Fame was preceded by a legal era and work as a journalist. Balzac even managed to open his own printing house, which eventually went bankrupt. He took up writing novels to earn money. And he very quickly surprised the world with the absolute maturity of his style. “The Last Chouan, or Brittany in 1800” (1829) and “Scenes from Private Life” (1830), even sparked the idea: after these works, Balzac no longer grew as an artist, but simply released into the world one work after another, after two weeks creating another novel. Be that as it may, “The Last Chouan” - the first work of Balzac, signed with his real name, absorbs all the components of the work of the writer, who began as the author of purely commercial novels about vampires ("The Birag Heiress", "The Vicar of Arden", "The Centennial old man") and suddenly decided to create a serious novel.
Balzac chose V. Scott and F. Cooper as his teachers. Scott was attracted by the historical approach to life, but was not satisfied with the dullness and schematism of the characters. The young writer decides to follow Scott’s path in his work, but to show readers not so much a moral example in the spirit of his own ethical ideal (as Scott did), but to depict passion, without which a truly brilliant creation does not exist. In general, Balzac’s attitude towards passion was contradictory: “killing passions would mean killing society,” he said; and added: “passion is an extreme, it is evil.” That is, Balzac was fully aware of the sinfulness of his characters, but did not even think of abandoning the artistic analysis of sin, which interested him very much and, practically, formed the basis of his work.
The romantic Musset spoke of his focus on the study of evil. And in the way Balzac is interested in human vices, one certainly senses a certain fate of romantic thinking, which was always inherent in the great realist. But Balzac, unlike the romantics, understood human vice not as an ontological evil, but as a product of a certain historical era, a certain period of the existence of a country or society. That is, vice for Balzac is a much more understandable phenomenon than for the romantics.
The world of Balzac's novels carries within itself a clear definition of the material world. Private life is very closely connected with official life, since big political decisions do not descend from the sky, but are comprehended and discussed in living rooms and notary offices, in the boudoir of singers, they collide with personal and family relations. Society is studied in Balzac's novels in such detail that even modern economists and sociologists study the state of society from his novels. Balzac did not show the interaction between people against the background of God, as Shakespeare did, he showed the interaction between people against the background of economic relations. For him, society appears in the form of a living being, a single living organism. This creature is constantly moving, changing, like the ancient Proteus, but its essence remains unchanged: the stronger eat the weaker. Hence the paradoxical nature of Balzac’s political views: the global realist once did not hide his royalist sympathies and sneered at revolutionary ideals. In the essay “Two Meetings in One Year” (1831), Balzac irreverently responded to the revolution of 1830 and its achievements: “After the battle comes victory, after victory comes distribution; and then there are many more winners than those who were seen at the barricades.” Such an attitude towards people in general is characteristic of a writer who studied humanity the way biologists study animal world.
One of Balzac's most serious passions, starting from childhood, was philosophy. At school age, he almost went crazy when, at a Catholic boarding school, he became acquainted with the ancient monastery library. He did not begin serious writing until he had studied the works of all the more or less outstanding philosophers of old and new times. That is why the “Philosophical Etudes” (1830 - 1837) arose, which can be considered not only works of art, but also quite serious philosophical works. The novel “Shagreen Skin” (1830-1831), fantastic and at the same time deeply realistic, also belongs to the “Philosophical Studies”.
Fiction, in general, is a phenomenon characteristic of Philosophical Studies. It plays the role of a deus ex machine, that is, it serves as the central plot premise. Like, for example, a piece of old, dilapidated leather, which the poor student Valentin accidentally gets in an antique shop. A piece of shagreen covered with ancient inscriptions fulfills all the desires of its ruler, but at the same time it shrinks and thereby shortens the life of the “lucky one”.
“Shagreen Skin,” like many other Balzac novels, is dedicated to the theme of “lost illusions.” All of Raphael's wishes were fulfilled. He could buy everything: women, valuable things, exquisite surroundings, he only did not have a natural life, natural youth, natural love, and therefore had no meaning to live. When Raphael learns that he has become the heir of six million and sees that his shagreen skin has shrunk again, hastening his old age and death, Balzac notes: “The world belonged to him, he could do everything - and no longer wanted anything.”
“Lost illusions” can be considered both the search for an artificial diamond, to which Walthasar Claes sacrifices his own wife and children (“Search for the Absolute”), and the creation of a super-work of art, which takes on the meaning of manic passion for the artist Frenhofer and is embodied in a “chaotic combination of strokes "
Balzac said that Uncle Thee from L. Rul's novel Tristram Shandy became for him a model of how to sculpt a character. Uncle Tebe was an eccentric, he had a strong point - he did not want to get married. The characters of Balzac's heroes - Grand ("Eugenia Grand"), Gobsek ("Gobsek"), Goriot ("Father Goriot") are built on the "horse" principle. For Grand, such a hobby (or mania) is the accumulation of money and valuables, for Gobsek it is enriching his own bank accounts, for Father Goriot it is fatherhood, serving his daughters, who demand more and more money.
Balzac described the story “Eugenie Grand” (1833) as a bourgeois tragedy “without poison, without a dagger, without shedding blood, but for the characters more cruel than all the dramas that took place in the famous family of Atrides.”
Balzac feared the power of money more than the power of feudal lords. He looked at the kingdom as a single family, in which the king is the father, and where there is a natural state of things. As for the rule of bankers, which began after the revolution of 1830, here Balzac saw a serious threat to all life on earth, as he felt the iron and cold hand of monetary interests. And the power of money, which he constantly exposed, Balzac identified with the power of the devil and contrasted it with the power of God, the natural course of things. And here it’s hard to disagree with Balzac. Although Balzac's views on society, which he expressed in articles and letters, cannot always be taken seriously. After all, he believed that humanity is a unique fauna, with its own breeds, species and subspecies. That is why he valued aristocrats as representatives of the best breed, which supposedly became the basis for the cultivation of spirituality, which neglects benefits and low calculation.
Balzac in print supported the worthless Bourbons as the "lesser evil" and propagated an elitist state in which the privileges of the wealthy would be intact and suffrage would be extended only to those with money, intelligence and talent. Balzac even justified serfdom, which he saw in Ukraine and was fond of. The views of Stendhal, who valued the culture of aristocrats only at the level of aesthetics, look much more fair in this case.
Balzac did not accept any revolutionary actions. During the revolution of 1830, he did not interrupt his vacation in the province and did not go to Paris. In the novel “The Peasants,” expressing sympathy for those who are “great because of their difficult lives,” Balzac says of the revolutionaries: “We poeticized the criminals, we admired the executioners, and we almost created an idol out of the proletarian!”
^ 2. The idea of the “Human Comedy” and its implementation. Preface to the epic as Balzac's literary manifesto
There are 3 stages in Balzac’s work:
1. 1820s (the writer’s proximity to the romantic school)
2. The 2nd half of the 1830s is the period of creative maturation of Balzac the realist (during this period such works as “Gobsek”, “Shagreen Skin”, “Père Goriot”, etc. were published).
3. mid-30s (the beginning of the period is associated with the work on “Lost Illusions,” the first volume of which was published in 1837) – the heyday of the writer’s creative powers. 1837-1847 - the embodiment of the concept of the “Human Comedy”.
As noted earlier, the idea of combining works into an epic appeared in Balzac after the publication of the novel “Eugenie Grande”. In 1834, he wrote to E. Ganskaya about working on a “large collection of works.” Under the general title “Social Studies”, “it will unite all these individual fragments, capitals, columns, supports, bas-reliefs, walls, domes - in a word, it will create a monument that will turn out to be ugly or beautiful...”.
Initially, Balzac plans autonomous editions of “Etudes of Morals of the 19th Century” (in October 1833, an agreement was concluded to publish 24 volumes) and “Philosophical Etudes” (in July 1834, the writer undertook to publish 5 volumes by the end of the year). Obviously, at the same time it becomes clear to him that the two main channels of his creative endeavors must merge into a single stream: a realistic depiction of morals requires a philosophical understanding of the facts. At the same time, the idea of “Analytical Studies” arose, which would include “The Physiology of Marriage” (1829). Thus, according to the plan of 1834, the future epic should include three large sections, like three tiers of a pyramid, towering one above the other.
The basis of the pyramid should be the “Studies of Morals”, in which Balzac intends to depict all social phenomena so that for one life situation, not a single character, not a single layer of society is forgotten. “Fictitious facts will not find a place here, because only what is happening everywhere will be described,” the writer emphasized. The second tier is “Philosophical Studies”, because after the consequences it is necessary to show the reasons, after “an overview of society”, it is necessary to “pass a verdict on it.” In “Analytical Studies” the beginnings of things must be determined. “Morals are the performance, reasons are the backstage and the mechanisms of the stage. The beginning is the author... as the work reaches the heights of thought, it, like a spiral, contracts and thickens. If “Etudes of Morals” requires 24 volumes, then “Philosophical Etudes” will need only 15 volumes, and “Analytical Etudes” only 9.”
Later, Balzac will try to connect the birth of the idea of the “Human Comedy” with the achievements of contemporary natural science, in particular with the system of unity of organisms by Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire. It was his acquaintance with these achievements (as well as with the achievements of French historiography of the 1820s and 30s) that contributed to the formation of his own system. In other words, in “The Human Comedy” Balzac wanted, inspired by the works of great naturalists who had already come to the idea of the mutual connection of all life processes, of their unity in nature, to present the same unity of all phenomena public life. The multifaceted and multidimensional world of the “Human Comedy” will represent Balzac’s system of the unity of organisms, in which everything is interconnected and interdependent.
The concept of the work matures gradually, its plan will mainly be drawn up by 1835.
By the time Lost Illusions is published, the plan to create a single cycle of works about modernity will be finalized. In 1832, at the time the general plan for the epic was drawn up, it did not yet have a name. It will be born later (by analogy with Dante’s “Divine Comedy”). From a letter to Ganskaya dated June 1, 1841, it is known that it was during this period that the writer decided what the cycle would finally be called.
In 1842, the Preface to the “Human Comedy” appeared - a kind of manifesto of the writer, aware of the innovative nature of the ensemble of works he was creating.
In the Preface, Balzac will outline the main provisions of his aesthetic theory and explain in detail the essence of his plan. It will formulate the basic aesthetic principles on which Balzac relies when creating his epic, and tells about the writer’s plans.
Balzac notes that, inspired by the works of great naturalists who came to the idea that all organisms and life processes are interconnected, he wanted to show the same connection of all phenomena of social life. He points out that his work should “encompass 3 forms of existence of men, women and things, that is, people and people and the material embodiment of their thinking - in a word, depict a person and life.”
The goal of a systematic and comprehensive study of reality dictates to the writer the method of artistic cyclization: within the framework of one novel or even a trilogy it is impossible to realize such a grandiose plan. We need an extensive cycle of works on one topic (the life of modern society), which should be presented consistently in many interrelated aspects.
The author of The Human Comedy feels like the creator of his own world, created by analogy with the real world. “My work has its own geography, as well as its genealogy, its families, its localities, settings, characters and facts, it also has its own armorial, its nobility and bourgeoisie, its artisans and peasants, politicians and dandies, its army - in a word, the whole world." This world lives an independent life. And since everything in it is based on the laws of reality, in its historical authenticity it ultimately surpasses this reality itself. Because patterns that are sometimes difficult to discern (due to the flow of accidents) in the real world take on a clearer and clearer form in the world created by the writer. The world of the “Human Comedy” is based on a complex system of relationships between people and events, which Balzac comprehended by studying the life of contemporary France. Therefore, it is possible to fully understand the poetic world of the writer only by perceiving the entire epic in its multidimensional unity, although each of its fragments is an artistically completed whole. Balzac himself insisted that his individual works be perceived in the general context of the “Human Comedy”.
Balzac calls parts of his epic “studies.” In those years, the term “etude” had two meanings: school exercises or scientific research. There is no doubt that the author had in mind the second meaning. As a researcher of modern life, he had every reason to call himself a “doctor of social sciences” and a “historian.” Thus, Balzac, that the work of a writer is akin to the work of a scientist who carefully examines the living organism of modern society from its multilayered, located in constant movement economic structure to the highest spheres of intellectual, scientific and political thought.
He can create the “history of morals” that Balzac wants to write only through selection and generalization, “compiling an inventory of vices and virtues, collecting the most striking cases of manifestation of passions, depicting characters, selecting the most important events from the life of society,” creating types by combining individual traits of numerous homogeneous characters. “I needed to study the fundamentals or one general basis of social phenomena, to grasp the hidden meaning of a huge collection of types, passions and events.” Balzac discovers this main “social engine” in the struggle of egoistic passions and material interests that characterize the public and private life of France in the first half of the nineteenth century. The author comes to the conclusion that there is a dialectic of the historical process, marked by the inevitable replacement of an obsolete feudal formation with a bourgeois formation.
In his epic, Balzac seeks to trace how this basic process manifests itself in various spheres of public and private life, in the destinies of people belonging to various social groups, from hereditary aristocrats to residents of towns and villages.
As noted above, the “Human Comedy” is divided into “Etudes on Morals” (“Etudes of Morals”), “Philosophical Etudes”, “Analytical Etudes”. TO last writer refers to “The Physiology of Marriage” and intends to write two or three more works (“Pathology of Social Life”, “Anatomy of a Pedagogical Corporation”, “Monograph on Virtue”). “Philosophical Studies” gives the expression “the social engine of all events,” and Balzac considers such an “engine” to be the “destructive” boiling of human thoughts and passions. Finally, “Etudes on Morals” traces numerous and varied combinations of specific causes and motivating principles that determine the private destinies of people. This group of works turns out to be the most numerous; 6 aspects are distinguished in it:
“Scenes of Private Life” (“Gobsek”, “Père Goriot”, “Marriage Contract”, etc.);
“Scenes of Provincial Life” (“Eugenia Grande”, “Lost Illusions”, “Museum of Antiquities”);
“Scenes of Parisian life” (“The splendor and poverty of courtesans”, “the story of the greatness and fall of Caesar Birotto”);
“Scenes of Military Life” (“Chouans”, “Passion in the Desert”);
"Scenes political life"("Dark Affair", "The Wrong Side of Modern History"),
“Scenes of Village Life” (“Village Priest”, “Peasants”
In the Preface, the author explains the meaning of the title of the cycle. “The enormous scope of the plan, which simultaneously embraces the history and criticism of society, the analysis of its ulcers and the discussion of its foundations, allows me, I think, to give it the name under which it now appears - “Human Comedy.” Is it demanding? Or just right? It’s up to the readers to decide when the work is finished.”
