The premiere of Dead Class inaugurated the period of the Theatre of Death. Kantor was no longer experimenting as he had before. Dead Class was his first fully grown, fully mature work, standing on its own, testifying to Kantor's fully developed, individual aesthetic as a director and an artist. Dead Class was followed by four major plays, which all belong to Kantor's Theatre of Death: Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Die (1984), I Shall Never Return (1988), and Today Is My Birthday (1991). The less well-known cricotages, Where Are the Snows of Yesterday (1982) and Machine of Love and Death (1987), also belong to this period, but are generally not considered fully developed productions.

Rehearsals for Dead Class began, according to various accounts, in December 1974 or January 1975. Fragments of the spectacle were first performed on 11 September 1975, for the 140 participants of the XI Congress of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Its official premiere, however, took place on 15 November 1975, at the Krzysztofory Gallery in Cracow. Located underground in a Gothic basement off Cracow's Main Market Square, the Krzysztofory Gallery had a somber, tomblike atmosphere ideally suited to Kantor's play.

“Although I am not of the opinion that in this dark age it is only negativism that is fit for literature, nevertheless the affirmative view, even though it may from time to time criticize the ‘byproducts' of the age, does smack of hypocrisy.” This striking statement by Ernst Fischer is to be found in an article on Beckett that presents Fischer's ideas on modern Marxist esthetics. In fact, Beckett's work offers nothing affirmative, and for this reason it has often been regarded as simply the image of an existence characterized—in the words of Georg Lukács—by the “most fundamental pathological debasement of man.” Such judgments are by no means confined specifically to Marxist literary criticism; they also arise when attempts are made to expound Beckett against the background of metaphysics or literary history, and they are often made with the same emphasis. Though one may suppose that even Beckett's critics do not always expect from literature an affirmative statement on the modern condition, nevertheless their judgments would seem to depend on a traditional criterion of literature, namely, that it should give a representative view of life.

If Wyspiański's Akropolis is an attempt to capture, condense and understand the Polish psyche at the end of the nineteenth century, Grotowski's Akropolis is an attempt to capture, condense and understand the new twentieth-century Polish consciousness, one forever framed by the smoke from the Auschwitz ovens. The fact that Grotowski chose Akropolis as his framework for a performance piece that seeks to respond to the trauma of the Holocaust is not accidental. Grotowski enters into a dialogue with Wyspiański, but to gain an understanding of what this dialogue entails, we must first understand the historical context surrounding the publication and production history of Wyspiański's drama. At the turn of the twentieth century, around the time Jarry wrote Ubu, Poland – in tune with its bleak European image – was swept by Romantic dreams of national greatness characterized by a combination of ironic self-awareness and fatalistic determination. As Margaret Croyden sums it up: “Periodically invaded, partitioned, dismembered, oppressed, and brutalized, and itself guilty of oppression and backwardness, Poland has embodied the modern tragedy in a world dominated by great powers. It has also come to symbolize heroic resistance to those powers, resistance depicted through the years by its great writers, poets and composers, and in our time by its film and theater directors as well.” Writing Akropolis, Wyspiański followed the tradition of engaging in political dialogue about Poland's liberatory project.

tom bishop: Which of the plays of Samuel Beckett have you directed?

roger blin: All of his first plays, Godot in 1953 and Fin de partie [Endgame] in 1957. Then, later, I directed La Dernière Bande [Krapp's Last Tape]; Jean Vilar was the producer, when he was at the Recamier. It was with an actor called R. J. Chauffard, who was extremely good. Unfortunately, Beckett didn't like it very much—perhaps because he would have preferred me to play Krapp myself. I was probably too tired at the time to do it.…Then I directed Oh les beaux jours [Happy Days] with Barrault producing.

bishop: How did you first meet Sam? Was it to do Waiting for Godot?

blin: Well, we first met in 1948. He had recently finished writing Godot and had just sent off the play. His wife, Suzanne, was taking care of all this. At that time I was director at the Gaité Montparnasse. I'd just directed Strindberg's Ghost Sonata. Without knowing me at all, Beckett had been to see the play. In fact, he'd been twice. After that, he sent me his play Waiting for Godot, together with his first play, Eleuthéria, which I'm just about the only person to know.

