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‘The Last Great Bourgeois’: on the Plays of Henrik Ibsen
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
The death of Ibsen in 1906 prompted a number of appraisals of the dramatist by Marxist critics, notably Clara Zetkin, Henrietta Roland-Holst, and George Plekhanov. The most extended of these was Anatoly Lunacharsky's article, ‘Ibsen and the Petty Bourgeoisie’, published in three parts in Obrazovanie, St. Petersburg, Nos. 5–7 (June-August 1907). The central section, ‘Ibsen's Dramas’, is printed below. Born in the Ukraine in 1875, Lunacharsky became a Marxist in his teens and joined the Moscow Social Democrat group in 1899. Arrested for his political activities, he was exiled to Northern Russia, where he wrote his first theoretical treatise, An Essay in Positive Aesthetics. In 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks, but broke with Lenin after 1905, having identified himself with the so-called ‘God-seeking’ tendency. Following the fall of Tsarism in 1917 Lunacharsky rejoined the Bolsheviks, and after the October Revolution he was appointed to Lenin's first ‘Cabinet’ as Commissar for Enlightenment, a post embracing the arts and education. Exceptionally, he retained this position up until 1930, when he became one of the Soviet Union's two representatives to the League of Nations. He died in 1933, shortly before he was due to become Soviet ambassador to Spain. Lunacharsky's published output runs to some 1,500 articles, embracing philosophy, aesthetics, and theoretical and critical writings on all the arts. He also wrote a number of plays, including Faust and the City (1918) and Oliver Cromwell (1920). He was an intellectual of wide erudition and acute critical perception, balancing respect for the old and the traditional with encouragement for the new and the inconoclastic. As Commissar for Enlightenment, he did much to defend the early avant garde's freedom to experiment, making the Soviet Union a power-house of artistic innovation.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994
References
Notes and References
1. Matthew, IX, 13Google Scholar
2. Compare Schiller's Swiss peasant, Wilhelm Tell, who echoes Ibsen when he says ‘There's only one person a man can count on – Himself!’ and ‘The strong are strongest by themselves’. Equally, he is the ideal ‘good neighbour’. [Lunacharsky's note.]
3. The references in square brackets are to the volume and page numbers of The Oxford Ibsen, ed. McFarlane, J. W. (London, 1957–1977).Google Scholar
4. ‘God is Love!’ in The Oxford Ibsen (III, 250).Google Scholar
5. Plekhanov, George V., ‘Ibsen, Petty Bourgeois Revolutionist’ (1906), in Flores, Angel, ed., Ibsen (New York, 1966), p. 39.Google Scholar
6. Kogan, P. S., Ocherki po istorii zapadnoevropeiskikh literatur, Vol. 2 (Moscow, 1905), p. 491.Google Scholar
7. Quoted from Brandes, George, Henrik Ibsen: a Critical Study, trans. Muir, Jessie (London, 1899, reprinted 1964), p. 64.Google Scholar There are slight deviations in translation in Lunacharsky's text.
8. Hamlet, V, i.Google Scholar
9. Lunacharsky's text is unclear here, but it seems to refer to John, , II, 4, and XIX, 27Google Scholar
10. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Penguin Classics, 1961), p. 91Google Scholar
11. From the introduction to A Doll's House in Anna, and Hansen's, Peter translation of Ibsen's Complete Works, Vol. 5 (Moscow, 1903)Google Scholar
12. Ibsen himself described this enforced emendation as a ‘barbaric outrage’. For an account of the incident see Meyer, Michael, Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 2 (London, 1971), p. 268–9Google Scholar
13. Used by Stockmann to illustrate the innate superiority of the outstanding individual over the masses.
14. Roland-Holst, Henrietta, ‘Ibsen, 20 March 1828–23 May 1906’, Vestnik zhizni, No. 9 (1906), p. 11.Google Scholar
15. Ephesians, V.
16. See Meyer, Michael, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 297.Google Scholar
17. Plekhanov, George V., op. cit., p. 76.Google Scholar
18. The nymph who counselled Numa Pompilius, second King of Rome (753–673 BC), in his wise legislation.
19. See p. 227.
20. From the last stanza of Pushkin's poem, ‘As down the noisy streets I wander’ (1829).
21. In Auerbach's cellar in Goethe's Faust.
22. A paraphrase of the Latin saying, Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi – ‘What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to the ox.’
23. Or Brändel, the German diminutive of Brand. [Lunacharsky's note.]
24. A reference to Ibsen's speech to the Norwegian Society for Women's Rights (see p. 230–1).