The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Jun Fosse, whose name in Russia is known primarily in the theater world.

The Nobel Prize for literary merit was awarded to the playwright, novelist and children’s writer Jun Fosse, whose name in Russia is known primarily in the theater world. The author, who explores through his texts questions of the meaning of existence and death, is considered by many to be a successor to Ibsen – while he himself prefers to refute him.

Norwegian Jun Olaf Fosse is now the most awarded playwright in the world – to the Ibsen Prize, called the “unofficial Nobel Prize”, which he received in 2009, Fosse added now a real Nobel. Of course, if it’s just the turn to reward someone from the playwright’s workshop, then, say, with Tom Stoppard alive, it’s strange to honor Fosse as the first playwright in the world. But, apparently, it was the turn of not only the theater, but also Norway – and there is no doubt that after Ibsen, none of the Norwegian playwrights achieved such fame as Fosse.

The importance of national representation is emphasized by the words of the Nobel Literary Committee that the features of Fosse’s work are rooted in the Norwegian language and nature. Of course, the language in which Fosse wrote his first texts in the 1980s also matters here: it is not the official Bokmål – the “national” written language of Norway, in which the urban majority of Norway writes, but Nynorsk – an alternative literary norm derived from the language the country’s rural minority living in the southwest.

However, for the Nobel Prize in Literature, both this local circumstance and the glory of Ibsen’s modern heir are not enough. In addition, the heyday of Jun Fosse’s popularity occurred approximately twenty years ago. In total, Fosse wrote about three dozen plays and almost as many prose works. One of his first plays, “Name,” attracted the attention of the theater world back in the 90s. Real fame came five years later, when his “Autumn Dream” (it was also staged in Russia), a minimalist, contemplative play about the vanity of all things, triumphantly performed on stages around the world.

Fosse’s main themes in his plays are similar to Ibsen’s – time and death. Following many Scandinavian authors, he persistently and at the same time laconicly describes the existential doom of man.

Melancholic and pessimistic, of course, he came at the right time – and today, in an era of rifts and general insanity, his hopeless view of man fully reflects the mood of the audience.

Even taking into account the fact that it has been ten years since outside of Norway, few people remembered Fosse, who stopped producing theatrical releases in 2007.

However, for Yun Fosse himself, it is probably extremely funny and perhaps annoying that in 2023, tens of thousands of large and small media outlets around the world will endlessly talk about the “modern Ibsen.” In an interview New Yorker in 2022, the author himself has certainly made it clear that there is nothing more contrary to Henrik Ibsen, whom he considers “the most self-destructive author in history.” Fosse’s self-destruction is completely different. This is a limitation to subtle graphics, the idea of ​​a line in a drawing, the simplicity of existence and the utmost desperation of this simplicity, which gives it true beauty. Fosse is about the fact that we are all mortal, and this is not a simple truth, but a very, very complex one. She just looks simple.

Fosse’s plays have been staged in more than 40 countries, including by such famous directors as Thomas Ostermeier and Robert Wilson. In Russia, the honor of discovering the main modern Norwegian playwright belongs to director Klim (Vladimir Klimenko) – back in 2002 he put at the Baltic House Theater his “Dream of Autumn”. But, perhaps, the best domestic production of this play was the somnambulistic, hypnotically beautiful performance by Yuri Butusov at the Lensovet Theater, released in 2016 and still remaining in the theater’s repertoire.

In 2018, Russia hosted an entire Yuna Fosse festival: its headliner was Alexander Ogarev’s play “Suzanne” at the School of Dramatic Art, where the main character, Ibsen’s widow slowly going mad, was played by Evgenia Simonova. A photograph of the actress in this role also adorned Fosse’s first collection, “When an Angel Walks Across the Stage,” published by the AST publishing house, which included translations of 12 of his plays—of course, Fosse’s plays are translated in Russia. And not only in Russian: the play “One Summer Day” directed by Farid Bikchantaev in the Tatar language has been running at the Kamala Theater in Kazan for ten years.

But dramaturgy is only part of what Fosse does. And if Fosse’s plays are a world heritage, then his main works of the 1980s, which continued in the 1990s in parallel with his work for the theater, that is, large novel forms, even began to be translated into English only now – obviously following the theatrical fame of the author. And here Fosse, which is obviously better known to the Norwegians, is an outstanding successor of Proust. With slow time in this very fast world, few are ready to work the same way as he: where there were not enough trilogies, Fosse created multi-volume philosophical novels (including the seven-volume Septology, 2019–2021), which discuss – in addition to unchangeable by death and love – including theories newly discovered in Catholic theology of the 20th century that claim to be the truth. Apparently, it is not boring, but it is no less complex than Proust. In his youth, Vosse considered himself something of an anarchist, a communist, and at the same time he studied literary criticism in Bergen, but even then he was much interested in ancient German theology: there was something to fill the slowly passing time.

Both prose and dramaturgy of Fosse, and his translations into his own language – from Euripides to Kafka – for a world that by default now requires the writer to be sensational, are extremely superficial and therefore non-sensational.

Apparently, the decision of the Nobel Committee took this into account – its decisions of recent years in this sense prefer something opposite to sensationalism, the sensationalism of a refusal to sensationalism.

What makes it all the more interesting is how common it has become to learn that virtually all authors of such complexity, such beauty and such an inner sense of doom are known for their children’s books. Fosse is also a children’s writer: in infrequent interviews, he likes to talk about his serious illness in childhood, to which he largely traces his creativity, the feeling of doom and beauty of the world around him, which together made him understand what he would do in his long life. life when he was seven years old. But, if you think about it, in fact, who, if not children, in this world knows the correct answers to those questions that Fosse asks into the void to anyone who is ready to leisurely reflect on them? Only then are these answers somehow forgotten, and Yun Fosse is needed to remember what we once knew.

Dmitry Butrin, Marina Shimadina, Esther Steinbock