In 1962, Eugene Barba, who was a student at Warsaw's Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Teatralna (PWST, the National School of Theatre), came to Opole as part of his internship. Eventually, he became one of Grotowski's closest collaborators and his most ardent foreign supporter. Shortly after meeting Barba, Grotowski participated in the Eighth World's Youth Festival in Helsinki, where he also met Raymonde Temkine. She visited Opole in 1963, watched a special performance of Akropolis, and was greatly impressed by Grotowski's theatre. Those two contacts augmented international perspectives of Grotowski, but to reach wider audiences, Grotowski needed a concrete theatrical piece that would appeal to international tastes. As Dariusz Kosiński notes:

As a showcase spectacle for a broader international audience, Akropolis fulfilled its function, but in Poland, initial reviews were mixed, to say the least. Puzyna notes that the production “provoked extremely tempestuous discussions.”

The challenges of rebuilding operations between the Sydney and London offices of Angus & Robertson after the Second World War were exacerbated by the tight post-war import and export restrictions between Australian, sterling and dollar areas. Although precisely determining which restrictions altered which conditions of the Australian book trade during the 1940s and 1950s is challenging; the nature of the impact of import licensing emerges most clearly in correspondence between Australian publishers, industry organisations and the Department of Trade and Customs.

During the Second World War, the Division of Import Procurement emphasised how imperative it was that space on ships destined for Australia was ‘conserved only for those commodities considered to be of primary importance to the war effort’. Post-war currency shortages accentuated the need to preserve exchange reserves, and applications for licences to import fiction in paper covered editions – more specifically books in the genres of juveniles, light romance, detectives and westerns – were not made available ‘under any consideration’.

Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857–1929) may no longer feature on the curricula of most economics students, but in terms of editions of his books published and doctoral work dedicated to his work and legacy he remains America's most famous economist. Veblen is the intellectual father of the two most influential economic schools to offer an alternative to today's mainstream economics: evolutionary economics and institutional economics. He vivisected modern capitalism and redrew the very framework of social science, and his renown goes well beyond the Ivory Tower. His name, alongside his signature concepts such as ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘vested interests’, appears in scholarly studies as well as novels and popular media, from the works of novelist John Dos Passos to Fortune Magazine. Other great economists may be cited in academic articles, but theatrical plays are rarely dedicated to their persons and their names are seldom invoked in comedy films as is Veblen's. His international reach extended far beyond the Atlantic communities: six of Veblen's books have been translated into Japanese, and at least two into Chinese.4 But who was he?

In a 1924 letter – written on the stationary of the New School for Social Research where he was employed at the time – Veblen describes himself to a certain ‘Mr. Pritchard’ as ‘an average person with few and slight ties of family or country, being born of Norwegian parents in America and educated at various American schools, and having never been hard at work or very busy‘.

Thorstein Bunde Veblen has passed into the annals of history as an academic enfant terrible: a womanising economist, atheist and iconoclast who mercilessly dissected the vices of the American leisure class, denounced the speculative vocations of their captains of industry and dismissed the entire corpus of contemporary economics and jurisprudence as empty theologies. Born to a Norwegian immigrant family on a Wisconsin farm in 1857, he grew up in a settlement inhabited by Irish and German settlers, from whom he learned both English and German early on. His foreign origins and segregated childhood, along with the autarkic principles and Lutheran morals of his parents, have often been invoked to explain Veblen's harsh denunciation of the American system. Indeed, he has been described as an ‘unacclimated alien’, an intellectual ‘wanderer’, and even an ‘interned immigrant’; a marauder on the border between the old world and the new who, like Peder Victorious in Rølvåg's epic saga about Norwegian-American immigration, nonetheless identified himself fully with neither of them.

On 27 April 1847 a young couple from the rural community of Høre in the administrative township of Vang in the Valdres region of Norway visited Pastor Carl Andreas Hansen at the Vang parsonage. They were Thomas Andersen Veblen, aged 29, and his seven-years-younger wife, Kari Torsteinsdatter Bunde. In refined handwriting, the pastor registered the two in the ministerial records as emigrants to America. Five days later, they left Høre to embark on their overseas journey to the land of promise.

This chapter aims to present the Norwegian background of Thorstein Bunde Veblen's parents, Thomas and Kari Veblen, with an emphasis on the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century until their exodus, and analyse their migration and settlement process in the upper Midwest. I do not make any particular mention of Thorstein Veblen, but I do assert that his parents’ experiences on both sides of the Atlantic may help us better to appreciate the origins of his ideas. The historical backdrop for this is illustrated by Thorstein's older brother Andrew A. Veblen in his notes The Veblen Family: Immigrant Pioneers from Valdris, and by the recollections of their father, Thomas Veblen, particularly with regards to his family background and his journey to America.