The meaning of the cycle name can be “deciphered” as follows. It should
– emphasize the grandiose scope of the plan (according to the author, his work should have the same significance for modern times as Dante’s great work “The Divine Comedy” for the Middle Ages);
– point out the writer’s desire to contrast the divine with the earthly, the circles of Dante’s hell with the social “circles” of human society;
– capture the main critical pathos of the work. According to the writer, modernity is a pitiful and at the same time cruel caricature of the revolutionary era. If the origins of bourgeois France are connected with the majestic and tragic events of the revolution of 1789, then the July Monarchy is, in the perception of Balzac, a pathetic and at the same time cruel caricature of the ideals of the leaders of this revolution. The tragedy of the 18th century gave way to the comedy of the mid-19th century, a comedy that is played - sometimes even unknown to themselves - by the real heirs of the great revolutionaries (hence the characteristic title of one of the works of the “Human Comedy”: “Comedians unknown to themselves”). By calling his epic “The Human Comedy,” Balzac, in essence, pronounced a verdict on the entire bourgeois-noble society of his time;
– the title also reflected the internal drama of the epic. It is no coincidence that its first part, “Studies of Morals,” was divided into scenes, as is customary in drama. Like a dramatic work, “The Human Comedy” is full of conflict situations that dictate the need for active action, a fierce confrontation of antagonistic interests and passions, which is most often resolved tragically for the hero, sometimes comically, less often melodramatically. It is no coincidence that the author himself indicates in the preface that his work is “a drama with three to four thousand characters.”
Balzac's vision of reality is distinguished by its depth and versatility. A critical assessment of human vices and all kinds of manifestations of social injustice, the imperfection of social organization as a whole is only one aspect of his analytical approach to the topic of modern life. The “Human Comedy” cycle is by no means a phenomenon of “pure criticism”. For the writer, it is obvious that in reality the best manifestations of human nature are present - generosity, honesty, selflessness, creative abilities, high impulses of spirit. He specifically dwells on this in the preface: “In the picture that I create, there are more virtuous persons than blameworthy ones.” The writer explains this by saying that he believes in the potential perfection of man himself, which manifests itself, if not in each individual, then in the general perspective of the evolution of humanity. At the same time, Balzac does not believe in the endless improvement of society. Therefore, the writer’s focus is on man not as a “complete creature,” but as a being in a state of continuous formation and improvement.
Starting to create a giant canvas, Balzac declares objectivity as his aesthetic principle. “The historian itself was supposed to be French society; I could only be its secretary.” At the same time, he does not consider himself a simple copyist. He believes that a writer should not only depict vices and virtues, but also teach people. “The essence of a writer is what makes him a writer and... I’m not afraid... to say, what makes a statesman equal, and maybe even superior to him, is a definite opinion about human affairs, complete devotion to principles.” Therefore, we can talk about the strict conceptuality of Balzac’s great creation. Its essence was already determined by 1834, although it would undergo changes as the artist’s worldview and aesthetic principles evolved.
The implementation of a hitherto unprecedented plan required a huge number of characters. There are more than two thousand of them in The Human Comedy. The writer reports everything necessary about each of them: he gives information about their origin, parents (and sometimes even distant ancestors), relatives, friends and enemies, past and present occupations, gives exact addresses, describes the furnishings of apartments, the contents of wardrobes, etc. P. The stories of Balzac's heroes, as a rule, do not end in the finale of a particular work. Moving on to other novels, stories, short stories, they continue to live, experiencing ups and downs, hopes or disappointments, joys or torments, since the society of which they are organic particles is alive. The interconnection of these “returning heroes” holds together the fragments of the grandiose fresco, giving rise to the polysyllabic unity of the “Human Comedy”.
In the process of working on the epic, Balzac's concept of the typical, which is fundamental to the entire aesthetics of realistic art, crystallizes. He noted that a “history of morals” can only be created through selection and generalization. “By compiling an inventory of vices and virtues, collecting the most striking cases of manifestation of passions, depicting characters, selecting the most important events from the life of society, creating types by combining individual traits of numerous homogeneous characters, perhaps I could write a history forgotten by so many historians - the history of morals.” . “A type,” Balzac argued, “is a character that generalizes in itself the characteristic features of all those who are more or less similar to it, a sample of the family.” At the same time, type as a phenomenon of art is significantly different from the phenomena of life itself, from its prototypes. “Between this type and many persons of this era” one can find points of contact, but, Balzac warns, if the hero “turned out to be one of these persons, it would be a condemnation of the author, for his character would no longer become a discovery.”
It is important to emphasize that the typical in Balzac’s concept does not at all contradict the exceptional, if in this exceptional they find a concentrated expression of the laws of life itself. Like Stendhal's, almost all of the heroes of The Human Comedy are exceptional individuals to one degree or another. All of them are unique in the concreteness and liveliness of their character, in what Balzac calls individuality. Thus, the typical and individual in the characters of “The Human Comedy” are dialectically interconnected, reflecting the dual creative process for the artist - generalization and concretization. The category of the typical extends in Balzac both to the circumstances in which the heroes act and to the events that determine the movement of the plot in novels (“Not only people, but also the most important events are cast in typical images.”)
Fulfilling his intention to depict in an epic two or three thousand typical people of a certain era, Balzac carried out a reform of the literary style. Created by him on principle a new style different from educational and romantic. The main essence of Balzac's reform is to use all the riches of the national language. Many of his contemporaries (in particular, such a serious critic as Sainte-Beuve, and later E. Faguet, Brunetiere and even Flaubert) either did not understand or did not accept this essence. Referring to Balzac's verbosity, roughness, and vulgar pathos, they reproached him for his bad style, which allegedly reflected his impotence as an artist. However, already at that time voices were heard in defense of Balzac’s linguistic innovation. T. Gautier, for example, wrote: “Balzac was forced to forge a special language for his needs, which included all types of technology, all types of argot, science, art, behind-the-scenes life. That is why superficial critics began to say that Balzac does not know how to write, whereas he has his own style, excellent, fatally and mathematically corresponding to his idea.” The principle of “polyphony”, unprecedented in literature, noted by Gautier, is the main feature of Balzac’s style, which was a true discovery for all subsequent literature. Zola, who believed that this style always remained Balzac’s “own style,” spoke superbly about the organic connection of this style with the artist’s very method of working on “The Human Comedy.”
It should be noted that the Preface to The Human Comedy reflects the writer’s contradictions. Along with a deep thought about the “social engine”, about the laws governing the development of society, it also sets out the author’s monarchical program, expressing views on the social benefits of religion, which, from his point of view, was an integral system of suppressing the vicious aspirations of man and was “ the greatest foundation of social order." Balzac's fascination with the mystical teachings popular in French society of that time, especially the teachings of the Swedish pastor Swedenborg, also manifested itself in the Preface.
Balzac's worldview, his sympathies for the materialistic science of nature and society, his interest in scientific discoveries, and his passionate defense of free thought and enlightenment sharply diverge from these positions. indicating that the writer was the heir and continuer of the work of the great French educators.
Balzac devoted two decades of intense work to the “Human Comedy” creative life. The first novel in the cycle, “The Chouans,” dates from 1829, the last, “The Underside of Modern Life,” was published in 1848.
From the very beginning, Balzac understood that his plan was exceptional and grandiose and would require many volumes. According to less implementation of plans, the expected volume The “human comedy” is growing more and more. Already in 1844, compiling a catalog including written and what is to be written, Balzac, in addition to 97 works, will name 56 more. After the writer’s death, studying his archive, French scientists published the titles of another 53 novels, to which can be added more than a hundred sketches that exist in the form of notes.
^ 3. Balzac’s story “Gobsek” Depiction in the work of the French nobility and bourgeoisie of the Restoration era.
As noted earlier, researchers distinguish three stages in Balzac’s complex creative development. The early period of Balzac’s work - the 20s - was marked by proximity to the romantic school of the so-called “violent”.
In the first half of the 30s, the great realistic art of Balzac took shape.
Critical articles by Balzac of the early 30s - “Romantic Masses”, a review of V. Hugo’s play “Ernani”, “Literary Salons and Eulogies” - indicate that the writer is increasingly more deeply and consciously criticizing French romanticism in its most varied manifestations . The young writer acts as an opponent of romantic effects, a romantic preference for historical subjects, and a romantically elevated and verbose style. During these years, Balzac followed the development of scientific knowledge with great interest: he was captivated by the discussion about the origin of the animal world on earth, which unfolded in 1830 between Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, and he was fascinated by the debates going on in French historical science. The writer comes to the conclusion that truthful art, which gives a scientifically accurate picture of reality, requires, first of all, a deep study of modernity, penetration into the essence of the processes occurring in society.
The desire to depict reality accurately, based on certain scientific data - historical, economic, physiological - is characteristic artistic feature Balzac. Problems of sociology, so widely represented in the writer’s journalism, occupy a huge place in his art. Already in the early 1930s, Balzac's realism was deeply and consciously social.
At the same time, in Balzac's creative method of this period, the realistic method of depiction is combined with romantic artistic means. While speaking out against certain schools of romantic French literature, the writer does not yet abandon many of the artistic means of romanticism. This can be felt in his works of the early 30s, including in the story, which was originally called “The Dangers of Dissipation” (1830).
Later, Balzac would again turn to this story in order to rework it, deepen its meaning and give it a new title: “Papa Gobsek” (1835), and later, in 1842, simply “Gobsek”.
From the first to the second version, the story underwent an evolution from an edifying moral description to a philosophical generalization. In The Perils of Dissipation, the central figure was Anastasi de Resto, the unfaithful wife of the Comte de Resto; her vicious life had devastating consequences not just for her own moral consciousness, but also for her children, for the family as a whole. In "Gobsek" a second semantic center appears - the moneylender, who becomes the personification of the power that dominates bourgeois society.
The work has a unique composition - a story within a story. The narration is told on behalf of lawyer Derville. This form of narration allows the author to create a certain “angle of view” on events. Derville not only talks about individual episodes from the life of Gobsek and the de Resto family, but also evaluates everything that happens.
Balzac's realism is manifested in the story primarily in the disclosure of characters and phenomena typical of French society during the Restoration era. In this work, the author sets himself the goal of showing the true essence of both the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The approach to depicting the surrounding life in “Gobsek” becomes more analytical, as it is based primarily on the study of phenomena through the means of art real life, and his conclusions about society as a whole flow from this analysis.
The artist shows the decline and decay of the old French aristocracy, (Maxime de Tray, Resto family). De Tray is shown as an ordinary gigolo, a man without honor and without conscience, who does not hesitate to profit at the expense of the woman who loves him and his own children. “You have dirt in your veins instead of blood,” the moneylender contemptuously throws in Maxime de Tray’s face. Count Resto is much more likable, but even in him the author emphasizes such an unattractive trait as weakness of character. He loves a woman who is clearly unworthy of him, and, not having survived her betrayal, he falls ill and dies.
For Gosbeck, Comte de Resto is one of those French aristocrats whose decline the writer observed with deep regret, perceiving it as a national tragedy. But, being a realist writer, Balzac, even pitying the hero, showed the doom of the old nobility, its inability to defend its rights, capitulation under the pressure of bourgeois relations. The appearance of the triumphant Gobsek in the ruined and empty house of Count de Resto is dramatic: it is money itself that bursts into the chambers of the old noble mansion as a sovereign owner.
Criticism of the morals of the aristocracy is combined in Gobsek with an anti-bourgeois beginning. The main character of the story, a millionaire usurer, is one of the rulers of the new France. A strong, exceptional personality, Gobsek is internally contradictory. “Two creatures live in him: a miser and a philosopher, a vile creature and a sublime one,” says lawyer Derville about him, on whose behalf the story is told.
Usury is the main area practical activities Gobsek. By lending money at high interest rates, he actually robs his “wards,” taking advantage of their extreme poverty and complete dependence on him. The usurer considers himself the “lord of life”, as he instills fear in his debtors - rich spendthrifts. Reveling in power over them, he lustfully waits for the time to come to remind the wasters of life that it is time to pay for the pleasures obtained with the help of his money. He considers himself the personification of punishing fate. “I appear as retribution, as a reproach of conscience” - he revels in this thought, stepping with dirty shoes on the luxurious carpets of the aristocratic living room.
Pedantic and soulless (“automatic man”, “bill man”), Gobsek for Balzac is the living embodiment of that predatory force that persistently makes its way to power. Inquisitively peering into the face of this force, the writer seeks to penetrate into the origins of its power and unshakable self-confidence. This is where Gobsek turns his other side to the reader. The practical moneylender gives way to the bourgeois philosopher, the insightful analyst. Exploring the laws of the modern world, Gobsek discovers that the main engine that determines social life in this world is money. Therefore, whoever owns gold rules the world. “What is life if not a machine driven by money? (...) Gold is the spiritual essence of the entire current society,” this is how the “thinking” moneylender formulates his ideas about the world. Realizing this, Gobsek became one of the rulers of the country. “There are ten people like me in Paris: we are the rulers of your destinies - quiet, unknown to anyone,” - with these words Gobsek defines the position in society that he and his like occupy.
“Gobsek” was an innovative, realistic work. At the same time, the fundamentally realistically convincing image of Gobsek also contains romantic signs. The past of Gobsek is vague, perhaps he was a corsair and traveled all the seas and oceans, trading in people and state secrets. The origin of the hero's untold wealth is unclear. His real life is full of mysteries. The scale of Gobsek’s personality, who has an exceptionally deep, philosophical mind, is almost global. The romantic exaggeration of the mystery and power of Gobsek - a predator and a lover of money - gives him the character of an almost supernatural being, standing above mortals. The entire figure of Gobsek, who personifies the power of gold, acquires a symbolic character in the work.
