Leon Trotsky: About Ibsen

[My own translation of the Russian text, printed in "Vostochnoye Obosreniye” [Eastern Outlook] No 121, 122, 126, 3/16 June, 4/17 June, 9/22 June, 1901. Reprinted in Sochineniya, Vol. 20, Moscow-Leningrad 1926, compared to the German translation. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome.]

It is said that great people have no charm in the eyes of their lackeys. But, on the other hand, personal acquaintance with great people turned and transforms them into lackeys, as can often be judged on the basis of documents quoted here.

The Norwegian writer John Paulsen, who tells in his "Memoirs"^A about his relationship with Henrik Ibsen, is no exception to this injurious rule. For example, he quotes with deep sympathy the words of his friend, a Norwegian painter, who said after his visit to Ibsen: “Well, you see, in essence he did not say anything, but his manner, as he filled my pipe, his look when he gave it to me, really moved me!" It is difficult to imagine a higher degree of spiritual servility!

In general, Paulsen's "Memoirs" provide very little material for elucidating the peculiar physiognomy of the famous writer. The facts reported by Paulsen are completely insignificant and are flavoured in small doses with self-made philosophy and in enormous proportions with spiritual servility before the "great compatriot." But bearing in mind that la plus jolie fille de France ne peut donner plus que ce qu'elle a (the most beautiful girl in France cannot give more than she has), we will try to use the little that Paulsen gives, in connection with the many, what the writings of Ibsen himself give.

“When Ibsen, this great sceptic who shook all our old ideals” – there is nothing behind Paulsen’s fake pathos – “was expressing one audacious idea after another in conversation, Ms. Lie (the wife of the famous Norwegian writer), raised in an old faithful bureaucratic family, sometimes objected to him, referring to the Holy Scripture." She apparently considered Ibsen a "revolutionary". Paulsen himself finds that Ibsen was a revolutionary "only in conversations and in his works, but not in his daily life."

Is Ibsen really a "revolutionary"?

The honourable lady in her view of Ibsen proceeded from a comparison of his views with the Holy Scripture; Paulsen contrasted Ibsen's "daring thoughts" with the squalid codes of his own morality and philosophy; we will try to confront Ibsen's "revolutionary" ideas to face-to-face with objective socio-historical conditions. The answer to the question posed will become clear by itself.

In 1870, Ibsen wrote to Georg Brandes: “Everything that we now eat is only crumbs from the table of the revolution of the last century, and this food has been chewed and chewed enough. The concepts need new content and new interpretation. The concepts of “freedom, equality and the fraternity" have long ceased to be what they were in the days of the late guillotine. That is what political revolutionaries do not want to understand, and that is why I hate them. These gentlemen only want special coups, coups in the external. But all this is nothing – that's the problem! A revolution of the human spirit – that's what is all about it". So far, there is little revolutionary here ...

Paulsen also understands that although "freedom for Ibsen is the same as air, he in spite of it understands it not so much in the sense of the civil as the personal. What's the point, in fact," Paulsen adds from his own reason, "to have the right to vote if not to develop personal freedom for yourself?"

Personal freedom! An overturn of the human spirit! … But do any social conditions make it possible to develop "freedom of the individual", and is it possible that a "revolution of the human spirit" can be accomplished regardless of external conditions? Ibsen did not know how to answer these questions: moreover, he did not even know how to put them.

Ibsen doesn’t care about social transformations. Ibsen treats parties, these great cultural forces of our time, in alliance with which alone it is possible to influence society in the desired direction, with the contempt of the lonely intellectual aristocrat. "Party programs," says Dr. Stockmann, "kill every viable truth," and even more so: "The party is like a pump that gradually siphons reason and conscience out of people!" ("An Enemy of the people"). Ibsen starts from individuality and returns to it. Within the limits of the individual soul, he solves or tries to solve all social problems. He expands and deepens this elastic individual soul to superhuman limits ("Brand"), without even touching the social environment with the elbow. In the person of Rosmer, Ibsen wants to "make all the people in the country aristocrats of the spirit ... by freeing their spirit and purifying their will" (how definite!), But Rosmer loses faith in this matter, having come to the conviction that "people cannot to be ennobled from the outside" ("Rosmersholm").

