person
Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen
also: Ибсен
Norwegian playwright whose work was the subject of active, often heated discussion in the Russian press of the late 1880s and early 1890s; invoked here as the gardener Mikhail Karlovich's favorite topic of conversation, a quick mark of his being unusually well-read and current for his station.
Reading notes
- The Head Gardener's Story §2 Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the Norwegian playwright, was at the height of his international reputation and controversy in Russia by the early 1890s (translations and stagings of A Doll's House and Ghosts had begun provoking heated debate in the Russian press through the late 1880s). That the gardener's chief intellectual pleasure is 'a talk about Ibsen' is a quick, economical way of marking Mikhail Karlovich as unusually well-read and up to date for his station -- consistent with the story's larger point that he is not the simple 'German' stereotype the narrator says everyone mistakes him for, but a serious, multilingual, widely read man.