|
|
|
|
|
NEW DIRECTIONS
The period between the
1890s and the First World War was a period of transition. Writers were
acutely aware of changes in society, particularly those relating to science
and technology, and to human consciousness. The certainties of the Victorian
era were lost, and the modern age loomed as a frightening, unknowable
future. However, such insecurity was not exactly new. It had activated the
often-noted malaise that affected so many 19th-century writers, including
such pillars of the Victorian age as Tennyson or Matthew Arnold. Literary
historians see the 'modern' revolution as two movements, the first,
relatively optimistic phase, which ended in 1914, and a second, pessimistic
phase in the
wake of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.
Like every new movement in the arts. Modernism was antagonistic to the tradition it displaced. It was hostile not only to 19th-century moral values, but also to 19th-century techniques, the general structure of rational narrative, description and resolution. Instead of the omniscient narrator, for example, novelists preferred to convey personality through unspoken thoughts and feelings in the 'stream of consciousness' technique (the phrase originated by the American philosopher William James, brother of Henry). Modernism was self-consciously and determinedly experimental, which is one reason why it is hard to categorize as a 'movement'. Incidentally, it represented a further widening of the division between the upper reaches of literature and the lower slopes occupied by the reading public. Poetry, in particular, was to become an increasingly a minority interest.
Of course not all writers of the early 20th century were modernists. In English literature, critics draw a distinction between modernists and Edwardians - broadly, those who followed the realist tradition, such as Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), John Galsworthy (1867-1933) or H. G. Wells (1886-1946). It is today increasingly evident that this distinction is far from straightforward, and that the most revered names among the modernists (James, Conrad, the early D. H. Lawrence, even Joyce) often wrote in an 'Edwardian' way. The influential novelist and critic Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), a major figure in contemporary thinking about literary form, who scoffed at amateurish 'nuvvles', nevertheless published, as editor of the English Review, Bennett and Galsworthy, as well as James, Conrad, the Voracist Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. His four-volume masterpiece. Parade's End (1924— 28), though employing many characteristic modernist experimental devices, can be seen as a direct successor of the old, three-decked, 'condition-of-Fngland' type novel. Altogether, Modernism was more pragmatic than is often assumed.
Probably no one had more influence on modern literature than the Viennese psychologist and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In an elegy written on Freud's death, W. H. Auden called him, without exaggeration, "no more a person now but a climate of opinion'.
Freud's ideas arose from his study of neuroses. Freudian criticism, though perhaps not Freud himself, sees creativity as a form of sublimation, typically deriving from traumatic experiences in childhood, and art as a pathological phenomenon. In the words of the critic Lionel I rilling, 'the poet is a poet by reason of his sickness as well as by reason of his power'. I he greatest impact of Freud himself resulted from his theories of the unconscious mind and the nature of repression, his study of the development of sexual instincts in young children, and his 'interpretation of dreams' (the title of his first great book). Many of his ideas have given rise to popularised conceptions with which everyone is now familiar: for example, the Oedipus Complex, the sexual rivalry between a son and father for the mother (whence the Electra Complex, rivalry between daughter and mother for the father); the death wish; phallic symbols, the significance, conscious or unconscious, of any penis-shaped object as a symbol of male sexuality; penis envy, the desire of a girl for such an organ. The latter doctrine in particular has aroused outrage amongst feminists, and in fact very little of Freud's teaching is now accepted without considerable qualification. However, that does not lessen its impact on the modernists.
Freud would have been less influential had he not also been a fine writer. Some of his case studies are true works of art, and he was also a penetrating literary critic, his writings on Hamlet, Oedipus and other characters marking the beginning of a long, continuous, tradition of Freudian biography.
After the writings of Freud, the most influential work was The Golden Bough of the British anthropologist. Sir James G. Frazer (1854— 1941), the first volume of which was published m 1907. It is a monumental comparative study of myth and religion, the fundamental thesis of which is that humanity progresses from magic, through religion, to science. Frazer's eloquent style added to its appeal. His work inevitably relied on secondary sources and his ideas have long been overtaken, but his description of primitive society and his discussion of such matters as fertility rites, sacrifice, the dying god, etc. had a profound effect on writers - which was in fact a greater effect than they had on anthropologists.
CRAFT OF THE NOVEL
The novel thrived in the
early years of this century, and so did the idea of the novel which, among
the modernists, was turning into a very different creature. According to the
literary theories of Flaubert and Henry James, style and form were
everything, or almost everything, and subject matter was unimportant. The
novel was an autonomous aesthetic creation, not an imitation of life, on
which the creator - the novelist -should not intrude. Aesthetic
considerations of this kind were the chief concern of the greatest novelists
of the period, including Proust, Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was physically frail, an asthmatic, who as a young man moved freely m Parisian high society. There he acquired the material for his single great masterpiece, A la recherche dii temps perdu (published in seven sections between 1913 and 1927), translated as Remembrance of Things Past. The work became practically his only interest during his latter years when he lived as a recluse, seldom venturing outside in daytime, an existence only partly prescribed by deteriorating health. The subject of this seminal novel, which ran to about 3,000 pages, is Time and Memory. The authentic past can only be recaptured through involuntary memory, triggered by an apparently insignificant incident or object. Through such 'privileged moments', the past is recaptured. All traditional ideas of narrative are abandoned, and events and feelings are fed through a narrator figure, Marcel (not, in spite of similarities, an alter ego). Proust's precision in describing human consciousness echoes Henry James and Joyce; his idea of insignificant past incidents assuming later importance is found in Virginia Woolf, and his notion of human relationships forming a pattern like a piece of music was adopted by Anthony Powell in A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of À la recherche du temps perdu (in English, In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927.
Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-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 prominent pathologist 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 well-off and cultured Jewish family. She was a literate and well-read woman. 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.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, part three of his novel. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber, whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of application. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting Swann's Way, the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913. Proust had a close relationship with his mother. 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 did not move from his parents' apartment until after both were dead (Tadié).
Proust, who was homosexual, was one of the first European novelists to treat homosexuality openly and at length. His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family home. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905, leaving him a considerable inheritance. (In today's terms, a principal of about $6 million, with a monthly income of about $15,000.) 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.
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 verte 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 Proust's universal protagonist recalls having translated 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 an imperfect command of English. In order to compensate for this he made his translations a group affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime lover Reynaldo Hahn, then by Proust again finally polished. Confronted about his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin" (Tadié). The Bible of Amiens, with Proust's extended introduction, was published in French in 1904. 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 published in various journals pastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation may have allowed Proust to solidify his own style. 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 continually during this period. The rough outline of the work centered on a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child 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.
Begun in 1909, À la recherche du temps perdu consists of seven volumes spanning some 3,200 pages and teeming with more than 2,000 literary 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 final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother, Robert. The book was translated into English by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, appearing as Remembrance of Things Past between 1922 and 1931. In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of the book by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, based on the latest and most authoritative French text. Subsequently, the title of the novel was more accurately translated as In Search of Lost Time and is now often referred to as such. 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.
