Victor Hugo poet. Victor Hugo is an outstanding French novelist. The writer's childhood

Victor Hugo is a short biography of the French writer, poet and playwright presented in this article.

Victor Hugo biography briefly

Years of life — 1802-1885

Famous works of Hugo:"Notre Dame", "Les Miserables", "The Man Who Laughs", "Cromwell".

Victor Hugo was born in 1802 in Besançon, the son of a Napoleonic officer. The family traveled a lot. Hugo visited Italy, Spain, Corsica.

Hugo studied at the Lyceum of Charlemagne. And already at the age of 14 he wrote his first works. Participated in competitions of the French Academy and Toulouse Academy. His writings were highly appreciated.

Readers drew attention to his work after the release of the satire “Telegraph”. At the age of 20, Hugo married Adele Fouché, with whom he later had five children. A year later, the novel “Gan the Icelander” was published.

The play “Cromwell” (1827) with elements of romantic drama caused a strong reaction from the public. Such outstanding personalities as Merimee, Lamartine, Delacroix began to visit his house more often.

The famous novelist Chateaubriand had a great influence on his work. The writer's first full-fledged and undoubtedly successful novel is considered to be “Notre Dame de Paris” (1831). This work was immediately translated into many European languages ​​and began to attract thousands of tourists from all over the world to France. After the publication of this book, the country began to treat ancient buildings more carefully.

In 1841, Hugo was elected to the French Academy, in 1845 he received the title of peer, and in 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly. Hugo was an opponent of the coup d'état of 1851 and after the proclamation of Napoleon III Emperor was in exile (lived in Brussels).
In 1870 he returned to France, and in 1876 he was elected senator.

The history of European literature has presented us with many examples of the most striking success that some writers and their works have received. French literature was no exception, introducing to the whole world the name of a talented writer who put notes of romanticism into his writings, Victor Hugo.

Victor was born on February 26, 1802 in the city of Besançon. His father was a military man. During the first French bourgeois revolution, he served as a simple soldier. And under Napoleon he rose to the rank of general. Victor's mother opposed the monarchy and dreamed that France would finally come to peaceful times. And since the father was rarely at home, the mother devoted all her time to raising the boy. Victor started writing early. While still at school, he took 1st place for his ode “On the benefits of science in all situations of life.” And in 1817 he was awarded by the French Academy. Inspired, Victor began to engage in literary activities. Together with his brothers, he takes on the editorship of the Literary Conservative magazine, but due to lack of funds, the magazine closes. So, an 18-year-old boy finds himself on the street without money. His mother had died by that time, and his father refused to help him. But Victor did not give up, and in 1821 the book “Odes and Miscellaneous Poems” was published, which attracted the attention and sympathy of Louis XVIII. He gives him a pension. Hugo perked up and immediately wrote another novel, “Gan the Icelander.”

Meanwhile, carbonari societies appear in France, pamphlets are published with incriminating lines addressed to the government and the monarch. Hugo does not lag behind the writers of that time and also writes several plays where powdered wigs and the stagnant rules of classicism are ridiculed. Thus, in 1827, his play “Cromwell” was published, and later his play “Ernani” was staged. But in 1831, the published novel “Notre Dame de Paris” brought him unprecedented success. All the features of romanticism were clearly reflected here, which are shown both in the main characters and in random encounters. In the novel, the theme of love, kindness and mercy was the most important for the author, since only these qualities can save the world. Soon, new poetry collections “Autumn Leaves” and “Songs of Twilight” will be published, where Hugo touches on the topic of social inequality.

From 1848 to 1851, the writer took an active part in the political life of the country. As a deputy of Paris, he participates in the work of the Legislative Assembly, where he raises the issue of improving the situation of the poor. He soon finds himself in the spotlight during a monarchical coup, and after that he had to remain in exile for 19 years. Being an emigrant, he creates his best works: “Les Miserables”, “Toilers of the Sea”, “The Man Who Laughs”. At the end of his life, Hugo remained the same active person. He publishes a collection of poems, The Four Spirits of the Times. The writer died in 1885 and was buried in the Pantheon.

About Victor Hugo

French poet and writer Victor Hugo was born in 1802 in the city of Besançon in February. A feature of childhood was frequent travel, which was caused by frequent business trips of Hugo's father, who was a high-ranking military man. The noble origin also allowed him to receive a decent education, which continued in 1813 after he moved to Paris with his mother, after Hugo’s parents separated.

At the age of 14, he entered a private boarding school and it was there that he began to write. His views were formed on the basis of monarchical beliefs and Voltairean ideology. From early childhood, Hugo moved in the vector of romanticism, of which he remained a representative in the future.

From the age of 19, he begins to actively work within the literary craft and reaches significant heights. First, he releases a collection of poems, which receives annual payments from King Louis, then he begins to work mostly with plays, collaborates with theaters and receives enormous popularity, capital, as well as a new muse, who becomes the actress Juliette Douay, who brought inspiration to the author for many years years. Researchers, as a rule, indicate the beginning of the most productive creative period 1829

Notre Dame Cathedral is published in 1831, 10 years later it becomes part of the French Academy. A couple of years later, he retreated from public activity due to a personal tragedy. Then he returns to politics against the background of the revolution of 1848 and receives a prestigious position, but in the end, when the revolution against the emperor arises and fails, Hugo has to flee to the British Isles, but even there he continues to create and creates a series of magnificent novels.

After the overthrow of the emperor, he returns back to his homeland, where he is greeted as an example of an oppositionist and given all sorts of honors. In 1871, he received the post of deputy, which he refused because he was not particularly attracted by the overly conservative policies of the majority. In 1883, his muse Juliette Douay died, after which two years later the writer himself left this world on May 22.

In his literary works, the poet and writer reflected the social problems of French society. Victor Hugo, even during the years of his creative crisis, was able to write the most important work in his biography - the novel “Les Miserables”.

Victor Hugo short biography

The French writer was born on February 26, 1802 in the family of a soldier in Napoleon's army, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, and the daughter of a ship owner, Sophie Trebuchet. Victor was the third son, the older brothers were Abel and Eugene.

Due to his duties, the head of the family often changed his place of residence, moving with his wife and children to Marseille, Corsica, Elba and Italy, to Madrid. From trips the family invariably returned to Paris. Parents often argued due to differences in political views. The children lived alternately, sometimes with their father, sometimes with their mother. In 1813, the family finally broke up, the mother and her youngest son Victor chose the capital of France - Paris as their place of residence.

From the age of 12, Victor Hugo, as a brief biography reports, went to study at the Lyceum of Louis the Great. And after 2 years he began to compose his first literary works in the genre of tragedy. He dedicated them to his mother. A year later he was recognized at an academy competition for his poem. Victor Hugo, as his biography informs, was good at mathematics, but the future writer refused to enter the Polytechnic Institute, choosing literary creativity as his life’s work.

Died of pneumonia at the end of May 1885.

Literary creativity

At the age of 17, he was twice awarded for a poem and an ode. I tried to write literary works in a satirical style. The writer Victor Hugo, as his biography reports, personally published a supplement to a Catholic magazine praising the monarchical structure of the state.

“Odes and Miscellaneous Poems,” published by Hugo at the age of 20, pleased King Louis XVIII. The royal lady assigned an annual salary to the author of the poetry collection. At the age of 24, Victor published a second collection of poems.

“The Last Day of a Person Condemned to Death”, a novel, became the writer’s first mature work. Victor Hugo wrote in his biography works based on real events. So, let's say briefly, “Claude Gue”, published in 1834, became the harbinger of the most important work in his career - “Les Miserables”. The last one talked about inequality social strata French society. The biography of Victor Hugo reports that an excerpt from the novel “Les Miserables” - “” is recognized as one of the best works for children.

The novel “Notre Dame de Paris” - “” - has been translated into many languages ​​in Europe and the world. After its publication, everything more people began to visit abandoned buildings of the old world. The novel was filmed and a musical based on it was staged.

The name Victor Hugo is familiar to everyone since childhood. The author of the famous novels Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Misérables and The Man Who Laughs was not just a great representative of world literature, but also a symbol of France. It was Victor Hugo who had a huge influence on such writers as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. But behind this fame of the writer there was a lot of interesting things hidden. We invite you to familiarize yourself with the most interesting facts about Victor Hugo and his novels.

The house where I was born before today not preserved. But it is known that there, on the Parisian street Notre Dame de Champs, glassblowers lived, where their workshops were located.

Victor Hugo in his youth

When the novel “Notre Dame Cathedral” was released to the world in 1831, the author’s preface read: “One of my main goals is to inspire the nation with a love for our architecture.”

There is a funny anecdote about what happened to Victor Hugo in Prussia:

- What do you do? - the gendarme asked him, filling out the form.

— I ask, how do you earn money to live?

- So let’s write it down: “Hugo.” Feather merchant."

Hugo wrote the novel Les Miserables over many years, and during these years he often experienced a creative crisis. The writer decided to fight this radically: he locked himself in a room where he had only pen and paper for company, and completely undressed, so that even his clothes would not distract him from writing the novel.

he even ordered his servants to return his clothes only when he managed to write at least something. He began writing the novel Les Miserables in the early 1840s, but work on it was completed only in 1862.

Illustration for the novel “Les Miserables”

Quite possibly the author of the shortest correspondence in postal history. When his new novel “Les Miserables” was published in 1862, the writer was on vacation, but he was still eager to know the reader’s reaction to his work. Therefore, Hugo sent his publisher an urgent telegram consisting of one character: “?”. That, in turn, was also laconic, sending only: “!”

One of the first editions of the novel “Les Miserables”

However, recognized today as a masterpiece, the novel was often criticized in the American press. For example, The New Englander wrote: “The whole career of Jean Valjean consists of a series of incredible coincidences of strange incongruities, and stands in constant antagonism with the principles of truth and honor, which should determine the line of life of every honest man.” Even the New York Times, which called the novel “remarkable” and “brilliant,” could not resist calling Hugo a “prose madman”—it turned out to be a somewhat mixed review.

Still from the film “Les Miserables” (2012)

U Victor Hugo There was a special predilection for feet. He was a real fetishist in this matter. And, as it turns out, many other writers had a similar attraction to feet: Dostoevsky, Goethe, George du Maurier and F. Scott Fitzgerald were also foot fetishists.

He claimed that he made love to his wife as many as 9 times on their wedding night. Edward Behr, a Hugo researcher, claimed that according to Hugo's diary, which Behr got with difficulty, Hugo actually managed to do this to his fiancée Adele. Even if we assume that the writer embellished his exploits a little, it was a terrible ordeal for his young wife. Behr claims that her feelings for her husband after that were never the same again. But, despite the complete lack of interest in her husband, Adele bore him five children.

Adele Hugo

He was a real reformer of his time. The writer never grew old and always tried to be at the center of the newest trends in literature, fashion and social life. Even when the writer was already over 70, he constantly attended various events intended more for young people.

He spent the last years of his life in Paris. And even before the writer’s death, the street on which the writer’s mansion was located was named after him. Therefore, when Hugo answered letters or simply left his return address to someone, he always wrote: “Monsieur Victor Hugo on his Avenue in Paris.”

House of Victor Hugo

died on May 22, 1885 from pneumonia, when he was 84 years old. But it is interesting that the writer developed this disease because of the parade in his honor. Hugo was weak, and doctors recommended that he remain in bed. But the writer was not one of those who could skip an entire action in his honor. Therefore, he opened the window wide to greet his fans from there. The next day he came down with a cold, which later developed into pneumonia.

became the only writer whose funeral procession stopped under the Arc de Triomphe. As a rule, only generals and marshals received this honor. And the first person with whose gunpowder the funeral cortege passed under the arch was Napoleon. Funeral ceremony Victor Hugo took place over ten days and was attended by more than a million people. After the funeral, the writer's ashes were placed in the Pantheon.

Triumphal Arch

He lived 16 years of his life in the Parisian hotel Roan-Gemen. Now entry to his room is free. Hugo worked on his famous novel Les Miserables in this hotel. It was here that he met the writers Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Alexandre Dumas, Balzac, Prosper Merimee and Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve. Visitors can see here the writer's manuscripts and drawings, as well as copies of Hugo's first editions. By the way, Milady Winter in Alexandre Dumas’s novel “The Three Musketeers” stayed in these apartments.

Room at the Roan Guemene Hotel

One of the Paris metro stations is named after Victor Hugo. By the way, it is located on the square that bears the same name. A crater on Mercury was also named in his honor.

In one of his poems he aptly called himself a “ringing echo.” And this was indeed the case. His novels have a purpose: moral, historical, social, or all three. The works of Victor Hugo changed the history of France, if not the whole world.

Biography (en.wikipedia.org)

Life and art

The writer's father, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo (French) Russian. (1773-1828), became a general in the Napoleonic army, his mother Sophie Trebuchet (1772-1821) - the daughter of a shipowner, was a Voltairian royalist.

Hugo's early childhood took place in Marseille, Corsica, Elba (1803-1805), Italy (1807), Madrid (1811), where his father worked, and from where the family returned to Paris each time. Victor studied at the Madrid Noble Seminary, and they wanted to enroll him as a page of the king.[source?] Traveling left a deep impression on the soul of the future poet and prepared his romantic worldview. Hugo himself later said that Spain was for him “a magical spring, the waters of which intoxicated him forever.” [source?] In 1813, Hugo’s mother, Sophie Trebuchet, who had an affair with General Lagorie, separated from her husband and settled with her son in Paris.

In October 1822, Hugo married Adele Fouché, and five children were born to this marriage:
* Leopold (1823-1823)
* Leopoldina (1824-1843)
* Charles (1826-1871)
* Francois-Victor (1828-1873)
* Adele (1830-1915).

In 1841 Hugo was elected to the French Academy, and in 1848 to the National Assembly.

Works

Like many young writers of his era, Hugo was greatly influenced by François Chateaubriand, a prominent figure in the literary movement of Romanticism and a prominent figure in early 19th-century France. As a young man, Hugo decided to be "Châteaubriand or nothing", and that his life should correspond to that of his predecessor. Like Chateaubriand, Hugo would contribute to the development of romanticism, would have a significant place in politics as the leader of republicanism, and would be exiled due to his political positions.

Early born passion and eloquence early works Hugo's brought him success and fame in his early years. His first collection of poems (Odes et poesies diverses) was published in 1822, when Hugo was only 20 years old. King Louis XVIII granted an annual allowance for the writer. Although Hugo's poems were admired for their spontaneous ardor and fluency, this collection of works was followed by Odes et Ballades, written in 1826, four years after the first triumph. Odes et Ballades presented Hugo as a magnificent poet, a true master of lyricism and song.