At the same time, the romantic beginning inherent in Gobsek’s character does not at all obscure the realistic features of this image. The presence of individual romantic elements only emphasizes the specificity of Balzac's realism at the early stage of its development, when the typical and exceptional appear in dialectical unity.
Sharply criticizing in his work representatives of the degrading aristocracy and the bourgeoisie that is replacing it, the author contrasts them with simple, honest workers. The author's sympathies are on the side of people who honestly earn their living - Fanny Malvo and Derville. Drawing a simple girl - a seamstress and a noble lady - Countess de Resto, the author clearly gives preference to the first of them. In striking contrast to Gosbeck, a creature gradually losing all human qualities and traits, is Derville, a successful lawyer making a career in the salons of the Parisian nobility. It outlines Balzac’s favorite image of an intelligent and active commoner, who owes everything only to himself and his work. This man with a clear and practical mind stands immeasurably higher than the family nobility and representatives of the new monetary aristocracy, like Gobsek.
It should be noted that in Balzac's later novels, moneylenders and bankers no longer appear, like Gobsek, in the romantic aura of mysterious and omnipotent villains. Delving into the essence of the laws that govern the life of society and the destinies of people, the writer will learn to really see the new masters of France in their truly funny and pitiful appearance.
^ 4. Novel “Père Goriot”.
The novel "Père Goriot" (1834) is the first work created by Balzac in accordance with general plan the epic he planned. It was during the period of work on this novel that Balzac finally formed the idea of creating a single cycle of works about modern society and including much of what was written in this cycle.
The novel “Père Goriot” becomes the “key” novel in the planned “Human Comedy”: it clearly expresses the most important themes and problems of the cycle, in addition, many of its characters have already appeared in the author’s previous works and will appear in them again in the future.
“The plot of “Père Goriot” is a nice man - a family boarding house - 600 francs of rent - depriving himself of everything for the sake of his daughters, each of whom has 50,000 francs of rent, dying like a dog,” reads the entry in Balzac’s album, made even before the idea was conceived "Human Comedy" (probably in 1832). Obviously, according to the original plan, it was assumed that the work would tell a story about one hero. However, having begun to create the novel, Balzac frames Goriot's story with many additional plot lines that naturally arise in the process of implementing the plan. Among them, the first is the line of Eugene de Rastignac, a Parisian student, like Goriot, staying at the Vauquer boarding house. It is through the perception of the student that the tragedy of Father Goriot is presented, who himself is not able to comprehend everything that is happening to him. “Without Rastignac’s inquisitive observations and without his ability to penetrate into Parisian salons, the story would have lost those true tones that it owes, of course, to Rastignac - his perspicacity and his desire to unravel the secrets of one terrifying fate, no matter how hard the perpetrators themselves tried to hide them , and her victim,” writes the author.
However, Rastignac's function is not limited to the simple role of a witness. The theme of the fate of the younger generation of the nobility, which was included with him in the novel, turns out to be so important that this hero becomes no less significant a figure than Goriot himself.
“Life in Paris is a constant battle,” says the author of the novel. Having set the goal of depicting this battle, Balzac faced the need to transform the poetics of the traditional novel, which, as a rule, is based on the principles of chronicle linear composition. The novel suggests new type novel action with a pronounced dramatic beginning. This structural feature, which appeared later in other works of the writer, will become the most important sign of the new type of novel that Balzac introduced into literature.
The work opens with an extensive exhibition typical of Balzac the novelist. It describes in detail the main scene of action - the Voke boarding house - its location, internal structure. The boarding house dining room with its motley random furniture and strange table settings, with its tense atmosphere of alienation, which they try to hide with external politeness, is not only an ordinary talbot of a cheap Parisian boarding house, but also a symbol of French society, where everything is shuffled and mixed by recent turbulent historical events.
The exhibition also fully describes the mistress of the house, her servants and guests. The action in this part of the novel flows slowly and eventlessly. Everyone is busy with their own worries and pays almost no attention to their neighbors. However, as the action progresses, the disparate lines of the novel come together, ultimately forming an indissoluble unity. After a detailed exposition, events pick up a rapid pace: a collision turns into a conflict, a conflict reveals irreconcilable contradictions, and a catastrophe becomes inevitable. It occurs almost simultaneously for all characters. Vautrin is exposed and captured by the police, having just arranged the fate of Victorine Taillefer with the help of a hired killer. Viscountess de Beauseant, devoted to her lovers, leaves the world forever. Ruined and abandoned by Maxime de Tray, Anastasi de Resto appeared before the court of her angry husband. Madame Vauquer's boarding house is emptying, having lost almost all of its guests. The finale ends with Rastignac’s remark, as if promising a continuation of the “Human Comedy” begun by the writer.
The main plot lines of the novel are determined by the writer's desire to deeply and comprehensively reveal the social mechanism of bourgeois society of the 1810-1820s. Having collected many facts that should convince the reader of the selfish, hypocritical, self-interested nature of social relations that were everywhere established in Europe during this period, the writer seeks to give their generalized and sharply revealing characteristics. The work combines three storylines (Goriot, Rastignac, Vautrin (under his name is the escaped convict Jacques Colin, nicknamed Deception-Death)), each of which has its own problem.
The life stories of his daughters are initially connected with Goriot - Anastasi, who became the wife of the nobleman de Resto, and Delphine, who married the banker Nucingen.
New storylines are included in the novel with Rastignac:
– Viscountess de Beauseant (who opens the doors of the aristocratic suburb of Paris and the cruelty of the laws under which it lives to the young provincial);
– “Napoleon of Hard Labor” by Vautrin (in his own way, continuing the “training” of Rastignac, tempting him with the prospect of quick enrichment through a crime committed by someone else);
– medical student Bianchon, who rejects the philosophy of immoralism;
– Victorine Taillefer (she would have brought Rastignac a million-dollar dowry if, after the violent death of her brother, she had become the sole heir of the banker Taillefer).
The storyline associated with the story of Father Goriot - a respectable bourgeois, whose money helped his daughters make a secular career and at the same time led to a complete alienation between them and their father - is the leading one in the novel. All the threads ultimately converge on Goriot: Rastignac becomes the lover of one of his daughters and therefore the fate of the old man acquires unexpected interest for him; Vautrin wants to make Rastignac his accomplice and therefore everything that interests the young man, including Goriot’s family affairs, becomes important to him. This is how a whole system of characters is formed, directly or indirectly connected with Goriot as a kind of center of this system, which includes the owner of the Vauquer boarding house with all her boarders, and representatives of high society visiting the salon of the Viscountess de Beauseant.
The novel covers a variety of layers of social life - from the noble family of Count de Resto to the dark bottom of the French capital. French literature has never known such a wide and bold coverage of life.
Unlike previous works, where the secondary characters were characterized by the writer very superficially, in “Père Goriot” each has his own story, the completeness or brevity of which depends on the role assigned to him in the plot of the novel. And if Goriot’s life path finds its completion, the stories of the remaining characters remain fundamentally unfinished, since the author intends to return to them in other works of the epic.
The principle of “return of characters” is not only the key that opens the way to the future world of Balzac’s epic. It allows the author to include into the “Human Comedy”, his beginning literary life, characters who appeared in works previously published. Thus, in “Gobsek” the story of the de Resto family was told, in “Shagreen Skin” the names of not only Taillefer, but also Rastignac appeared for the first time. In “The Abandoned Woman,” de Beauseant is the heroine, who left high society and imprisoned herself in the family estate. In the future, the stories of a number of heroes will be continued.
The novel reflected the intertwining of psychological and social planes characteristic of Balzac the realist. The writer explained the psychology of people and the motives of their actions by the social conditions of life; he tried to show the development of relations between people against the broad background of the life of Parisian society.
The dominance of money and its corrupting influence are shown by Balzac in typical and at the same time deeply individual images. The tragedy of Father Goriot is presented in the novel as a particular manifestation general laws, defining the life of post-revolutionary France, as one of the brightest manifestations of the drama of bourgeois everyday life. Balzac uses a fairly well-known plot (almost a Shakespearean story), but interprets it in a unique way.
Goriot's story, for all its tragedy, is devoid of the features of exclusivity characteristic of the “furious literature” of the 1830s. The daughters, idolized by the old man, having received everything that he could give them, having completely tormented him with their worries and troubles, not only left him to die alone in the miserable kennel of the Vauquer boarding house, but did not even come to the funeral. But these women are not monsters or fiends at all. They are, in general, ordinary people, nothing special, not particularly violating the laws established in their midst. Goriot himself is just as common in his environment. What is unusual is his exaggerated sense of fatherhood. It prevailed in Gorio over all the bad traits of a hoarder and money-grubber, which he had in abundance. In the past, a vermicelli worker who made a considerable fortune through clever speculation in flour, he profitably marries his daughters, one to a count, the other to a banker. Since childhood, indulging all their desires and whims, Goriot later allowed them to ruthlessly exploit their paternal feelings.
Father Goriot is in many ways similar to the hero of Balzac's previous novel, Grande. Like Grandet, Goriot rose to prominence by cleverly and unscrupulously using the revolutionary situation of 1789 and profiting from speculation. But unlike old Grandet, Goriot is full of love for his daughters, which clearly raises him above that environment where money and personal gain are placed above all else.
The daughters never learned to be grateful to Goriot. For Anastasi and Delphine, corrupted by permissiveness, the father turns out to be only a source of money, but when his reserves have dried up, he loses all interest for his daughters. Already on his deathbed, the old man finally sees the light: “Money can buy everything, even daughters. Oh my money, where is it? If I left treasures as an inheritance, my daughters would follow me and treat me.” IN tragic life and Goriot’s lamentations reveal the true basis of all connections - even blood connections - in a society where immense selfishness and soulless calculation reign.
One of the most important problems in Balzac's work - the depiction of the fate of a young man beginning his life's journey - is associated with Eugene de Rastignac. This character, who has already been encountered in “Shagreen Skin,” will appear in other works of the writer, for example, in the novels “Lost Illusions” (1837 – 1843), “The Banking House of Nucingen” (1838), “Beatrice” (1839). In "Père Goriot" Rastignac begins his independent life path.
Representative of the impoverished noble family, law student Rastignac came to the capital to make a career. Once in Paris, he lives in a wretched boarding house of Madame Vauquer on meager money, which, denying themselves everything, is sent to him by his mother and sisters, vegetating in the provinces. At the same time, thanks to belonging to an ancient family and ancient family ties, he has access to the highest spheres of noble-bourgeois Paris, where Goriot cannot get. Thus, with the help of the image of Rastignac, the author connects two contrasting social worlds of post-revolutionary France: the aristocratic Saint-Germain suburb and the Vauquer boarding house, under whose roof the outcast and impoverished people of the capital found refuge.
Returning to the theme first posed in “Shagreen Skin,” the writer this time reveals more deeply and comprehensively the evolution of a young man who enters the world with good intentions, but gradually loses them along with youthful illusions that are shattered by the cruel experience of real life.
The story of Goriot, unfolding before Rastignac's eyes, becomes perhaps the most bitter lesson for him. The author, in fact, depicts the first stage in Rastignac’s “education of feelings,” his “years of learning.”
Not the least role in the “education of feelings” of Rastignac belongs to his unique “teachers” - the Viscountess de Beauseant and the escaped convict Vautrin. These characters are opposite to each other in every way, but the instructions they give to the young man turn out to be surprisingly similar. The Viscountess teaches the young provincial life lessons, and her main lesson is that success in society must be achieved at any cost, without stinting on means. “You want to create a position for yourself, I will help you,” says the Viscountess, stating with anger and bitterness the unwritten laws of success in high society. “Explore the depth of the depravity of women, measure the degree of pathetic vanity of men... the more cold-bloodedly you calculate, the further you will go.” Strike mercilessly, and they will tremble before you. Look at men and women as post horses, drive them without sparing them, let them die at every station, and you will reach the limit in the fulfillment of your desires.” “I thought a lot about the modern structure of our social structure,” says Rastignac Vautrin. – Fifty thousand profitable places do not exist, and you will have to devour each other, like spiders planted in a jar. Nothing can be achieved by honesty... They bow to the power of genius, and they try to denigrate him... Corruption is everywhere, talent is rare. Therefore, corruption has become the weapon of mediocrity that has filled everything, and you will feel the edge of its weapon everywhere.” “There are no principles, but there are events,” Vautrin teaches his young protégé, wanting to convert him to his faith, “there are no laws, there are circumstances; a high-flying man himself applies himself to events and circumstances in order to lead them.” Gradually, the young man begins to understand the cruel truth of the Viscountess, who became a victim of high society, and the immoralist Vautrin. “Light is an ocean of mud, where a person immediately goes up to his neck, as soon as he dips the tip of his foot into it,” the hero concludes.
Balzac considered “Père Goriot” one of his saddest works (in a letter to E. Ganskaya he called this novel “a monstrously sad thing”), not only because Rastignac’s future depressed him no less than the tragic fate of old Goriot. Despite all the dissimilarity of these characters, their destinies highlight all the “moral filth of Paris.” An inexperienced young man soon discovers that the same inhuman laws, greed, and crime dominate society at all levels - from its “bottom” to the highest “light.” Rastignac makes this discovery for himself after another instructive advice from Vautrin: “He roughly, bluntly told me what Madame de Beauseant put into an elegant form.”
Having accepted as true that success is higher than morality, Rastignac, nevertheless, in his real actions is not immediately able to follow this principle. Rastignac's initially inherent honesty, intelligence, nobility, sincerity and youthful idealism come into conflict with the cynical instructions that he hears from both the Viscountess de Beauseant and Vautrin. In “Père Goriot,” Rastignac still confronts the secular “ocean of dirt,” as evidenced by his refusal of Vautrin’s proposal to captivate Victorine. The hero, who still retains a living soul, refuses such a deal without hesitation. Therefore, he ends up on the side of society's victims; the viscountess, whom her lover abandoned for the sake of concluding a profitable marriage deal, and especially the abandoned Goriot. He takes care of a hopelessly ill old man together with Bianchon, and then buries him with his pittance.