In his personal life, Ibsen himself, this “daring revolutionary,” this “great minus”, as his compatriots call him, bows submissively to conditions acting from the outside: with pedantic thoroughness he obeys all the conventions of the hypocritical and decent everyday life of the bourgeois environment. Only in the creations of his spirit does he stand "high and free" (and even then not as much as Paulsen and Ibsen himself imagine!), But "ah ... I am not like that in everyday life," complains with bitter lips to himself the builder Solness. Like this builder, he "dares not ... cannot rise as high as he himself builds".^B

And this is not the weakness of his own individuality, but of his individualistic preaching, his extra-social morality, or, if you like, immorality. And if only this sermon contained the whole meaning of Ibsen, then – we can safely say this – he would have no significance.

Ibsen – the creator of great, new words and daring ideas, Ibsen – the prophet of renewed humanity, Ibsen – the spiritual leader of the future ... and whatever else one called him, this Ibsen does not have a hundredth, thousandth part of the meaning of Ibsen as the great painter of the petty bourgeois environment ... Ibsen the artist-denier, the "great minus", stands infinitely high above Ibsen, the symbolist prophet and leader. And by nature Ibsen is not suitable for this second role. "I can’t remember a case," says Paulsen, "that Ibsen ever burst out enthusiastic expressions, passionate words that would indicate that feeling plays a special role in his mental life." No, this is not a leader! If Ibsen's "new words" are freed from the vague, so captivating^C symbolic shell, then these new words in most cases will lose both their novelty and their attractiveness. And no wonder. At the present time, when human thought possesses such a colossal, inexhaustible in its diversity, hereditary and acquired heritage, a serious and valuable new word can be said only by standing on the shoulders of one's great predecessors. Meanwhile, Ibsen, according to Paulsen, "read extremely little. He got acquainted with the latest works of fine literature and philosophical thought more from conversations with others than through personal study." An ingenious self-taught, without systematic education, without a whole world outlook, he treated the fruits of someone else's thought with inappropriate disdain.

The self-taught builder akin to him in spirit, the hero of the already cited drama, which has undoubted autobiographical significance, asks Gilda if she is reading. Gilda. Not. Never … anymore. All the same, I don't see the point. Solness. Just like me ("The Master Builder"). This disdainful attitude to books, and especially the unfamiliarity with them did, we repeat, leave a trace on the work of Ibsen: he did not give much that he could have given. But, having forgiven him for shortcomings, let's talk about what he gave, let's see what material he operated on – and he gave a lot, worked on a material that deserves the closest attention.

What is the social background against which the usually personal dramas of Ibsen's heroes are played out?

This is the life of small Norwegian provincial cities, peaceful, motionless, frozen in the same forms, inhabited by a middle-class philistinism, so moral and decent, so respectable and religious ...

Oh! This balanced provincial decency left a bitter residue in the soul of the great playwright, and you fully understand it when, in response to Paulsen's exclamation "What a huge city!", Ibsen bitterly remarked: "You can't live in a smaller one!"

There, in these large commercial, industrial and intellectual centres, there is still more space and air, less conventions, and most importantly, less of this morality and decency characteristic of petty-bourgeois cities, suffocating like the soot of a bad lamp, tough and sticky like thick sugar syrup, like air, penetrating through all pores and permeating all relationships – family, kinship, love, friendship ...

Eaten to the core by routine, age-old sluggishness, provincial philistinism is frightened by any innovations: some new railway makes it look to the future with apprehension: after all, before the railway "it was so calm and peaceful here!" – complains Ms. Bernick ("Pillars of Society"). If this is the case with the railway, then with new ideas it is very bad. And what are they for society? "The good old ones, who are already recognised by all, are quite enough for it" ("An Enemy of the People").