Victor Hugo's first mature work of fiction was written in 1829 and reflected the writer's keen social consciousness, which continued in his subsequent works. The story Le Dernier jour d'un condamne (The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death) had a great influence on such writers as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens and F. M. Dostoevsky. Claude Gueux, a short documentary story about a real-life murderer executed in France, was published in 1834 and was subsequently regarded by Hugo himself as a harbinger of his magnificent work on social injustice, Les Misérables. But Hugo's first full-length novel would be the incredibly successful Notre-Dame de Paris (Notre-Dame Cathedral), which was published in 1831 and quickly translated into many languages ​​throughout Europe. One of the novel's effects was to draw attention to the desolate Notre Dame Cathedral, which began to attract thousands of tourists who read the popular novel. The book also contributed to a renewed respect for old buildings, which were immediately actively preserved.

Last years

Hugo was buried in the Pantheon.

Interesting Facts

* A crater on Mercury is named after Hugo.
* “Hugo” is one of the socionic types in socionics.
* There is the following anecdote about Hugo:
“Once Victor Hugo went to Prussia.
- What do you do? - the gendarme asked him, filling out the questionnaire.
- Writing.
- I ask, how do you earn money to live?
- Pen.
- So let’s write it down: “Hugo.” Feather merchant."

Essays

Poetry

* Odes and poetic experiments (Odes et poesies diverses, 1822).
* Odes (Odes, 1823).
* New Odes (Nouvelles Odes, 1824).
* Odes and ballads (Odes et Ballades, 1826).
* Oriental motifs (Les Orientales, 1829).
* Autumn Leaves (Les Feuilles d'automne, 1831).
* Songs of Twilight (Les Chants du crepuscule, 1835).
* Inner voices (Les Voix interieures, 1837).
* Rays and shadows (Les Rayons et les ombres, 1840).
* Retribution (Les Chatiments, 1853).
* Contemplations (Les Contemplations, 1856).
* Songs of streets and forests (Les Chansons des rues et des bois, 1865).
* The Terrible Year (L’Annee terrible, 1872).
* The Art of Being a Grandfather (L'Art d'être grand-pere, 1877).
* The Pope (Le Pape, 1878).
* Revolution (L"Ane, 1880).
* The Four Winds of the Spirit (Les Quatres vents de l’esprit, 1881).
* Legend of the Ages (La Legende des siecles, 1859, 1877, 1883).
* The End of Satan (La fin de Satan, 1886).
* God (Dieu, 1891).
* All the strings of the lyre (Toute la lyre, 1888, 1893).
* The Dark Years (Les annees funestes, 1898).
* The Last Sheaf (Derniere Gerbe, 1902, 1941).
* Ocean (Ocean. Tas de pierres, 1942).

Dramaturgy

* Cromwell (Cromwell, 1827).
* Amy Robsart (1828, published 1889).
* Hernani (Hernani, 1830).
* Marion Delorme (Marion Delorme, 1831).
* The King Amuses himself (Le Roi s’amuse, 1832).
* Lucrece Borgia (1833).
* Marie Tudor (Marie Tudor, 1833).
* Angelo, tyrant of Padua (Angelo, tyran de Padoue, 1835).
* Ruy Blas (Ruy Blas, 1838).
* The Burgraves (Les Burgraves, 1843).
* Torquemada (Torquemada, 1882).
* Free theatre. Small plays and fragments (Theatre en liberte, 1886).

Novels

* Han Icelander (Han d’Islande, 1823).
* Byug-Jargal (Bug-Jargal, 1826)
* The last day of a man sentenced to death (Le Dernier jour d’un condamne, 1829).
* Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral (Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831).
* Claude Gueux (1834).
* Les Miserables (Les Miserables, 1862).
* Toilers of the Sea (Les Travailleurs de la Mer, 1866).
* The Man Who Laughs (L’Homme qui rit, 1869).
* Ninety-third year (Quatrevingt-treize, 1874).

Journalism and essays

Selected bibliography

Collected works

* ?uvres completes de Victor Hugo, Edition definitive d’apres les manuscrits originaux - edition ne varietur, 48 vv., 1880-1889
* Collected works: In 15 volumes - M.: Goslitizdat, 1953-1956.
* Collected works: In 10 volumes - M.: Pravda, 1972.
* Collected works: In 6 volumes - M.: Pravda, 1988.
* Collected works: In 6 volumes - Tula: Santax, 1993.
* Collected works: In 4 volumes - M.: Literature, 2001.
* Collected works: In 14 volumes - M.: Terra, 2001-2003.

Literature about Hugo

* Brahman S. R. “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo. - M.: Khud. liter., 1968. - (Mass historical-literary library)
* Evnina E. M. Victor Hugo. - M.: Nauka, 1976. - (From the history of world culture)
* Karelsky A.V. Hugo // History of world literature. T. 6. M.: Nauka, 1989.
* Louis Aragon "Hugo - realist poet"
* Lukov V. A. Hugo // Foreign writers: Bibliographical dictionary. M.: Education, 1997.
* Meshkova I. V. The work of Victor Hugo. - Book 1 (1815-1824). - Saratov: Publishing house. Sar. University, 1971.
* Minina T.N. Novel “Ninety-third year”: Probl. revolution in the work of Victor Hugo. - L.: Leningrad State University Publishing House, 1978.
* Maurois A. Olympio, or the Life of Victor Hugo. - Numerous publications.
* Muravyova N.I. Hugo. - 2nd ed. - M.: Mol. Guard, 1961. - (ZhZL).
* Safronova N. N. Victor Hugo. - Biography of the writer. Moscow "Enlightenment". 1989.
* Treskunov M. S. V. Hugo. - L.: Enlightenment, 1969. - (B-literary book)
* Treskunov M.S. Victor Hugo: Essay on creativity. - Ed. 2nd, add. - M.: Goslitizdat, 1961.
* Treskunov M. S. Victor Hugo’s novel “The Ninety-Third Year.” - M.: Khud. lit., 1981. - (Mass historical-literary library)
* Hugo Adele. Victor Hugo Raconte par un Temoin de sa Vie, avec des Oeuvres Inedites, entre autres un Drame en Trois Actes: Inez de Castro, 1863
* Josephson Matthew. Victor Hugo, a Realistic Biography, 1942
* Maurois Andre. Olympio: La vie de Victor Hugo, 1954
* Pironue Georges. Victor Hugo romancier; ou, Les Dessus de l'inconnu, 1964
* Houston John P. Victor Hugo, 1975
* Chauvel A.D. & Forestier M. Extraordinary House of Victor Hugo in Guernsey, 1975
*Richardson Joanna. Victor Hugo, 1976
* Brombert Victor. Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel, 1984
* Ubersfeld Anne. Paroles de Hugo, 1985
* Guerlac Suzanne. The Impresonal Sublime, 1990
* Bloom Harold, ed. Victor Hugo, 1991
* Grossman Kathryn M. “Les Miserables”: Conversion, Revolution, Redemption, 1996
* Robb Graham. Victor Hugo: A Biography, 1998
* Frey John A. Victor Hugo Encyclopedia, 1998
* Halsall Albert W. Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama, 1998
* Hovasse Jean-Marc. Victor Hugo. Avant l'exil 1802-1851, 2002
* Kahn Jean-Francois. Victor Hugo, un revolutionnaire, 2002
* Martin Feller, Der Dichter in der Politik. Victor Hugo und der deutsch-franzosische Krieg von 1870/71. Untersuchungen zum franzosischen Deutschlandbild und zu Hugos Rezeption in Deutschland. Marburg 1988.
* Tonazzi Pascal, Florilege de Notre-Dame de Paris (anthologie), Editions Arlea, Paris, 2007, ISBN 2-86959-795-9
* Hovasse Jean-Marc, Victor Hugo II: 1851-1864, Fayard, Paris, 2008

Memory

* House-Museum of Victor Hugo in Paris.
* Monument at the Sorbonne by Laurent Marquest.
* House-Museum of Victor Hugo in Luxembourg. Bust of Hugo created by Rodin.
* Monument to Hugo in the Hermitage. Author - Laurent Marquest. Gift from the City Hall of Paris to Moscow.

Works of Hugo in other forms of art

Screen adaptations and films based on works

* Quasimodo d’El Paris (1999) (novel “Notre Dame de Paris”)
* Les miserables (1998) (novel)
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) (novel “Notre Dame de Paris”)
* Les miserables (1995) (novel)
* Mest shuta (1993) (novel “Le Roi s’Amuse”)
* Les miserables (1988) (novel)
* Dias dificiles (1987) (novel)
* La conscience (1987) (short story)
* Le dernier jour d’un condamne (1985) (novel “Le dernier jour d’un condamne”)
* Les miserables (1982) (novel)
* Rigoletto (1982) (play “Le roi s’amuse”)
* Kozete (1977) (novel “Les Miserables”)
* Le scomunicate di San Valentino (1974) (loosely inspired by a drama by)
* Sefiller (1967) (novel “Les Miserables”)
* L’uomo che ride (1966) (novel “L’Homme qui rit”) (uncredited in Italian version)
* Jean Valjean (1961) (novel “Les Miserables”)
* Les miserables (1958) (novel)
* La deroute (1957) (story)
* Nanbanji no semushi-otoko (1957) (novel “Notre Dame de Paris”)
* Notre Dame de Paris (1956) (novel)
* Sea Devils (1953) (novel “Les Travailleurs de la mer”)
* La Gioconda (1953) (novel “Angelo, tyran de Padoue”)
* Les miserables (1952) (novel)
* Re mizeraburu: kami to jiyu no hata (1950) (novel)
* Re mizeraburu: kami to akuma (1950) (novel)
* Ruy Blas (1948) (play)
* I miserabili (1948) (novel “Les Miserables”)
* Il tiranno di Padova (1946) (story)
* Rigoletto (1946) (novel)
* El rey se divierte (1944/I) (play)
* El boassa (1944) (novel “Les Miserables”)
* Los miserables (1943) (novel)
* Il re si diverte (1941) (play)
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) (novel)
* Les pauvres gens (1938) (writer)
* Gavrosh (1937) (novel “Les Miserables”)
* Toilers of the Sea (1936) (novel “Les Travailleurs de la mer”)
* Les miserables (1935) (novel)
* Les miserables (1934) (novel)
* Jean Valjean (1931) (novel “Les Miserables”)
* Aa mujo: Kohen (1929) (novel)
* Aa mujo: Zempen (1929) (novel)
* The Bishop's Candlesticks (1929) (novel "Les Miserables")
* The Man Who Laughs (1928) (novel “L’Homme Qui Rit”)
* Rigoletto (1927) (play “Le Roi s’Amuse”)
* Les miserables (1925) (novel)
* The Spanish Dancer (1923) (novella)
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923/I) (novel “Notre-Dame de Paris”)
* Toilers of the Sea (1923) (novel “Les Travailleurs de la mer”)
* Aa mujo - Dai nihen: Shicho no maki (1923) (story)
* Aa mujo - Dai ippen: Horo no maki (1923) (story)
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923/II) (novel)
* Tense Moments with Great Authors (1922) (novel “Les Miserables”) (segment “Miserables, Les”)
* Tense Moments from Great Plays (1922) (novel “Notre Dame de Paris”) (segment “Esmeralda”)
* Esmeralda (1922) (novel “Notre Dame de Paris”)
* Das grinsende Gesicht (1921) (novel “L’homme e qui rit”)
* Der rote Henker (1920) (novel)
* Quatre-vingt-treize (1920) (novel)
* The Toilers (1919) (novel “Les Travailleurs de la mer”)
* Marion de Lorme (1918) (play)
* Les travailleurs de la mer (1918) (novel)
* Der Konig amusiert sich (1918) (novel “Le Roi s’Amuse”)
* Les miserables (1917) (novel)
* Marie Tudor (1917) (play)
* The Darling of Paris (1917) (novel “Notre Dame de Paris”)
* Don Caesar de Bazan (1915) (novel “Ruy Blas”)
* The Bishop's Candlesticks (1913) (novel "Les Miserables")
* Les miserables - Epoque 4: Cosette et Marius (1913) (novel)
* Les miserables - Epoque 3: Cosette (1913) (novel)
* Les miserables - Epoque 2: Fantine (1913) (novel)
* Les miserables - Epoque 1: Jean Valjean (1913) (novel)
* La tragedia di Pulcinella (1913) (play)
* Marion de Lorme (1912) (writer)
* Ruy-Blas (1912) (play)
* Notre-Dame de Paris (1911) (novel “Notre Dame de Paris”)
* Ernani (1911) (writer)
* Hugo the Hunchback (1910) (novel)
* Hernani (1910) (writer)
* Les miserables (1909) (novel)
* Rigoletto (1909/I) (writer)
* Les miserables (Part III) (1909) (novel “Les Miserables”)
* Le roi s'amuse (1909) (play)
* Les miserables (Part II) (1909) (novel)
* Les Miserables (Part I) (1909) (novel “Les Miserables”)
* The Duke’s Jester or A Fool’s Revenge (1909) (novel “Le Roi s’Amuse”)
* A Fool’s Revenge (1909) (novel “Le Roi s’Amuse”)
* Ruy Blas (1909) (play)
* Rigoletto (1909/II) (play)
* Esmeralda (1905) (novel “Notre Dame de Paris”)

Musical Theatre

* 1836 - “Esmeralda” (opera), composer L. Bertin
* 1839 - “Esmeralda” (ballet), composer C. Pugni
* 1839 - “Esmeralda” (opera), composer A. Dargomyzhsky
* 1876 - “Angelo” (opera), composer Ts. Cui
* 1851 - “Rigoletto” (opera), composer G. Verdi
* 1844 - “Ernani” (opera), composer G. Verdi
* 1880 - “La Gioconda” (opera), composer A. Ponchielli
* 1914 - “Notre Dame” (ballet), composer F. Schmidt
* 2005 - Notre-Dame de Paris (musical)

Biography

February 26, 1881, the seventy-ninth birthday of Victor Hugo, Paris and all of France celebrated as a national holiday. A triumphal arch was erected on Eylau Avenue. Six hundred thousand Parisians and provincials marched through it, past Hugo’s house. The great man, standing with his grandchildren at the window, bowed and thanked his admirers. Six months later, Avenue Eylau was renamed Avenue Victor-Hugo. Hugo lived on his own street for another four years.

On June 1, 1885, a countless crowd escorted his coffin from Star Square to the Pantheon. Twelve young poets stood as a guard of honor at a black hearse, unadorned with nothing but two wreaths of white roses. In his will, Hugo wrote: “I leave fifty thousand francs to the poor. I want to be taken to the cemetery in a poor man's hearse. I refuse funeral services from any churches. I ask all souls to pray for me. I believe in God. Victor Hugo".

He was born in Besançon, according to the French revolutionary calendar - 7 vantose of the X year of the Republic. His parents were the Napoleonic officer Joseph Leopold Siguisbert Hugo and Madame Hugo, née Sophie Françoise Trebuchet de la Renaudiere. Soon the Hugo couple began to live apart.

Victor Marie and his two older brothers were either with his father or his mother, moving from one city to another, from France to Italy and Spain. From the age of five, Victor was assigned to his father’s regiment and considered himself a soldier. In fact, at such a tender age he happened to see the phenomena of war and death - on the way to Madrid, through all of Spain desperately resisting the Napoleonic invasion.