Born and raised in Catholic Ireland, James Joyce (1882—1941) set all his fiction in his native city of Dublin, although from 1904 he abandoned country and religion and lived abroad. His first, autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published, largely clue to the enthusiasm of Ezra Pound, in 1916, throws light on his early life and his discover}' of his vocation. It adopts a stream-of-consciousness narrative reflecting the hero's development and foreshadows the astonishingly original use of language that characterises his greatest work, Ulysses (1922; not published in Britain until 1936 due to alleged obscenities). Ostensibly it covers a single day in the life of three characters in Dublin (Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, the hero of Portrait of the Artist). Its 18 episodes roughly reflect equivalents in the Odyssey, and this mythic structure contributes to the creation of an epic from superficially mundane material. Past and present interact, trivial events acquire sometimes profound significance, and extreme erudition mingles with coarse humour. Joyce's highly allusive style, including parodies of various literary forms, does not make for easy reading, and his last book Finnegans Wake (1939) is inaccessible to the ordinary reader without a comprehensive gloss. Newcomers to Joyce, possibly the most influential novelist of the century, wisely start with his early short stories, Dubliners (1914), which are relatively conventional in technique.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its highly controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
Although he spent most of his adult life
outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional universe is firmly
rooted in his native Dublin, the city which provides the settings and much
of the subject matter for all his fiction. In particular, his tempestuous
early relationship with the Irish Roman Catholic Church is reflected through
a similar inner conflict in his recurrent alter ego Stephen Dedalus. As the
result of his minute attentiveness to a personal locale and his self-imposed
exile and influence throughout Europe, notably in Paris, Joyce became
paradoxically one of the most cosmopolitan yet one of the most
regionally-focused of all the English language writers of his time.
Dublin, 1882–1904
In 1882, James Augustine Joyce was born into a
Roman Catholic family in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He was the oldest of
10 surviving children; two of his siblings died of typhoid. His father's
family, originally from Fermoy in Cork, had once owned a small salt and lime
works. Joyce's father and paternal grandfather both married into wealthy
families. In 1887, his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was appointed rate
(i.e., a local property tax) collector by Dublin Corporation; the family
subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of Bray 12 miles
(19 km) from Dublin. Around this time Joyce was attacked by a dog; this
resulted in a lifelong canine phobia. He also suffered from a fear of
thunderstorms, which his deeply religious aunt had described to him as being
a sign of God's wrath.In 1891,
Joyce wrote a poem, "Et Tu Healy," on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell.
His father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic church and
at the resulting failure to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The elder Joyce
had the poem printed and even sent a copy to the Vatican Library. In
November of that same year, John Joyce was entered in Stubbs Gazette (an
official register of bankruptcies) and suspended from work. In 1893 John
Joyce was dismissed with a pension. This was the beginning of a slide into
poverty for the family, mainly due to John's drinking and general financial
mismanagement. James Joyce was initially educated by the Jesuit order at
Clongowes Wood College, a boarding school near Sallins in County Kildare,
which he entered in 1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no
longer pay the fees. Joyce then studied at home and briefly at the Christian
Brothers school on North Richmond Street, Dublin, before he was offered a
place in the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, in 1893. The offer
was made at least partly in the hope that he would prove to have a vocation
and join the Order. Joyce, however, was to reject Catholicism by the age of
16, although the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas would remain a strong
influence on him throughout his life.He enrolled at the recently established
University College Dublin in 1898. He studied modern languages, specifically
English, French and Italian. He also became active in theatrical and
literary circles in the city. His review of Ibsen's New Drama, his first
published work, was published in 1900 and resulted in a letter of thanks
from the Norwegian dramatist himself. Joyce wrote a number of other articles
and at least two plays (since lost) during this period. Many of the friends
he made at University College Dublin would appear as characters in Joyce's
written works. He was an active member of the Literary and Historical
Society, University College Dublin, and presented his paper "Drama and Life"
to the L&H in 1900. After graduating from UCD in 1903, Joyce left for Paris
to "study medicine", but in reality he squandered money his family could ill
afford. He returned to Ireland after a few months, when his mother was
diagnosed with cancer. Fearing for her son's "impiety", his mother tried
unsuccessfully to get Joyce to make his confession and to take communion.
She finally passed into a coma and died on August 13, Joyce having refused
to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside. After her
death he continued to drink heavily, and conditions at home grew quite
appalling. He scraped a living reviewing books, teaching and singing — he
was an accomplished tenor, and won the bronze medal in the 1904 Feis
Ceoil.On 7 January 1904, he attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it
rejected by the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his
twenty-second birthday, to revise the story and turn it into a novel he
planned to call Stephen Hero. However, he never published this novel in this
original name. This was the same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman
from Galway city who was working as a chambermaid at Finn's Hotel in Dublin.
On 16 June 1904, they went on their first date, an event which would be
commemorated by providing the date for the action of Ulysses. Joyce remained
in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. After one of his alcoholic
binges, he got into a fight over a misunderstanding with a man in St.
Stephen's Green; he was picked up and dusted off by a minor acquaintance of
his father, Alfred H. Hunter, who brought him into his home to tend to his
injuries. Hunter was rumored to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife,
and would serve as one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the main protagonist
of Ulysses. He took up with medical student Oliver St John Gogarty, who
formed the basis for the character Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. After staying
in Gogarty's Martello Tower for 6 nights he left in the middle of the night
following an altercation which involved Gogarty shooting a pistol at some
pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed. He walked all the way back to Dublin
to stay with relatives for the night, and sent a friend to the tower the
next day to pack his possessions into his trunk. Shortly thereafter he
eloped to the continent with Nora.
1904–1920: Trieste and Zurich
Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first
to Zürich, where he had supposedly acquired a post teaching English at the
Berlitz Language School through an agent in England. It turned out that the
English agent had been swindled, but the director of the school sent him on
to Trieste, which was part of Austria-Hungary until World War I (today part
of Italy). Once again, he found there was no position for him, but with the
help of Almidano Artifoni, director of the Trieste Berlitz school, he
finally secured a teaching position in Pula, then also part of
Austria-Hungary (today part of Croatia). He stayed there, teaching English
mainly to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pula base, from
October 1904 until March 1905, when the Austrians — having discovered an
espionage ring in the city — expelled all aliens. With Artifoni's help, he
moved back to the city of Trieste and began teaching English there. He would
remain in Trieste for most of the next 10 years.Later
that year Nora gave birth to their first child, Giorgio. Joyce then managed
to talk his brother, Stanislaus, into joining him in Trieste, and secured
him a position teaching at the school. Ostensibly his reasons were for his
company and offering his brother a much more interesting life than the
simple clerking job he had back in Dublin, but in truth, he hoped to augment
his family's meagre income with his brother's earnings. Stanislaus and James
had strained relations the entire time they lived together in Trieste, with
most arguments centering on James' frivolity with money and drinking
habits.With chronic wanderlust much of his early life, Joyce became
frustrated with life in Trieste and moved to Rome in late 1906, having
secured a position working in a bank in the city. He intensely disliked
Rome, however, and ended up moving back to Trieste in early 1907. His
daughter Lucia was born in the summer of the same year. Joyce returned to
Dublin in the summer of 1909 with Giorgio, in order to visit his father and
work on getting Dubliners published. He visited Nora's family in Galway,
meeting them for the first time (a successful visit, to his relief). When
preparing to return to Trieste he decided to bring one of his sisters, Eva,
back to Trieste with him in order to help Nora look after the home. He would
spend only a month back in Trieste before again heading back to Dublin, this
time as a representative of some cinema owners in order to set up a regular
cinema in Dublin. The venture was successful (but would quickly fall apart
in his absence), and he returned to Trieste in January 1910 with another
sister in tow, Eileen. While Eva became very homesick for Dublin and
returned a few years later, Eileen spent the rest of her life on the
continent, eventually marrying Czech bank cashier František Schaurek. Joyce
returned to Dublin briefly in the summer of 1912 during his years-long fight
with his Dublin publisher, George Roberts, over the publication of
Dubliners. His trip was once again fruitless, and on his return he wrote the
poem "Gas from a Burner" as a thinly veiled invective against Roberts. It
was his last trip to Ireland, and he never again came closer to Dublin than
London, despite the many pleas of his father and invitations from fellow
Irish writer William Butler Yeats. Joyce came up with many money-making
schemes during this period of his life, such as his attempt to become a
cinema magnate back in Dublin, as well as a frequently discussed but
ultimately abandoned plan to import Irish tweeds into Trieste. His expert
borrowing skills saved him from indigence. His income was made up partially
from his position at the Berlitz school and from taking on private students.
