off his finger so as not to go into the army (that is, actually, out of cowardice), he comes to genuine admiration for this act (Ibsen's italics):
You can think, you can wish
But to commit? It's unclear...
This is all Peer Gynt - he fantasizes, wants to do something, but does not dare (or is afraid)...
However, returning to the mentioned article by Khodasevich and the symbolists, one can look at Gynt as a poet who does not write, but only lives his poetry. An artist who creates a poem not in his art, but in life. Same reason why poets Silver Age revered Ibsen as one of their gurus.
But is it enough for an artist to create his life without creating any other works? The answer to this question is precisely given by “Peer Gynt”.

Mythology of Gynt

Solveig renounced everyone to be with Peer Gynt. Per goes to build the royal palace, happy and proud of the appearance of Solveig. But suddenly he encounters an elderly woman in green rags (he dreams of her, apparently because he is too proud of his “victory” over Solveig, because the trolls appear just at those moments when Pera is overwhelmed by vanity). The old woman demands that he drive Solveig out, presents him with her deformed son as her rights to his house, but he answers her: “Get away, witch!” She disappears, and then Peer Gynt begins to reflect:

“Detour!” - the crooked one told me. And, by the way,
That's right. My building collapsed.
Between me and the one who seemed mine,
From now on it's a wall. There is no reason to be delighted!
Bypass! There's no way left for you
Which you could go straight to her.
Directly to her? There would also be a way.
But what? I lost the Holy Scripture.
I forgot how repentance is interpreted there.
Where can I get edification from in the forest?
Remorse? The years will pass by
As long as you are saved. Life will become hateful.
Break into pieces the world that is immensely dear to me,
And put worlds back together from fragments?
You can hardly mend a cracked bell,
And you don’t dare trample what’s blooming!
Of course, the devil is just a vision
She disappeared from sight forever,
However, bypassing ordinary vision,
An unclean thought entered my soul.

This is how Per addresses himself before leaving Solveig until old age.
If we use the terminology of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (close in spirit to Ibsen), Per is trying at this moment to move from the aesthetic stage of existence to the ethical, to take responsibility. And this is the guarantee of his future salvation. After all, by leaving Solveig, he does the only great thing he is capable of - he forever “preserves himself in her heart.” Then he can live as he pleases (which, in fact, is what he does). The deed of his life was completed. Purpose fulfilled. The "poem" has been written.
Solveig is Peer Gynt's muse, a woman who “lives waiting”, remembering him young and beautiful. Great Mother, Soul of the World, Eternal Femininity (both in the Goethean and symbolist meaning of this mythology). She kept the image of Peer Gynt in her heart and, in the end, thereby saved Peer.
Gynt is always under the protection (under the cover) of the Eternal Femininity. At the end of the battle with the trolls, he shouts: “Save me, mother!” And after that, the conversation with Krivoy, a blurred, shapeless voice from the darkness, ends with the words of the barely breathing Krivoy: “Women keep him; dealing with him is a difficult matter.”
Krivoy is precisely a symbol of “laziness”, “fear”, “inactivity” of Per (“The Great Crooked One wins without a fight”, “The Great Crooked One awaits victories from peace”). On the one hand, it is a function of the psyche, and on the other, it is the Norwegian god of the underground (the god of the underground depths, embodied most clearly in the hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground; in Slavic mythology this is Ovinnik).

Mythology flowed through Ibsen. Perhaps he thought that he was writing about the decline in which contemporary Norway found itself, about the smaller Norwegians (this is how “Peer Gynt” and other Ibsen texts are often interpreted). But he ended up with a manifesto for overcoming Christianity and returning to paganism. (Symbolism is a special case of such overcoming.)

If we look at Ibsen’s works as a reflection of his time, then only in the sense in which Carl Gustav Jung, in his work “Psychology and Poetic Creativity,” spoke about works of a visionary type. Those in which (often bypassing the will of the author) the spirit of the time was expressed. The author, at the moment of writing a visionary work, becomes a kind of mouthpiece of the collective unconscious, passing through himself information coming from the most sacred depths of all human experience.
“For this reason, it is quite understandable when a poet turns again to mythological figures in order to find an appropriate expression for his experience. To imagine the matter as if he were simply working with this material he inherited would mean to distort everything; in fact, he creates based on the first experience, the dark nature of which needs mythological images, and therefore greedily reaches out to them as something related, in order to express himself through them,” writes Jung.
Undoubtedly, Ibsen's work (especially Peer Gynt) belongs to this visionary type.
Christianity, paganism and Nietzscheanism

Starting from the Fourth Act, everything in Peer Gynt takes place on a different level - there are no mythical monsters or voices from the darkness. The matured and apparently settled Peer Gynt (now a wealthy slave trader) teaches:

Where does courage come from?
On our life path?
Without flinching, we must go
Between the temptations of evil and good,
In the struggle, take into account that the days of struggle
Your life will not end at all,
And the right way back
Save for later salvation
Here's my theory!