In his adolescence, Victor Hugo filled ten notebooks with poems and translations of Latin poets, which he burned; in the next he wrote a note: “I am fifteen years old, it is written poorly, I could write better.” At that time, he studied and was brought up in Paris, in a boarding house on St. Margaret Street, and dreamed of literary fame. One of his pastorals, inspired by the works of Chateaubriand, was called “Indian Woman of Canada Hanging Her Child’s Cradle from the Branches of a Palm Tree.” However, at a competition announced by the French Academy, young Hugo received an honorary diploma for a poem of three hundred and thirty-four lines. The Toulouse Academy of Floral Games awarded him the Golden Lily for his ode "Restoration of the Statue of Henry IV".

The Hugo brothers tried to publish a magazine - “Literary Conservative”. Over the course of a year and a half, Victor published 112 articles and 22 poems under eleven pseudonyms. The eldest of the brothers, Abel, published Victor’s first book, “Odes and Other Poems,” at his own expense. The twenty-year-old poet was convinced that poetry requires “a clear mind, a pure heart, a noble and sublime soul.”

In the third decade of his life, Hugo became the author of the poetry collections “Oriental Motifs” and “Autumn Leaves”, the novel “Gan the Icelander” (in the manner of W. Scott and under the influence of the English Gothic novel), the story “The Last Day of the Condemned to Death”, the drama “Cromwell "(the preface to it is considered a manifesto of romanticism), "Marion Delorme" (banned from production by censorship) and "Ernani" (its premiere turned into a battle of romantics with classicists).

Hugo explained the essence of romanticism as “a strange confusion of the soul, never knowing peace, now rejoicing, now groaning.” At the beginning of 1831, he completed the novel Notre-Dame de Paris. Hugo said that this book was, first of all, “a product of imagination, whim and fantasy,” although he collected materials about 15th-century Paris over the course of three years. He submitted the manuscript of the novel to the publisher on the deadline. Hugo already had a home and family and hoped to earn at least fifteen thousand francs a year through literary work. Soon he began to earn significantly more, but every evening he steadily calculated all expenses, down to the centime.

Between the two French revolutions - July 1830 and February 1848 - Hugo wrote several new poetic cycles, a verse drama “The King Amuses himself”, three prose dramas, a book of essays about Germany (“Rhine”) and began to create the novel “Poverty” , later retitled Les Misérables.

On January 7, 1841, Victor Hugo was elected to the Academy of Immortals, and by a royal ordinance of April 13, 1845, he was elevated to the peerage of France.

In 1848, after the February events, this title was abolished. Hugo became mayor of the VIII Paris arrondissement. In the Legislative Assembly, he made a speech against the President of the Republic, Prince Louis Bonaparte. When Louis Bonaparte carried out a coup d'etat in order to usurp imperial power, Hugo, under threat of arrest, left Paris for Brussels with someone else's passport, and then went into long-term exile.

“If there are charming places of exile in the world, then Jersey must be included among them... I settled here in a white hut on the seashore. From my window I see France,” Hugo lived on Jersey, an island in the Normandy archipelago, in the Marine Terrace villa, figuratively referred to in this letter as a hut, for three years. Having been expelled from Jersey along with other French emigrants, he settled on the neighboring island of Guernsey, where, with the amount of the fee for the poetry collection Contemplations, he bought, remodeled and furnished to his taste a house, Hauteville House.

Hugo adhered to a strict daily routine: got up at dawn, doused himself with ice water, drank black coffee, worked on manuscripts in a glass belvedere in the sunlight, had breakfast at noon, then walked around the island, worked until dusk, had dinner with family and guests, at ten in the evening went to bed religiously. Every Monday he invited forty children of local poor people to lunch.

At Hauteville House, Hugo finished the novel “Les Miserables”, wrote many poems for the planned grandiose epic “Legend of Ages” and two new novels - “Toilers of the Sea” (about the fishermen of Guernsey) and “The Man Who Laughs” (“drama and history”) simultaneously").

On September 5, 1870, as soon as the Republic was proclaimed in France, Hugo left for Paris. At the Gare du Nord he was met by a crowd singing “La Marseillaise” and shouting “Long live France!” Long live Hugo! He was elected to the National Assembly and spoke out for the Republic and Civilization, but against the Commune and revolutionary terror.

Mine last novel- “The Ninety-Third Year” - he continued to write in the “crystal room”, returning to Guernsey for this, and after publishing the novel, he rented an apartment in Paris for himself, his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren. By this time he had survived his wife, sons and eldest daughter. His youngest daughter was in a mental hospital. Hugo was very affectionate with his grandchildren - Georges and Jeanne - and dedicated a collection of poems to them, “The Art of Being a Grandfather.”

According to the testimony of relatives, lying on his deathbed, he said: “There is a struggle between the light of day and the darkness of night,” and just before the end: “I see a black light.”

Biography (S. Brahman. VICTOR HUGO (1802-1885))

RUN-UP

On a spring day, February 26, 1802, in the city of Besançon, in three-story house, where Captain Leopold Sigisbert Hugo then lived, a child was born - the third son in the family. The frail baby was, according to his mother, “no longer than a table knife,” but he was destined to grow into a man of powerful physical and spiritual health and live a long and glorious life.

Victor Hugo's childhood passed under the roar of Napoleonic drums, under a sky still illuminated by the lightning of the revolution. Together with his mother and brothers, he accompanied his father on campaigns, and the roads and cities of France, Italy, the Mediterranean islands, Spain, engulfed in a partisan war against the French invaders, flashed before the child’s eyes - and again Paris, a secluded house and an overgrown garden of the former monastery of Feuillantines, where he lived and played with his brothers in the hours free from lessons - with what love he would later describe this garden in Les Misérables under the guise of Cosette’s garden on the Rue Plumet!

But Hugo’s childhood was soon overshadowed by family discord: his father, who came from the lower classes, was promoted during the revolution, became an officer in the Republican army, and then a supporter of Napoleon and, finally, his general; mother, Sophie Trebuchet, the daughter of a wealthy shipowner from Nantes, was a staunch royalist. By the time of the restoration (in 1814) of the Bourbon dynasty to the French throne, Victor Hugo's parents had separated, and the boy, left with his adored mother, fell under the influence of her monarchical views. His mother managed to convince him that the Bourbons were champions of freedom; but the dreams of the 18th century enlighteners about the ideal “enlightened monarch,” which Hugo learned about from the books he read, also played a significant role here. At the request of his father, Victor, together with his brother Eugene, had to prepare at the boarding school to enter the Polytechnic School - the boy turned out to have great aptitude for mathematics; but he preferred to translate Latin poetry, read voraciously everything that came to hand, and soon began to compose himself - odes, poems and plays, which he staged on the school stage (he also played the main roles in them). At the age of fourteen, he wrote in his diary: “I want to be Chateaubriand - or nothing!”, and a year later he sent an ode about the benefits of science to a literary competition and received a commendable review. The jury members could not believe that the author was only fifteen years old.

In the first years of the Restoration, Hugo appeared in literature as a well-intentioned legitimist and Catholic, a supporter of the established literary traditions of classicism. The young poet attracted the favorable attention of the authorities with his ode “To the restoration of the statue of Henry IV” and, continuing to praise the Bourbon dynasty in “classical” verses, soon received a number of literary prizes, monetary incentives, and a few years later even a pension from the king. In 1819, together with his brother Abel, Victor Hugo began publishing the magazine “Literary Conservative”. The collection “Odes” (1822) made him a recognized poet.

This success came at the right time: deprived of his father’s material support for abandoning a practical career, the young man lived in poverty in Parisian attics; he was passionately in love with his childhood friend Adele Fouché and dreamed of bringing the wedding day closer (Victor’s mother was against this marriage; it was concluded only after her death, in 1822).

Subsequently, Hugo was ironic about his youthful, politically well-intentioned works. The young poet's legitimism turned out to be as unstable as his adherence to the routine of classicism. Already in the early 20s, Hugo became close to the circle of romantics and soon became a regular at their meetings at Charles Nodier's, in the Arsenal library. During the years of heated debate around Stendhal’s pamphlet “Racine and Shakespeare” (1823), where the aesthetics of classicism was first dealt a sensitive blow, Hugo also became interested in Shakespeare, was interested in Cervantes and Rabelais, and wrote with sympathy about Walter Scott (article 1823) and Byron (1824). ).

The romantic wind also blew in Hugo’s poetry: in 1826, when he republished his “Odes,” he added to them a series of picturesque “ballads” in the spirit of the new school.

Next to the hymns to the counter-revolutionary Vendee uprising, to the “legitimate” kings, next to the depiction of the decline of ancient Rome, colorful pictures of the French Middle Ages appear, imbued with interest and love for the national culture of the past: feudal castles, border towers, knightly tournaments, battles, hunting. Motifs from folk legends and fairy tales are woven into the ballads; they feature not only knights, troubadours and ladies, but also fairies, mermaids, dwarfs, and giants.

Sans attendre,
Sa, piquons!
L'osil bien tendre,
Attaquons
De nos selles
Roset belle's!
Aux balconies.
(...What to expect here?
Two pairs of spurs -
Under the balcony at full speed:
On bright-eyed beauties,
White-faced, rosy-cheeked
Let's look at you tenderly.)
(“KING JOHN’S TOURNAMENT.” Translation by L. May)

And when, a few months after “Odes and Ballads,” in 1827, the young poet, in a fit of patriotic protest against the humiliation of the French generals by the Austrian ambassador, sang the military victories of Napoleon in “Ode to the Column of Vendôme,” the legitimist camp screamed about Hugo’s “treason.” .

Two years later, a collection of poems, “Eastern Poems” (1829), was published, where medieval exoticism was replaced by the dazzling exoticism of the romantic East, with its luxury, cruelty and bliss, proud pashas and harem beauties. But the central place in the collection was occupied by poems in which the poet sang the heroes of the Greek liberation war of 1821-1829 against the yoke of Turkey. Thus, Hugo’s poetry comes closer and closer to the poet’s contemporary reality; events, colors, and sounds of living life imperiously invade it.

The vague hum of modernity penetrated into Hugo's early prose. In 1824, the novel “Gan the Icelander” was published, in which “Gothic” horrors and “Scandinavian” exoticism were combined with a love story, which largely reflected the relationship of the young author with his bride. Next to the romantic monster Gan the Icelander, the uprising of miners is depicted here, in which the noble young man Orderer, the author’s alter ego, takes part.

In 1826, “Bug Jargal” appeared in print - a novel about the uprising of black slaves on the island of Haiti, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (the first version of this thing was written in 1818, in two weeks, on a bet, by a sixteen-year-old schoolboy). Although there is still a lot of naiveness in the novel, it is entirely permeated with the spirit of freethinking and humanity. In its center is the heroic image of the black rebel Byug Zhargal, whose courage and nobility create a striking contrast with the cruelty and cowardice of white slave owners.

The drama "Cromwell" (1827) is Hugo's final break with the camp of political and literary reaction. The drama was written not according to the canons of classicism, but on the model of Shakespeare's historical chronicles and contained ideas that were new to the young Hugo. The personality of Cromwell, who, according to Engels, “combined Robespierre and Napoleon in one person” (1), attracted many French writers in those years; Balzac and Mérimée began with dramas about Cromwell; the fate of the English politician was interpreted in the light of the historical experience (1. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 2, p. 351.) of France. In Hugo's drama, the ambitious Cromwell betrayed freedom, began to seek personal power, and therefore broke away from the people and lost ground - such is the fate of all despots. Realizing this, Hugo's hero refuses the crown at the last minute. The drama “Cromwell” was in many ways an innovative work, but could not conquer the stage for the romantics, where at that time the dramaturgy of the epigones of classicism reigned supreme; it was more of a historical drama to read; Moreover, Hugo expected that the title role would be played by the great Talma, and after the death of the latter (in 1826), not seeing another worthy performer, he abandoned the idea of ​​staging the drama and brought it to enormous proportions - up to six thousand verses.

FIRST HIT

Hugo dealt the first decisive blow to classicism with his famous “Preface to Cromwell.” “No matter how great the cedar and palm trees are, you cannot become great by feeding only on their juice,” no matter how beautiful the art of ancient antiquity was, new literature cannot limit itself to imitation of him - this is one of the main thoughts of the “Preface,” which opens a new stage in the life and work of the recent author of “Odes.” The time of vague impulses and searches was left behind; a harmonious system of views and principles in art had developed, which Hugo solemnly proclaimed and began to defend with all the fervor of his youth.

Art, Hugo said, changes and develops along with the development of humanity, and since it reflects life, each era has its own art. Hugo divided the history of mankind into three large eras: the primitive, which in art corresponds to the “ode” (that is, lyric poetry), the ancient, which corresponds to the epic, and the new, which gave rise to drama. The greatest examples of art from these three eras are biblical legends, Homer's poems and the work of Shakespeare. Hugo declares Shakespeare to be the pinnacle of the art of modern times, by the word “drama” meaning not only the theatrical genre, but also art in general, reflecting the dramatic character of the new era, the main features of which he seeks to define.

In contrast to epigonic classicism, divorced from modern life, with its aristocratic opposition of “noble” heroes to “ignoble”, “high” plots and genres to “low” ones, Hugo demanded to expand the boundaries of art, to freely combine in it the tragic and the comic, the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime ( sublime) and grotesque (grotesque). The beautiful is monotonous, he wrote, it has one face; the ugly one has thousands of them. Therefore, the “characteristic” should be preferred to the beautiful. Hugo believed that an important feature of the new art was that it opened a wide path for the grotesque. Another important feature is “antithesis” in art, designed to reflect the contrasts of reality itself, primarily the opposition and struggle of flesh and spirit, evil and good. Hugo demanded respect for historical verisimilitude in drama - “local color” and attacked the absurdity of “unities of place and time” - the inviolable canons of classicism. He solemnly proclaimed the freedom of art from all kinds of “rules”: “The poet should consult only nature, truth and his inspiration.” Hugo declared real life and man to be the subject of modern art.

Written with brilliance and passion, full of daring thoughts and vivid images, “The Preface to Cromwell” made a huge impression on his contemporaries; its significance went far beyond the theater: it was a militant manifesto of a new literary movement - progressive romanticism. Now Hugo has largely diverged from his former comrades in the romantic school of the 20s. And for younger generation Romantics, primarily for Hugo himself, the struggle for a new aesthetics was integral to the struggle for political freedoms; The “hydra of powdered wigs” merged in their eyes with the “hydra of reaction.” Subsequently, the poet himself assessed his activities in the 20s as follows:

On dense rows of Alexandrian feet
I directed the revolution autocratically,
He pulled a red cap over our decrepit dictionary.
There are no words-senators and words-plebeians! ..
(“Answer to the Charge.” Translation by E. Linetskaya)

By the end of the 20s, Hugo became the recognized leader and “prophet” of “detachments of youths who fought for the ideal, poetry and freedom of art.” “The preface to Cromwell shone in our eyes like the tablets of the Covenant on Sinai,” admitted one of Hugo’s students and associates of those years, Théophile Gautier.