Many of his acquaintances through meeting these private students proved
invaluable allies when he faced problems getting out of Austria-Hungary and
into Switzerland in 1915. One of his students in Trieste was Ettore Schmitz,
better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo; they met in 1907 and became
lasting friends and mutual critics. Schmitz was a Catholic of Jewish origin,
and became the primary model for Leopold Bloom; most of the details about
the Jewish faith included in Ulysses came from Schmitz in response to
Joyce's queries. Joyce would spend most of the rest of his life on the
Continent. It was in Trieste that he first began to be plagued by major eye
problems, which would result in over a dozen surgeries before his death. In
1915, when Joyce moved to Zürich in order to avoid the complexities (as a
British subject) of living in Austria-Hungary during World War I, he met one
of his most enduring and important friends, Frank Budgen, whose opinion
Joyce constantly sought through the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
It was also here where Ezra Pound brought him to the attention of English
feminist and publisher Harriet Shaw Weaver, who would become Joyce's patron,
providing him thousands of pounds over the next 25 years and relieving him
of the burden of teaching in order to focus on his writing. After the war he
returned to Trieste briefly, but found the city had changed, and his
relations with his brother (who had been interned in an Austrian prison camp
for most of the war due to his pro-Italian politics) were more strained than
ever. Joyce headed to Paris in 1920 at an invitation from Ezra Pound,
supposedly for a week, but he ended up living there for the next twenty
years.
1920–1941: Paris and Zurich
During this era, Joyce traveled frequently to
Switzerland for eye surgeries and treatments for Lucia, who, according to
the Joyce estate, suffered from schizophrenia. Lucia was even analyzed by
Carl Jung at the time, who was of the opinion that her father had
schizophrenia after reading Ulysses. Jung noted that she and her father were
two people heading to the bottom of a river, except that he was diving and
she was falling. In-depth knowledge of Joyce's relationship with his
schizophrenic daughter is scant, because the current heir of the Joyce
estate, Stephen Joyce, burned thousands of letters between Lucia and her
father that he received upon Lucia's death in 1982. Stephen Joyce stated in
a letter to the editor of the New York Times that "Regarding the destroyed
correspondence, these were all personal letters from Lucia to us. They were
written many years after both Nonno and Nonna [i.e. Joyce and Nora
Barnacle..] died and did not refer to them. Also destroyed were some
postcards and one telegram from Samuel Beckett to Lucia. This was done at
Sam's written request."In Paris,
Maria and Eugene Jolas nursed Joyce during his long years of writing
Finnegans Wake. Were it not for their unwavering support (along with Harriet
Shaw Weaver's constant financial support), there is a good possibility that
his books might never have been finished or published. In their now
legendary literary magazine "transition," the Jolases published serially
various sections of Joyce's novel under the title Work in Progress. He
returned to Zurich in late 1940, fleeing the Nazi occupation of France. On
11 January 1941, he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer. While at first
improved, he relapsed the following day, and despite several transfusions,
fell into a coma. He awoke at 2 a.m. on 13 January 1941, and asked for a
nurse to call his wife and son before losing consciousness again. They were
still en route when he died 15 minutes later. He is buried in the Fluntern
Cemetery within earshot of the lions in the Zurich zoo. Although two senior
Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, neither attended Joyce's
funeral, and the Irish government subsequently declined Nora's offer to
permit the repatriation of Joyce's remains. Nora, whom Joyce had finally
married in London in 1931, survived him by 10 years. She is buried now by
his side, as is their son Giorgio, who died in 1976. Ellmann reports that
when the arrangements for Joyce's burial were being made, a Catholic priest
tried to convince Nora that there should be a funeral Mass. Ever loyal, she
replied, 'I couldn't do that to him'. Swiss tenor Max Meili sang Addio
terra, addio cielo from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at the funeral service.
Marilyn on Long Island (New York) Reading
James Joyce's Ulysses
by Eve Arnold (1955)
'Can't hear with the waters of. The chit-
tering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice
bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome?
... Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night!.
My ho head halls. 1 feel as heavy as
yonder stone ... Beside the rivering waters
of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!'
Joyce, Finnegans Wake.
Place is no less important in William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose mythical Yoknapatawpha County reflects Lafayette County in Mississippi where his family had long been established and where he lived nearly all his life. The history and legends of the South, including his own family, furnish the material for most of his books and all of the better ones. Encouraged by Sherwood Anderson (1876—1941), a leading naturalistic writer famous for his stories of Winesburg, Ohio, he began writing fiction while working as a journalist in New Orleans. His first two novels were based respectively on his experiences as a trainee pilot in the Royal (British) Air Force and bohemian life in contemporary New Orleans.
Moving back to his home town of Oxford (Jefferson in the novels), Faulkner began to write the remarkable novels that presented a fictional illustration of the doom-laden history of the South, containing plenty of tragedy and horror but also much humour. Though his literary career was long and productive, Faulkner's fame rests chiefly on the novels written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, persistently experimental in style and earning him recognition as a leader of Modernism (a slightly later development in North America). The Sound and the Fury (1929) has several narrators, one of them mentally disabled. As I Lay Dying (1930) brilliantly employs the stream-of-consciousness technique. Light in August (1932), the immense and complex Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Intruder in the Dust (1940) consolidated his reputation. Faulkner also wrote short stories, including the classic 'The Bear' which is an episode in Go Down, Moses (1942), and two volumes of poetry. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1949, his best work was some years behind him, though his last novel, The Reivers (1962) is genial and entertaining.
William Faulkner
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
William Faulkner (born William Cuthbert
Falkner), (September 25, 1897–July 6, 1962) was an American author. One of
the most influential writers of the twentieth century, he was awarded the
1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. His reputation is based on his novels,
novellas, and short stories. However, he was also a published poet and an
occasional screenwriter. Most of Faulkner's works are set in his native
state of Mississippi, and he is considered one of the most important
"Southern writers," along with Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty,
and Tennessee Williams. While his work was published regularly starting in
the mid 1920s, he was relatively unknown before receiving the Nobel Prize.
He is now deemed among the greatest American writers of all time.Faulkner
was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi. He was raised
in and heavily influenced by the state of Mississippi, as well as by the
history and culture of the South as a whole. When he was four years old, his
entire family moved to the nearby town of Oxford, where he lived on and off
for the rest of his life. Oxford is the model for the town of "Jefferson" in
his fiction, and Lafayette County, Mississippi which contains the town of
Oxford, the model for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner's
great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, was an important figure in
northern Mississippi who served as a colonel in the Confederate Army,
founded a railroad, and gave his name to the town of Falkner in nearby
Tippah County. He also wrote several novels and other works, establishing a
literary tradition in the family. Colonel Falkner served as the model for
Colonel John Sartoris in his great-grandson's writing. The older Falkner was
greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which they
lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic
position of blacks and whites, his characterization of Southern characters
and timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people dwelling behind
the façades of good old boys and simpletons. After being snubbed by the
United States Army because of his height, (he was 5' 5½"), Faulkner first
joined the Canadian and then the British Royal Air Force, yet did not see
any World War I wartime action. The definitive reason for Faulkner's change
in the spelling of his last name is still unknown. Faulkner himself may have
made the change in 1918 upon joining the Air Force or, according to one
story, that a careless typesetter made an error. When the misprint appeared
on the title page of Faulkner's first book and the author was asked about
it, he supposedly replied, "Either way suits me."Although Faulkner is
heavily identified with Mississippi, he was living in New Orleans in 1925
when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, after being influenced by
Sherwood Anderson to try fiction. The small house at 624 Pirate's Alley,
just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral, is now the premises of
Faulkner House Books, and also serves as the headquarters of the Pirate's
Alley Faulkner Society. Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the
University of Virginia from 1957 until his death at Wright's Sanitorium in
Byhalia, Mississippi of a heart attack at the age of 64.
