   #copyright

Marcel Proust

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

   CAPTION: Marcel Proust

       Born:      July 10, 1871
                  Auteuil, France
       Died:      November 18, 1922
                  Paris, France
   Occupation(s): Novelist, essayist

   Marcel-Valentin-Louis-Eugène-Georges Proust ( IPA [prust]) ( July 10,
   1871 – November 18, 1922) was a French intellectual, novelist, essayist
   and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time (in
   French À la recherche du temps perdu, also translated previously as
   Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work of twentieth-century
   fiction consisting of seven volumes published from 1913 to 1927 (the
   last three volumes posthumously).

Biography

   The son of well-to-do parents, Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern
   sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his
   mother's uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended
   the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that
   surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood
   corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much
   of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly
   the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes, that
   occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.

   Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a famous doctor and
   epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the
   causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the
   author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's
   mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured
   Jewish family. She was highly literate and well-read. Her letters
   demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of
   English was sufficient for her to provide the necessary impetus to her
   son's later attempts to translate John Ruskin (Tadié).

   By the age of nine Proust had had his first serious asthma attack, and
   thereafter he was considered by himself, his family and his friends as
   a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers.
   This village, combined with aspects of the time he spent at his
   great-Uncle's house in Auteuil became the model for the fictional town
   of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of
   Lost Time take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray on the
   occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations).

   Despite his poor health, Proust served a year (1889–90) as an enlisted
   man in the French army, stationed at Coligny Caserne in Orléans, an
   experience that provided a lengthy episode in The Guermantes Way,
   volume three of his novel. As a young man Proust was a dilettante and a
   successful social climber, whose aspirations as a writer was hampered
   by his lack of application to work. His reputation from this period, as
   a snob and an aesthete, contributed to his later troubles with getting
   Swann's Way, the first volume of his huge novel, published in 1913.

   Proust was quite close to his mother, despite her wishes that he apply
   himself to some sort of useful work. In order to appease his father,
   who insisted that he pursue a career, Proust obtained a volunteer
   position at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the summer of 1896. After
   exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave which was to
   extend for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He
   never worked at his job, and he didn't move from his parents' apartment
   until after both were dead (Tadié).
   Grave of Marcel Proust at Père Lachaise Cemetery.
   Enlarge
   Grave of Marcel Proust at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

   Proust was an intimate friend of the pianist and composer Reynaldo
   Hahn.

   His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905.
   In February of 1903 Proust's brother Robert married and left the family
   apartment. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and
   most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September of 1905. In
   addition to the grief that attended his mother's death, Proust's life
   changed due to a very large inheritance he received (in today's terms,
   a principal of about $6 million, with a monthly income of about
   $15,000). Despite this windfall, his health throughout this period
   continued to deteriorate.

   Proust spent the last three years of his life largely confined to his
   cork-lined bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to
   complete his novel. He died in 1922 and is buried in the Père Lachaise
   Cemetery in Paris.

Early writing

   Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In
   addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated and, in
   which he published, while at school, La Revue vert and La Revue lilas,
   from 1890–91 Proust published a regular society column in the journal
   Le Mensuel.(Tadie) In 1892 he was involved in founding a literary
   review called Le Banquet (also the French title of Plato's Symposium),
   and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces
   regularly in this journal and in the prestigious La Revue Blanche.

   In 1896 Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a compendium of many of these early
   pieces, was published. The book included a foreword by Anatole France,
   drawings by Mme. Lemaire, and was so sumptuously produced that it cost
   twice the normal price of a book its size.

   That year Proust also began working on a novel which was eventually
   published in 1954 and titled Jean Santeuil by his posthumous editors.
   Many of the themes later developed in In Search of Lost Time find their
   first articulation in this unfinished work, including the enigma of
   memory and the necessity of reflection; several sections of In Search
   of Lost Time can be read in first draft in Jean Santeuil. The portrait
   of the parents in Jean Santeuil is quite harsh, in marked contrast to
   the adoration with which the parents are painted in Proust's
   masterpiece. Following the poor reception of Les Plaisirs et les Jours,
   and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust gradually
   abandoned Jean Santeuil in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by
   1899.

   Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Carlyle, Emerson
   and John Ruskin. Through this reading Proust began to refine his own
   theories of art and the role of the artist in society. Also, in Time
   Regained the protagonist in Proust's magnum opus recalls having
   translating Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. The artist's responsibility is
   to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or
   explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's view of artistic
   production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so
   important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of
   Ruskin's books, including The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Bible of
   Amiens, and Praeterita (Tadié 350).

   Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French, but was
   hampered by his lack of a firm command of English. In order to
   compensate for this his translations were a group affair: sketched out
   by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie
   Nordlinger, the English cousin of his lover Reynaldo Hahn, and then
   finally polished by Proust again. When confronted by an editor about
   his method, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim
   to know Ruskin" (Tadié). The translated The Bible of Amiens was
   published in 1904, with Proust's extended introduction. Both the
   translation and the introduction were very well reviewed; Henri Bergson
   called Proust's introduction, "an important contribution to the
   psychology of Ruskin," and had similar praise for the translation
   (Tadié 433). At the time of this publication, Proust was already at
   work on translating Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, which he completed in
   June 1905, just prior to his mother's death, and published in 1906.
   Literary historians and critics have ascertained that, apart from
   Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences included Saint Simon,
   Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo
   Tolstoy

   1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer. During
   the first part of the year he wrote, and had published in various
   journals, pastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation
   allowed Proust to solidify his own style by exorcising the styles of
   writers he admired. In addition, in the spring and summer of the year
   Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that would
   later coalesce under the working title of Contre Saint-Beuve. Proust
   described what he was working on in a letter to a friend: "I have in
   progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on
   Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on pederasty
   (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on
   tombstones, a study on the novel" (Tadié 513).

   From these disparate fragments Proust began to shape a novel on which
   he worked continuously during this period. The rough outline of the
   work was centered around a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who
   during the night remembers incidents from childhood as he waits for his
   mother to come to him in the morning. The novel was to have ended with
   a critical examination of Sainte-Beuve, and a refutation of his theory
   that biography was the most important tool for understanding an
   artist's work. Present in the unfinished manuscript notebooks are many
   elements that correspond to parts of the Recherche, in particular, to
   the "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Volume 1, and to the
   final section of Volume 7. Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as
   a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work
   to a substantially different project that still contained many of the
   same themes and elements. By 1910 he was at work on À la recherche du
   temps perdu.

In Search of Lost Time

   Begun in 1909 and finished just before his death, In Search of Lost
   Time consists of seven volumes spanning some 3,200 pages and teeming
   with more than 2,000 characters. Graham Greene called Proust the
   "greatest novelist of the 20th century", and W. Somerset Maugham called
   the novel the "greatest fiction to date". Proust died before he was
   able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the last
   volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited
   by his brother, Robert.

   In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of In Search of Lost
   Time by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three
   countries, based on the latest and most authoritative French text. Its
   six volumes were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in
   2002. The first four (those which under American copyright law are in
   the public domain) have since been published in the U.S. under the
   Viking imprint and in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Proust"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