Not tolerating novelty, the petty bourgeoisie also cannot stand any originality, independence, even simple uniqueness. It mercilessly crushes the slightest manifestations of these qualities. “You have a passion,” it teaches Dr. Stockmann through the mouth of its burgomaster, “to always make your own way, and this is not permissible in a comfortable society. The individual must obey his whole” ...

While the industrial feudal lords, under their heels tens of thousands of people, the rulers and legislators of the stock exchange, the great "shakers" of the world market, in a word, the omnipotent dictators of the modern commercial and industrial world are too clearly aware of their power to disguise their real attitude to life and people, – the middle bourgeoisie, on the contrary, cannot stand the bareness of these relations, cannot look openly into the eyes of the work of its hands: it is frightened by the friction of the constituent parts of the bourgeois mechanism set in motion by itself, and it tries to soften this friction by using musty oil for lubrication hypocritical sentimentalism. In the immoral big world – "what is the price of human life there? – asks the adjunct Rørlund, this embodied conscience of the local society: – there human lives are treated like capital. But we, I dare to think, are on a completely different moral point of view." ("Pillars of society"). You bet!..

Standing on the borderline between the upper classes of society and its lower classes, the middle and small petty bourgeoisie are not averse to relying on these lower classes, to speak on their behalf – but all this, of course, is not done in earnest.

“Well, and the political education of the people through self-government – have you thought about that?” – asks the editor Hovstad the typographer Aslaksen.

“When a person has achieved a certain prosperity and must protect it, then he cannot think about everything, Mr. Hovstad” – the typographer, wise in the "school of life", answers with excessive frankness ("An Enemy of the People").

In general, you can learn a lot from Aslaksen. His motto is "moderation is the first civic virtue." His individuality is completely immersed in the social type; he is strong in the strength of the "close-knit majority", he speaks only on behalf of this close-knit majority, on behalf of the "small owners", on behalf of the homeowners ...

Those hypocritical liberal moderate principles that govern Aslaksen permeate the entire philistine. It is they who compel the philistine society – for all its hatred of everything new, original and "indecent" – to diligently avoid naked measures of repression; after all, Mymretsov's¹ principle of "drag and not let go" has been erased from the petty bourgeois everyday life. The petty bourgeoisie acts more indirectly, although no less effectively. In a different political setting, Dr. Stockmann, as a "public enemy", would have been forcibly isolated. The cultural petty bourgeoisie acts differently. It boycotts its enemy. It dismisses him from his post (the employer and the hired person are "free" in their relationship), it denies him an apartment, deprives his daughter of lessons, expels his boys from school, and finally leaves a man without a post who accidentally gave his apartment to Stockmann for a meeting. "Without a whip, without a twig" it truly achieves its goal. It isolates its enemy almost as surely as if it had sent him to some "distant place".

If the bourgeois of the cosmopolitan type is a free-thinker, at least not long ago he was one, then the provincial philistine, on the contrary, always found it necessary to defend religion, hoping at the same time to be protected by it. The pastor occupies not the least place in many of Ibsen's dramas. Preparing to commit a heinous act – to let his "friend" go on the ship, which is threatened with imminent death, just to secure himself from possible revelations – Consul Bernick seeks consolation in ... religion. And, I must say, he finds it. Adjunct Rørlund tells him – of course, in the name of religion: "My dear consul, you are almost too conscientious. I believe that if you rely on the will of providence" ... ("Pillars").

All the various and often contradictory "moments" of philistine life are kept in relative equilibrium by means of the tested cementing "ideological" material – hypocrisy. Listen to what a man says, who exchanged his girlfriend for a dowry, who without pity broke with an unfortunate singer, who was later abandoned by her husband and died in poverty, who supports slandering a friend to improve his financial affairs, who is ready to drown this friend to strengthen his own well-being, in a word, Consul Bernick, who is already familiar to us, the "pillar of society": "Oh, the family is the foundation of society. A cosy, homely hearth, worthy and loyal friends, a small closed circle, into which no insidious elements invade" ... The main thing, of course, is that there were no "insidious elements".