In the early 1940s, Howard Hawks invited
Faulkner to come to Hollywood to become a screenwriter for the films Hawks
was directing. Faulkner happily accepted because he badly needed the money,
and Hollywood paid well. Thus Faulkner contributed to the scripts for the
films Hawks made from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Ernest
Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. Faulkner became good friends with director
Howard Hawks, the screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, and the actors Humphrey
Bogart and Lauren Bacall. An apocryphal story regarding Faulkner during his
Hollywood years found him with a case of writer's block at the studio. He
told Hawks he was having a hard time concentrating and would like to write
at home. Hawks was agreeable, and Faulkner left. Several days passed, with
no word from the writer. Hawks telephoned Faulkner's hotel and found that
Faulkner had checked out several days earlier. It seems Faulkner had spoken
quite literally, and had returned home to Mississippi to finish the
screenplay. Faulkner's Hollywood experience is fictionalized in the Joel and
Ethan Coen 1991 film Barton Fink, whose supporting character, W.P. Mayhew,
is intended as a composite of Faulkner and his Lost Generation peer, F.
Scott Fitzgerald.
Faulkner married Estelle Oldham in June 1929 at College Hill Presbyterian
Church just outside of Oxford, Mississippi. They honeymooned on the
Mississippi Gulf Coast at Pascagoula, then returned to Oxford, first living
with relatives while they searched for a home of their own to purchase. In
1930 Faulkner purchased the antebellum home Rowan Oak, known at that time as
"The Bailey Place". He and his family lived there until his daughter Jill,
after her mother's death, sold the property to the University of Mississippi
in 1972. The house and furnishings are maintained much as they were in
Faulkner's day. Faulkner's scribblings are still preserved on the wall
there, including the day-by-day outline covering an entire week that he
wrote out on the walls of his small study to help him keep track of the plot
twists in the novel A Fable. Faulkner accomplished what he did despite a
lifelong serious drinking problem. As he stated on several occasions, and as
was witnessed by members of his family, the press, and friends at various
periods over the course of his career, he did not drink while writing, nor
did he believe that alcohol helped to fuel the creative process. It is now
widely believed that Faulkner used alcohol as an "escape valve" from the
day-to-day pressures of his regular life, including his financial straits,
rather than the more romantic vision of a brilliant writer who needed
alcohol to pursue his craft[citation needed]. Faulkner is known to have had
two extramarital affairs. One was with Howard Hawks's secretary and
script-girl, Meta Carpenter. The other, lasting from 1949 to 1953, was with
a young writer, Joan Williams, who considered him her mentor. She made her
relationship with Faulkner the subject of her 1971 novel The Wintering.
From the early 1920s to the outbreak of WWII, when Faulkner left for
Hollywood, he published 13 novels and numerous short stories, the body of
work that grounds his reputation and for which he was awarded Nobel Prize at
the early age of 52. This prodigious output, mainly driven by an obscure
writer's need for money, includes his most celebrated novels such as The
Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932),
and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short
stories. His first short story collection, These 13 (1932), includes many of
his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including "A
Rose for Emily," "Red Leaves", "That Evening Sun," and "Dry September."
Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha
County—based on, and nearly geographically identical to, Lafayette County,
of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat. Three
novels, "The Hamlet", "The Town" and "The Mansion", known collectively as
the "Snopes Trilogy" document the town of Jefferson and its environs as an
extended family headed by Flem Snopes insinuates itself into the lives and
psyches of the general populace. It is a stage wherein rapaciousness and
decay come to the fore in a world where such realities were always present,
but never so compartmentalized and well defined; their sources never so
easily identifiable. Additional works include Sanctuary (1931), a
sensationalist "pulp fiction"-styled novel, characterized by André Malraux
as "the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story." Its themes of
evil and corruption, bearing Southern Gothic tones, resonate to this day.
Requiem for a Nun (1951), a play/novel sequel to Sanctuary, is the only play
that Faulkner published, except for his The Marionettes, which he
essentially self-published -- in a few hand-written copies -- as a young
man. Faulkner is known for an experimental style with meticulous attention
to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his
peer Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of
consciousness" in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle,
cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide
variety of characters—ranging from former slaves or descendents of slaves,
to poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, to Southern
aristocrats. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1956, Faulkner
remarked, "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested
in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no
shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach
yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist
believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme
vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him".
Another esteemed Southern writer, Flannery O'Connor, stated that, "The
presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the
writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon
stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." Faulkner also
wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small printings, The
Marble Faun (1924) and A Green Bough (1933), and a collection of
crime-fiction short stories, Knight's Gambit.
Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel". He donated a portion of his Nobel winnings "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers", eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He donated another portion to a local Oxford bank to establish an account to provide scholarship funds to help educate African-American education majors at nearby Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes for what are considered as his "minor" novels: his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the 1962 novel, The Reivers, which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951 and once again for his novel A Fable in 1955. In 1946, Faulkner was one of three finalists for the first Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award. He came in second to Manly Wade Wellman.
BLOOMSBURY
Bloomsbury is an area of west London containing the University, the British Museum (and Library), many publishers, bookshops, and residential Georgian streets and squares which, in the early years of the century, were home to many mutually acquainted literary and artistic people. 'Bloomsbury', in the sense of an intellectual social circle, extended much further. It represented the essence of the post-Victorian, modernist culture, extending from literature and art to sex, family life and international relations. Bloomsbury in this sense had a profound effect on Britain, although its truly international figures were few, the most notable being the economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and the novelist Virginia Woolf. Today, Bloomsbury has become a cult, and an apparently inexhaustible subject of books. Tourists have worn a path along the bank of the River Ouse in Sussex to the spot where Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) came from a prominent literary family. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was the originator of the (British) Dictionary of National Biography, and her mother was a Duckworth, the publishing family Her sister Vanessa Bell was, like her husband Clive, an artist, who designed jackets for the Hogarth Press, set up by Virginia and her husband Leonard in 1917. Virginia, a woman of ethereal beauty and, like so many of the Bloomsbury group, bisexual, married Leonard, social reformer and author, in 1912.
Woolf, whose life was punctuated by nervous breakdowns, was an experimental novelist often compared with [ovce. Besides her own work, she was a stimulating commentator in her luminously intelligent essays and in her feminist criticism, for example, A Room of One's Own, 1929. Her early novels, The Voyage Out (1915, but written earlier) and Night and Day (1919) were relatively realistic. The interval between them was largely occupied with the Hogarth Press, which published Katharine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot, among others.
Her reputation as England's leading modernist author was established in the 1920s by Jacob's Room (1922), based on the life and death of a beloved brother; Mrs Dalloway (1925), a classic using the stream-of-conscious-ness technique; To the Lighthouse (1927), employing the same technique to explore male-female conflict and based on her parents; and The Waves (1931), her most boldly experimental (and difficult) novel, and considered by some critics to be her masterpiece. The eponymous Orlando (1928), is alternatively male and female through four centuries. Something of a departure, it was her most successful novel and dedicated to Vita Sackville West, a woman of shared affinities. Her last novel Between the Acts (1941) returns to the stream-of-consciousness technique and celebrates traditional English values in the shadow of war.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Adeline)
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English
novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary
figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a
significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury
Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of
One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room
of her own if she is to write fiction."
Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London to Sir Leslie Stephen, considered
the father of the Bloomsbury Group, and Julia Prinsep Stephen (born Jackson)
(1846–1895), she was educated by her parents in their literate and
well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Virginia's
parents had each been married previously, and their spouses had died.
Consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages:
Julia's children with her first husband Herbert Duckworth: George Duckworth
(1868–1934); Stella Duckworth (1869–1897); and Gerald Duckworth (1870–1937).
Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870–1945), Leslie's daughter with Minny Thackeray,
who was declared mentally disabled and lived with them until she was
institutionalised in 1891 to the end of her life; and Leslie and Julia's
children: Vanessa Stephen (1879–1961); Thoby Stephen (1880–1906); Virginia;
and Adrian Stephen (1883–1948). Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor,
critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray (he was the
widower of Thackeray's eldest daughter) meant that Woolf was raised in an
environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. Henry
James, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron (an aunt of
Julia Stephen), and James Russell Lowell, who was made Virginia's godfather,
were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well
connected. Descended from an attendant of Marie Antoinette, she came from a
family of renowned beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as
models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers. Supplementing
these influences was the immense library at 22 Hyde Park Gate, from which
Virginia (unlike her brothers, who were formally educated) was taught the
classics and English literature. According to her memoirs her most vivid
childhood memories, however, were not of London but of St Ives in Cornwall,
where the family spent every summer until 1895. The family stayed in their
home called the Talland House, which looked out over the Porthminster Bay.
Memories of the family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially
the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction she wrote in later years,
notably To the Lighthouse. She also based the summer home in Scotland after
the Talland House and the Ramsay family after her own family. The sudden
death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half
sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several
nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most
alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalized. Her breakdowns and
subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have claimed, were
also induced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subject to by their
half-brothers George and Gerald (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical
essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate). Throughout her life,
Woolf was plagued by drastic mood swings. Though these
recurring mental breakdowns greatly affected her social functioning, her
literary abilities remained intact. Modern diagnostic techniques have led to
a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness which coloured her
work, relationships, and life, and eventually led to her suicide. Following
the death of her father in 1904 and her second serious nervous breakdown,
Virginia, Vanessa, and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate, and bought a house at
46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Following studies at King's College London,
Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan
Grant, and Leonard Woolf, who together formed the nucleus of the
intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group which came to notorious
fame in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax Virginia Woolf participated in,
dressed as a male Abyssinian royalty. Virginia Stephen married writer
Leonard Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a
"penniless Jew." The couple shared a close bond, and in 1937 Woolf wrote in
her diary "Love-making — after 25 years can’t be attained by my unattractive
countenance ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted, a pleasure
that I have never felt." They also collaborated professionally, in 1917
founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published most of Woolf's
work. The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922,
Woolf met Vita Sackville-West. After a tentative start, they began a
relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s. In 1928, Woolf presented
Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous
hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by
Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming
love letter in literature." After their affair ended, the two women remained
friends until Woolf's death. After completing the manuscript of her last
(posthumously published) novel Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a
depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The war, the
Luftwaffe's destruction of her London homes, as well as the cool reception
given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry, worsened her condition
until she was unable to work.On 28 March 1941, after having a nervous
breakdown, Woolf drowned herself by weighing her pockets with stones and
walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until
April 18. Her husband buried her cremated remains under a tree in the garden
of their house in Rodmell, Sussex. In her last note to her husband she
wrote:
"I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. "
Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family.[5] Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd. This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost Modernists, though she disdained some artists in this category. Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was anti-Semitic and a snob, it seems that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist. Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes. She was also criticized by some as an anti-Semite, despite her marriage to a Jewish man. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." However, in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard's Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality."Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings - often wartime environments - of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars. To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel. Her last work, Between the Acts (1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation - all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history. While nowhere near a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.
Technically, E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was a more traditional novelist. The novel, he famously said, 'tells a story'. He established his reputation with Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room With a View (1907) and, conclusively, with Howard's End (1910), a brilliant encapsulation of contemporary middle-class mores, which ends with Forster's famous motto, 'Only Connect ... ', signifying his commitment to sympathetic relationships as the foundation of a civilized existence. During the rest of his life he wrote only two more novels: Maurice (1971), celebrating a homosexual relationship, which he declined to publish during his lifetime, and his most famous, A Passage to India (1924), the fruit of two visits to the subcontinent that cemented his hatred of imperialism. Sexual deviance, then highly improper, no doubt contributed to Forster's humane liberalism (he was the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties). Besides his few but intensely evocative novels, he wrote short stories and fine and accessible commentaries on English literature, notably in Aspects of the Novel (1927).
As the son of a Nottingham miner, the connections of D. H. Lawrence (1883-1930) with Bloomsbury were remote, though when living in London he became friendly with several of the group, including the critic David Garnett, the new Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He was a born — and prolific - writer, of poetry, criticism, travel, plays, essays and short stories, as well as novels. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), was published thanks to Ford Madox Ford, who had been impressed by his early poetry. Sons and Lovers (1914), based on his childhood, exemplified the intensity of Lawrence's passions, but The Rainbow (1915), one of his best, ran into trouble through alleged obscenity and for some time he was unable to find a publisher for Women in Love (privately printed 1920).
In 1912, Lawrence ran off with Frieda, the German wife of a Nottingham professor, and from 1919 they lived a peripatetic life. Australia provided the setting for Kangaroo (1923) and Mexico for The Plumed Serpent (1926). Although the real subject of his last novel is the destructive effects of industrialism on human consciousness, Lawrence's frank treatment of sex prevented publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover until 30 years after his death from tuberculosis at the age of 44.
WASTELANDS
WAR POETS
The First World War had a dramatic effect on literature. All the great works
of Modernism, if not actually concerned with the War, are affected by it.
The term 'war poets' signifies a disparate group in whose work the War plays
the major part, often because, sadly, the poet himself did not survive it.
Rupert Brooke, a young Georgian, was probably the most popular with -
civilian -readers, though not with critics. He died early (April 1915),
before the hideous experience of the trenches had obliterated the curiously
exalted spirit in which, at the outset, war was regarded as a liberating,
cleansing experience.Julian Grenfell (fatally wounded May 1915) also died
before disillusion led Edmund Blunden (a survivor) to the realisation that
only 'the War had won, and would go on winning'. Other survivors included
Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, a major though idiosyncratic writer, and
Ivor Gurney. Among non-survivors were Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and
Wilfred Owen.
ELIOT
Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, where
he wrote some of the satirical poems in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(1917), T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888-1965) left the U.S.A. in 1914 and
settled in London, eventually becoming an influential publisher at Faber and
Faber. Like many others, he was encouraged by Ezra Pound, to whom The Waste
Land (1922) is dedicated. Among other important influences were Dante,
the Elizabethans Jacobeans, especially Donne, and Christian mystics (Eliot
joined the Anglican Church in 1927). The Waste Land, the most influential
(though not the most read) poem of the century, is a pessimistic view of the
desolation of European civilization after the war. In five books, mainly in
free verse, it is uncompromisingly intellectual, full of complex and learned
references which are not much clarified by Eliot's notes (for further
elucidation of a transcription from the Sanskrit Upanishads, the reader is
advised to consult a scholarly work in German). Eliot's poetic drama.