At the same time, there is evidence in the novel that the hero is ready to enter into a deal with the world and his own conscience. Particularly symptomatic in this regard is the relationship with Delphine Nucingen, born of calculation, which opens the way for him to millions and a future career.
The fact that the hero intends to follow this path to the end is suggested by the final episode, where Rastignac seems to say goodbye to the noble dreams of his youth. Shocked by the story of old Goriot, having buried the unfortunate father betrayed by his daughters, Rastignac decides to measure his strength with the arrogant and greedy Paris. The last argument that persuaded him to take this step was that he did not have even twenty sous to tip the gravediggers. His sincere tears, caused by sympathy for the poor old man, were buried in the grave with the deceased. Having buried Goriot and looking at Paris, Rastignac exclaims: “And now - who will win: me or you!” And he goes to the rich quarters of Paris to win his place in the sun.
This symbolic touch at the end of the novel seems to sum up the first “act” of the hero’s life. The first real victory is on the side of society, ruthless and immoral, although morally Rastignac has not yet allowed himself to be defeated: he acts in obedience to his inner moral feeling. At the end of the novel, the hero is ready to transgress the prohibitions of conscience that he previously obeyed. Challenging Paris and not doubting success, he simultaneously commits an act of moral surrender: after all, in order to succeed in society, he is forced to accept its “rules of the game,” that is, first of all, to abandon simplicity, spontaneity, honesty, and noble impulses.
In the novel “Père Goriot,” the author’s attitude towards the young hero turns out to be ambivalent. Often in his descriptions there is deep sympathy. Balzac, as it were, justifies the young man, explains his moral decline with his youth and love of life, the thirst for pleasure that boils in Rastignac.
In the following novels of the cycle, the author's attitude towards the hero changes. Rastignac consciously chooses this path, which requires him to become familiar with the art of secular intrigue and absolute unscrupulousness. From subsequent works (“Lost Illusions”, “The Trading House of Nucingen”, “The Splendor and Poverty of Courtesans”, etc.), the reader learns that Rastignac eventually makes a brilliant career and achieves a lot: he becomes a millionaire, marries the daughter of his mistress, as a relative in the income of Nusingen, receives the title of peer of France and enters as a minister into the bourgeois government of the July Monarchy. All this will be obtained by the hero not only at the cost of the lost illusions of youth, but also through the loss of the best human qualities. With the degradation of Rastignac, Balzac connects the most important theme for the entire epic: the moral capitulation of the French nobility, which trampled upon the original principles of chivalry and ultimately merged with the bourgeoisie hated by the writer. It is obvious that the study of the patterns of life of the young nobleman Rastignac leads Balzac to the loss of his own legitimist illusions regarding the hereditary aristocracy, in which he would like to see the support of the monarchy.
Along with Father Goriot and Rastignac, a significant place in the work is occupied by the image of Vautrin, with whom another of the most important problems of the novel is connected - the problem of crime.
Balzac believes that crime is born from the individual’s natural desire for self-affirmation. Resisting crime is a self-protective function of society. This function is carried out the more successfully, the stronger the power, which knows how to direct individual abilities and talents for the common good, otherwise they become destructive for society as a whole. Such a dangerous, destructive principle is embodied in Vautrin.
Vautrin - a strong, bright, demonic personality - embodies the revolt of the outcasts against the powers that be. He embodies the rebellious nature characteristic of a freedom-loving and rebellious romantic robber or pirate. But Vautrin’s rebellion is very specific, based on predatory aspirations and therefore naturally fits into the struggle of man against everyone, characteristic of modern society. Vautrin's ultimate goal is not wealth, but power, understood as the ability to command while remaining independent of anyone's will.
For all his exclusivity, Vautrin is a typical figure, since his fate is determined by the cohesion of the laws of life in modern society, as Balzac understands it. In this sense, the criminal - “Napoleon of hard labor” - can be compared with the “usurer-philosopher” Gobsek, with the only difference that the latter is completely devoid of authorial sympathies, while a person like Vautrin, distinguished by highly extraordinary abilities and a spirit of rebellion, always aroused Balzac's sympathetic interest.
The story of Jacques Colin (Vautrin) passes through a number of works by Balzac and finds its natural conclusion in the novel “The Splendor and Poverty of the Courtesans.” This work depicts the finale of Vautrin’s duel with society. In the end, Vautrin realizes the futility of his rebellion, and the former convict joins the police. The criminal genius turns into a guardian of public order; now he zealously serves those who pay him. This plot twist is far from straightforward. It contains the idea of the futility of confronting society, the inevitable victory of the social principle over the individual, and one more touch to the picture of Paris with its “moral filth”: the criminal world and the world of law enforcement officers merge there.
14. The theme of money and the image of a miser in the works of Balzac: “Gobsek”, “Eugenia Grande”, etc.
The theme of the power of money is one of the main ones in Balzac’s work and runs like a red thread in The Human Comedy.
"Gobsek" written in 1830 and included in Scenes of Private Life. This is a mini-novel. It begins with a frame - the ruined Viscountess de Granlier was once helped by the solicitor Derville, and now wants to help her daughter marry Ernest de Resto (son of the Countess de Resto, ruined by his mother, but just the other day, according to Derville, entering into inheritance rights Already here is the theme of the power of money: a girl cannot marry the young man she likes, because he does not have 2 million, and if he did, she would have many contenders). Derville tells the Viscountess and her daughter the story of Gobsek, a moneylender. The main character is one of the rulers of the new France. A strong, exceptional personality, Gobsek is internally contradictory. “Two creatures live in him: a miser and a philosopher, a vile creature and a sublime one,” says lawyer Derville about him.
Gobsek's image– almost romantic. Telling surname: Gobsek is translated from French as “guzzler”. It is no coincidence that clients turn to him only last, because he takes into account even the most unreliable bills, but takes hellish interest from them (50, 100, 500. Out of friendship, he can give 12%, this, in his opinion, is only for great merits and high moral). Appearance: " moon face, Facial features, motionless, impassive, like Talleyrand, they seemed cast from bronze. The eyes, small and yellow, like those of a ferret, and almost without eyelashes, could not stand the bright light" His age was a mystery, his past is little known (they say that in his youth he sailed on a ship and visited most countries of the world), he has one great passion - for the power that money gives. These features allow us to consider Gobsek as a romantic hero. Balzac uses more than 20 similes for this image: a man-bill, an automaton, a golden statue. The main metaphor, Gobsek’s leitmotif, is “silence, like in the kitchen when a duck is killed.” Like Mr. Grandet (see below), Gobsek lives in poverty, although he is terribly rich. Gobsek has his own poetry and philosophy of wealth: gold rules the world.
He cannot be called evil, because he helps honest people who came to him without trying to deceive him. There were only two of them: Derville and Count de Resto. But he also takes an extortionate percentage from them, explaining this very simply. He doesn’t want their relationship to be bound by a feeling of gratitude, which can make even friends enemies.
Gobsek's image is idealized, he is expressive, and gravitates towards the grotesque. He is practically asexual (although he appreciates female beauty) and has gone beyond passions. He enjoys only power over the passions of other people: “I am rich enough to buy other people's consciences. Life is a machine driven by money.”
He dies like a true miser - alone, his stinginess reaches fantastic limits. He accepts gifts from his debtors, including food, tries to resell them, but is too intractable, and in the end it all rots in his house. Everywhere there are traces of crazy hoarding. Money falls out of books. The quintessence of this stinginess is the pile of gold that the old man, for lack of a better place, buried in the fireplace ashes.
Balzac initially existed within the framework of the romantic movement, but the image of Gobsek is given with the help of the narrator - Mr. Derville, and romantic exaggeration is objectified, the author is eliminated from it.
"Evgenia Grande" belongs to the novels of the “second style” (repetitions, comparisons and coincidences), is included in “Scenes of Provincial Life”, and it develops the theme of the power of money and has its own image of the miser - Felix Grande, father main character. The path to describing Eugenie's character begins with her surroundings: the house, the history of her father Grande and his wealth. His stinginess, monomania - all this influenced the character and fate of the main character. Little things in which his stinginess is manifested: he saves on sugar, firewood, uses the food reserves of his tenants, consumes only the worst of the products grown on his lands, considers 2 eggs for breakfast a luxury, gives Evgenia old expensive coins for her birthdays, but constantly monitors so that she doesn’t spend it, she lives in a poor dilapidated house, although she is fabulously rich. Unlike Gobsek, Father Grande is completely unprincipled in accumulating wealth: he violates the agreement with neighboring winemakers, selling wine at exorbitant prices before others, and even knows how to benefit from the ruin of his brother, taking advantage of the fall in the price of bills.
The novel, seemingly devoid of deep passions, in fact simply transfers these passions from the love sphere to the market. The main action of the novel is the transactions of Father Grande, his accumulation of money. Passions are realized in money and are also bought for money.
U Father Grande- his values, views on the world, characterizing him as a miser. For him, the worst thing is not the loss of his father, but the loss of his fortune. He cannot understand why Charles Grandet is so upset about his father’s suicide, and not about the fact that he is ruined. For him, bankruptcy, intentional or unintentional, is the most terrible sin on earth: “To be bankrupt means to commit the most shameful of all acts that can disgrace a person. Robber with high road- and he is better than an insolvent debtor: the robber attacks you, you can defend yourself, at least he risks his head, but this one...”
Papa Grande is a classic image of a miser, miser, monomaniac and ambitious. Its main idea is to possess gold, to physically feel it. It is no coincidence that when his wife dies and he tries to show her all his tenderness, he throws gold coins on the blanket. Before his death, a symbolic gesture - he does not kiss the golden crucifix, but tries to grab it. From the love of gold grows the spirit of despotism. Apart from the love of money, like " The Stingy Knight", another of his features is cunning, which manifests itself even in his appearance: a bump on his nose with veins, which moved slightly when Father Grande was planning some trick.
Like Gobsek, at the end of his life his stinginess takes on painful traits. Unlike Gobsek, even at the moment of death maintaining a sound mind, this man loses his mind. He constantly rushes to his office, makes his daughter move bags of money, and asks all the time: “Are they there?”
The theme of the power of money is the main one in the novel. Money rules everything: it plays main role in the fate of a young girl. They trample all human moral values. Felix Grande counts the profits at his brother's obituary. Evgenia is interesting to men only as a rich heiress. Because she gave the coins to Charles, her father almost cursed her, and her mother died from nervous shock because of this. Even the actual engagement of Eugenia and Charles is an exchange of material values (gold coins for a gold box). Charles marries for convenience, and when he meets Evgenia, he perceives her more as a rich bride, although, judging by her lifestyle, he comes to the conclusion that she is poor. Evgenia’s marriage is also a trade deal; for money she buys complete independence from her husband.
15. Character and environment in Balzac’s novel “Eugenie Grande”.
“Eugenie Grande” (1833) is a truly realistic stage in Balzac’s work. This is a drama contained in the simplest circumstances. Two of his important qualities appeared: observation and clairvoyance, talent - depicting the causes of events and actions, accessible to the artist’s vision. At the center of the novel is the fate of a woman who is doomed to loneliness, despite all her 19 million francs, and her “mold-colored life.” This work “is not like anything I have created so far,” the writer himself notes: “Here the conquest of absolute truth in art has been completed: here the drama is contained in the simplest circumstances of private life.” The subject of the new novel is bourgeois everyday life in its seemingly unremarkable course. The scene is the typical French provincial city of Saumur. The characters are Saumur townsfolk, whose interests are limited to a narrow circle of everyday concerns, petty squabbles, gossip and the pursuit of gold. The cult of cleanliness is dominant here. It contains an explanation of the rivalry between two eminent families of the city - the Cruchots and the Grassins, who are fighting for the hand of the heroine of the novel, Eugenie, the heir to the multimillion-dollar fortune of “Papa Grande”. Life, gray in its wretched monotony, becomes the background of Eugenia’s tragedy, a tragedy of a new type - “bourgeois... without poison, without a dagger, without blood, but for the characters more cruel than all the dramas that took place in the famous family of Atrides.”
IN character Eugenia Grande Balzac showed a woman’s ability to love and remain faithful to her beloved. This is an almost perfect character. But the novel is realistic, with a system of techniques for analyzing modern life. Her happiness never materialized, and the reason for this was not the omnipotence of Felix Grande, but Charles himself, who betrayed his youthful love in the name of money and position in the world. Thus, forces hostile to Eugenia ultimately prevailed over Balzac’s heroine, depriving her of what she was intended for by nature itself. The theme of a lonely, disappointed woman, her loss of romantic illusions.
The structure of the novel is of the “second manner”. One theme, one conflict, few characters. This is a novel that begins with everyday life, an epic of private life. Balzac knew provincial life. He showed boredom, everyday events. But something more is put into the environment, things - this Wednesday, which determines the character of the heroes. Small details help to reveal the character of the heroes: the father, saving on sugar, the knock on the door of Charles Grandet, unlike the knock of provincial visitors, Chairman Cruchot, trying to erase his surname, who signs “K. de Bonfon”, since he recently bought the de Bonfon estate, etc. The path to Eugenia's character consists of a description of everything that surrounds her: the old house, Father Grande and the history of his wealth, accurate information about the family, the struggle for her hand between two clans - the Cruchots and the de Grassins. The father is an important factor in the formation of the novel: the stinginess and monomania of Felix Grande, his power, to which Eugenia submits, largely determines her character; later, the stinginess and mask of the father’s indifference is passed on to her, although not in such a strong form. It turns out that the Saumur millionaire (formerly a simple cooper) laid the foundations of his well-being during the Great French Revolution, which gave him access to the ownership of the richest lands expropriated by the republic from the clergy and nobility. During the Napoleonic period, Grande became mayor of the city and used this post to build a “superior railway” to his possessions, thereby increasing their value. The former cooper is already called Mr. Grande and receives the Order of the Legion of Honor. The conditions of the Restoration era did not hinder the growth of his well-being - it was at this time that he doubled his wealth. The Saumur bourgeoisie is typical of France at that time. Grande, a former simple cooper, laid the foundations of his wealth during the years of the revolution, which gave him access to the ownership of the richest land. During the Napoleonic period, Grande became mayor of the city and used this post to build a “superior road” to his possessions, thereby increasing their value. The former cooper is already called Mr. Grande and receives the Order of the Legion of Honor. The conditions of the Restoration era do not hinder the growth of his well-being - he doubles his wealth. The Saumur bourgeoisie is typical of France at that time. In discovering the “roots” of the Grande phenomenon, the historicism of Balzac’s artistic thinking, which underlies the ever-increasing deepening of his realism, is manifested in all its maturity.