He tells his drinking buddies that he wants to become the king of the world:

If I have not become myself, the ruler
A faceless corpse will appear above the world.
This is what the covenant sounded like:
And, it seems to me, it’s better than that!

And to the question “What does it mean to “become yourself?” answers: to be unlike anyone, just as the devil is not like God.
The question of what it means to “be yourself” torments Peer Gynt and gives him no peace. This is generally main question plays. And in the end a simple and comprehensive answer is given. An indication of the only opportunity for a person to “be himself”... (And the only opportunity for an artist to truly connect poetry with life.)

In literary criticism, Peer Gynt is often contrasted with another Ibsen hero - the priest Brand (from the drama of the same name). And they claim that it was Brand who always remained “himself.”
If Gynt for the literary tradition is a typical person of the “neither fish nor fowl” type, some kind of rare egoist who shirked his destiny all his life, as a result of which his personality (and his life) fell into fragments, then Brand is usually interpreted as a beloved Ibsen's hero, they see in him a kind of ideal of a person - whole and complete.
And indeed, he is not at all tormented by the search for his own Self. But if you look closely, you discover that Brand is not even a person at all. He is some kind of superhuman soulless function. He pushes everything weak that surrounds him to fall, he is ready to sacrifice his life and the lives of others, because... he considers himself (so he decided!) the chosen one of God. These Brandovian sacrifices are no longer even Abrahamic sacrifices, not “faith by the power of the absurd” that Kierkegaard spoke of, but the rational decision of a strong-willed proud man. Crowleyan tyranny. Nietzschean pride.
Therefore, it is logical that Brand perishes, unlike Peer Gynt, who - in a completely Christian way, although in a pagan setting - is saved.
This salvation occurs already in the fifth act, which again turns out to be filled with symbolic visions. When Peer Gynt escapes into the forest (into the depths of the unconscious), he merges so much with nature that the elements, personified by the poet’s imagination, begin to express to him his own thoughts about himself:

We are songs, you are us
I didn't sing at the top of my lungs,
But thousands of times
He stubbornly silenced us.
Right in your soul
We are waiting for freedom.
You didn't give us a chance.
There is poison in you.

Biblical parable about the talents. A slave who buried his talent in the ground and did not increase his master's fortune falls into disgrace. The button maker (a mythological character whose function is to take Peer Gynt’s soul, unworthy of either hell or heaven, for melting) says:

To be yourself means to show up
By what the owner has revealed in you.

Per fusses in every possible way, makes excuses, dodges. But the accusation (self-accusation) looks quite impressive: he is a man who did not fulfill his destiny, who buried his talent in the ground, who could not even really sin. All he created was an ugly troll who gave birth to his own kind. Melting down or hell - punishment in any case seems inevitable...

Per wants Solveig to condemn him, because he believes that it is to her that he is most to blame. But in the person of Solveig, the condemned man meets a vestal virgin. Solveig calls Peru the place where he has always been himself:
In faith, in my hope and in love!
End. The rescue. The button maker is waiting behind the hut...

“I spoke above about the attempt to merge life and creativity as the truth of symbolism,” writes Khodasevich. “This truth will remain with him, although it does not belong to him alone.” This is an eternal truth, only experienced most deeply and vividly through symbolism.” Like Goethe's Faust, Peer Gynt in the finale of Ibsen's drama avoids retribution because the main creation of his life was love.

The high spirit is saved from evil
A work of God:
“Whose life was spent in aspirations,
We can save him."
And for whom love itself
The petition does not get cold
He will be a family of angels
Welcomed in heaven.

And as a final point:

Everything is fleeting -
Symbol, comparison.
The goal is endless
Here - in achievement.
Here is a commandment
The whole truth.
Eternal femininity
She draws us to her.

http://www.peremeny.ru/