It is well known what this sacred petty bourgeois "family home" is. One writer wittily puts the following words into the mouth of a philistine: "My house is my fortress, and I am the commandant of this fortress!" – How often, according to Paulsen, Ibsen himself "had to deal – both in books and in sermons – with Paul's strict words, which said that the husband should be the head and master, and his wife his most humble servant." Even such an exceptional person as Dr. Stockmann, this lonely fighter against the vulgarity of the petty bourgeois majority, says to his wife such typical petty bourgeois vulgarity: “What nonsense, Katerina! Go and mind your own business, and leave me to take care of the needs of society."

There is no need, of course, to add that the most fundamental debauchery is peacefully coexisting with the reverent cult of the family, as if supplementing it – of course, on the side. "Do you know," says the artist Osvald to the pastor, "when and where did I see immorality in the circle of artists? It happened when one of our compatriots, exemplary fathers and spouses, came there (to Paris) to look at the new order ... These gentlemen told us (the artists) about places and things that we never dreamed of "("Ghosts").

As a final touch to this cursory description of the Norwegian province, let us cite an interesting anecdote reported by Paulsen.

A singer unknown to the public performed in a theatre in a Norwegian town, and the primitive petty bourgeois audience, despite their admiration, did not dare to applaud her. Everyone was afraid that his personal impression would not be in consonance with the impression of the majority, and everyone watched with intense attention the poet Welhaven, a recognised authority, who, making fun of the audience, sat in complete immobility. But then Welhaven raised his hands for applause – and the whole audience resounded with friendly applause. "The sign was given to the public that they can trust their impressions and give an outcome to the feeling of admiration!"

Such is this terrible, stifling social atmosphere, unbearable for healthy human lungs.

Woe to the one whom fate has endowed in this environment with strongly expressed originality, broad demands – he is doomed to complete loneliness. “Our great torment,” says Guy de Maupassant, “lies in the fact that we are constantly alone, and all our efforts, all our actions are directed only to avoid this loneliness” (“Loneliness”). "The most powerful man," objects the gloomy Norwegian, "is the one who stands completely alone in the arena of life!" (Ibsen, "An Enemy of the People").

This contradiction runs through the entire work of these writers, who are similar in their starting point – hatred of the petty bourgeoisie.

While the feeling of loneliness is the main note of the mournful groans of Maupassant, the sick singer of the decaying philistine society of France, most of Ibsen's dramas are composed, on the contrary, into a solemn hymn, an ecstatic song to the glory of "standing alone in the public arena."

In a society of philistine impersonality and hypocritical cowardice, Ibsen creates a cult of personal energy, "a conscience full of health: so that you can dare what you most desire!" ("The Master Builder").

The cult of a lonely, proud force in Ibsen sometimes takes on downright repulsive forms. Next to the socially naive scientist Stockmann, he is ready to put the financial adventurer Borkman, to whom the author, not with the aim of irony, puts into his mouth such speeches: “This is it, that curse that hangs over us, exceptional, chosen natures. The crowd, the mass ... all these mediocrities ... do not understand us" ("John Gabriel Borkman").

Ibsen does not care that moral strength, like any other, is determined not by one magnitude, but also by the point of application and direction. But it is characteristic of Ibsen as a figure in the sphere of thought that his particular sympathies are nevertheless directed towards mental forces. “Who is the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom?” – he asks in the name of Dr. Stockmann. "It's the tight-knit majority, the damn liberal majority." What is the most disastrous lie? This is "the doctrine that the crowd, imperfect and ignorant beings, have the same right to judge, govern and rule as few true aristocrats of the mind" ("An Enemy of the People").

These are the final conclusions, the "great discoveries" of Dr. Stockmann.

Do I need to prove that they have no social value? What, in fact, will be the social system in which few "true aristocrats of the mind" will "judge, govern and rule"? And which Areopagus will deal with the distinction between "true" and "untrue"?