The adventure and love that readers expect is missing. Instead of adventures, there are stories of people: the story of the enrichment of Grande and Charles, instead of a love line, deals with Father Grande.
Evgenia's image. She has a monastic quality and the ability to suffer. Another characteristic feature of her is ignorance of life, especially at the beginning of the novel. She doesn’t know how much money is a lot and how much is little. Her father doesn't tell her how rich she is. Eugenia, with her indifference to gold, high spirituality and natural desire for happiness, dares to come into conflict with Father Grande. The origins of the dramatic collision lie in the heroine’s emerging love for Charles. In the fight for Charlyaon, he shows rare audacity, again manifested in “little truthful facts” (secretly from his father, he feeds Charles a second breakfast, brings him extra pieces of sugar, lights the fireplace, although it’s not supposed to, and, most importantly, gives him a collection of coins, although he has no right to dispose of them). For Grande, Eugenie’s marriage to the “beggar” Charles is impossible, and he floats his nephew to India, paying for his way to Nantes. However, even in separation, Evgenia remains faithful to her chosen one. And if her happiness never materialized, then the reason for this is not the omnipotence of Felix Grande, but Charles himself, who betrayed his youthful love in the name of money and position in the world. Thus, forces hostile to Eugenia ultimately prevailed over Balzac’s heroine, depriving her of what she was intended for by nature itself.
The final touch: betrayed by Charles, having lost the meaning of life along with love, the internally devastated Eugenie at the end of the novel by inertia continues to exist, as if fulfilling her father’s behest: “Despite eight hundred thousand livres of income, she still lives the same way as poor Eugenie Grande lived before , lights the stove in her room only on those days when her father allowed her... Always dressed like her mother dressed. The Saumur house, without sun, without heat, constantly shrouded in shadow and filled with melancholy - a reflection of her life. She carefully collects her income and, perhaps, could seem like a hoarder if she did not refute the slander with the noble use of her wealth... The greatness of her soul conceals the pettiness instilled in her by her upbringing and the skills of the first period of her life. This is the story of this woman - a woman not of the world in the midst of the world, created for the greatness of a wife and mother and who received neither a husband, nor children, nor a family.”
16. The plot and composition of the novels “Père Goriot” and “Lost Illusions”: similarities and differences.
both novels
Composition.
In Lost Illusions, the plot develops linearly, what happens in Lucien. Start with the printing house - and then all the twists and turns
1. "Père Goriot"
Composition: Its composition seems to be linear, chronic. In fact there are a lot of backstories, and they are very natural, as if one of the characters learns something about the other. This interaction is a mechanism of secrets and intrigue - Vautrin, Rastignac, betrayal - it seems to be a chronicle day after day. However, this is a novel that provides a broad picture of social life.
Balzac faced the need transformation of the poetics of the traditional novel, which is usually based on the principles of chronicle linear composition. The novel proposes a new type of novel action with pronounced dramatic beginning.
Plot:
Balzac uses a fairly well-known plot (almost the Shakespearean story of King Lear), but interprets it in a unique way.
Among Balzac's creative recordings, entitled "Thoughts, plots, fragments", there is a short sketch: “The old man - a family boarding house - 600 francs of rent - deprives himself of everything for the sake of his daughters, both of whom have an income of 50,000 francs; dies like a dog." In this sketch, you can easily recognize the story of Goriot’s boundless fatherly love, desecrated by his daughters.
The novel shows the boundless, sacrificial love of a father for his children, which turned out to be not mutual. And which ultimately killed Goriot.
The story begins with the boarding house Vauquet, where Goriot lives. Everyone in the boarding house knows him, treats him extremely unkindly and calls him nothing more than “Père Goriot.” Together with him, young Rastignac also lives in the boarding house, who, by the will of fate, learns the tragic fate of Goriot. It turns out that he was a small merchant who amassed a huge fortune, but squandered it on his adored daughters (Rastignac becomes the lover of one of them), and they, in turn, having squeezed everything they could out of their father, abandoned him. And it was not a matter of noble and rich sons-in-law, but of the daughters themselves, who, having entered high society, began to be embarrassed by their father. Even when Goriot was dying, the daughters did not deign to come and help their father. They didn't show up at the funeral either. This story became the impetus for the young Rastignac, who decided to conquer Paris and its inhabitants at all costs.
SIMILARITIES: both of these works are parts of Balzac’s “human comedy”. One environment, approximately one society, AND!!! a person encounters this society and, in fact, loses some of his illusions, naivety, and faith in goodness (we continue in the same spirit).
19. The image of Rastignac and his place in Balzac’s “Human Comedy”.
The image of Rastignac in "C.K." - the image of a young man who wins personal well-being. His path is the path of the most consistent and steady ascent. The loss of illusions, if it occurs, is accomplished relatively painlessly.
IN "Pere Goriot" Rastignac still believes in goodness and is proud of his purity. My life is “pure as a lily.” He is of noble aristocratic origin, comes to Paris to make a career and enroll in law school. He lives in Madame Vake's boarding house with his last money. He has access to the Viscountess de Beauseant's salon. In terms of social status, he is poor. Rastignac's life experience consists of a collision of two worlds (the convict Vautrin and the Viscountess). Rastignac considers Vautrin and his views above aristocratic society, where crimes are petty. “No one needs honesty,” says Vautrin. “The colder you expect, the further you will go.” Its intermediate position is typical for that time. With his last money he arranges a funeral for the poor Goriot.
He soon realizes that his situation is bad and will lead nowhere, that he must sacrifice honesty, spit on his pride and resort to meanness.
In the novel "Banker's House" tells about Rastignac's first business successes. Using the help of the husband of his mistress Delphine, Goriot's daughter, Baron de Nucingen, he makes his fortune through clever play on stocks. He is a classic opportunist.
IN "Shagreen skin"- a new stage in the evolution of Rastignac. Here he is already an experienced strategist who has long said goodbye to all illusions. This is an outright cynic who has learned to lie and be a hypocrite. He is a classic opportunist. In order to prosper, he teaches Raphael, you need to climb forward and sacrifice all moral principles.
Rastignac is a representative of that army of young people who followed not the path of open crime, but the path of adaptation carried out by means of legal crime. Financial policy is robbery. He is trying to adapt to the bourgeois throne.
20. The main conflict and arrangement of images in the novel “Père Goriot”.
The novel is an important part of the artistic history of society of the last century conceived by the writer. Among Balzac’s creative notes, entitled “Thoughts, plots, fragments”, there is a short sketch: “The old man - a family boarding house - 600 francs of rent - deprives himself of everything for the sake of his daughters, both of whom have an income of 50,000 francs; dies like a dog." In this sketch, you can easily recognize the story of Goriot’s boundless fatherly love, desecrated by his daughters.
The image of Father Goriot, of course, is, if not the main one in the novel, then at least one of the main ones, since the entire plot consists of the story of his love for his daughters.
Balzac describes him as the last of all the “freeloaders” in Madame Vauquer’s house. Balzac writes “...As in schools, as in corrupt circles, and here, among eighteen parasites, there turned out to be a wretched, outcast creature, a scapegoat, on whom ridicule rained down (...) Next, Balzac describes the story of Goriot in the boarding house - how he appeared there, how he filmed a more expensive room and was “Mr. Goriot,” as he began to rent rooms cheaper and cheaper until he became what he was at the time of the story. Balzac further writes: “However, no matter how vile his vices or behavior were, hostility towards him did not go so far as to expel him: he paid for the boarding house. Moreover, there was also benefit from him: everyone, ridiculing or bullying him, poured out their good or bad mood.” Thus, we see how all the boarding house residents treated Father Goriot and what their communication with him was like. As Balzac further writes about the attitude of the residents towards Father Goriot, “He inspired disgust in some, pity in others.”
Further, the image of Goriot's father is revealed through his attitude towards his daughters, Anastasi and Eugene. Already through the description of his actions, it is clear how much he loves his daughters, how much he is ready to sacrifice everything for them, while they seem to love him, but do not appreciate him. At the same time, at first it seems to the reader that Goriot, behind his boundless love for his daughters, does not see this certain indifference to himself, does not feel that they do not value him - he constantly finds some kind of explanation for their behavior, is content with what he can only out of the corner of his eye he sees his daughter passing him in a carriage; he can only come to them through the back door. He doesn’t seem to notice that they are ashamed of him, doesn’t pay attention to it. However, Balzac gives his point of view on what is happening - that is, outwardly Goriot seems not to pay attention to how his daughters behave, but inside “... the poor man’s heart was bleeding. He saw that his daughters were ashamed of him, and since they love their husbands, then he is a hindrance for their sons-in-law (...) the old man sacrificed himself, that’s why he is a father; he expelled himself from their houses, and the daughters were pleased; noticing this, he realized that he had done the right thing (...) This father gave away everything... He gave his soul, his love for twenty years, and he gave away his fortune in one day. The daughters squeezed the lemon and threw it into the street.”
Of course, the reader feels sorry for Goriot; the reader immediately feels compassion for him. Father Goriot loved his daughters so much that even the state in which he was - for the most part, precisely because of them - he endured, dreaming only that his daughters would be happy. “By equating his daughters to angels, the poor fellow thereby elevated them above himself; he even loved the evil that he suffered from them,” writes Balzac about how Goriot raised his daughters.
At the same time, Goriot himself, realizing that his daughters are treating him unfairly and incorrectly, says the following: “Both daughters love me very much. As a father I am happy. But two sons-in-law behaved badly with me.” That is, we see that he in no way blames his daughters for anything, shifting all the blame onto his sons-in-law, who, in fact, are much less to blame for him than his daughters. »
And only dying, when none of his daughters came to him, although both knew that he was dying, Goriot says out loud everything that the reader was thinking about while watching the development of the plot. “They both have hearts of stone. I loved them too much for them to love me,” Goriot says of his daughters. This is what he did not want to admit to himself: “I have completely atoned for my sin - my excessive love. They cruelly repaid me for my feeling - like executioners, they tore my body with pincers (...) They don’t love me and never have loved me! (...) I'm too stupid. They imagine that everyone's father is just like their father. You must always keep yourself in value.”
“If fathers are trampled under foot, the fatherland will perish. It is clear. Society, the whole world is held together by fatherhood, everything will collapse if children stop loving their fathers,” says Goriot, thereby, in my opinion, voicing one of the main ideas of the work.
13. Concept and structure of Balzac's "Human Comedy".
1. Concept. In 1834, Balzac conceived the idea of creating a multi-volume work, which was to become an artistic history and artistic philosophy of France. Initially, he wanted to call it “Studies of Morals”; later, in the 40s, he decided to call this huge work “ A human comedy”, by analogy with Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. The task is to emphasize the comedy inherent in this era, but at the same time not to deny humanity to its heroes. The Cheka was supposed to include 150 works, of which 92 were written, works of the first, second and third manners of Balzac. It was necessary not only to write new works, but also to significantly rework the old ones so that they corresponded to the plan. The works included in the “Chka” had the following features:
ü A combination of several storylines and dramatic construction;
ü Contrast and juxtaposition;
ü Keynotes;
ü The theme of the power of money (in almost all sections of The Human Comedy);
ü The main conflict of the era is the struggle between man and society;
ü Shows his characters objectively, through material manifestations;
ü Pays attention to little things - the path of a truly realistic writer;
ü The typical and individual in the characters are dialectically interconnected. The category of typical applies to both circumstances and events that determine the movement of the plot in novels.
ü Cyclization (the hero of "Chka" is considered as a living person about whom more can be told. For example, Rastignac appears, in addition to "Père Goriot", in "Shagreen Skin", "The Banker's House of Nucingen" and barely flashes in "Lost Illusions").
The intention of this work is most fully reflected in “ Preface to The Human Comedy”, written 13 years after the start of the implementation of the plan. The idea of this work, according to Balzac, “was born from comparisons of humanity with the animal world", namely, from the immutable law: " Everyone for themselves, - on which the unity of the organism is based.” Human society, in this sense, is similar to nature: “After all, Society creates from man, according to the environment in which he operates, as many diverse species as there are in the animal world.” If Buffon tried to represent the entire animal world in his book, why not try to do the same with society, although, of course, the description here will be more extensive, and women and men are completely different from male and female animals, since often a woman does not depend on men and plays an independent role in life. In addition, if the descriptions of the habits of animals are unchanged, then the habits of people and their environment change at every stage of civilization. Thus, Balzac was going to " to embrace three forms of existence: men, women and things, that is, people and the material embodiment of their thinking - in a word, to depict a person and life».
In addition to the animal world, the idea of the “Human Comedy” was influenced by the fact that there were many historical documents, and history of human morals was not written. It is this story that Balzac has in mind when he says: “Chance is the greatest novelist of the world; to be prolific, you need to study it. The historian itself was supposed to be the French Society; I could only be its secretary».
But it was not only his task to describe the history of morals. To earn the praise of readers (and Balzac considered this the goal of any artist), “ it was necessary to reflect on the principles of nature and discover in what ways human Societies move away from or approach the eternal law, truth, and beauty" A writer must have strong opinions on matters of morality and politics; he must consider himself a teacher of people.
Truthfulness of details. The novel “would not have any meaning if it were not truthful in detail" Balzac attaches the same importance to constant, everyday, secret or obvious facts, as well as to events in personal life, their causes and motivations, as historians have hitherto attached to events in the social life of peoples.