After Ireland, Norway is the country that lost the largest part of its population through migration to America, and one of the Norwegian areas that lost the most was Veblen's Valdres. Most Norwegians have some family or relation who left for America, and I am no exception. I grew up with stories about the United States and what to me seemed like an exotic tribe: the Norwegian-Americans (norskamerikanerne).

I later found it fascinating that one of these Norwegian-Americans was an important economist, but I found reading Veblen challenging. Eventually, however, I was able to make the words of a 1920 reviewer of Veblen my own:

Reading Veblen in the 1970s, the capitalism he described was as unfamiliar as Marx's ‘army of the unemployed'. Veblen's idea that business could represent some modern version of piracy sounded just as strange as when he proposed that one of the tools of business was sabotage.

Veblenists from Mars

It would seem that one's life experience refracts his or her perceptions and thoughts and that the physical spaces we inhabit influence our sense of who we are and what ultimately matters. Yet in the case of Norwegian-American political economist Thorstein Veblen this existential aspect of his seminal contributions to social science has for the most part been misconstrued or discounted altogether. In its most familiar version, Veblen has been portrayed as the marginal man from Mars whose cultural alienation as the product of the American immigrant frontier moved him to become an alienated critic of the prevailing socio-economic order. Joseph Dorfman bears primary responsibility for this misreading of Veblen's spatial groundings but others have contributed to the distortions as well. Happily, considerable effort has been made in recent years to address this shortcoming in our understanding of Veblen's life and work. Stephen Edgell provides an excellent corrective in his concisely written 2001 volume, Veblen in Perspective, while Elizabeth Watkins Jorgensen and Henry Irving Jorgensen likewise have contributed useful new material for a rethinking of past assumptions about Veblen the man. We, too, have added our own grains of revisionist sand.

Attentive observer that he was of discoveries occurring at the frontiers of the biological sciences a century ago, Thorstein Veblen, were he transported to our own time, would almost certainly be fascinated by the research of contemporary biological scientists, perhaps especially by the work of those in the thriving field of comparative genomics. Findings by genomics researchers that, for example, human DNA and the DNA of chimpanzees differ by less than 1.2 per cent would have captivated Veblen, who – we may confidently assume – would have followed with great interest scientists’ current efforts to plumb this comparatively small zone of interspecies genetic difference and to specify the particular bundle of genes that differentiates humans from chimps (and others species), as well as to identify precisely when and how these distinguishing genes emerged in the course of human evolution. At the least, Veblen would have understood the reasoning of present-day evolutionary anthropologists, paleo-neurologists and other genomic scientists when they hold that finding the human genetic differentia furnishes one of the keys to our origins as humans.

The language of the market serves a social function, which is to obscure and also to sanitise many economic encounters – especially encounters between the large business enterprise on one side and its customers, workers and suppliers on the other. On the blackboard, these encounters appear balanced: the supply curve matches that of demand; both are drawn in lines of equal width. The underlying thought is that by their weight of numbers, consumers, workers and suppliers just offset the mass of the organised firms. But of course no such balance exists in real life. There is every difference between an organised and a disorganised force, between an army and a mob. Thus, the lived experience of the relationship between the private individual and the business firm is, always and everywhere, one of a radical difference in power. The appropriate way to think about this is in terms that acknowledge the imbalance, and, although the fact is not very well known, for this purpose there already exists an economics of predator and prey.

Few authors are so perennially in the process of being rediscovered as Thorstein Veblen. Most recently, his authority has been summoned to combat the climate crisis, to uncover the meaning of life generally and what it means to be American particularly, and by those seeking to make sense of financial scandals such as those of Enron, Worldcom and Parmalat, not to mention the current global economic turmoil. His theories regarding the moral and material costs of conspicuous consumption are today echoed for wider audiences in works such as Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety and Oliver James's Affluenza, and the phrase ‘Gilded Age’ again enjoys cultural and analytical currency. This chapter contributes to this Veblen Renaissance, but neither by dwelling on the structural and cultural similarities between the crises of his time and ours, nor by using his writings to shed light on the technical origins of modern financial misdemeanours.