If the "crowd" were called to resolve the issue of the correctness of a particular scientific theory, philosophical system, then Stockmann-Ibsen would be a thousand times right in his insulting comment on the competence of the "tight-knit majority". Darwin's opinion on a biological issue is 100,000 times more important than the collective opinion of a meeting of 100,000 people.

But a completely different matter is the field of social practice, with its deep antagonism of interests, where it is not a question of establishing scientific or philosophical truths, but of constant compromises between social forces pulling in different directions. In this area, the suppression of the minority by the majority, if it corresponds to the actual balance of social forces, and is not caused by temporarily artificial measures, is incomparably higher than the suppression of the majority by the minority, which is often carried out under the cover of twilight.

Of course, this arithmetic, numerical solution of social issues is not the ideal of social solidarity, but as long as society is divided into hostile groups, the primacy of the majority over the minority retains all its deep significance in life, and the appeal from the "plebeian spirit" of the tight-knit majority to the "intellectual aristocracy" of a select few will be left "without consequences" by the supreme judgment seat of life.

In the cited drama ("An Enemy of the People"), two main features of Ibsen's work are excellently manifested: the brilliant embodiment of reality and the complete lack of resources for a positive ideal.

Throughout the drama, you watch with keen interest how the, apparently, purely technical issue of urban sewerage hooks up with the property relations of the urban population, creates a grouping of parties and forces Dr. Stockman to move from the chemical study of water to the analysis of the social environment; you watch the wave of oppositional mood grow in the chest of an honest scientist with bated breath, and as a result you stop in annoyed bewilderment, in resentful disappointment before the meagre preaching of "intellectual aristocracy."

Ah! We have heard and hear this sublime sermon from different sides, and not only from poets, but also from economists and sociologists ...

For example, Prof. Schmoller, as you know, stands for social reform: he wants to satisfy demands of the workers. But does he want all of them? Oh, no! There are, you see, "just" and "unjust" demands. Selfish class demands are very far from professorial justice. Fair interests are not class interests, but extra-class, over-class, above-class interests. The class interests are based on rough economics; over-class, just interests rise on the ethical and legal principle of "distributive justice" (verteilende Gerechtigkeit). This universal principle, inaccessible to class claims, says: the distribution of material wealth and honours must correspond to the spiritual properties of people; therefore – either the income should be distributed according to the virtue (Mr. Schmoller, this is dangerous!), or the virtue should be increased by the corresponding percent figure for persons with high incomes (Mr. Schmoller, this is unattainable!).

The principle of "distributive justice", this worthy fruit of philistine thoughtfulness, would, therefore, have rather risky sides, if Prof. Schmoller did not make the bearers of this principle "aristocrats of education and spirit" – representatives of liberal professions, the bureaucracy, etc. (of course, this also includes the aristocrats of the university department). But once this is done, everything is fine. The classes that participate in the process of material production and are, as a result of this, the bearers of egoistic class interests, are once and for all removed from the universal principle. The classes of material production are as much below "distributive justice" as the innate bearers of this justice are above material production.

If the "aristocrats" of university education and the professorial-bureaucratic spirit did not have their own corporate interests, then the fruit of the aristocratic spirit of Prof. Schmoller would have turned out to be truly a over-class theory devoid of social flesh ... But ...

But since "distributive justice" is given to the "aristocrats of education and spirit" in permanent maintenance, and these latter, once and for all removed from participation in material production, are thereby permanently maintained by the class of material labour, the principle of "distributive justice" turns out to be a little fig leaf that poorly covers the naked shamelessness of professorial-bureaucratic corporate lusts.

Prof. Stammler, another "aristocrat of education and spirit", competing with his colleague, is also trying to rise above "social aspirations caused by purely subjective impulses generated only by a given state of affairs, to the height of social aspirations, objectively substantiated, justified from an objective point of view." With this laudable goal, the aristocrat Stammler arms himself with the ideal of "a society of freely willing people", as the highest point of view in all social judgments, as a formal idea on the basis of which one can decide "whether an empirical or desired social state is objectively justified."

