Dedicated to Serhii Danchenko and Bohdan Stupka
The dramatic poem “Peer Gynt” (1867) by Henrik Ibsen is considered to be one of the greatest achievements of the world drama. It seems to have absorbed all the cross-cutting issues and themes that have troubled humanity for centuries: what the meaning of human life is, what the sacramental “being yourself” means, how not to betray yourself in search of the true purpose, how to find the strength to...
Dedicated to Serhii Danchenko and Bohdan Stupka
The dramatic poem “Peer Gynt” (1867) by Henrik Ibsen is considered to be one of the greatest achievements of the world drama. It seems to have absorbed all the cross-cutting issues and themes that have troubled humanity for centuries: what the meaning of human life is, what the sacramental “being yourself” means, how not to betray yourself in search of the true purpose, how to find the strength to resist a variety of temptations that are always somewhere near you. As a large-scale philosophical canvas implies, the plot of the play is expansive and multi-layered. Peer Gynt's story moves in time from the pranks and antics of a young dreamer to the desperate insights of a gray-haired old man on the verge of dying, winding between routine and fairy tale, between reality and delusion, in the world of people and in the land of trolls. Events are transferred from a harsh fishing town to lost corners of the Norwegian fjord, from the distant African shores to the seagoing ship rushing through the storm into the abyss.