Around 1827, on Notre-Dame-des-Champs Street, near the Champs-Elysees, which at that time consisted of a single house in which the Hugo couple and their children settled, a new romantic circle began to gather - the “little Cenacle”. In a modest room, where there were not enough chairs and debates were held standing, shaggy, bearded young people dressed in extravagant costumes “to stun the bourgeois,” talented poets, artists, sculptors gathered and argued until they were hoarse about the fate of national art. And on the way home they scared the townsfolk with a mysterious song: “We’ll do busengo!” There were writers Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset, Gerard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, artists Deveria and Delacroix, and sculptor David d'Angers.

The first word in these disputes belonged to the owner. The poet Théophile Gautier describes Victor Hugo at the time of The Cenacle: “What struck Victor Hugo first of all was his forehead, truly majestic, crowning his calm and serious face, like a white marble pediment. True, he did not reach the dimensions that were later given to him by David d'Angers and other artists who wanted to emphasize the genius of the poet, but he was truly superhumanly tall; there was enough space for the most grandiose thoughts; he asked for a gold or laurel crown, as if for the brow of a god or Caesar. The mark of power lay on him. Light brown hair framed his forehead and fell in rather long strands; no beard, no mustache, no sideburns - a carefully shaved, very pale face, on which brown shone as if piercing it. eyes that resembled eagle eyes. The outline of the mouth spoke of firmness and will; curved lips with raised corners, partly opening in a smile, revealed teeth of dazzling whiteness. He wore a black jacket, gray trousers, a shirt with a turn-down collar - the most strict and correct appearance. , no one would have suspected in this impeccable gentleman the leader of a shaggy and bearded tribe - the menace of the beardless bourgeois." in French society even under the Bourbons and won a complete victory under the “bourgeois king” Louis Philippe. This is precisely where romantics long for bright characters, strong passions, turbulent events that they were looking for under the blue skies of Spain, Italy or in the distant Middle Ages. Hence their passion for the historical genre in literature.

BATTLE IN THE STREETS, BATTLE IN LITERATURE

The stormy summer of 1830 arrived. The "three glorious days" of the July Revolution crushed the Bourbon monarchy. The storming of the royal palace, barricade battles on the streets of Paris, and popular heroism intoxicated Hugo. It seemed that the spirit of the great revolution of the end of the 18th century had been resurrected and France had once again put on the Phrygian cap. The poet enthusiastically welcomed the July revolution and did not immediately see that the bourgeoisie took advantage of the fruits of the people's victory. Hugo's speeches, articles, and poetry of those years are full of heroic images and tyrant-fighting pathos. On the first anniversary of the revolution, during a public festival on the Place de la Bastille, a hymn was sung based on the words of Hugo, in which he sang the heroes of the July days:

We will sing the glory of our fatherland
And to those who dedicated their lives to her, -
To selfless fighters,
In whom the flame burns with freedom,
Who longs for a place in this temple
And who is ready to die himself!
(Translation by E. Polonskaya)

In the wake of the July Revolution, Hugo's dramaturgy grew, permeated with political free-thinking and deep democracy. Between 1829 and 1842, he created eight romantic dramas, which formed an important stage in the development of French theater.

The first of these dramas, “Marion Delorme, or the Duel in the Age of Richelieu” (1829), was banned by censors, who, not without reason, saw in the image of the feeble-minded Louis XIII a hint of the then reigning King Charles X, and saw the scene only after the overthrow of the Bourbons, in 1831 year. Therefore, the second drama, Ernani, played a decisive role in the development of romantic theater. The production of Ernani in the tense atmosphere on the eve of the revolution (February 25, 1830) could not be understood otherwise than as a political demonstration. In the preface to Ernani, Hugo openly declared his romanticism as “liberalism in literature,” and in the drama itself he portrayed a man rejected by society as a tragic hero and rival of the king. The appearance of such a play on the stage of the Comedie Francaise theater, hallowed by the centuries-old tradition of classicism, meant a daring challenge to public opinion in literary matters.

The premiere of “Ernani” turned into a pitched battle between the “classics” and the “romantics”: the audience began to gather several hours before the start of the performance, there was a terrible noise in the hall; The whistles of the hired claque of enemies of the play and the enthusiastic applause and cheers of its fans prevented the actors from playing. This continued for all 32 performances during which Ernani remained on stage in 1830. “The Battle of Hernani” ended in the victory of romanticism - from now on it received the right to exist in the theater.

Contemporaries were struck primarily by the external novelty of Hugo's dramas: instead of the usual antiquity - medieval France, Spain, Italy, England; instead of figurines and wigs - “local flavor”, historical costumes and furnishings, Spanish cloaks, wide-brimmed hats, “a table laid in the taste of the sixteenth century”, a hall “in the semi-Flemish style of the time of Philip IV”. Disregarding the “unity of place,” Hugo boldly transfers the action from the courtesan’s boudoir to the royal palace, from art gallery- into a torch-lit tombstone, into a smuggler’s shack, into the gloomy dungeons of the Tower. The “unity of time” is equally daringly violated - the action sometimes spans entire months. Elements of tragedy and comedy, “high” and “low” style are mixed in both the plot and the language. The “classics” greeted the verse from “Ernani” with a storm of indignation:

Est-il minuit?
- Minuit bientot (l),
because natural colloquial speech grated ears accustomed to stilted paraphrases; the famous tragic actress Mademoiselle (1. “What time is it?” - It’s almost midnight.”) Mars, who played the role of Doña Sol, argued with Hugo to tears, considering her remark addressed to Hernani indecent:

Vous etes, mon lion, superbe et genereux (1).

But what struck his contemporaries most of all was that rebellious pathos, that atmosphere of struggle and courage, that breath of great passions, that humanism that constituted the very soul of Hugo’s dramaturgy.

Under the onslaught of new ideas, the old, classical form crumbled. In fact, what kind of division into “high” and “low” genre can we talk about if the king competes with the “bandit”, the queen reciprocates the feelings of the lackey who is in love with her, and the pathetic jester tramples under his foot the imaginary corpse of a powerful monarch? If the positive heroes are plebeians without family or tribe, humiliated, rejected, thrown to the bottom of society: the foundling Didier, the courtesan Marion, the jester Triboulet, the artisan Gilbert, the lackey Ruy Blas; if the negative characters are a whole string of greedy, mediocre nobles and stupid, cruel, immoral kings?

The historical masquerade could not deceive anyone: contemporaries called Hugo’s drama nothing more than “drame moderne” (2), in contrast to the “classical” tragedy, which was far from life. The drama The King Amuses himself was a direct response to the Republican uprising in Paris on June 5-6, 1832; During the premiere, revolutionary songs, Marseillaise and Carmagnola, were heard in the auditorium; the play was banned for half a century and was resumed only in 1885. In the drama "Mary Tudor", which appeared in September 1833, between two popular uprisings (1832 and 1834), Hugo brought out as the ideal hero the worker, the blouse, the brother of those who came out under the black banner of the Lyon weavers with the slogan; “Bread or death!”; in this drama, the rebellious people of London fight back against the queen. And in the drama “Ruy Blas,” the plebeian who finds himself at the helm of government personifies the people from whom only one can expect salvation for a dying country.

Of course, in Hugo’s dramas, the convention of classicism turned out to be replaced by another, romantic convention - from one of his plays to another walked the same romantic hero, a noble rebel and renegade, dressed now in picturesque rags, now in a blouse, now in livery. The writer’s very idea of ​​the people was idealistic. But the important thing was that new genre The romantic drama created by Hugo and strengthened in literature was filled with topical political and social content.

Two days before the start of the July Revolution, on July 25, 1830, Victor Hugo began work on the novel Notre Dame. The book was published on March 16, 1831, during the alarming days of the cholera riots and the destruction of the archbishop's palace by the Parisian people. Turbulent political events determined the nature of the novel, which, like Hugo's dramas, was historical in form, but deeply modern in ideas.

Paris at the end of the 15th century... Gothic roofs, spiers and turrets of countless churches, gloomy royal castles, cramped streets and wide squares where the free people roar during the festivities (1. “You, my lion, are proud and generous.” 2. "Modern drama.") riots and executions. Colorful figures of people from all layers of the medieval city - lords and merchants, monks and scholars, noble ladies in pointed headdresses and dressed up townswomen, royal warriors in sparkling armor, tramps and beggars in picturesque rags, with real or fake ulcers and injuries. The world of the oppressors - and the world of the oppressed. The Royal Castle of Bastille, the noble house of Gondelaurier - and Parisian squares, the slums of the “Court of Miracles”, where the outcasts live.

Royal power and its support - the Catholic Church - are shown in the novel as forces hostile to the people. The calculatingly cruel Louis XI is very close to the gallery of crowned criminals from Hugo's dramas. The image of the gloomy fanatic, Archdeacon Claude Frollo (created after the cardinal-executioner from “Marion Delorme”) reveals Hugo’s many years of struggle against the church, which will end in 1883 with the creation of the drama “Torquemada” (in this drama the great inquisitor, wanting to repay good for good , sends the young couple who saved him from death to the fire). Claude Frollo's feelings are no less perverted than Torquemada's: love, fatherly affection, thirst for knowledge turn into selfishness and hatred for him. He fenced himself off from popular life with the walls of the cathedral and his laboratory, and therefore his soul is in the grip of dark and evil passions. The appearance of Claude Frollo is complemented by a chapter bearing the expressive title “The Dislike of the People.”

The outwardly brilliant, but in fact heartless and devastated high society is embodied in the image of Captain Phoebus de Chateaupert, who, like the archdeacon, is incapable of selfless and selfless feeling. Spiritual greatness and high humanism are inherent only to outcast people from the bottom of society; they are the real heroes of the novel. Street dancer Esmeralda symbolizes moral beauty a simple man, the deaf and ugly bell-ringer Quasimodo - the ugliness of the social fate of the oppressed.

At the center of the novel is Notre Dame Cathedral, a symbol of the spiritual life of the French people. The cathedral was built by the hands of hundreds of nameless craftsmen, the religious core in it is lost behind wild imagination; the description of the cathedral becomes the occasion for an inspired prose poem about French national architecture. The cathedral gives shelter to the folk heroes of the novel; their fate is closely connected with it; around the cathedral there are living and fighting people.

At the same time, the cathedral is a symbol of the enslavement of the people, a symbol of feudal oppression, dark superstitions and prejudices that hold the souls of people captive. It is not for nothing that in the darkness of the cathedral, under its arches, merging with bizarre stone chimeras, deafened by the roar of bells, Quasimodo, the “soul of the cathedral,” whose grotesque image personifies the Middle Ages, lives alone. In contrast, the charming image of Esmeralda embodies the joy and beauty of earthly life, the harmony of body and soul, that is, the ideals of the Renaissance, which replaced the Middle Ages. The dancer Esmeralda lives among the Parisian crowd and gives the common people her art, fun, and kindness.

The people, in Hugo's understanding, are not just passive victims; he is full of creative forces, the will to fight, the future belongs to him. The storming of the cathedral by the masses of Paris is only a prelude to the storming of the Bastille in 1789, to the “people's hour”, to the revolution that the Ghent stocker Jacques Copenol predicts to King Louis XI: “-...When the sounds of the alarm bell ring from this tower, when they rumble guns, when the tower collapses with a hellish roar, when soldiers and townspeople roaringly rush at each other in mortal combat, then that hour will strike.”

Hugo did not idealize the Middle Ages; he truthfully showed the dark sides of feudal society. At the same time, his book is deeply poetic, full of ardent patriotic love for France, for its history, for its art, in which, according to Hugo, lives the freedom-loving spirit and talent of the French people.

The people, their fate, their sorrows and hopes in the 30s increasingly worried the heart of Hugo the poet:

Yes, the muse must devote itself to the people.
And I forget love, family, nature,
And appears, omnipotent and formidable,
The lyre has a copper, rattling string.
(Translation by E. Linetskaya)

Already in 1831, while preparing the collection of poems “Autumn Leaves” for publication, Hugo added a “copper string” to his lyre - he also included political lyrics in the collection. It is not enough for the poet to sing about the charm of spring, the beauty of his native fields and the first trembling of a young heart; he also has another task:

I menacingly send curses to the rulers,
Mired in robbery, in blood, in wild debauchery.
I know that the poet is their holy judge...
(Translation by E. Linetskaya)

Social reality intrudes into the poems in the collection “Songs of Twilight” (1835), their heroes are people from the people, heroes of the July barricades, poor workers, homeless women and children. During these years, Hugo became closer to utopian socialism; his works were published in the Saint-Simonist magazine Globe.

In one of his poems, Victor Hugo aptly called himself a “ringing echo” of his time. Indeed, he responded unusually sensitively to all changes in the political and social atmosphere of the era; By the end of the 30s, the decline of the democratic movement in France and the subsequent reaction began to affect his work. The poet is overcome by moods of reconciliation, disappointment, and sadness (poetry collections “Inner Voices,” 1837, and especially “Rays and Shadows,” 1840). These sentiments are aggravated by painful events in Hugo's private life: his beloved brother Eugene died in 1837; in 1843 under tragic circumstances The writer's eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Leopoldina, drowned along with her husband... The death of his daughter deeply shocked Victor Hugo, his paternal grief and attacks of despair were captured in a whole cycle of poems, later included in the collection “Contemplations” (1856).

Now Hugo is moving away from radical political positions; in the book of travel essays “Rhine” (1843), he expresses quite “well-intentioned” thoughts, and in his last drama “The Burgraves” (1843), which failed on stage, he paints a majestic image of the monarch. At the end of the 40s, Hugo was experiencing an ideological and creative crisis.

Official circles appreciated the change in the views of the greatest poet of the era: in 1837, King Louis Philippe awarded Hugo the Order of the Legion of Honor; The French Academy, which had recently written denunciations against Hugo, elected him a member in 1841; in 1845 he received the title of count and was created a peer of France by royal decree.

However, even during these years, Hugo did not abandon humanistic ideals: he worked on a novel from folk life (which was then called “Poverty”); Using his position as a peer, he defended the interests of oppressed Poland, and in 1839 he achieved the abolition of the death sentence of the revolutionary Barbes. Hugo did not remain a supporter of royal power for long and soon broke with it forever.

