Summary
Jacques De Decker: Henrik Ibzen - Biography
Iben did practically everything in the theater, the only thing he did not act. He was also a journalist, a supervisor in a boarding school, a teacher who exercises with the students. And his first profession, which causes surprise even though he earned his living with it for about six years, was the profession of apothecary. He doesn't talk about it at all in his texts, but in that profession he acquired great care when dosing the ingredients of his pieces, the pedantry he applied even to the smallest substance that went into their composition. He dosed the ingredients, paid attention to every detail, especially the vocabulary and accents in the speech of his characters. This precision that governed the writing of his works may have been acquired in the back room of the pharmacy where he was entrusted with the preparation of medicines, the composition of which had to be carefully controlled. Acting on the ailments of his fellow men, helping to alleviate them: there is something in this activity from his youth, very close to medicine, as a propaedeutic of what he will strive for in preparing his art...
Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906) is today counted among the most significant playwrights of the 19th century and occupies an indisputable place in the canon of European literature. But during his life he was sometimes, especially in his native Norway, the subject of fierce disputes and criticism. jacques de Decker, himself a successful playwright, gives a portrait of Ibsen's stormy artistic career in the first line, but does not neglect his private life and descriptions of the environment in which his aesthetic views, political attitudes and social engagements were built. In addition to reliable factography, a harmonious interweaving of public and private, this biography is also characterized by a refined style and non-authoritative but sovereign storytelling.
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