'Sweeney Agonistes' (published in the 1936 Collected Poems, but written ten
years earlier) turned him towards the theatre. His most successful verse
play, often revived, was Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about the murder of
Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral and first staged there. The Cocktail
Party (1950) was also a popular and critical success. The work that some
critics think challenges The Waste Land as Eliot's masterpiece is the
sequence Four Quartets (1943), 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', "The Dry
Salvages' and 'Little Gidding'. It is suffused with Anglo-Catholic
mysticism, dwells on time, memory and consciousness and offers some hope of
reconciliation that is hardly discernible in The Waste Land. Eliot also
wrote several volumes of profound and original social and literary
criticism, not forgetting humorous verses for children about cats.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (26 September 1888–4 January 1965), was a poet, dramatist, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot was born in the United States, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39. Of his nationality and its role in his work, T.S. Eliot said: "[My poetry] wouldn’t be what it is if I’d been born in England, and it wouldn’t be what it is if I’d stayed in America. It’s a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."
treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis; his mother, born Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843–1929), wrote poems and was also a social worker. Eliot was the last of six surviving children; his parents were both 44 years old when he was born. His four sisters were between eleven and nineteen years older than he; his brother was eight years older. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns. From 1898 to 1905, Eliot was a day student at Smith Academy, a preparatory school for Washington University. At the academy, Eliot studied Latin, Greek, French, and German. Upon graduation, he could have gone to Harvard University, but his parents sent him to Milton Academy (in Milton, Massachusetts, near Boston) for a preparatory year. There he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard, where he earned a B.A., from 1906 to 1909. During this time, he read Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature, where, by his own admission, he first came across Laforgue, Rimbaud, and Verlaine. The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems, and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken. The next year, he earned a master's degree at Harvard. In the 1910–1911 school year, Eliot lived in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and touring the continent. Returning to Harvard in 1911 as a doctoral student in philosophy, Eliot studied the writings of F. H. Bradley, Buddhism and Indic philology (learning Sanskrit and Pāli to read some of the religious texts). He was awarded a scholarship to attend Merton College, Oxford, in 1914, and, before settling there, he visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer program in philosophy. When the First World War broke out, however, he went to London and then to Oxford. In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote "I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society)" and then added a complaint that he was still a virgin. Less than four months later, he was introduced by Thayer, then also at Oxford, to Cambridge governess Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Eliot was not happy at Merton and declined a second year there. Instead, on 26 June 1915, he married Vivienne in a register office. After a short visit, alone, to the U. S. to see his family, he returned to London and took a few teaching jobs such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University of London. He continued to work on his dissertation and, in the spring of 1916, sent it to Harvard, which accepted it. Because he did not appear in person to defend his dissertation, however, he was not awarded his PhD. (In 1964, the dissertation was published as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.) During Eliot's university career, he studied with George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, Henri Bergson, C. R. Lanman, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim. Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivien (the spelling she preferred) while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have suggested that Vivien and Russell had an affair , but these allegations have never been confirmed. Eliot, in a private paper, written in his sixties, confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate School where he taught the young John Betjeman, and later at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. To earn extra money, he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London, where he worked on foreign accounts. In August 1920, Eliot met James Joyce on a trip to Paris, accompanied by Wyndham Lewis. After the meeting, Eliot said he found Joyce arrogant (Joyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the time), but the two soon became friends with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris. In 1925, Eliot left Lloyds to join the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), where he remained for the rest of his career, becoming a director of the firm. In 1927, Eliot took two important steps in his self-definition. On June 29 he converted to Anglicanism and in November he dropped his American citizenship and became a British subject. In 1928, Eliot summarised his beliefs when he wrote in the preface to his book, For Lancelot Andrewes that "the general point of view [of the book's essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion." By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard University offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932-1933 academic year, he accepted, leaving Vivien in England. Upon his return in 1933, Eliot officially separated from Vivien. He avoided all but one meeting with his wife between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. (Vivien died at Northumberland House, a mental hospital north of London, where she was committed in 1938, without ever having been visited by Eliot, who was still her husband.) From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat with his friend, John Davy Hayward, who gathered and archived Eliot's papers and styled himself Keeper of the Eliot Archive. He also collected Eliot's pre-"Prufrock" verse, commercially published after Eliot's death as Poems Written in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge in 1965. Eliot's second marriage was happy but short. On January 10, 1957, he married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, to whom he was introduced by Collin Brooks. In sharp contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Miss Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August 1949. Like his marriage to Vivien, the wedding was kept a secret to preserve his privacy. The ceremony was held in a church at 6.15 a.m. with virtually no one other than his wife's parents in attendance. Valerie was 37 years younger than her husband. Since Eliot's death she has dedicated her time to preserving his legacy; she has edited and annotated The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land.
Eliot died of emphysema in London on January 4, 1965. For many years, he had health problems owing to his heavy smoking, often being laid low with bronchitis or tachycardia. His body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and, according to Eliot's wishes, the ashes taken to St Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which Eliot's ancestors emigrated to America. There, a simple wall plaque commemorates him with a quote from his poem, "East Coker": "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning." On the second anniversary of his death, a large stone placed on the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey was dedicated to Eliot. This commemoration contains his name, an indication that he had received the Order of Merit, dates, and a quotation from his poem, "Little Gidding": "the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living."
Rainer Maria Rilke
see also
(in Russian):
Marina Tsvetaeva
"Rainer Maria Rilke"
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rainer Maria Rilke (also Rainer Maria von Rilke) (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926) is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century poets. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets. He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.
Life
1875-1896
He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague,
Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now the Czech Republic). His childhood
and youth in Prague were sorrowful. His father, Josef Rilke (1838-1906),
became a railway official after an unsuccessful military career. His mother,
Sophie ("Phia") Entz (1851-1931), came from a well-to-do Prague family, the
Entz-Kinzelbergers, who lived in a palace on the Herrengasse (Panská) 8,
where René also spent much of his early years. Despite his mother's Jewish
background, Rilke was raised Roman Catholic[citation needed]. The
relationship between Phia and her only son was encumbered by her prolonged
mourning for her elder daughter who was lost after only a week of life. In
fact, during Rilke's early years Phia acted as if she sought to recover the
lost girl through the boy by dressing him in girl's clothing when he was
young, and making him act like a girl, etc.. The parents' marriage fell
apart in 1884. His parents pressured the poetically and artistically gifted
youth into entering a military academy, which he attended from 1886 until
1891, when he left due to illness. From 1892 to 1895 he was tutored for the
university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895. In 1895 and 1896, he
studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Prague and Munich.
1897-1902
In 1897 in Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the
widely traveled intellectual and lady of letters Lou Andreas-Salome
(1861-1937). (Rilke changed his first name from "René" to the more masculine
Rainer at Lou's urging.) His intense relationship with this married woman,
with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. But
even after their separation, Lou continued to be Rilke's most important
confidante until the end of his life. Having trained from 1912 to 1913 as a
psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis
with Rilke. In 1898, Rilke undertook a journey lasting several weeks to
Italy. In 1899, he traveled with Lou and her husband, Friedrich Andreas, to
Moscow where he met the novelist Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August 1900, a
second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to Moscow
and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of Boris Pasternak and
Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Later, "Rilke called two places his
home: Bohemia and Russia".In autumn 1900, Rilke stayed at the artists'
colony at Worpswede, where his portrait was painted by the
proto-expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker (illus. above). It was here that
he got to know the sculptress Clara Westhoff (1878-1954), whom he married
the following spring. Their daughter Ruth (1901-1972) was born in December
1901. However, Rilke was not one for a middle-class family life; in the
summer of 1902, Rilke left home and traveled to Paris to write a monograph
on the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Still, the relationship between
Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life.
1902-1910
At first, Rilke had a difficult time in Paris, an experience that he
called on in the first part of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte
Laurids Brigge. At the same time, his encounter with modernism was very
stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved in the sculpture of Rodin, and
then with the work of Paul Cézanne. For a time he acted as Rodin's
amanuensis, eventually writing a long essay on Rodin and his work. Rodin
taught him the value of objective observation, which led to Rilke's
Dinggedichten ("thing-poems"), a famous example of which is "Der Panther"
("The Panther"). During these years, Paris increasingly became the writer's
main residence. The most important works of the Paris period were Neue
Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (Another Part
of the New Poems) (1908), the two "Requiem" poems (1909), and the novel The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January
1910.