DURING THE YEARS OF THE “FIRST GREAT BATTLE”

The revolution of 1848 - “the first great battle,” as Karl Marx called it, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie - was a milestone for the entire 19th century and at the same time a milestone in the life of Victor Hugo. Soon after the victory of the February revolution, he declared himself a republican and remained faithful to the bourgeois-democratic republic until the end of his life. He did not hesitate even when many of his former comrades in romantic circles lost hope, retreated, or even went over to the side of political reaction. Hugo was confident that the establishment of a republic would resolve all social issues of bourgeois society, ensure freedom, equality and fraternity, for which the great enlighteners of the 18th century fought, and make all people happy. Therefore, he sought to take personal part in the 1848 revolution. He put forward his candidacy for the Constituent Assembly and on June 4 was elected as a deputy from the Seine department. This was the most acute moment in the development of the revolution: the big bourgeoisie, which made up the majority of the assembly, began frantic activity, trying to take away from the workers the right to work they had won in the February battles, the issue of closing the National Workshops, organized to eliminate unemployment, was discussed. The Law on National Workshops was adopted on June 22; the next day an uprising broke out in Paris, during which for the first time in history the proletariat and the bourgeoisie - yesterday's allies in the struggle against royal power - found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades. Four days later, the workers' uprising was drowned in blood and all the democratic gains of the February revolution were liquidated one after another.

Victor Hugo did not understand the meaning of the June days. He was not a shrewd statesman; he spoke primarily of a magnanimous heart, sincere sympathy for the oppressed and love for political freedom, the personification of which in his eyes was the republic. It seemed to him that, by opposing the bourgeois-republican government, the people “came against themselves.” Blinded by faith in bourgeois democracy, Hugo decisively dissociated himself from the executioners of the uprising, but condemned the rebels themselves. He declared that he stood for the “republic of civilization” against the “republic of terror”, and, without meaning to, he found himself on the side of property and “order” against the working class.

But the fiery speeches of Deputy Hugo (later collected in the book “Deeds and Speeches”) have always been a hymn to freedom and humanity. When the short, big-browed man climbed to the podium, the audience was filled with excitement. Cheers and applause rang out from the left benches; Indignant shouts and whistles were heard from the right benches. With breathtaking eloquence, Hugo demanded the abolition of popular poverty, glorified the heroism of ordinary people, and defended the liberation movement in Italy; At the risk of being accused of high treason, he insisted on canceling the Roman expedition sent by France to help Pope Pius XI: in one of his most striking speeches he rebelled against the church's attempt to establish supervision over public education and attacked the obscurantism of the clerics.

Like many romantics, Hugo was charmed by the personality of Napoleon I, so he warmly supported the candidacy of Louis Bonaparte, the commander's nephew, for the presidency of France. All the more alarming were the first signs of a conspiracy against the republic. Already on July 17, 1851, he delivered a brilliant speech to the Legislative Assembly, in which he warned against the Bonapartists' attempt to revise the Constitution. Amidst a storm of shouts, protests and applause, Hugo declared: “France cannot be allowed to be taken by surprise and one fine day discover that it has an emperor from nowhere!”

But then came the ominous day of December 2, 1851. At eight o'clock in the morning, when Hugo had already woken up and was working in bed, one of his friends ran in to him in terrible excitement and told him that a coup d'etat had occurred that night, fifteen Republican deputies had been arrested, Paris was crowded with troops, the Legislative Assembly had been dissolved and Hugo himself was in danger . The writer got dressed and entered his wife's bedroom. - What do you want to do? - she asked, turning pale. “Fulfill your duty,” he answered. His wife hugged him and said only one word: “Go.” Hugo went outside.

From that moment on, his stubborn, long-term struggle against Napoleon III, whom Hugo, in a speech on July 17, murderously aptly dubbed “Napoleon the Less,” did not stop. Herzen wrote about Hugo in Past and Thoughts: “On December 2, 1851, he stood up to his full height: in view of bayonets and loaded guns, he called the people to revolt: under bullets, he protested against the coup d’etat [coup d’etat] and retired from France, when there was nothing to do in it.”

Hugo, together with five comrades, formed the Republican “Committee of Resistance”; they walked around the people's quarters of Paris, made speeches in the squares, issued proclamations, rousing people to fight, and supervised the construction of barricades. Every minute at the risk of being captured and shot, changing housing several times a day, amid the bloody massacre committed by the Bonapartist military and police, Victor Hugo fearlessly and decisively fulfilled his civic duty.

Reactionary newspapers threw mud at him, spies followed on his heels, his head was valued at 25 thousand francs, his sons were in prison. But only on December 11, when there was no doubt that a handful of Republicans (there were only one and a half to two thousand of them) suffered a final defeat, Hugo fled to Belgium and on December 12, under an assumed name, arrived in Brussels. A nineteen-year period of exile began.

In the troubled years, when a social storm shook France and caused echoes of workers' uprisings throughout Europe, the question of the historical destinies of peoples worried all outstanding minds. During these years, Hugo's romantic philosophy and his views on nature and society finally took shape, which formed the basis for all of the writer's further work.

The world seemed to Victor Hugo to be an arena of fierce struggle, the struggle of two eternal principles - good and evil, light and darkness. The outcome of this struggle is predetermined by the good will of Providence, which controls everything in the universe - from the circulation of the stars to the smallest movement of the human soul; evil is doomed, good will triumph. The life of humanity, like the life of the universe, is a powerful upward movement, from evil to good, from darkness to light, from a terrible past to a wonderful future: “Progress is nothing more than a fact of gravity. Who could stop him? O despots, I challenge you, stop the falling stone, stop the flow, stop the avalanche, stop Italy, stop the year 1789, stop the world, directed by God towards the light" (Speech of 1860).

The paths of history are drawn by providence; social catastrophes, wars, revolutions are only stages on the path of humanity to the ideal. Reaction is like a barge sailing against the current: it is unable to reverse the powerful movement of the waters.

But how will happiness reign on earth? Answering this question, Hugo followed in the footsteps of utopian socialism: a new era will come as a result of the moral improvement of mankind, as a result of the victory of the ideas of justice, mercy, and brotherly love. Hugo, the son of the heroic era of bourgeois revolutions, a student of the Enlightenment, wholeheartedly believed in the transformative power of ideas. He considered himself an educator and leader of people, and said that a writer is a “prophet,” “messiah,” “a beacon of humanity,” called upon to show the people the path to a bright future. Hugo gave every page of his creations, along with his heart, to people.

After the monarchical coup of 1851, Hugo declared himself a socialist. But this was naive and superficial “socialism”. He limited himself to demanding political equality and democratic reforms: universal suffrage, freedom of speech, free education, abolition of the death penalty. It seemed to the writer that if it had been possible to implement the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, proclaimed back in 1789, then this would already have been the beginning of “socialism.” Hugo did not recognize any other socialism and did not at all understand the meaning of private property; he only wanted “every citizen, without exception, to be an owner,” so that “no one was the owner,” and innocently called for “limiting digestive socialism” for the sake of “socialism of the ideal.”

However, Hugo was close to the utopian socialists with his fiery belief in progress, in the limitless possibilities of the human spirit, in the liberating role of knowledge, science, technology: man had already tamed three terrible chimeras of antiquity, creating a steamship, a steam locomotive and a balloon; someday he will subjugate all the forces of nature, and only then will he be completely freed!

But could Hugo, who called for the violent overthrow of Napoleon III, limit himself to a hymn to peaceful progress? After 1851, the writer reflected more and more persistently on issues of social struggle. He claims that universal peace will be achieved the last war, glorifies the “divine monster - the revolution” and, having called the revolution an “abyss” in one of his speeches, immediately adds: “But there are beneficial abysses - those into which evil falls” (“Speech on Voltaire”).

Until the end of his days, Hugo tried to combine Christian charity and revolutionary violence, he wavered between denial and recognition of the revolutionary path. This left an indelible imprint on all of his mature work.

VICTOR HUGO VS LOUIS BONAPARTE

Once outside his homeland, Hugo did not think of stopping the fight, but now the pen became a formidable weapon for him. The day after his arrival in Brussels, he began writing a book about the coup d’etat on December 2, which he expressively called “The History of a Crime.” Hugo published this book only in 1877, when the republican system in France was again under threat, and the writer wanted to use a reminder of the past to prevent its repetition. But already in July 1852, another pamphlet appeared in print - “Napoleon the Small”, which thundered throughout Europe and forever pilloried Louis Bonaparte.

With all his political temperament, with all the power of his talent, Hugo attacked the usurper of the freedom of France. He indignantly tells how Louis Bonaparte solemnly swore to defend the republic, and then trampled on this oath. Step by step, the path of betrayal, bribery and crimes by which Napoleon the Less came to power is revealed to the reader; a terrible spectacle of bloody murders, the shooting of random passers-by, tyranny and lawlessness arises. With sarcastic contempt, Hugo draws a portrait of the “hero” of the coup d'etat, who appears in double guise - a bandit and a petty swindler.

“He appeared, this rogue without a past, without a future, gifted with neither genius nor glory, either a prince or an adventurer. All his advantages are hands full of money, bank notes, railway shares, places, orders, sinecures, and the ability to remain silent about his criminal plans. Having sat on the throne, he tries to intimidate the people with atrocities. “Kill, what is there to talk about! Kill whoever you want, chop, shoot with grapeshot, strangle, trample, intimidate this disgusting Paris to death! streams flow from him, but he mistakes it for purple and demands an empire for himself.”

But, passionately indignant at the reactionary coup in France, Victor Hugo did not understand the true roots of Bonapartism - this was hampered by his idealistic view of history. He places all responsibility for the coup personally on Louis Bonaparte. “On the one hand there is a whole nation, the first of nations, on the other hand there is one person, the last of people; and this is what this man has done to this nation.”

As Karl Marx wittily noted, who highly appreciated Hugo’s pamphlet at the time of its appearance, the writer, having declared Napoleon the Less the sole culprit of all the shameful events of 1851-1852, instead of belittling, unwittingly exalted his enemy, attributing to him unprecedented personal power, whereas in fact in fact, he was only a pathetic figurehead, used by the reactionary circles of France for their own purposes. But the bold denunciation of a gang of political adventurers and the fiery civic pathos of Hugo’s book played a huge role in the fight against reaction. It is still impossible to read the pages of “The History of a Crime” and “Napoleon the Small” without deep emotion, which paint terrible pictures of the reprisals of the Napoleonic clique against the Parisian people; one cannot help but admire the sacrificial greatness of the Republicans who died on the barricades for freedom. For contemporaries, the book was a formidable warning and a call to fight. It was secretly imported into France, was a huge success and subsequently went through ten editions.

After the publication of Napoleon the Lesser, Louis Bonaparte achieved the expulsion of Hugo from Belgium. To do this, the Belgian government had to issue a special law that made it possible to violate the right of asylum for political emigrants. The writer was forced to leave Brussels. He stayed in London for several days, and then with his whole family moved to the English island of Jersey, in the English Channel; terribly homesick for his homeland, full of indignation and pain for its fate, Hugo again took up his pen and already in 1853 published in Brussels a collection of civil lyrics “Retribution”, in which he branded the Second Empire with great force.

Since the time of the “Tragic Poems” of Agrippa d'Aubigné, the voice of anger has not thundered so powerfully over France, political poetry has not risen to such heights. “Retribution” is essentially a whole poem, united by one thought and a harmonious composition. Each of its seven books ironically entitled one of the false declarations of Napoleon III (“Society saved”, “Order restored”, etc.), but the content of the poems every time refutes the title. political crooks, perjurers and renegades, swindlers and robbers, “altar jesters” and corrupt judges, adventurers and greedy businessmen, the poet does not reveal the historical roots of Bonapartism in him; he regards the Second Empire as sinister; a parody of the First Empire, as historical and moral “retribution” to Napoleon I for strangling the revolution. The victory of Napoleon III for Hugo is a temporary victory of Evil over Good, Lies over Truth. And he addresses his compatriots, the working people of France, with a call to wake up, gather all their strength and crush Evil:

Are you unarmed? Nonsense! And the pitchforks?
And the hammer, the worker’s friend?
Take the stones! Enough strength
It's hard to pull the hook out of the door!
And stand, handing over your spirit to hope,
Great France, as before,
Become free Paris again!
Carrying out righteous vengeance,
Free yourself from contempt,
Wash away the dirt and blood from your homeland!
(“To the Sleepers.” Translation by G. Shengeli)

Hugo used all poetic means, colors and forms in “Retribution”: there is deadly sarcasm and enthusiastic dreams of the future; menacing oratorical tirades are interspersed with gentle lyricism, terrible descriptions of murder and violence are adjacent to bright pictures of nature. The poet turns to literary images of the past, to images of the Bible, antiquity, to fables and folk song- everything is put in the service of one task: to open the eyes of the people, to rouse them to fight. The poet passionately believes in the final victory of goodness and light over darkness and injustice, in the future of France. "Retribution" opens with the chapter "Moss" ("Night") and ends with the chapter "Lux" ("Light").

In "Retribution" Hugo first appeared as a revolutionary poet, as a staunch defender of his homeland, democracy, and progress. According to Romain Rolland, he showed his contemporaries “an example of a hero who said his decisive “no” in response to the crimes of the state and became the living embodiment of the indignant consciousness of the people who were silenced.” Hugo's poem had a huge impact on his contemporaries. Having spread with lightning speed in Europe, it also penetrated into France - in its entirety, in fragments, in the form of proclamations; she was transported across the border, sometimes in a sardine box, sometimes sewn into a woman’s dress or into the sole of a boot. The fiery lines of the patriotic poet became a formidable weapon in the fight for the freedom of his homeland. “Retribution” remains to this day one of the peaks of French civil poetry, despite the fact that the poem is not free from rhetoric, “naive pomposity,” as V.I. Lenin said, according to the memoirs of N.K. Krupskaya. He loved this poem by Hugo and forgave its shortcomings, because the “breath of revolution” was felt in it.

After the release of Retribution, Victor Hugo had to leave the island of Jersey. He moved to the neighboring island of Guernsey, where he lived until the fall of the Second Empire. In 1859, Hugo refused an amnesty, which he did not want to accept from the hands of the political criminal Louis Bonaparte. In a letter to the usurper, the poet declared with dignity: “When freedom returns, I will return.”

"CLIF OF THE EXILES"

Day and night the surf hits the harsh rocks of Guernsey, seagulls fly screaming over the white foam, fishing boats fill the picturesque harbor of Saint-Pierre, gear is drying on the sand... And on a sunny day from the round glass veranda of Hauteville House, located right under the roof , the endless distance of the sea opens up, and the vague outlines of the coast of France are visible on the horizon. Victor Hugo stood at his desk on this veranda all morning, seized by the fever of work; now he puts down his pen. He goes down the stairs, passes through the rooms, which he personally decorated with paintings, carvings, paintings, draperies, through the garden, where, together with his family, he dug up flower beds and planted flowers, and, bypassing the streets of a fishing town, goes out to the sea. Along a narrow path he climbs a coastal cliff - “The Cliff of Exiles,” as the poet’s friends called it - and sits for a long time on a ledge that looks like a stone chair, thinking to the sound of the waves.

