Norwegian

Question 1

Henrik Ibsen

Answer 1

Norwegian (1828-1906)
Norwegian playwright, one of “the four great ones” with Alexander Kielland, Jonas Lie and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson of the 19th-century Norwegian literature. Ibsen is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern prose drama. Ibsen’s only real discipline or successor, George Bernard Shaw, shared his intellectualism and method of teaching - dramatizing generally accepted ideas into uncompromising plays. Known by ETS as someone bucking the status quo.

Question 2

A Doll´s House

Answer 2

Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian)
was a social drama on marriage, in which a woman refuses to obey her husband and walks out from her apparently perfect marriage. The work caused a sensation and toured Europe and America.

Question 3

Ghosts

Answer 3

Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian)
touched the forbidden subject of hereditary venereal disease and attacked social conventions as destroyers of life and happiness. The London Daily Telegraph called the play "an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar house wit all its doors and windows open."

Question 4

Hedda Gabler

Answer 4

Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian)
Hedda, twenty-nine years old, has married down, is pregnant with an unwanted child, and bored by her husband. Before marriage she has flirted with the drunken poet Loevborg, a portrait of the playwright Strindberg, who hated Ibsen. She plots to the ruin of Loevborg by burning his manuscript on the future of civilization. Judge Brack, who lusts after Hedda, discovers that Hedda has instigated Loevborg's accidental suicide - he has died in a bordello. Hedda cries: "Oh, why does everything I touch become mean and ludicrous? It's like a curse!" Brack gives her the choice either of public exposure or of becoming his mistress. But Hedda chooses suicide when she falls into his power

Question 5

Knut Hamsun

Answer 5

Norwegian (1859-1952)

Sympathized with Nazis before WWII; this caused him to be known as a traitor afterwards.

Question 6

The Hunger

Answer 6

Knut Hamsun (Norwegian)
a story about a young writer on his own, unable to find work, starving and homeless in Christiania. Although his clothing, prospects, and health fail, he guards his dignity (often comically) and pencil stubs. The narrator wanders through the streets of the city - "that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him..." Eventually his high-minded articles - now and then purchased by newspapers - become incomprehensible even to his own fevered thoughts. There is nothing sentimental in his fasting - it is his own more or less nihilistic choice. He sells articles to the local paper, and meets a young woman, who is frightened of his impetuosity. '"Well, I never!" I blurted out. "Just you wait and see!" And I flung my arms lustily around her shoulders. Was the girl out of her mind? Did she take me for a complete greenhorn? Haw-haw, wouldn't I, though, by the living... None should say about me that I was backward on that score. What a little devil! If it was juts a matter of pushing on, then..." Losing his hair in clumps and unable to keep down his hard-won meals, the narrator finally gets a job as a deckhand on a Russian ship bound for England.

Question 7

The Growth of the Soil

Answer 7

Knut Hamsun (Norwegian)
learned Hamsun the Nobel Prize. The protagonist is Isak, Hamsun's ideal hero, who lives close to the elements. In Hamsun's idyll the human world and nature are united in a strong, mystical bond. "The wilderness was inhabited and unrecognizable, a blessing had come upon it, life had arisen there from a long dream, human creatures lived there, children played about the houses. And the forest stretched away, big and kindly, right up to the blue heights."  Isak and Inger, who has a hare lip, live in the countryside, which is invaded by the city.