1910-1919
Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino,
near Trieste, home of Countess Marie of Thurn and Taxis. There, in 1912, he
began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished
for a decade due to a long-lasting creativity crisis. The outbreak of World
War I surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to
Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the
greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent
affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard. Rilke was called up at the
beginning of 1916, and he had to undertake basic training in Vienna.
Influential friends interceded on his behalf, and he was transferred to the
War Records Office and discharged from the military on 9 June 1916. He spent
the subsequent time once again in Munich, interrupted by a stay on Hertha
Koenig's Gut Bockel in Westphalia. The traumatic experience of military
service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost
completely silenced him as a poet.
1919-1926
On 11 June 1919, Rilke traveled from Munich to Switzerland. The outward
motive was an invitation to lecture in Zürich, but the real reason was the
wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up once again his work on the
Duino Elegies. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved
to be very difficult. Among other places, Rilke lived in Soglio, Locarno,
and Berg am Irchel. Only in the summer of 1921 was he able to find a
permanent residence in the Chateau de Muzot in the commune of Veyras, close
to Sierre in Valais. In May 1922, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart purchased
the building so that Rilke could live there rent-free. In an intense
creative period, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies within several weeks in
February 1922. Before and after, he wrote both parts of the poem cycle
Sonnets to Orpheus containing 55 entire sonnets. Rilke afterwards called it
"the great giving."[citation needed] Both works together constitute the high
points of Rilke's work. From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly had to struggle
with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a sanatorium in
Territet, near Montreux, on Lake Geneva. His long stay in Paris between
January and August 1925 was an attempt to escape his illness through a
change in location and living conditions. Despite this, numerous important
individual poems appeared in the years 1923-1926 (including Gong and
Mausoleum), as well as a comprehensive lyrical work in French. Only shortly
before his death was Rilke's illness diagnosed as leukemia. The poet died on
29 December 1926 in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland, and was laid to
rest on 2 January 1927 in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp. Rilke had
believed that his death would be from blood poisoning as the result of
having been pricked by a rose thorn. He chose his own epitaph as:
Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.
Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep, under so
many lids.
Rilke's literary style
Rilke's work was highly influenced by his education and knowledge of
classic authors. Ancient gods Apollo, Hermes and hero Orpheus can be found
often as motifs in his poems and are depicted in new ways and original
interpretations (e. g. story of Eurydice, apathetic and dazed by death, not
even recognising her lover Orpheus, who descended to hell for her, in the
poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes). Other characteristic figures in Rilke's
poems are angels, roses and a character of a poet and his creative work.
Rilke often worked with metaphors, metonymy and contradictions (e. g. as in
his epitaph, rose is represented as a symbol of sleep - rose petals remind
of closed eye lids, and of awakened senses - colour, scent and fragility of
a rose). Rilke's 1898 poem, "Visions of Christ" depicted Mary Magdalene as
the mother to Jesus' child.
Quoting Susan Haskins:
"It was Rilke's explicit belief that Christ was not divine, was entirely human, and deified only on Calvary, expressed in an unpublished poem of 1893, and referred to in other poems of the same period, which allowed him to portray Christ's love for Mary Magdalene, though remarkable, as entirely human."
Fall Day
Lord, it is time. This was a very big summer.
Lay your shadows over the sundial,
and let the winds loose on the fields.
Command the last fruits to be full;
give them two more sunny days,
urge them on to fulfillment and throw
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, will never build one.
Whoever is alone now, will long remain so,
Will watch, read, write long letters
and will wander in the streets, here and there
restlessly, when the leaves blow.
What fields are fragrant as your hands?
You feel how external fragrance stands
Upon your stronger resistance.
Stars stand in images above.
Give me your mouth to soften, love;
Ah, your hair is all in idleness.
See, I want to surround you with yourself
And the faded expectation lift
From the edges of your eyebrows;
I want, as with inner eyelids sheer,
To close for you all places which appear
By my tender caresses now.
(1909)
Tanslated J.B. Leishman
Rainer Maria Rilke - Rainer Maria
Rilke "Elegie fur Marina" -
Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva
see also
(in Russian):
Marina Tsvetaeva
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (Marina Ivanovna Cvetaeva) (26 September/8 October 1892 – 31 August 1941) was a Russian poet and writer.
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. She was one of the most original of the Russian 20th-century poets. Her work was not looked kindly upon by Stalin and the Bolshevik régime; her literary rehabilitation only began in the 1960s. Tsvetaeva's poetry arose from her own deeply convoluted personality, her eccentricity and tightly disciplined use of language. Among her themes were female sexuality, and the tension in women's private emotions; she bridges the mutually contradictory schools of Acmeism and symbolism.
Much of Tsvetaeva's poetry has its roots in the depths of her displaced and disturbed childhood. Her father was Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of art history at the University of Moscow, who later founded the Alexander III Museum, which is now known as the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, was Ivan's second wife, a highly literate woman. She was also a volatile (and a frustrated) concert pianist, with some Polish ancestry on her mother's side. (This latter fact was to play on Marina's imagination, and to cause her to identify herself with the Polish aristocracy.) Marina had two half-siblings, Valeria and Andrei, who were the children of Ivan's deceased first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna Ilovaisky (daughter of the historian Dmitry Ilovaisky). Her only full sister, Anastasia, was born in 1894. Quarrels among the children were frequent and occasionally violent. There was considerable tension between Tsvetaeva's mother and Varvara's children, and Tsvetaeva's father maintained close contact with Varvara's family. Maria favoured Anastasia over Marina. Tsvetaeva's father was kind, but deeply wrapped up in his studies and distant from his family. He was also still deeply in love with his first wife; he would never get over her. Maria, for her part, had had a tragic love affair before her marriage, from which she never recovered. Maria Alexandrovna particularly disapproved of Marina's poetic inclination. She wished her daughter to become a pianist and thought her poetry was poor. In 1902, Tsvetaeva's mother contracted tuberculosis. Because it was believed that a change in climate could help cure the disease, the family travelled abroad until shortly before her death in 1906. They lived for a while by the sea at Nervi, near Genoa. There, away from the rigid constraints of a bourgeois Muscovite life, Marina was able for the first time to run free, climb cliffs, and vent her imagination in childhood games. It should be noted that there were many Russian émigré revolutionaries residing at that time in Nervi, and undoubtedly these people would have had some influence on the impressionable Marina. The children began to run wild. This state of affairs was allowed to continue until June 1904, when Marina was dispatched to school in Lausanne. Changes in the Tsvetaev residence led to several changes in school, and during the course of her travels she acquired the Italian, French, and German languages. In 1908, Tsvetaeva studied literary history at the Sorbonne. During this time, a major revolutionary change was occurring within Russian poetry: the flowering of the Russian Symbolist movement, and this movement was to colour most of her later work. It was not the theory which was to attract her, but the poetry and the immense gravity which writers such as Andrey Bely and Aleksandr Blok were capable of generating. Her own first collection of poems, Evening Album, was self-published in 1910. It attracted the attention of the poet and critic Maximilian Voloshin, whom Tsvetaeva described after his death in 'A Living Word About a Living Man'. Voloshin came to see Tsvetaeva and soon became her friend and mentor.