On a cliff lost at sea, Hugo feels as if he is on a battlefield - he is still the same indomitable fighter for freedom and justice, moreover, he is a friend of all peoples and an enemy of all despots. Hundreds of letters fly here, to Guernsey, from all over the world, from outstanding political figures, writers, artists, from ordinary people - from those who value their homeland, human dignity, and the happiness of their people. Hugo corresponds with Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Mazzini, with the revolutionary Barbes and the future communard Flourens; Italy's national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi asks for his help in raising funds to arm Italian patriots; A.I. Herzen calls him “great brother” and invites him to collaborate in Kolokol. From his Guernsey cliff, Hugo responds to liberation struggles in all corners of the globe: in 1854, he addressed an open letter to the English Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, demanding the abolition of the death penalty; in 1859, he delivered a message to the United States of America, in which he angrily protested against the death sentence of John Brown, the leader of the rebellious blacks of Virginia. “It is possible that the execution of Brown will strengthen slavery in Virginia, but it will undoubtedly shake the entire foundations of American democracy. You are saving your shame and killing your glory,” wrote Hugo. In 1860 he welcomed Haitian independence; opposed the British military expedition to China; in connection with the Polish uprising of 1863, he wrote an appeal to the Russian army, which Herzen published on the pages of “The Bell”; Hugo raised his voice in defense of Mexico against the French invaders sent there by Napoleon III in 1863; supported the struggle of the island of Crete against the Turkish yoke; protested against the execution of Irish Fenian patriots. He ardently supported the struggle for a republic in Spain in 1868, and when the people of Cuba rebelled against the Spanish colonialists, Hugo spoke out for the freedom of Cuba.

Hugo witnessed the beginning of aggression by major capitalist powers against weaker peoples; He was one of the first in Europe to begin the fight against wars. Hugo was the initiator and chairman of the first Congress of the Friends of Peace in Paris back in 1849, and in 1869 he took part in the Peace Congress in Lausanne, where he was also elected chairman. At the opening of the congress, Hugo gave an inspired speech: “We want peace, we passionately want it... But what kind of peace do we want? Peace at any cost? Peace without any effort? No! We do not want a world in which those who are bent do not dare to raise their heads; We don’t want peace under the yoke of despotism, we don’t want peace under the stick, we don’t want peace under the scepter!” And, declaring that “the first condition of peace is liberation”, that to achieve it “a revolution will be required, the most amazing of all revolutions, and perhaps - alas! - war, the last of all wars,” Hugo ended his speech with the words: “Our goal is freedom! Freedom will ensure peace!

The brave struggle of the poet expelled from his homeland, his indestructible spirit, his noble dreams of universal happiness won him enormous popularity. An entire generation of progressive youth experienced the irresistible charm of the personality and creativity of Victor Hugo. According to Emile Zola, Hugo seemed to his twenty-year-old peers a supernatural creature, “a colossus singing in the storm,” some kind of new Prometheus.

During the years of exile, Hugo's powerful literary talent also reached its peak. He creates beautiful lyrics (collections “Contemplation”, book two; “Songs of Streets and Forests”), and works on the grandiose poetic cycle “Legend of the Ages” (1859-1883). In this huge epic, the entire history of mankind passes before the reader, clothed in romantic images, colored with all the colors of wild fantasy; history is a cruel struggle of peoples against bloody despots, it is full of suffering, disasters and injustice; but the hour will come, Evil will be defeated, and Good will triumph. In the finale, a vision of a happy future appears before the poet’s spiritual gaze. In exile, Hugo also wrote his great social novels.

EPIC OF NATIONAL LIFE

On a dark night, a hunted man wanders through the sleeping streets; he once stole bread because he was deprived of the opportunity to earn it, all the doors slammed in his face, even the yard dog chases him out of his kennel... A young woman, in the old days beautiful and cheerful, but now toothless, shorn, sick, goes out into the street in the last desperate hope of feeding his child... A barefoot, hungry child, trembling with fear of beatings, struggling, drags a heavy bucket...

These are people from the people, “outcasts,” the heroes of Hugo’s new novel, published in 1862. The writer devoted thirty years of work and thought to this work, which was the result of an entire period of his life and glorified him throughout the world. The idea of ​​the book is about tragic fate the masses of the people, whom the absurd structure of bourgeois society made “outcasts,” was nurtured by Hugo from the end of the 20s; the contours of its plot appeared in the stories “The Last Day of the Condemned to Death” (1828) and “Claude Gue” (1834), and in many poems of the 30s; The theme of people's grief, which deeply worried the writer, arose both in “Notre Dame Cathedral” and in dramas. But only in “Les Miserables” is folk life shown directly, without romantic allegory. From Spanish castles and medieval temples, Hugo boldly transferred his heroes to modern Paris, raised glaring social issues, and showed typical destinies and characters; the life of the common people and the bourgeoisie, the life of the Parisian slums, the desperate struggle of the poor for a piece of bread, the enmity between the worker and the manufacturer, the popular uprising - all this is in Hugo’s book.

Hugo wrote Les Misérables in defense of the people; he directly stated this in the preface: “As long as by the force of laws and morals there will be a social curse, which, in the midst of the flourishing of civilization, artificially creates hell and aggravates the fate depending on God with the fatal predestination of man... as long as there will be want and ignorance reign on earth, books like this will perhaps not be useless.”

Three insoluble problems of bourgeois society - unemployment, prostitution, homelessness - were, according to the original plan, to be revealed through the examples of the fate of the three heroes of the book: Jean Valjean, Fantine and Cosette.

Hugo called upon all the power of his talent, all his love for people, to shake the hearts of readers with the spectacle of the disasters of his heroes. It is impossible to indifferently read the story of Jean Valjean, “a poor good beast, driven by a whole hound society” (in the words of A.I. Herzen), the story of Fantine, her desecrated love, tragic motherhood and, finally, her death in the prison infirmary; The pages depicting the “sinister domestic slavery” in the Thenardier house of little Cosette, whom “fear made deceitful and poverty ugly,” breathe cruel truth. Around these central characters there is a whole crowd of others: homeless old people and children, hungry teenagers, residents of gloomy slums and dens of thieves - in a word, those whom the author called “outcasts”. How to help these people, how to alleviate their lot? This is exactly the question Victor Hugo wanted to answer; he set himself a double goal: to condemn social evil and show the way to overcome it. “A society that would not like to be criticized would be like a patient who does not allow himself to be treated,” Hugo wrote in one of the many drafts of the preface to Les Miserables. Like the utopian socialists, he sought to find a recipe for healing bourgeois society. Hugo attached special importance to his book, considering it a practical weapon in the fight for the future; he even called it “the new gospel.”

The novels of the mature Hugo differ greatly from the classical form of the social novel of the Balzac type. These are epic novels. Specific life questions, living images of people, a fascinating plot - only one side of them; Behind this there is always a question about the fate of the people, humanity, moral and philosophical problems, general questions of existence. And if in “Les Miserables” there is no merciless social analysis and the brilliant insight of Balzac, then the unique originality of this work lies in the epic grandeur, in the fiery humanism that colors every page with lyrical excitement, gives special significance to each image and raises the picture of folk life to high romance. The author himself wrote: “... the proportions here are enormous, because this work completely fits the giant Man. From here there are wide horizons opening in all directions. There must be air around the mountain.”

It is no coincidence that Hugo sought to combine his works into large cycles; in the 60s, he began to consider Les Misérables as the second part of a trilogy, the first book of which was to be Notre Dame, and the last book Toilers of the Sea. According to the author, these three works show the struggle of man against fate in its triple guise: religious superstitions, social injustice and unconquered nature. In the light of such a plan, it is clear why Hugo included in “Les Miserables” all new author’s digressions, reflections on the past and future, on peaceful progress and revolution, on monasteries and religion, and was even going to write a philosophical introduction in two parts - “God” and “Soul” " As in “The Legend of the Ages,” Hugo sees the life of his era through the prism of a romantically understood history; images of Dante and Homer, images of biblical and ancient myths appear through the pictures of the bitter life of the Parisian people and stand behind the images of folk heroes. More than anywhere else, the main characters of Les Misérables are carriers of the author’s ideas, symbols of sorts.

At the center of the book is the image of Jean Valjean, personifying the oppressed people. “Often the entire people are completely embodied in these inconspicuous and great creatures, trampled underfoot. Often the one who is an ant in the material world turns out to be a giant in the moral world,” wrote Hugo in the rough drafts for the novel. Such “moral giants” are all of Hugo’s favorite folk heroes: the peasant Jean Valjean, the seamstress Fantine, the street urchin Gavroche.

Jean Valjean, personifying the people, is contrasted with the innkeeper Thenardier, the embodiment of predatory egoism, misanthropy and hypocrisy, on which the bourgeois order, hostile to the people, rests. The bourgeois state is just as hostile to the people with its soulless and inhumane legislation, embodied in the image of the police officer Javert, the watchdog of bourgeois society. Jean Valjean’s spiritual resurrection is brought not by the guardian of order Javert, but by Bishop Miriel, who, according to Hugo’s plan, embodies the idea of ​​humanity, brotherly love and mercy, called upon to save society. True, the author failed to rid the image of the bishop of falsehood, and progressive criticism, especially in Russia, noted this immediately after the book was published.

In the 40s, Hugo was even more influenced by “Christian socialism” and believed that it was enough to convince people of the injustice of the then social system and show an example of humanity and love - in other words, replace Javert with a bishop - and social evil would disappear. But having returned to the novel in exile, Hugo could no longer be satisfied with preaching moral improvement; Les Misérables now includes the theme of revolutionary struggle against evil. The writer adds new chapters, depicts with warm sympathy the republican uprising in Paris in 1832, creates the ideal image of the “priest of the revolution” Enjolras and his comrades from the republican secret society “Friends of the ABC” and, finally, gathers everyone goodies on the barricade.

As a result, an irreconcilable contradiction arose in the novel; It was impossible to combine the ideas of Christian humility and the glorification of the revolution - this contradicted artistic truth. Hugo himself could not decide what was more valuable to him, abstract humanity or an active revolutionary struggle for the future. But the readers of the novel are strongly impressed by the exciting picture of the people’s battle for freedom, painted with a romantic pathos that elevates “The Epic of the Street of Saint-Denis” to the heroic images of Homer’s poems.

The death of little Gavroche, “the marvelous Gavroche,” in the words of Maurice Thorez, is unforgettable; Gavroche is one of Hugo's best creations, a favorite of readers in all countries. This cheerful mischief-maker, impudent and simple-minded, cynical and childishly naive, speaks thieves' jargon, hangs out with thieves, but gives the last piece of bread to the hungry and protects the weak; he despises the authorities, hates the bourgeoisie, fears neither God nor the devil, and greets death with a mocking song. Like Esmeralda, Gavroche is completely immersed in folk life. He dies for the people's cause. Gavroche - “the soul of Paris” - embodies the best national traits of the French people, their “Gallic spirit” - ineradicable cheerfulness, generosity and love of freedom.

The publication of Les Misérables aroused great interest not only in France, but throughout the world; within several years the book was published in translation in England, Germany, Italy, America, Japan, India; In Russia, the novel was published simultaneously in three magazines, including Nekrasov’s Sovremennik, already in the very year of its publication in France, and was immediately persecuted by the tsarist censorship. The initiative to fight against Hugo belonged to Alexander II himself. Minister of Public Education Golovnin wrote to the St. Petersburg censorship committee in April 1862: “The Emperor wanted that, in the case of the translation of Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Miserables,” the censorship strictly considers the meaning of various incidents described by the author with great talent and therefore having a strong impact on the reader.”

Publication of the novel was prohibited. Having learned about this, Herzen wrote indignantly in The Bell: “Imagine that our miserables banned Hugo’s novel. What a pathetic and disgusting barbarism!”

MAN AGAINST CHAOS

No matter how much Hugo missed his homeland, no matter how immersed he was in political struggle and hard work, every day he succumbed more and more to the charm of the unique nature surrounding him. He fell asleep and woke up to the roar of the sea, the sea rolled like waves outside his window, shook the glass walls of his terrace with storms or gently splashed at his feet; The life of the Guernsey fishermen, which took place before the eyes of the writer, depended entirely on the sea. During his leisure hours, Hugo took boat trips, admired the quaint cliffs of Dover, wandered around the rocky islet of Circe, climbed into caves and grottoes - in one of them he saw an octopus for the first time with disgust... The music of the sea, its iridescent colors, its contrasts and secrets, the greatness of the elements and the greatness of man’s brave struggle against it captured Hugo’s creative imagination. Magnificent pictures of the sea appear in his poetry (“Oceano Nox”, “Poor People”, “Rosa Infanta”); More and more often, the image of a man - the tamer of the ocean - appears before his mind's eye. By 1865, he completed a new novel, “Toilers of the Sea.”

Once again Hugo's focus is on a man of the people; but in “Les Miserables” he was brought face to face with the “social element” hostile to him, but now man stood before the formidable element of nature. A popular uprising thundered there; here, in the words of Maurice Thorez, “the furious roar of the sea waves could be heard from every page.”

In “Toilers of the Sea,” as in “Les Miserables,” it is easy to distinguish two sides, two levels of narrative: a lively, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes ironic story about the life of the islanders and a sublime poem about a man - the conqueror of nature. The scale of what happens on the shore and what happens at sea is incomparable. On the island there is a provincial philistine little world, a copy of bourgeois England: greed covered by hypocrisy, caste isolation, ostentatious piety. The possessive morality of this society is expressed in the image of Captain Clubin, who for ten years wore a mask of incorruptible honesty in order to rob his master at a convenient moment; the ruler of souls here is Pastor Erod, who sanctimoniously covers up the oppression of peoples and the slave trade with the authority of the Christian religion. In the ocean, man wages a heroic struggle, free from bourgeois self-interest.

All the greatness, all the poetry of this struggle is connected for Victor Hugo with those who work. In the novel "Toilers of the Sea" there is no branched, masterfully constructed intrigue, as in "Les Miserables", there is no string of folk heroes. The plot of the novel is simple, and all the “workers” are summarized in one image - the Norman fisherman Gilliatt. Gilliatt is the embodiment of all the best that is in a person: he has a brave soul, strong muscles, a clear mind, a pure heart. In spiritual and moral terms, he is so much higher than the possessive society that he arouses the hostility and distrust of those around him, who awarded him the nickname Gilliatt the Crafty. Gilliatt is a kind of “outcast,” a romantic renegade. He bears on his shoulders the entire burden of labor necessary for society, but is not understood and not recognized by this society.

For the first time in Hugo’s work, it is labor that exalts the hero and makes his image poetic. Jean Valjean personified the suffering of an oppressed people; Gilliatt has absorbed labor experience, talent, knowledge accumulated over centuries by working people - he is a jack of all trades: a sailor, a blacksmith, a self-taught mechanic, a doctor and musician, a gardener and a carpenter.