The implementation of the plan required a huge number of characters. There are more than two thousand of them in The Human Comedy. And we know everything necessary about each of them: their origin, parents (sometimes even distant ancestors), relatives, friends and enemies, previous and current income and occupations, exact addresses, apartment furnishings, the contents of wardrobes and even the names of the tailors who sewed costumes. The story of Balzac's heroes, as a rule, does not end in the finale of a particular work. Moving on to other novels, stories, short stories, they continue to live, experiencing ups and downs, hopes or disappointments, joys or torments, since the society of which they are organic particles is alive. The interconnection of these “returning” heroes holds together the fragments of the grandiose fresco, giving rise to the polysyllabic unity of the “Human Comedy”.
2. Structure.
Balzac's task was to write a history of the morals of France in the 19th century - to depict two or three thousand typical people of this era. Such a multitude of lives required certain frames, or “galleries.” Hence the entire structure of The Human Comedy. It is divided into 6 parts:
· Scenes of private life(this includes "Père Goriot" - the first work written in accordance with the general plan of the Cheka , "Gobsek"). « These scenes depict childhood, youth, their delusions»;
· Scenes of provincial life (« Evgenia Grande" and part " Lost illusions" - "Two poets"). " Mature age, passions, calculations, interests and ambition»;
· Scenes of Parisian life (« Banking house of Nucingen»). « A picture of tastes, vices and all the unbridled manifestations of life caused by the morals characteristic of the capital, where extreme good and extreme evil meet simultaneously»;
· Scenes of political life. « A very special life, in which the interests of many are reflected, is a life that takes place outside the general framework.” One principle: for monarchs and statesmen there are two moralities: great and small;
· Scenes of military life. « Societies in a state of highest tension, emerging from their usual state. Least complete piece of work»;
· Scenes of rural life. « Drama of social life. In this section are found the purest characters and the realization of the great principles of order, politics and morality».
Paris and the provinces are socially opposite. Not only people, but also the most important events differ in typical images. Balzac tried to give an idea of the different areas of France. "Comedy" has its own geography, as well as its own genealogy, its own families, setting, characters and facts, it also has its own armorial, its own nobility and bourgeoisie, its own artisans and peasants, politicians and dandies, its own army - in a word, the whole world.
These six sections are the basis of The Human Comedy. Above it rises the second part, consisting of philosophical studies, where the social engine of all events finds expression. Balzac discovers this main “social engine” in the struggle of egoistic passions and material interests that characterize the public and private life of France in the first half of the 19th century V. (" Shagreen leather"- connects scenes of morals with philosophical studies. Life is depicted in a fight with Desire, the beginning of every Passion. The fantastic image of shagreen skin does not conflict with the realistic method of depicting reality. All events are strictly motivated in the novel by a natural coincidence (Raphael, who has just wished for an orgy, has gone out from an antique shop, he unexpectedly encounters friends who take him to a “luxurious feast” in Taillefer’s house; at the feast, the hero accidentally meets a notary who has been looking for the heir of a deceased millionaire for two weeks, who turns out to be Raphael, etc.). – analytical studies(for example, “Physiology of Marriage”).
2. The main characters of O. Balzac
2.1 Papa Gobsek
Memoirists have left us a description of the appearance of this short man with a lion's mane of hair, who wore his plumpness easily and was bursting with energy. His golden-brown eyes were well remembered, “expressing everything as clearly as a word,” “eyes that could see through walls and the heart,” “before which eagles had to lower their eyes...”
While Balzac was seeking recognition, his contemporaries did not yet suspect that his works, decades and centuries later, would be considered the most reliable and most fascinating evidence of his era. His friends George Sand and Victor Hugo will be the first to understand this.
Gobsek - means “swallowing dry food”, roughly translated - “guzzler”. So Balzac renamed his story in the process of work, which in 1830 still bore the moralizing title “The Dangers of Dissipation.” Its hero, an old moneylender, living alone and poor, without family or attachments, unexpectedly reveals himself as the ruler of hundreds of human destinies, one of the few uncrowned kings of Paris. He owns gold, and money is the key to all human dramas. How many unfortunate people come to beg him for money: “... a young girl in love, a merchant on the verge of bankruptcy, a mother trying to hide her son’s misdeeds, an artist without a piece of bread, a nobleman who has fallen out of favor... shocked... with the power of his word. .." Gobsek charges monstrous interest rates. Sometimes his victims lost their temper, screamed, then there was silence, “like in a kitchen when they kill a duck in it.”
The image of the moneylender fully expressed Balzac's characteristic artistic vision of man. He did not paint mediocre, average people of one social class or profession, but always endowed them with outstanding personal qualities and a bright personality. Gobsek is insightful and prudent, like a diplomat, he has a philosophical mind, an iron will, and rare energy. He doesn’t just accumulate wealth, the main thing is that he knows the value of his clients, the bankrupt, degraded aristocrats who, for the sake of a luxurious life, “steal millions, sell their homeland.” In relation to them, he is right and feels like a just avenger.
Gobsek's past includes years of wanderings in colonial India, full of romantic vicissitudes. He knows people and life, sees the most secret springs of the social mechanism. But Balzac's thick, sparkling colors help expose him. The perverting power of money manifested itself in Gobsek’s very personality: imagining that gold rules the world, he exchanged all human joys for acquisitiveness, turning into a pathetic maniac by the end of his life. The story ends with a stunning picture of the rotting of various valuables hidden by the miser in his home. This pile, where decaying gourmet foods and precious objects of art are mixed, is a grandiose symbol of the destructive power of acquisitiveness, the inhumanity of the bourgeois system of life and thought.
2.2 Raphael and “shagreen skin”
In 1831, Balzac gained even greater fame with his short novel Shagreen Skin. Can you call it fantastic? In this work there is a magical symbol - skin, which fulfills all the desires of its owner, but at the same time shortens his life according to the strength of desire... The story of Raphael, a lonely and poor young scientist, lost in the “paved desert” of Paris and stopped on the verge of suicide by a magical a gift from a mysterious antique dealer, was entertaining Arabian tales, very popular in those years. And at the same time, this brilliantly written story, full of thought and heartfelt warmth, revealed the true truth about France in the thirties, exposed the hypocrisy of a society that gave power to murderers, endlessly increased selfishness, impoverished and dried out human soul.
2.3 Eugenia Grande
The depiction of life in Balzac's work expanded and diversified. In 1833, in “Eugenie Grande,” Balzac discovered the drama of a seemingly dull provincial existence. This was a very important discovery, a whole revolution in the history of the Western European novel: prose poetry. Against the backdrop of the life of the provincial town of Saumur, Balzac depicted the miser Grandet - a type of the same breed as Gobsek, and at the same time deeply different from him, and his meek, persistent daughter, whose love and life her father sacrificed to his passion for gold .
The writer's political views developed in a unique way. In his journalism, he declared himself a supporter of royal power (in addition, a legitimist) and the ancient aristocracy. Such a self-determination of an artist, whose work carried within itself a powerful charge of denial of social injustice, a thinker who was carried away by many of the achievements of his century, must have seemed strange and paradoxical. But Balzac's monarchism can be explained historically. It was dictated primarily by his disgust for the power of the bourgeoisie; in comparison with it, the ancient nobility had the advantages of culture, traditions of knightly honor and duty. And firm royal power, according to the writer, could restrain the rampant selfish interests that were harmful to France and unite the nation for the common good. Despite Balzac’s deep respect and sympathy for working people, depicted in a number of images, the people as a whole were, in his perception, a passive suffering mass in need of care. L.N. Tolstoy rightly wrote about the property of real talent to peer into people and the phenomena of life in a special way and see the truth; he considered talent to be an “extraordinary light” in an artist, helping to “stand out” from the worldview of his environment.
The characteristic of talent is incorruptibility, and Balzac, as F. Engels noted, knew the value of “his beloved aristocrats” and described them sharply satirically, with bitter irony. And he clearly saw that the most noble and heroic individuals are those who rebel against the current society in the name of social justice. Over time, he will write the novel “Lost Illusions,” where he will depict, next to the corrupt Parisian journalists, a community of young people working for the future, and the most attractive of them will be the chivalrous republican Michel Chrétien, who died on the barricade in the Parisian uprising of 1832. Engels would call this ability to rise above his own political prejudices one of “the greatest victories of realism” and one of “the greatest traits of old Balzac” 3 .
Artistic clairvoyance led Balzac to a vivid depiction of the departure of the nobility from the historical stage; None of the 19th-century writers in the West delivered a more damning and better-founded verdict on the bourgeoisie than Balzac. And it is not surprising that neither his enemies nor his friends took his legitimacy seriously.
3. "Human Comedy"
Creative plans Balzac's works grew and at the same time acquired a more definite shape. Everything that had already been created and was being created, and everything that he would ever write again, was seen by him as a kind of integral “portrait of the century.” All of France was supposed to be expressed here - all the main contradictions and conflicts of the era, all human types, classes, professions. In a huge mosaic panorama there will be a capital, a province and a village, here there are ministers, scientists, lawyers, traders, peasants. Balzac painted an intense struggle of passions, the story of precious human energy wasted in bourgeois society on base goals; the history of crimes against morality, not prosecuted by law, but claiming thousands of lives. In the early forties, the author called this building he was erecting “The Human Comedy,” defining its three main sections: “Etudes on Morals,” “Philosophical Etudes,” and “Analytical Etudes.” “Studies on Morals” were divided by Balzac into Scenes of private, provincial, Parisian, military, political and village life. Thus, individual works Balzac's works merged into a grandiose epic covering all aspects of social life.
In this unparalleled complex works of art the same characters appear in different units multiple times. But there is no direct chronological continuation of lives and events; the situation is more complicated. The same person appears either as the main character or as a secondary character, at different moments and at different stages of his life. It either appears in one episode, then passes in the background, making up the background or forming the atmosphere of the action, then appears in the perception of many, different persons, which themselves are reflected in their ideas about him. This achieves an unusually versatile illumination of the character in the current time, the relief of the characterization; the hidden corners of his soul and life, his desires and possibilities are highlighted. A person invariably appears in relationships with a mass of other persons, with society, which has a decisive influence on him. The technique of “returning characters”, invented by Balzac, gives a high artistic and educational effect.
Balzac’s recognized masterpieces include the novel “Père Goriot,” created at his usual almost unimaginable pace and intensity of work. The novel is relatively small, but is distinguished by the highest degree of drama inherent in all Balzac’s work, the richness and severity of conflicts that are resolved in intense struggle. The excited tone of the narrative is one of the integral features of the novel, captivating the reader and introducing him to the suffering of the heroes, to the vicissitudes of their destinies and their internal development.
Goriot is called the bourgeois King Lear; indeed the same situation is depicted here; but not the king, but the former vermicelli merchant, having given his two daughters in marriage with honor, divides his entire fortune between them, and then becomes superfluous to them. Having experienced prolonged moral agony, the torment of disappointment and trampled paternal love, Gorio dies on the straw, abandoned by everyone. What Balzac shares with Shakespeare is the energy of passions and the general scale of the conflict and heroes.
But Balzac's art is new, and it corresponds to the new time. The novel contains a memory of Goriot's past, of the wealth acquired through grain speculation during the years of revolution and famine; there is Madame Boke's boarding house with its motley parasites (such boarding houses appeared only after violent political upheavals and often provided shelter for all sorts of social detritus). The image of Eugene Rastignac, a typical figure of a young aristocrat, who, after a short struggle with himself, surrenders his moral positions for the sake of money and success in society, also belongs to modern times.
In a conversation between two students, Rastignac and Bianchon, the first asks the question that has since become famous: should we agree or not to kill an old mandarin in distant China, if at such a price one can buy personal well-being? This question (of course, symbolic) poses a moral dilemma: is it permissible to build one’s happiness on the misfortune of another person? Bianchon refuses. After some time, Rastignac, gaining experience in the Parisian world, will say that his mandarin is “already wheezing”...
Goriot's line in the novel is closely related to Rastignac's line, not only because both live in the same miserable boarding house, but that Rastignac meets both of the old man's daughters in the living rooms, studies them and decides to make the younger one an instrument of his career. More important than this purely plot connection between Rastignac and Goriot is their connection in terms of moral issues novel: the monstrous ingratitude of the daughters, the loneliness of Goriot and all the bitterness of his death serve as an object lesson for Rastignac in the process of his re-education - this is what high society reward of selfless feeling. Vautrin is right, at least he’s not being a hypocrite...
The escaped convict Jacques Collin, who lives with the same Madame Vauquer under the name Vautrin, is a figure of large scale, like 3 and Gobsek. Endowed with devilish energy and insight, he sees perfectly and proves to the student with crushing eloquence that people at the top of society - politicians, financiers, social beauties - live by the same laws of robbery as the world of hard labor; morally, both worlds are worth each other.
Eugene’s elegant relative, Viscountess de Baussant, teaches him, based on bitter experience, the same thing as “this tornado called Vautrin”: “Strike without mercy, and they will fear you... look at men and women as shifting horses, to whom They let you die at every station...”
Thus, everything in the novel is interconnected. The picture of society, drawn in a deeply moving way, reveals its ins and outs. "Père Goriot" love story(the love story between Rastignac and Delphine is not the main plot point); it has secrets, surprises, cunningly organized crimes, but it is clear that this is not an adventure novel. All its elements are united by the theme of Rastignac’s “education”: the behavior of Goriot and his daughters, the activities of Vautrin, the fate of Bossin, the life of the boarding house and the life of the living rooms. “Père Goriot” is a novel about a society plowed up by the French revolution, about the primacy of the bourgeois spirit in it, a novel full of bitter truth. He is imbued with the indignation and fearlessness of a researcher who discovers the underside of things behind their elegant surface. "The world is a quagmire." “I’m in hell and I’ll stay in it,” declares Rastignac, who has made his choice.