She began spending time at Voloshin's home in the Black Sea resort of Koktebel (trans. "Blue Height"), which was a well-known haven for writers, poets and artists. She became enamoured of the work of Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova, although she never met Blok and did not meet Akhmatova until the 1940s. Describing the Koktebel community, the émigré Viktoria Schweitzer wrote: "Here inspiration was born." At Koktebel, Tsvetaeva met Sergei (Seryozha) Yakovlevich Efron, a cadet in the Officers' Academy. She was 19, he 18: they fell in love instantly and were married in 1912, the same year as her father's project, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, was ceremonially opened, an event attended by Czar Nicholas II. Tsvetaeva's love for Efron was intense, however, this did not preclude her from having affairs, including one with Osip Mandelstam, which she celebrated in a collection of poems called Mileposts. At around the same time, she became involved in an affair[citation needed] with the poet Sofia Parnok, who was 7 years older than Tsvetaeva. The two women fell deeply in love, and the relationship profoundly affected both women's writings. She deals with the ambiguous and tempestuous nature of this relationship in a cycle of poems which at times she called The Girlfriend, and at other times The Mistake. Tsvetaeva and her husband spent summers in the Crimea until the revolution, and had two daughters: Ariadna, or Alya (born 1912) and Irina (born 1917). Then, in 1914, Efron volunteered for the front; by 1917 he was an officer stationed in Moscow with the 56th Reserve. Tsetsaeva was to witness the Russian Revolution first hand. On trains, she came into contact with ordinary Russian people and was shocked by the mood of anger and violence. She wrote in her journal: "In the air of the compartment hung only three axe-like words: bourgeois, Junkers, leeches". After the 1917 Revolution, Efron joined the White Army, and Marina returned to Moscow hoping to be reunited with her husband. She was trapped in Moscow for five years, where there was a terrible famine. She wrote six plays in verse and narrative poems, including The Tsar's Maiden (1920), and her epic about the Civil War, The Swans' Encampment, which glorified those who fought against the communists. The cycle of poems in the style of a diary or journal begins on the day of Czar Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917, and ends late in 1920, when the anti-communist White Army was finally defeated. The 'swans' of the title refers to the volunteers in the White Army, in which her husband was fighting as an officer. The Moscow famine was to exact a terrible toll on Tsvetaeva. Starvation and worry were to erode her looks. With no immediate family to turn to, she had no way to support herself or her daughters. In 1919, she placed Irina in a state orphanage, mistakenly believing that she would be better fed there. Tragically, she was mistaken, and Irina died of starvation in 1920. The child's death caused Tsvetaeva great grief and regret. In one letter, she said, 'God punished me.' During these years, Tsvetaeva maintained a close and intense friendship with the actress Sofia Evgenievna Holliday, for whom she wrote a number of plays. Many years later, she would write the novella "Povest' o Sonechke" about her relationship with Holliday, who ended up betraying her.
Exile
Berlin and Prague
In May 1922, Tsvetaeva and Ariadna left the Soviet Union and were
reunited with Efron in Berlin. There she published the collections
Separation, Poems to Blok, and the poem The Tsar Maiden. In August 1922, the
family moved to Prague. Unable to afford living accommodation in Prague
itself, with Efron studying politics and sociology at the Charles University
in Prague and living in hostels, Tsvetaeva and Ariadna found rooms in a
village outside the city. In Prague, Tsvetaeva had a passionate affair with
Konstantin Boeslavovich Rozdevitch, a former military officer. This affair
became widely known throughout émigré circles, and even to Efron himself.
Efron was devastated by the affair (this is well-documented and supported
particularly by a letter which he wrote to Voloshin on the matter). It was
bound to end disastrously, and it did. Her break-up with Rozdevitch in 1923
was almost certainly the inspiration for her great 'The Poem of the End'.
This relationship was also the inspiration for "The Poem of the Mountain".
At about the same time, a more important relationship began: Tsvetaeva's
correspondence with Boris Pasternak, who had stayed in the Soviet Union. The
two were not to meet for nearly twenty years, but for a time they were in
love, and they maintained an intimate friendship until Tsvetaeva's return to
Russia. In summer 1924, Efron and Tsvetaeva left Prague for the suburbs,
living for a while in Jiloviste, before moving on to Vsenory, where
Tsvetaeva completed "The Poem of the End", and was to conceive their son,
Georgy, whom she was to later nickname 'Mur'. Tsvetaeva wanted to name him
Boris (after Pasternak); Efron would have none of it and insisted on Georgy.
He was to be a most difficult and demanding child. Nevertheless, Tsetaeva
loved him in the only way she knew, obsessively. Ariadna was relegated
immediately to the role of mother's helper and confidante, and was
consequently robbed of much of her childhood. However, the child did not
reciprocate. The older he grew, the more difficult and obstreperous he
became.
Paris
In 1925, the family settled in Paris, where they would live for the next
14 years. At about this time Efron contracted tuberculosis, adding to the
family's difficulties. Tsvetaeva received a meagre stipend from the
Czechoslovak government, which gave financial support to artists and writers
who had lived in Czechoslovakia. In addition, she tried to make whatever she
could from readings and sales of her work. She turned more and more to
writing prose because she found it made more money than poetry. Tsvetaeva
did not feel at all at home in Paris's predominantly ex-bourgeois circle of
Russian émigré writers. Although she had written passionately pro-White
poems during the Revolution, her fellow émigrés thought that she was
insufficiently anti-Soviet, and that her criticism of the Soviet régime was
altogether too nebuluous. She was particularly criticised for writing an
admiring letter to the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the wake of this
letter, the émigré paper The Latest News, to which Tsvetaeva had been a
frequent contributor, refused point blank to publish any more of her work.
She found solace in her correspondence with other writers, including Boris
Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Czech poet Anna Teskova, and the critics
D. S. Mirsky and Aleksandr Bakhrakh.
Husband's involvement with espionage
Meanwhile, Tsvetaeva's husband was rapidly developing Soviet sympathies
and was homesick for Russia. He was, however, afraid because of his past as
a White soldier. Eventually, either out of idealism or to garner acceptance
from the Communists, he began spying for the NKVD, the forerunner of the
KGB. Alya shared his views, and increasingly turned against her mother. In
1937, she returned to the Soviet Union. Later that year, Efron too had to
return to Russia. The French police had implicated him in the murder of the
former Soviet defector Ignaty Reyss in September 1937, on a country lane
near Lausanne. After Efron's escape, the police interrogated Tsvetaeva, but
she seemed confused by their questions and ended up reading them some French
translations of her poetry. The police concluded that she was deranged and
knew nothing of the murder. (Later it was learned that Efron possibly had
also taken part in the assassination of Trotsky's son in 1936). Tsvetaeva
does not seem to have known that her husband was a spy, nor the extent to
which he was compromised. However, she was held responsible for his actions
and was ostracised in Paris because of the implication that he was involved
with the NKVD. World War II had made Europe as unsafe and hostile as Russia.
Tsvetaeva felt that she no longer had a choice.
Return to the Soviet Union
In 1939, she and her son returned to the Soviet Union. She could not
have foreseen the horrors which were in store for her. In Stalin's Russia,
anyone who had lived abroad was suspect, as was anyone who had been among
the intelligentsia before the Revolution. Tsvetaeva's sister had been
arrested before Tsvetaeva's return; although Anastasia survived the Stalin
years, the sisters never saw each other again. Tsvetaeva found that all
doors had closed to her. She got bits of work translating poetry, but
otherwise the established Soviet writers refused to help her, and chose to
ignore her plight; Aseyev, who she had hoped would assist, shyed away,
fearful for his life and position. Efron and Alya were arrested for
espionage. Alya's fiancé, it turned out, was actually an NKVD agent who had
been assigned to spy on the family. Efron was shot in 1941; Alya served over
eight years in prison. Both were exonerated after Stalin's death. In 1941,
Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga, while most families of the
Union of Soviet writers were evacuated to Chistopol. Tsvetaeva had no means
of support in Yelabuga, and on August 24, 1941 she left for Chistopol
desperately seeking for a job. On August 26, 1941, Marina Tsvetaeva and poet
Valentin Parnakh applied to the Soviet of Literature Fund asking for a job
at the LitFund's canteen. Valentin Parnakh was accepted as a doorman, while
Tsvetaeva's application for a permission to live in Chistopol was turned
down and she had to return to Yelabuga on August 28. On 31 August, 1