The main thing in the novel is the labor feat of Gilliatt, who threw down a daring challenge to the elements and alone, without any help, armed with the simplest tools, surrounded by a raging ocean, amid unheard-of difficulties and countless dangers, he removed the car of a broken steamer from a distant reef and brought ashore. It is the worker, the simple man, “an ant in the material world, but a giant in the moral world” who appears before the writer as the builder of the future and the owner of the earth. Gilliatt’s struggle to save the machine, his single combat with the ocean take on titanic shapes and become a poetic personification of the eternal struggle that, according to the author, humanity wages against nature: “Man works, arranging his home, and his home is the earth. He moves, moves, abolishes, demolishes, throws away, crushes, digs, digs, breaks, explodes, crumbles, wipes one thing from the face of the earth, destroys another and, destroying, creates a new one. No hesitation before anything: neither before the thickness of the earth, nor before the mountain range, nor before the power of matter emitting light, nor before the greatness of nature... Submit, earth, to your ant!”

This human activity expresses the movement from evil to good, the victory of the spirit over inert matter. “Toilers of the Sea” shows the clash of the dark, evil element - nature with the good will and reason of man. Nature is full of contrasts and surprises, fabulous beauties and unimaginable horrors; sometimes it is friendly to man, sometimes hostile to him. The mirror sea suddenly begins to “growl dully”, a thundercloud with violent squalls is suddenly born from a tiny cloud, deadly reefs are hiding in a peaceful backwater, a disgusting “lump of mucus endowed with will” - a giant octopus - lives in a shining underwater palace.

The writer's romantic imagination spiritualizes the elements; with “almost magical pictorial power, he recreates on the pages of the novel a picture of a majestic, formidable, every second changing, seething, breathing ocean. From reality, the reader is easily transported into the atmosphere of myth and fairy tale. Gilliattna on his rock is like a hero of ancient folk tales, repelling the attack of fantastic monsters, hydras and dragons: he fights with insidious clouds, viciously hissing waves, whirlwinds mad with rage, multi-headed lightning; in the end he endures a completely fabulous duel with an octopus. In Les Misérables, depicting the sad life of little Cosette and the righteous life of Bishop Miriel, Hugo used the fairy tale about Cinderella, the evil machecha and sisters and the fairy tale about the good old man and the robbers; in “Toilers of the Sea” he again calls upon the poetic imagination of the people to help reveal all the greatness of Gilliatt’s combat with nature. The magnificent symphony of labor and struggle that sounds on the pages of the novel cannot be drowned out by the melodramatic finale, in which the author, contrary to the truth of art, imposed Christian self-denial and humility before fate on the conqueror of the elements, the people's hero Gilliatt. The reader does not want to believe that this is the same Gilliatt.

For readers all over the world, the novel about a humble Guernsey fisherman is a heroic epic in which the glory of a human fighter, worker and creator is sung. And this is the originality and strength of Hugo’s book, which is unlike any other work of French literature of the mid-19th century.

TERRIBLE LAUGHTER

Insistently striving to understand the laws of history, almost simultaneously with “Toilers of the Sea,” Hugo is planning a new trilogy: aristocracy - monarchy - republic. The first part, “The Man Who Laughs,” was published in 1869, the third was subsequently compiled by the novel “The Ninety-Third Year,” the second part remained unfulfilled.

In form, “The Man Who Laughs” is a historical novel, but, as usual with Hugo, it is entirely directed towards the present. The action takes place in England at the beginning of the 18th century, and Hugo once again demonstrates his brilliant skill in historical painting. Royal Palace - and London slums; the ominous dungeons of the Tower - and aristocratic clubs; crowds of vagabonds deprived of shelter and work - and arrogant, stupid lords; The time-honored parliamentary ritual - and the gallows with tarred corpses on creaking chains - is the backdrop against which the exciting plot unfolds. During the heyday of the realistic social novel, when Flaubert’s main books had already been published and Zola began to write, Hugo came up with a work that shimmered with all the colors of romantic art. The reader is faced with a romantic world full of horrors, secrets, spectacular contrasts, unexpected coincidences: the buffoon turns out to be a lord, the duchess has fun in the company of the mob, a bottle thrown into the sea seals the fate of a nobleman, monstrous criminals are tortured in secret dungeons, a blind beauty loves a freak. Gloomy mysteries, evil deceit, and violent passions surround the hero, who bravely rushes into battle for his happiness, but dies in an unequal struggle.

In the novel “The Man Who Laughs,” as in “The Cathedral,” two worlds confront each other: the outwardly brilliant, but essentially vicious and heartless world of the upper classes, personified by the fatal beauty with a black soul, Duchess Josiana, and the world of goodness and humanity , embodied in the images of folk heroes: the tramp philosopher Ureus, the common jester Gwynplaine and the blind girl Dea.

Romantic antithesis and romantic symbolism permeate the entire fabric of the novel: next to the demonic Josiana rises the figure of the insidious spy and envious Barkilphedro, a hypocrite, like Clubin from “Toilers of the Sea”; Child traffickers - comprachicos - are also a symbol of social evil. On the other hand, goodness exists only outside of official society. On a cold winter night, an abandoned child shows mercy to an even weaker and helpless baby; in front of him, half-frozen and hungry, all the doors are locked, as once before Jean Valjean; He finds shelter in the van of a poor man like himself, a man alien to the animal laws of society, although he bears the name of a bear (Latin Ursus) and considers the wolf his comrade.

Gwynplaine, like Quasimodo, is also a symbol of the people's suffering; behind the ugly mask of laughter he hides a bright soul. But the social meaning of this image is deeper: Quasimodo is simply a monstrous whim of nature, while Gwynplaine’s life, as well as his face, is disfigured by people and society for selfish purposes. The struggle between good and evil finds expression in Gwynplaine's hesitation between the brilliant fate of an aristocrat and the humble lot of a common man, between his passion for Duchess Josiana and pure love to Deya. Guimplen soon becomes convinced that true happiness cannot be found in gilded chambers, and returns, though too late, to the people's soil from which he was so suddenly torn away.

The writer’s deep belief in the doom of evil prompted him to devote an entire part of the novel (“Sea and Night”) to the story of how the Comprachicos died in the depths of the sea - this is moral retribution for the crimes of society. But the beloved heroes of Hugo, Gwynplaine and Day also die, for evil is still stronger than good. Nevertheless, Gwynplaine, who rejected the world of hypocrisy and violence, wins a moral victory. The tragic figure of Gwynplaine is the image of an oppressed people who begin to straighten their shoulders, ready to finally rebel against their enslavers. The novel was created on the eve of the fall of the Second Empire and is permeated with a premonition of the coming social storm. In a brief moment of his fantastic exaltation, finding himself, by a whim of fate, on the bench of parliament, the pathetic jester, yesterday's plebeian, throws menacing and prophetic words into the faces of the laughing and howling lords:

“Bishops, peers and princes, know that the people are a great sufferer who laughs through their tears. My lords, people - it is me...Tremble! The inexorable hour of reckoning is approaching, the cut off claws grow back, the torn tongues turn into tongues of flame, they soar upward, caught by a violent wind, and cry out in the darkness, the hungry gnashing their teeth... This is the people coming, I tell you, this is the man rising; this is the end; this is the crimson dawn of catastrophe - this is what lies in the laughter you mock!”

And although this speech makes the lords freeze in horror only for a minute, the revolutionary-romantic spirit of Hugo’s book is expressed with great force.

TERRIBLE YEAR

Less than two years had passed before the forebodings of the author of the book about Gwynplaine came true. The empire of Napoleon the Less collapsed. Hugo's fate was closely connected with the fate of his country, and this political event turned his entire personal life in a new direction - the exiled poet returned to his homeland. On September 5, the day after the proclamation of the Third Republic, almost seventy years old, the great writer of France set foot on French soil for the first time in nineteen years... Seized with deep emotion, he could not hold back his tears.

Hugo remained true to his word: he returned with the Republic. But freedom - have the French people gained freedom? Hugo Okoryu became convinced that this was not the case. At a difficult time for France, the exile returned to his native country. The adventurist war started by Napoleon III with Prussia led France to disaster: on September 2, defeated in the battle of Sedan, the emperor, along with an army of one hundred thousand, surrendered to the Germans; enemy troops launched an attack on Paris; The new republican government of “national defense”, which came to power on September 4, soon pursued such a treacherous policy that it earned the shameful nickname of “the government of national treason” - it feared the people armed against the enemies of France more than the victory of the Prussians. The siege of Paris, famine, epidemic, betrayal of the generals, a two-time uprising against the government and bloody reprisals against its participants... Finally, on January 28, 1871, Paris fell. The workers responded to the betrayal and provocations of the bourgeoisie with an armed uprising on March 18. On March 28, the Paris Commune was solemnly proclaimed.

All these turbulent events shocked and captured Victor Hugo. Just two weeks after his return, he found himself in besieged Paris; having shared the disasters of war with the people, he wrote patriotic proclamations; elected to the National Assembly, which met in the city of Bordeaux, called from his rostrum for the defense of the homeland and denounced the traitors who tried to drown out his speeches with angry cries and howls. Ten days before the Commune, the reactionary majority of the assembly deprived the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi, an old comrade of Hugo, who was fighting in the ranks of the French army, of his deputy mandate. Outraged by this, Deputy Hugo resigned.

The writer’s thoughts and feelings of that time were reflected in the wonderful collection of political lyrics “The Terrible Year” (1872). This is a kind of poetic diary that Hugo kept day after day, from August 1870 to August 1871. The poet proudly depicts the resilience and courage of the Parisian people in the difficult days of the siege, cold and hunger, turns fiery lines to France - his “mother, glory and only love”, calls for a continuation of the struggle and showers bitter reproaches on the government that agreed to surrender.

But great poet remained completely alien to any chauvinism. Immediately upon his arrival in France, he wrote a proclamation to the German soldiers, calling on them to stop the war; in the poems of “The Terrible Year,” he places responsibility for the bloodshed not on the people, but on the rulers and calls Napoleon III and William I bandits “worth each other.” In another poem, a lion and a tiger are released into the arena of the Roman Colosseum to squabble for the amusement of Nero, and the lion says: “We would do better if we tore the emperor to pieces.”

Hugo's patriotic poems, glorification of folk heroism, calls to the franchisors and soldiers of 1871 sounded with renewed vigor in our days, during the years of Hitler's invasion of the poet's homeland; they were adopted by the loyal sons of France, published in the underground press of the French Resistance and infused faith in victory into the souls of the fighters.

The pain for the fate of his homeland, which tormented Hugo’s heart, was soon joined by severe personal grief: the writer’s beloved son, Charles, died.

On the historical day of March 18, 1871, a funeral carriage slowly moved through the streets of Paris, engulfed in the revolutionary storm. Behind her, with his head bowed, walked a gray-haired old man. Shots thundered all around, his path was constantly blocked by barricades, and the Communards were dismantling the cobblestones to allow the funeral procession to pass...

Due to the affairs of his deceased son, Victor Hugo had to leave for Brussels; the entire heroic tragedy of the Paris Commune played out without him. Could an old man, burdened with the prejudices of his time, from afar correctly judge the significance and scale of events, information about which he drew mainly from bourgeois newspapers? It turned out that Victor Hugo, a sincere fighter for the happiness of the oppressed, did not understand and did not accept the Paris Commune. The singer of the bourgeois-democratic revolution could not find a common language with the broad masses at the time of the first attempt at proletarian revolution in history. Just before the emergence of the Commune, the Red Clubs of Paris, among which was the International Workers' Association (International), reverently recited verses from Retribution during their meetings, but the author of these poems welcomed the Commune only in the first days; He was soon frightened by the radical breakdown of the entire state machine of the bourgeois republic, which he still considered the ideal political form, despite the sad experience of the “terrible year.” In addition, the old humanist could glorify past revolutions as much as he wanted, but when he encountered the revolutionary terror of the Commune in practice, it turned out that he was unable to agree with it.

Most of the poems in the collection “The Terrible Year” are dedicated to the Paris Commune. Its emergence is marked by the enthusiastic poem “Burial” (we are talking about the death of the old world), but after that the poet attacks the Communards with a whole stream of poems in which he demands an end to repression; Hugo believed the reactionary fictions about the cruelty of the Communards. However, when the Commune fell and the bloody May Week began, the same Victor Hugo, with all his ardor and energy, rushed to defend the defeated Communards from the Versailles executioners. Risking his life, he offered the Communards refuge in his Brussels house and then for many years courageously fought for a complete amnesty for the participants of the Commune (under pressure from public opinion, the amnesty was granted only in 1880). His speeches and articles of those years are collected in the book “Deeds and Speeches. After the expulsion." The reactionaries did not limit themselves to throwing mud at Hugo in the press; One evening, a brutal gang attacked his house, broke the windows with stones, and a cobblestone flew right to the temple of the writer, who was trying to shield his little grandson.

In the poems of “The Terrible Year,” Hugo glorified the heroism of the Communards and painted stunning pictures of the atrocities of the White Terror. The poem “Here they are leading a captive…”, which tells the story of how graceful ladies use the tips of lace umbrellas to heal the wounds of a captive commune woman, has become widely known in France and abroad. The poet says:

I feel sorry for the unfortunate
I hate these dogs
Tormenting the chest of the wounded she-wolf!
(Translation by G. Shengeli)

In another famous poem (“On the Barricade”), a Communard boy, a worthy brother of Gavroche, having the opportunity to escape from the executioners, voluntarily returns to the place of execution to die along with his comrades in arms.

Angrily denouncing the cruelty of the victorious bourgeoisie, the poet exclaims: “You judge the crimes of the dawn!” The last poems in the collection are imbued with recognition of the historical correctness of the cause of the Commune. The poet glorifies the revolutionary capital - the mother of a bright future; the city is all wounded by reaction, but Paris is the sun, and the executioners will see with horror how the rays of freedom splash from its wounds. “The Terrible Year” ends with a majestic allegory: sea ​​wave rises to the stronghold of the old world, threatening to swallow it, and responds to a cry for help:

You thought I was the tide, but I am the global flood!
(Translation by I. Antokolsky)

TWO POLES OF TRUTH

Under the influence of the events of the Commune, the long-planned novel “The Ninety-Third Year” was finally cast and largely rethought. This was the writer’s direct response to the Commune, the result of his many years of reflection on the historical paths of mankind and the revolutionary struggle. Hugo began writing on December 16, 1872 and finished the work on June 9, 1873. In 1874 the work was published. It came out at a time of acute political struggle, when yesterday’s executioners of the Commune tried to betray the bourgeois republic and, frightened by the recent revolution, entered into an agreement with extremely reactionary forces, secretly preparing a new monarchical coup.

In his novel, as well as in the speeches delivered at that time in the National Assembly, Hugo resolutely defended the democratic gains of the people. Painting the French Revolution of the late 18th century, he also has in mind the Commune of 1871 and looks at the past through the prism of the present. All moral and political problems, arising in the novel, for him are the questions of today, they burn his heart. Do people have the moral right to shed the blood of their oppressors in the struggle for freedom? How to combine love for a person and for humanity, the personal happiness of each and the need to make sacrifices for the common good in the future? How to reconcile the two sides of the revolution - its humanistic ideals and violent methods?