Balzac captivated readers. And yet the bourgeois press constantly attacked the author " Shagreen leather", "Eugénie Grande", "Père Goriot", these "imperishable books", as George Sand called them. Most readily they accused him of implausibility and immorality. The first is because he gave the typical circumstances of modern life the most distinct, complete and complete expression. He considered the enlargement and condensation of reality in art to be an aesthetic law. In the novel “Lost Illusions,” the writer d'Artez expresses the author's thought: “What is art? A clot of nature.” Another favorite accusation was based on the immorality of his heroes; the moral qualities of the characters were attributed to the author himself.
Balzac had long been short of a day, not enough life to realize his plans. From his letters to his sister Laura, to his friend, to E. Ganskaya, a picture emerges of ever-renewing labor, often eighteen or more hours a day, night and day, with the shutters and candles closed; labor that crowds out everything else from life except the “fight against the avalanche” of multiplying plans. He writes several works at the same time and edits countless proofs. He calls himself “a prisoner of an idea and a cause, as inexorable as creditors.” “If only they knew what it means to process ideas, give them shape and color, how exhausting it is!” “Burning nights are replaced by other blazing nights, days of reflection are replaced by new days of reflection, from writing you move on to plans, from plans to writing.” He is afraid of going crazy from overexertion. His work is a battle; this comparison appears many times in his correspondence, as does the comparison of himself with a plowman, a mason, and a foundry worker. And just as often as complaints about the overwhelming load of work, courage, determination not to retreat, and notes of hope for victory are heard in his correspondence. He likens himself to a republican general leading a campaign without bread or boots (an image suggested by recent events in the military history of the French Revolution). In the novel “Cousin Betta,” reflecting on labor as the first law of creativity, he obliges the artist to work “like a miner buried in a landslide.”
He allowed himself, much less often than he wanted, to travel around France or abroad, including to Russia. Balzac dreamed of having a family, a home. One day they brought him a letter from Russia with the signature “Stranger” - a response to his works that attracted his attention, and later an acquaintance followed. He went to St. Petersburg and to her estate in the Kyiv province to the woman who wrote the letter, the Polish Countess Evelina Ganskaya, with whom he wanted to connect his fate. She, a wealthy landowner, was afraid of his debts and instability. The marriage with her took place only eighteen years after her letter, in the year of his death. Balzac considered his “main” genre to be the novel - a large and free literary form, the possibilities of which were well suited to his plans: to draw complex social connections between many characters, to reflect the course of history... At the same time, he often turned to the “small genre” - the story ( short story), a story with elements of a short story; the diversity of genres reflected the versatility of his talent. There are few heroes in a story, there is usually only one line of action, but a small form has its advantages. Just a small volume of work, with a skillful choice of content, can contribute to the concentration of expressiveness.
Balzac's stories and tales are always large-scale: behind one incident or one chain of events in someone's private life, thanks to their deeply revealed roots, an important side of reality is outlined that goes beyond the life of this one person (for example, in “Gobsek”). Balzac in the stories remains a “doctor of social medicine” and a great heart specialist.
In the story “Colonel Chabert” (1832), the action grows out of an extraordinary situation: a man who was considered killed in battle and buried, turned out to be only seriously wounded, miraculously got out of a mass grave and spent eight long years trying to ensure that he, poor and unrecognizable because of wounds and illnesses, the bureaucratic machine of society officially recognized him as alive...
Balzac has no plots that are not related to the analysis of society and era. The desperate struggle of passions, the life paths of heroes, full of surprises and twists and turns, tragic mental crises grow out of strictly truthful historical circumstances. In "Colonel Chabert" the development of action is directly influenced by the difficult situation in France in the first decades of the century, the change political regimes in the country. Chabert, a pupil of a foundling asylum, having neither wealth nor privileges, straightforward and noble by nature, received the title and rank of count from Napoleon for his personal bravery. He was considered dead in the battle of 1807, during the time when Napoleon was emperor. Chabert's wife, beneficially and happily for herself, remarried to a man from an old aristocratic family - the political situation favored such a mixed union. But the Empire gave way to the Bourbon restoration, and Rose's second husband Chabert began to secretly regret his marriage, which was now hindering his career. Thus, the entire historical process in the country passes before us in the vicissitudes of the fate of one married couple. Clinging to her happiness, Chabert's ex-wife, the Countess, refused to recognize him with bestial egoism and pushed him back into the grave. But, despite her, with the support of a talented lawyer (this is Derville, familiar to us from Gobsek), Chabert finally received all the necessary documents. Then his wife changed tactics. Playing on the feelings of her husband, who still retained his love for her, acting like a skilled actress, she persuaded him to voluntarily give up - for the sake of her happiness - everything that he had regained at the cost of heroic efforts in a duel with her and with society.
But chance revealed to Chabert all her baseness: having achieved her goal, to be sure, she decided to deprive him of his honorable name, she was ready to slander him, to lock him up in a madhouse...
Shocked, he refuses - no longer out of love, as he wanted before, but out of contempt for both her and the general falsehood - not only from property, but also from his place in society and his very name. As a nameless tramp, he sinks to the bottom.
The unexpected tragic outcome is not exhausted by this (here is an example of the drama inherent in Balzac's narrative). A full twenty years later, Derville discovers Chabert, apparently mentally retarded, among the inhabitants of the almshouse. But it turns out that both the mind and patriotic feelings of the old warrior are alive. He wears a mask of madness, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, this is his form of rejection of the environment with its bestial morals. He is not able to defeat this environment, but it did not defeat his spirit.
“What a fate! Spend your childhood in a foundling asylum, die in an almshouse for the elderly, and in between help Napoleon conquer Europe and Egypt.” At the end of the story, two experienced lawyers confirm that Chabert’s story, while seemingly unusual, is in fact typical: “I’ve already seen enough of all this while working for Desroches...”
Chabert's spiritual inflexibility and his adherence to moral sense are characteristic of the artistic world of the “Human Comedy”. This world is populated by crowds of moneylenders, careerists, bankers, convicts, brilliant egoists with cold hearts. But the other pole is also fully represented in it: Eugenie Grandet, Chabert, Michel Chrétien and the entire Commonwealth of d'Artesa, lawyer Derville (about whom his high-society client says ironically: “You will never achieve anything, but you will be the happiest and best of people”) In Balzac's novels, selfless seekers selflessly pursue their ideas: scientists, artists, inventors. In the story “Colonel Chabert,” Derville expresses a brilliantly simple observation: one of the properties of virtue is not to be an owner. This idea is confirmed in Balzac by a string of images of people from the people.
4. “Mass of the Atheist” as a continuation of the collection
Balzac always sees broadly the area of reality that he undertakes to depict, and each of his works is characterized by multi-themes and multi-problems. The same is true in this story, where there are only three characters: the famous surgeon Desplaines, the doctor Bianchon, who appeared in many of Balzac’s works, and the worker Bourges from the province of Auvergne. Outlining a characterization of Desplein (this character had a living prototype, the surgeon Dupuytren), built on a surprisingly lively combination of contradictory traits, the author raised the question of the difference between genius and talent, the universality of knowledge and breadth of outlook, and the importance of a philosophical mind for a specialist. Balzac constantly cared about the fascination of his plots, and here the action is based on revealing the mystery: why does Desplein, a convinced atheist, attend church? But a fascinating plot is never an end in itself; it certainly serves the truth of the characters, reveals the truth about the society in which the heroes live. The mystery is clarified through Desplaine's account of his past.
He had difficult years of study; The theme of a young talent perishing without support in poverty and loneliness was touched upon more than once in The Human Comedy; it was also personally close to Balzac. In “The Atheist’s Mass” it is repeated in the biography of Bianchon, who became his teacher’s assistant and friend. With the irresistible power of feeling inherent in Balzac, meager pages were written about the selfishness of rich mediocrities, which “are encountered at every step in high society,” about the “army of pygmies” that trample the talent and the very life of the poor. His only friend turned out to be a simple water-carrier, who in his heart understood the human value of a poor student and, selflessly and delicately helping, gave him the opportunity to complete his course and defend his diploma. And the famous surgeon, who could not be further from sentimentality, through the decades carried passionate gratitude to his named father, “like a fire that burns to this day!” In memory of him, Desplaines is ready to rush to the aid of any other worker who in any way resembles the late Bourges.
For judging Balzac’s values, the image of Bianchon is also important - “direct, incapable of any compromise in matters of honor” (it was he who refused to “kill the mandarin” in “Père Goriot”). He is a wonderful comrade, a courageous and at the same time light-hearted man, not averse to pleasure, but “locked” his lusts and passions “within the limits of incessant work.” Thus, in a short story, the charge of humanity characteristic of all the work of its author was fully embodied.
Balzac thought deeply about the problems of art and wrote several stories about artists. It would be fair to call “The Unknown Masterpiece” the pearl of the entire series.
This story has its own amazing history. It was published in 1831, then thoroughly revised and took its final form only in 1837, incorporating creative experience Balzac, by that time already the author of “Gobsek”, “Colonel Chabert”, “Eugenie Grande”, “Père Goriot”, “The Quest for the Absolute”. “The Unknown Masterpiece” is a story about the paths of art, extremely rich in thought (it is classified by the author in the section of “philosophical studies”); the thought was embodied in living, visible images and an exciting plot. The action takes place at the beginning of the 17th century; Like any significant work from the distant past, the story vividly resonates with the present.
A mysterious painter who has comprehended the deep secrets of craftsmanship has created an image beautiful woman, so perfect that it seems to blur the line between art and nature. And later, the same artist, taking the wrong path, ruined his painting, unnoticed by himself turning it into a chaos of lines and colors. Realizing this, he committed suicide.
What was the secret of his success? And what was the cause of the crash?
In the mouth of Frenhofer, when he corrects Porbus's painting as an instruction to his fellows, thoughts about great art resulted in popular verbal formulas. “The task of art is not to copy nature, but to express it! You are not a pathetic copyist, but a poet! And this idea is further explained by comparing a simple plaster cast of a woman’s hand (the cast doesn’t seem to lie) with an image of the same hand made by an artist: the cast is “the hand of a corpse, and you will have to turn to a sculptor, who, without giving an exact copy, will convey the movement and life." It is impossible to better imagine the essence and truth of art, its magical power. The artist is not limited to the surface of things, like a craftsman taking a cast. "Impression! Impression! But they are only accidents of life, and not life itself!.. Neither an artist, nor a poet, nor a sculptor should separate the impression from the cause, since they are inseparable - one in the other.” The sources of facial expression are in the past of a lifetime. This means that the artist explores his model with inspiration. Frenhofer is right a thousand times: he is not a pathetic copyist...
The artist Frenhofer is a fictitious person. The artists Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and France Porbus (1569-1622) are historical figures, as is the mentioned “Frenhofer’s teacher” Mabuse (Jan Gossaert). Balzac skillfully finds reference points for his fiction in reality. the artist explores his model with inspiration. He reflects specifically on the role of air and light in painting - he breaks up the rigid outline of objects, creating “a haze of light and warm undertones,” prophetically anticipating the discoveries of the Impressionists.
What happened next that led Frenhofer to a dead end? This question is not easy to answer, especially since there is more than one reason. Balzac, as usual, sees the problem “comprehensively,” including many of its roots and sides.
The clearest warning is against the deception of subjective perceptions; a creative person, carried away by his idea, in a thirst for absolute perfection, may unnoticed by himself lose the correct judgment about his work, about its value, its suitability for its purpose. The author has penetrated into the complex area of the psychology of creativity. Through the mouth of Porbus, Balzac also warns the artist against theorizing in isolation from direct creative work: “Artists should reason only with a brush in their hands.” Of course, the content of the psychological study is not exhausted by this. It is not exaggerating to call it inexhaustible. In this sense, it resembles Leonardo da Vinci’s world-famous painting La Gioconda,” like this painting, it retains something mysterious in itself. But to understand this, you need to learn to understand painting and its history. For now, we will limit ourselves to providing other evidence in favor of the depth and prophetic power of the story. In our time, Stefan Zweig wrote: “It is the artists who feel that never before has the most intimate secret of art, the desire for perfection, been so violently brought to tragic proportions.” The famous painter Paul Cezanne recognized himself with great excitement in the personality of Frenhofer. Pablo Picasso, a famous artist of the 20th century, made eighty illustrations for a short story.
The fate of this story is unprecedented. In addition to countless articles, special books have been written about him in French and English languages. Interest in the “Unknown Masterpiece” increases over time, as art develops.
This book includes selected works of Balzac from the thirties. In the last decade of the writer's life, The Human Comedy continued to grow. Novels increased in volume, covering ever new aspects of reality, substantiating increasingly numerous and complex connections between characters. Let’s name at least the most important ones: “Lost Illusions”, “Dark Affair”, “A Bachelor’s Life”, “Cousin Betta”, “Cousin Pons” are finished.
Conclusion
Balzac was fifty-one years old when death interrupted his work. So many plans, fragments, and new titles were discovered in his papers that one of the researchers rightfully suggested: no matter how long this unusually prolific writer lived, The Human Comedy would still not have been completed, because as plans were implemented, new ones would appear ; there would be no end to it, just as there is no end to the life of society.
Balzac died on August 19, 1850. Over his grave, Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables, said prophetic words: “...Whether he wanted it or not, whether he agreed with it or not, the creator of this huge and unprecedented work was from a strong breed of revolutionary writers... Balzac takes modern society death grip. His scalpel penetrates the soul, the heart, the brain... into the abyss that everyone carries within themselves. And so Balzac, after these terrible labors that led Moliere to melancholy and misanthropy - Rousseau, comes out smiling and bright.”
Balzac can be read superficially, at the level of changing dramatic events. In this case too, he gives a lot. And you can read more and more thoughtfully, at the same time trying to understand the human scientist, the reliable historian, the “doctor of social medicine.” Then Balzac is not an easy read. But he rewards with the fullest measure.
