Le portrait d'Ibsen

The Portrait of Ibsen

Suares

FIFTH CAHIER OF THE TENTH SERIES

This cahier presents Suares’s extended critical essay on Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist. Writing in his characteristically dense, lyrical, and deeply personal style, Suares offers not a conventional literary study but a spiritual portrait — an attempt to capture the essence of Ibsen’s genius through the lens of his dramatic works and the moral vision they embody.

Suares examines Ibsen as a figure of uncompromising truth, a dramatist who stripped away the comfortable illusions of bourgeois society to expose the conflicts of conscience beneath. He traces the arc of Ibsen’s career from the early verse dramas through the great realistic plays — A Doll’s House, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder — to the late symbolic works, finding in each a deepening engagement with the question of how human beings can live authentically in a world of convention and compromise.

For Suares, Ibsen is above all a moralist and a poet of the will — an artist who understood that the drama of modern life is interior, a struggle of the individual soul against the forces that would diminish it. The essay is as much a confession of Suares’s own aesthetic creed as it is a study of Ibsen.

The full French text is available at the Archive.org link above.