From this minute on, Prof. Stammler is already above the classes; history takes him out of the hustle and bustle of everyday struggle and seates him on the judicial throne as a "freely willing person" so that, armed with a universal objectively patented ideal, he can create an unmerciful judgment and harsh reprisals against "social aspirations generated by the given state of affairs."

Needless to say that there is no need for Prof. Stammler to get up from his professorial chair, which is a judicial throne, to participate in the rough process of material production. But you can guarantee that if (oh, wonderful dream!) Prof. Stammler was drafted together with Prof. Schmoller to control the intellectual process of material distribution, then the "freely willing person" Stammler and the "aristocrat of education and spirit" Schmoller would act so solidly and rigorously that the carriers of "social aspirations generated only by the given state of affairs" and representatives of selfish class interests devoid of a solid ground of "ethical-legal principle" under themselves, would receive a worthy punishment for the absence of Stammlerian objectivism and Schmollerian virtue in them.

No, not from a corporation of intellectual aristocrats, which will be left to "judge, govern and rule", you need to wait for salvation.

★ ★ ★

We need to dwell on the female characters of Ibsen, to whom many are even ready to confer the social title of "singer of women." Indeed, Ibsen devotes a lot of attention to portraying female characters, which in his dramas represent a great deal of variety.

In Ellida ("The Lady from the Sea"), partly in Martha ("Pillars"), dreamy outbursts from a dull life are embodied – to where "the sky is wider ... the clouds move higher ... the air is freer …", impulses that in the higher stages turn into a desire to "strike all this decency in the face", not stopping even at a break with the homeland (Lona and Dina in "Pillars") or with her husband and children (Nora). Before us are the selfless women of Ibsen, who always live for someone else and never for themselves (Aunt Juliana in Hedda Gabler, Miss Linde in A Doll's House), unfortunate slaves of matrimonial and maternal duty (Helen Alving in Ghosts), soft, painfully sensitive, loving and weak-willed, like Kaia Fosli ("The Master Builder") or Mrs. Elvsted ("Hedda"), finally, the woman in the taste of fin de siècle (end of the century), the spiritually broken, agitated decadent Hedda Gabler.

A whole spectrum of psychic shades, a whole gamut of emotional moods! But nevertheless, we cannot say together with Mr. A. Veselovsky² that "they contain all the shades of life, all the aspirations, hopes and all the weaknesses of the contemporary woman." No! Ibsen has a huge gap in this area, too.

The reality of recent decades has brought forward a new woman, who is three heads above not only the Nora, who breaks with her husband due to the awakening consciousness of personal dignity, but also the Nora of the subsequent period, who devotes her strength to the heated struggle for female emancipation.

This new woman raised the social question high above the question of the position of women of the privileged class, the question of the implementation of those forms of society in which not only the subordination of woman to man, but in general the subordination of person to person, cannot take place. Hand in hand with the man, she – not in the old role of the inspirer of her husband, brother or son, but as their equal comrade in struggle – fights for the realisation of the best ideals of our time. This woman Ibsen did not know.

★ ★ ★

The time has now passed both for the mystical cult of Ibsen symbolism, and for that impudent "critical", "scientific-physiological" and other abuse against the great Norwegian, in which Max Nordau is so well versed.^D

The history of European social consciousness will never forget those slaps in the face, those truly glorious slaps that Ibsen inflicted on the cleanly washed, well-combed and glistening petty-bourgeois physiognomy. Even if Ibsen does not indicate the ideals ahead, even if his criticism of the present does not always come from the proper point of view, he nevertheless, with the hand of a genius master, exposed the philistine soul to us and showed how much inner trashness lies at the basis of petty-bourgeois respectability and decency. When you look at the inimitable petty-bourgeois images created in the best moments of his creative work, the thought involuntarily comes to mind that it was necessary to press the brush a little harder in one or two places, add two or three barely noticeable strokes, and the social type of the highest realism turned into deep social satire.