Bibliography
1. Balzac O. Collection. Op. in 24 volumes - M.: Leningrad State University Publishing House, 1960.
2. Grigorieva E.Ya., Gorbacheva E.Yu. French literature. – M.: Infra-M, 2009. – 560 p.
3. Balzac O. Gobsek. Father Goriot. Evgenia Grande. Unknown masterpiece. – M.: Bustard, 2007. – 656 p.
4. Zhirmunskaya N.A. From Baroque to Romanticism: Articles on French and German literature. – M.: Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg State University. – St. Petersburg: 2001. – 464 p.
5. Tolstoy L.N. Full Collection Op. in 30 volumes, 30 volumes - M.: GIHL. 1951.
6. Maurois A. Literary portraits. – M.: Progress, 1970. – 455 p.
7. Balzac in the memoirs of his contemporaries. – M.: Fiction, 1986. – 559 p.
8. Zweig St. Balzac. – M.: Young Guard, 1961. – 768 p.
9. Hugo V. Collection. Op. in 15 volumes. T. 15 – M.: - 1956.
Balzac O. Collection. Op. in 24 volumes - M.: Leningrad State University Publishing House, 1960.
Grigorieva E.Ya., Gorbacheva E.Yu. French literature. – M.: Infra-M, 2009. – 560 p.
Balzac O. Gobsek. Father Goriot. Evgenia Grande. Unknown masterpiece. – M.: Bustard, 2007. – 656 p.
Zhirmunskaya N.A. From Baroque to Romanticism: Articles on French and German literature. – M.: Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg State University. – St. Petersburg: 2001. – 464 p.
Tolstoy L.N. Full Collection Op. in 30 volumes, 30 volumes - M.: GIHL. 1951.
Maurois A. Literary portraits. – M.: Progress, 1970. – 455 p.
Balzac in the memoirs of his contemporaries. – M.: Fiction, 1986. – 559 p.
Zweig St. Balzac. – M.: Young Guard, 1961. – 768 p.
Hugo V. Collection. Op. in 15 volumes. T. 15 – M.: - 1956.
absolutely loved his profession. And this devotion of Achille Flaubert to science was passed on to his son. Contemporaries were amazed at Gustave Flaubert's education and his truly encyclopedic knowledge. After graduating from the Rouen Lyceum, he entered the law faculty of the University of Paris, but a nervous illness that developed in 1844 forced him to interrupt his studies. My father bought the small estate of Croisset near Rouen, in...
He was an honorary member of the Brotherhood and completed a number of works commissioned by him: a stained glass window for the chapel in the Church of St. John, painting and gilding of the altar, a painting with the subject of the Crucifixion, etc. Hieronymus Bosch is known for his works filled with demonic creatures, showing his exceptional independence from tradition his time. However, this painting is fully consistent with the iconographic tradition of the 15th...
His whole appearance: his dark face with huge radiant eyes, his openness and kindness, his ardor and impressionability, the spontaneity of his reactions made him stand out extraordinarily. From his first steps in poetry, Boris Pasternak discovered a special handwriting. He has his own system of artistic means and techniques. The reader had to get used to Pasternak’s poems, he had to get used to them. Much in...
She makes Makar Alekseevich a vest made of “yellow fabric with flowers.” So, in my opinion, the colors most often used in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky are: yellow, red, pink, green, black. II L.N. Tolstoy Just like many other writers, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy used the technique of color painting in his works to create deeper images of heroes. Not...
* This work is not a scientific work, it is not a graduation work qualifying work and is the result of processing, structuring and formatting the collected information intended for use as a source of material for self-study educational works.
Honore de Balzac, famous French writer. Born on May 8 (20), 1799 in Tours, died on August 6 (18), 1850 in Paris. Not only by the peculiarities of his work, but also by his very personality and literary career, he represents a bright type of writer, developing under the influence of the broad successes of natural science and positive philosophy, amid the harsh struggles and fierce competition caused by the growth of industry. His life is the story of a worker who, with tireless energy, strives to make his way forward, at all costs to win fame and fortune. His work is imbued with the desire to transfer the methods of modern natural science to fiction, to erase the line separating literature from science. His father was a vulgar materialist and left a number of writings on social issues; Above all, he set the task of physically improving the human race and, with the help of the conclusions of natural science, dreamed of resolving the social and moral issues of his time.
Balzac inherited his father's worldview, his health and iron will. Having received his initial education first in a provincial college, then in a Parisian college, Balzac remained in the capital when his father left with his family for the provinces. Having decided, against the will of his father, to devote himself to literature, he was almost deprived of family support. As his letters to his sister Laura show, this did not stop him from being full of energy and ambitious plans. In his wretched closet he dreamed of influence, fame and wealth, of conquering a great city. He writes under a pseudonym a number of novels that are devoid of literary significance and were not subsequently included by him in the complete collection of his works.
At the same time, the projector and entrepreneur awakens in him. Warning against the subsequently widely established idea of cheap editions, Balzac was the first to launch one-volume editions of the classics and publish (1825 - 1826) Moliere and La Fontaine with his notes. But its publications were not successful. The printing house and word-writing he started also failed, which he had to cede to his partners.
Balzac's trip to Sardinia ended even more sadly, where he dreamed of discovering the silver left there by the ancient Romans in the mines they were developing. As a result of all these enterprises, Balzac found himself in unpayable debts, forcing him to persistent literary work. He writes stories, brochures on various issues, and collaborates in the magazines “Caricature” and “Silhouette”.
Balzac's fame began with the appearance in 1829 of his novel Le dernier Chouane ou la Bretagne en 1800. From this moment on, Balzac almost never deviates from the path he embarked on. One after another, his novels appear, in which he outlines all aspects of French life, displays an endless string of the most diverse types, and compiles “the greatest collection of documents on human nature.” He is a typical craft writer. Like Zola and in contrast to the romantics, poet-prophets, he does not wait for inspiration. He works 15 to 18 hours a day, sits down at his desk after midnight and hardly leaves his pen until six o'clock the next evening, interrupting work only for a bath, breakfast, and especially for coffee, which he uses to maintain his energy and which he himself carefully prepared and prepared. consumed in huge quantities.
The novels “Shagreen Skin”, “A Thirty-Year-Old Woman” and especially “Eugenie Grande” (1833), which appeared in the early thirties, brought him great fame, and Balzac no longer had to chase publishers. However, he fails to realize his dream of wealth, despite his extraordinary fertility; he sometimes publishes several novels a year.
Of his many novels, the most famous are: “The Country Doctor”, “In Search of the Absolute”, “Père Goriot”, “Lost Illusions”, “The Country Priest”, “A Bachelor’s Household”, “The Peasants”, “Cousin Pons”, “Cousin Bette” "
Perhaps the influence of the scientific spirit of the times on Balzac was not reflected so clearly in anything as in his attempt to combine his novels into one whole. He collected all the published novels, added a number of new ones to them, introduced common characters into them, connected individuals with family, friendship and other connections, and thus created, but did not complete, a grandiose epic, which he called “The Human Comedy,” and which was supposed to serve as scientific and artistic material for studying the psychology of modern society.
In the preface to The Human Comedy, he himself draws a parallel between the laws of development of the animal world and human society. Different types animals represent only modifications of a general type that arise depending on environmental conditions; so, depending on the conditions of upbringing, the environment, etc. - the same modifications of a person as a donkey, a cow, etc. - species of the general animal type.
For the purpose of scientific systematization, Balzac divided this huge number of novels into series. In addition to novels, Balzac wrote a number of dramatic works; but most of his dramas and comedies were not successful on the stage.
In 1833, Balzac received a letter from an unknown Polish aristocrat, Hanska, née Countess Rzhevusskaya. A correspondence began between the novelist and an admirer of his talent (published on the centenary of Balzac’s birth). Balzac subsequently met Ganskaya several times, among other things, in St. Petersburg, where he visited in 1840. When Ganskaya became a widow, she accepted Balzac’s proposal, but for several more years, for various reasons, their wedding could not take place. Balzac carefully decorated the apartment for himself and his wife, but when, finally, in March 1850, the wedding took place in Berdichev, death was already waiting for him, and Balzac had only a few months left to enjoy family happiness and a relatively prosperous existence.
Balzac is generally recognized as the father of realism and naturalism. The development of realism in literature was a reflection of the general scientific spirit of the 19th century, just like the triumph of positivism in philosophy and the successes of natural science. The famous dispute between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire made a great impression on the minds of that time. Cuvier recognized in the animal kingdom several separate types, between which there is no connection; Saint-Hilaire defended the principle of unity of organic structure in all animals. Balzac was a student of Saint-Hilaire and transferred his method to the field of the novel.
Depicting “social varieties,” Balzac strives for an accurate scientific classification and displays the powers of observation characteristic of a botanist or zoologist. He studied with amazing accuracy the characteristics characteristic of this or that “variety.” He knows the habits, turns of speech, techniques, movement, gait, gestures, even the little details of the situation, details of the costume characteristic of this or that hero. Just as Cuvier guesses the structure of an entire animal organism from a found tooth or bone, so Balzac, from one gesture or word, determines the entire psyche of a given social type. The correspondence that Cuvier discovered between parts of the body, Balzac seeks to establish between the manifestations of the human psyche. That is why he follows his characters so carefully, depicts in detail the arrangement of rooms in the apartment, trinkets on the dressing table, knows exactly down to the centimeter the amount of money in the wallet actor. He has a deep respect for fact.
Like a true scientist, he seems to be aware that his psychological conclusions will be justified only when they embrace many facts, and Balzac strives with unparalleled zeal to collect as many documents as possible. For him, as for the natural scientist, facts play a primary role along with classification. Balzac amazes with the abundance of material he collected. Ministers, bankers and merchants, journalists, critics and poets, artists and scientists, courtesans, moneylenders, representatives of the old aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the capital and the province, political struggle and private life - Balzac collects everything in his “comedy”. The same scientific direction of Balzac's creativity explains the mixture of artistic, scientific and journalistic elements in his novels. Along with the depiction of feelings and passions, we will find in them detailed information of a business nature about banking operations, about the return account, about the production of cheap paper, journalistic discussions about marriage, morality, about political and social issues, etc.
Balzac merges with his heroes, he almost physically clearly experiences their sorrows and joys with them, he languishes and suffers when his hero finds himself in a difficult situation from which he cannot show him a way out; he comes to despair when he cannot find among his heroes a suitable groom for some heroine, uses every effort to promote the moral revival of a degraded person or to keep an inexperienced young man from moral fall, and sincerely grieves when his efforts fail. It seems to him that he is facing living people and real conflicts that develop according to certain laws, beyond his power.
Balzac's worldview, as it becomes clear from his novels, has a pessimistic tint. He is objective in his portrayal of his heroes and in this regard does not deviate from the general scientific spirit of his work. It does not serve satirical purposes. Its task is to collect documents about a person and classify them. And, nevertheless, one cannot help but see that, in general, his “Comedy” is a grave indictment against French society of the restoration era and the July monarchy and against man in general. Perhaps no one has embodied such vivid images the heartless egoism that reigns in the bourgeois world. This egoism, generated by a frenzied pursuit of the blessings of life, pleasure and wealth, seems to Balzac to be the main driving force of society.
Balzac's favorite theme is the fierce struggle of talented ambitious people making their way in a big city. A pure young man caught in Big city and making a career at the cost of his moral destruction is Balzac’s favorite image. Such is Rastignac (“Père Goriot”), such is Lucien Chardon (“Lost Illusions”). His women, in most cases, are as cold and selfish as Goriot’s daughters, easily trading in both toilets and souls. His men are mostly lustful animals. If he brings out a pure girl, like Eugenia Grande, then, it seems, only to show how in the terrible atmosphere of modern public life the most sensitive and tender heart hardens, sincere feelings and touching love are eradicated.
Balzac has one of the best types of miser known in literature. In the person of old Grandet, he brought out a modern genius of profit, a millionaire who turned speculation into art. Grande renounced all the joys of life, dried up the soul of his daughter, deprived all his loved ones of happiness, but made millions. His satisfaction lies in successful speculation, in financial conquests, in trade victories. He is a kind of disinterested servant of “art for art’s sake,” since he himself is personally unpretentious and is not interested in the benefits that are given by millions.
Balzac understood the power of money. For him, money is the main reason for events. He was able to show how his age exchanged everything for hard cash, from basic necessities to talent, inspiration and the most tender and sacred feelings.
Representatives of the noblest professions - doctors, priests, publicists, artists, poets - became the hired servants of those who have capital.
This pessimism corresponds to the general materialistic direction of Balzac's work. Ideal images are less successful for him than those figures that reflected the material direction of the 19th century.
Balzac’s view of the meaning of modern life, of the factors that control modern man, can best be formulated by the words that he puts into the mouth of the convict Vautrin, teaching a young student: “To jump out into the people - this is the task that 50,000 young people in your position strive to solve.” . And you are one in this amount. Think what efforts will be required from you, what a fierce struggle lies ahead! You will devour each other like spiders! There are no principles, but only events; and there are no laws, but only circumstances to which an intelligent person adapts in order to trade them in his own way. Vice is now in force, and talents are rare. Honesty is no good. You have to crash into this crowd like a bomb, or sneak into it like a plague.”
Life appears to Balzac as a cruel struggle of appetites, a heartless fratricidal war of all against all over pleasures and wealth. Balzac also applied the objective scientific method to the study of a woman’s inner world. In contrast to most poets and romantics, who loved to depict the delights of first love and the first kiss and lowered the curtain on the history of a woman after the period of her naive attitude towards life ended, Balzac traced the history of the female soul from youth to old age and made it the central point of his attention is paid to that period of a woman’s life when she reaches full maturity, gains broad experience, and reaches the peak of her physical and spiritual powers. Balzac preferred the 30-year-old age of a woman to her youth, since at this age she is free from illusions, from a naive understanding of life; she gives her heart consciously, knows how to choose and distinguish between people, and therefore her love has more value, gives more happiness and joy.
These are the main features of Balzac's work and the main features of his worldview. His novels will forever remain the greatest collection of documents about the 19th century - a collection in which every corner of life in this industrial and materialistic age is vividly illuminated.
Bibliography:
"Honore de Balzac". Under. ed. P.F. Aleshkina. Ed.
"Voice". 1992