Hugo unconditionally takes the side of the revolution against reaction both in the past and in the present. He rightly evaluates the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1789-1794 as a heroic page in national history, as one of the greatest milestones on the path of progress of all mankind. In his book, he sought first of all to convey the heroism of the revolution. The immediate theme of the novel is one episode: the struggle of the Jacobin Convention against the counter-revolutionary rebellion raised by the French feudal lords among the backward peasants of the Vendee with the support of the troops of Royal England. This is one of the most acute moments of the revolution, when its fate was decided, and this is revealed with great force in the novel. With deep patriotic emotion, Hugo describes the fearlessness and courage of the French people. In the pictures of the civil war in the Vendée, in the story about the activities of the Convention, one can sense an excellent knowledge of history. But a specific historical episode, under the pen of the great romantic, is transformed into a titanic battle between the Past and the Future, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. The whole picture of complex events and stormy passions of the era comes down to a clash of two “eternal” and mutually hostile moral forces; it acquires simplified and grandiose outlines characteristic of the images of the folk epic.

“The Ninety-Third Year” is a book about heroes, about the heroic struggle of an entire people. The author does not try to take the point of view of a participant in the events, a contemporary of the revolution; like an epic poet, he seems to cast a glance at the past from afar, allowing him to embrace the entire era, appreciate the greatness of events and highlight the main thing in them. From the pages of the novel emerges a stern and tragic image of the revolution, written in powerful, broad strokes, in dark and fiery colors.

The main forces of the revolution are personified for the writer in the images of its leaders. But true to his artistic principle - “to illuminate true facts through fictional characters", Hugo does not make Danton, Marat and Robespierre the heroes of the novel; portraits of the great figures of the revolution of 1789-1794 appear only in one episode - in the scene of their conversation in a Parisian tavern, and the image of Marat is distorted under the influence of bourgeois historians; The main characters of the novel are Lantenac, Cimourden and Rowen.

The Marquis de Lantenac, the leader of the counter-revolutionary Vendean gangs, the “killer of the fatherland,” ready to sell France to the British for the sake of restoring the monarchy, surrounded by insignificant emigrant nobles, is a symbol of reaction, of the past; he is opposed by the revolution, personified in two images: the stern republican Cimourdain and the generous dreamer Gauvin. Cimourdain, the embodiment of reason and justice, a supporter of the “republic of swords”, demanding the steady fulfillment of revolutionary duty, merciless reprisal against enemies - this is the present day of the revolution; Roven, dreaming of a “republic of the ideal”, of universal brotherhood, peace and happiness, is a bright future. Both of them oppose Lantenac, as Jean Valjean and Enjolras opposed Javert; these are “two poles of truth” directed against the lies of the past.

The entire novel is structured to highlight the deep meaning of the contrast between these characters. Lantenac acts against the backdrop of the picturesque landscapes of Brittany at the end of the 18th century, where semi-wild, dark, but fanatically persistent peasants in their struggle for a wrong cause hide in the gloomy forests. Around Cimourdain a majestic picture of revolutionary Paris grows, enthusiastic crowds come to life, “offering their lives to their homeland,” and stormy meetings of the Convention come to life. Not only the images of the heroes acquire symbolic meaning in the novel: Paris and Brittany are the same mortal enemies as Cimourdain and Lantenac; Feudal violence, embodied in the Turg Tower, is opposed to revolutionary violence, embodied in the guillotine.

Hugo recognizes the justice of the people's revenge for centuries of suffering and oppression: “Turg is a duty, the guillotine is retribution,” “Turg is a criminal history, the guillotine is a punishing history.” He is even ready to admit that the Jacobin terror of 1793 was caused by historical necessity, but for reasons of abstract humanity, he in principle rejects all violence, just as he rejected the white terror of the executioners of Versailles and the red terror of the Commune. Rowen, striving to defeat the old world with generosity and mercy, is the brightest image of the novel. And the people are on his side: Sergeant Radub and all the Republican soldiers heartily sympathize with the act of Gauvin, who released the captured enemy Lantenac, as Valjean once released Javert. And the same soldiers unanimously condemn the inflexibility of Cimourdain, who sent Gauvin to the scaffold. And Simurdain himself gives in to the humane ideals of his pupil, and this leads him to suicide.

Sooner or later, for most of Hugo’s heroes, a moment comes when the goodness, according to the deep conviction of the writer, lies dormant in every human soul, at least for a moment, wins victory over evil. Such a mental crisis was experienced by Jean Valjean when meeting with the bishop, Javert, saved by his enemy, Lantenac, who put the king’s cause and his own life at stake in order to save three peasant children from the fire. In Gauvin's eyes, Lantenac commits an irrespectively good deed, which is why he responds to mercy with mercy. However, in the novel “The Ninety-Third Year,” Hugo is for the first time forced to admit that abstract humanity, humanity in itself, which does not take into account the demands of life, can bring harm, rather than benefit, to people. Shocked by Valjean's mercy, Javert threw himself into the Seine; Lantenac, released by Gauvin, again becomes an evil and dangerous enemy of the homeland and the revolution.

At the end of the novel, assessing his fatal act, committed in a fit of generosity, Gauvin says: “I forgot the burned villages, trampled fields, brutally finished off prisoners, finished off the wounded, shot women; I forgot about France, which was betrayed to England; I gave freedom to the executioner of my homeland. I am guilty".

The logic of revolutionary events, the logic of facts in the novel turn out to be stronger than abstract moral principles. And it is no coincidence that instead of a ladder, which should decide victory, Gauvin is brought a guillotine, on which he is soon destined to lay his head.

But this does not mean that Hugo abandons the magnanimous dream of brotherhood and peace between people and completely accepts the merciless severity of Cimourdain. The tragedy of the novel lies in the fact that each of the heroes is right in his own way. The writer was never able to find an answer to the painful questions of the present in the heroic past. He was unable to comprehend the dialectic of the revolution, to unite the “two poles of truth”; this was prevented weak sides his worldview. The novel “The Ninety-Third Year” remained a monument to revolutionary romanticism with all its advantages and disadvantages - a vague idea of ​​the historical process, hatred of tyranny and heroic ideals. But in his last novel, Hugo rose to an artistic epiphany, which revealed to him the tragedy of history.

Hugo's masterpiece amazed progressive contemporaries: it called for a courageous struggle for the future, awakening high and noble feelings. Precisely because - as the official newspaper La Presse wrote then - the “spirit of social demands” hung over the book, “not a white and three-colored, but a red banner”, reactionary criticism met it with hostility. From now on, in the eyes of his ideological enemies, Hugo became, first of all, the author of this book, and they dubbed him “The Ninety-third Year in Literature” - a nickname of which Victor Hugo was rightly proud.

SUNSET

The nineteenth century was drawing to a close, and with it the life of Victor Hugs was coming to an end. Behind there was a bright spring, a stormy summer, and now a clear autumn has come. Extreme old age covered Hugo's face with wrinkles, whitened his head with gray hair, but could not extinguish the fire of his heart, his civic and creative burning. At eighty years old, he still stood at the music stand in his office for several hours a day, still showered angry sarcasms on the monarchists, the military, and the Catholic Church, still raised his voice in defense of everyone who fought for justice, be it the rebels Serbia (1876), the Russian Narodnaya Volya member Jacob Hartmann, whose extradition the Tsar demanded from France (1880), the heroes of the Commune languishing in hard labor, or the Lyon weavers thrown into the streets by factory owners (1877).

The elderly poet retained the freshness of his feelings, created youthfully passionate lyrical poems, wrote a charming book of poems about his beloved little grandchildren Georges and Jeanne (“The Art of Being a Grandfather”), and he also retained selfless faith in the future, a radiant vision of which increasingly appears in his later poems and poems.

Truly, in the soul of Victor Hugo until the end of his days, “All the Strings of the Lyre” sounded in a powerful and discordant choir - this is the name of one of his last collections of poetry.

The death of Victor Hugo on May 22, 1885 was perceived by the French people as an event of national significance. National mourning was declared throughout the country. More than a million people followed the writer’s coffin, gathered from all over France and Europe to see off the knight of democracy on his last journey. Veterans of the Paris Commune appealed through Parisian newspapers to all their comrades, inviting them to take part in the funeral of Victor Hugo, who courageously defended them during his lifetime.

Victor Hugo was buried in the Pantheon, next to the tomb of another defender of the oppressed - Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

It is impossible to imagine the spiritual history of humanity in the 19th century without Victor Hugo. His personality and creativity left an indelible mark on the minds of his contemporaries and subsequent generations. A poet of humanity and justice, an ardent patriot, a tireless fighter against social and national oppression, a defender of democracy, he expressed with enormous talent the noblest thoughts and feelings of his era, its heroic ideals and historical errors. His work was an expression and, as it were, the result of the era of bourgeois-democratic revolutions.

Hugo was the most prominent figure of French progressive romanticism and remained a romantic until the end of his days. In the last decades of the 19th century, at a time of decline of bourgeois culture and the dominance of decadence, he was, according to Saltykov-Shchedrin, the living embodiment of “ideological, heroic literature,” which “ignited hearts and excited minds,” resurrected this tendentious time, when not only people, but also stones cried out for heroism and ideals.”

Hugo's word is addressed not to a narrow circle of literary connoisseurs, but always to a large audience, to the people, to humanity. He has something to say to people, and he speaks in a full voice, broadcasting so that it can be heard to all ends of the earth. His inexhaustible imagination suggests to him the most grandiose images, the most dazzling colors, the sharpest contrasts. A. N. Tolstoy found that Hugo’s brush was more like a broom. And with this broom he scattered the ghosts of the past and sought to clear the path to the future for humanity.

“Tribune and poet, he thundered over the world like a hurricane, calling to life everything that is beautiful in the human soul. He taught all people to love life, beauty, truth and France,” Maxim Gorky wrote about Hugo. This, the great romantic believed, is precisely his duty to the people.

Victor Hugo: ethical-intuitive extrovert (Evgenia Gorenko)

Evgenia Gorenko:
A physicist by education, he currently works as a journalist. She is known in socionics for her book (under the literary editorship of V. Tolstikov) and a number of publications (some co-authored with her sister). Shows great interest in other trends in psychology, such as psychotherapy and transpersonal psychology.
Email address: [email protected]
Website: http://ncuxo.narod.ru

Victor Hugo, who to this day remains the unsurpassed romantic poet of France, came to poetry when romanticism was already conquering the last strongholds of classicism. All his creations are imbued with either a passionate desire for the ideal, for the mountains, or tragic disappointment, or joyful exaltation, or sadness due to the inexorable passage of time...

If you had to find out only from the poems of lovers,
The suffering, joy and passion of those scorched...
If you were not tormented by jealousy or torment,
Seeing your dear hand in someone else's hands,
The opponent's lips are on his rosy cheek,
If you weren't watching with gloomy tension
For the waltz with a slow and sensual whirling,
Plucking petals from fragrant flowers...

How irrevocably everything is carried away into oblivion,
Nature's clear face changes endlessly,
And how lightly he touches
Breaks the secret ties that bind hearts!..

All passions inevitably go away with age,
One with a mask, and one clutching a knife - Like a motley crowd of actors serenely
He leaves with songs, they will never come back.

There is no other way for my grief:
Dream, run into the forests and believe in miracles...

In the works of Victor Hugo, the trembling of feelings is clearly visible - unrepressed intuition coupled with strong emotionality:

Today's sunset is shrouded in clouds,
And tomorrow there will be a storm. And again the wind, night;
Then again the dawn with transparent vapors,
And again nights, days - time flies away.

Every dreamer (and Victor Hugo likes to call himself a Dreamer) carries within himself an imaginary world: for some it is dreams, for others it is madness. “This somnambulism is characteristic of man. A certain predisposition of the mind to madness, short-lived or partial, is not at all a rare phenomenon... This invasion into the kingdom of darkness is not without danger. Daydreaming has victims - crazy people. Disasters happen in the depths of the soul. Explosions of firedamp... Don't forget the rules: the dreamer must be stronger than the dream. Otherwise he is in danger. Every dream is a struggle. The possible always approaches the real with some mysterious anger..."

In life, Victor Hugo makes a slightly different impression - not so reverent, which is due to his belonging to the Beta Quadra - the quadra of the military aristocracy.

From the gloomy fire that burned in his soul, not a single flash breaks out. Everyone who knew Victor Hugo in the first months of his marriage noticed his triumphant appearance, like that of “a cavalry officer who had captured an enemy post.” This was explained by the consciousness of his strength, generated by his victories, the rapturous joy of owning his chosen one, and in addition, after getting closer to his father, he began to take pride in his father’s military exploits, in which, oddly enough, he considered himself involved. Admirers who saw him for the first time were struck by the serious expression of his face and were surprised with what dignity, somewhat stern, this young man, imbued with naive nobility and dressed in black cloth, received them on his “tower”.

Because of the bad review in the article, he becomes furious. He seems to consider himself invested with high powers. Imagine, he was so furious over a few unpleasant words in an article published in La Cotidienne that he threatened to beat the critic with a stick.

There are two, and the war in poetry, apparently, must be no less fierce than the furious social war. The two camps seem more eager to fight than to negotiate... Inside their clan they speak with orders, but outside they issue a cry of war... Between the two battle fronts, prudent mediators have acted, calling for reconciliation. Perhaps they will be the first victims, but so be it... (Preface by Victor Hugo to his collection “New Odes and Ballads”).

Everything that relates to the aspect of “introverted sensory” is either almost absent in Victor Hugo, hiding behind intuitively exalted mists, or has a negative connotation. Thus, in the novel “Notre Dame de Paris,” only characters who have not received the author’s respect can afford to blurt out something white-sensory.

Some of the thoughts of the still young Victor are quite funny: “I would consider an ordinary woman (that is, a rather insignificant creature) that young girl who married a young man, not being convinced both by his principles known to her and by his character that he is not only a prudent man, but - I will use the words here in the full sense - that he is a virgin, just as she herself is a virgin...”; “...In sublime, intimate conversations, we both prepared for holy intimacy in marriage... How sweet it would be for me to wander alone with you in the evening twilight, away from any noise, under the trees, among the lawns. After all, in such moments the soul reveals feelings unknown to most people!” (from letters to fiancée Adele Fouche).

“How much torment! He even had a thought in the spirit of Werther: couldn’t he marry Adele, be her husband for only one night, and commit suicide the next morning? “No one could blame you. After all, you would be my widow... One day of happiness is worth paying for with a life full of misfortunes...” Adele did not want to follow him along the path of such sublime suffering and returned him to thoughts about neighborly gossip about them.

...Throw about, and moan, and shed bitter tears...

Ethical-intuitive extroverts, frankly speaking, are unlucky in socionics. Historically, the formation of the idea of ​​this TIM was tightly layered with the characteristics of other TIMs. Thus, by projecting onto the EIE the image of a reflective, constantly self-analyzing and limitedly capable of action, the Danish prince, socionics deeply offended the real representatives of this type - purposeful, passionately and recklessly striving to occupy a social position that gives power over other people. In power beta quadra the question “To be or not to be?” it’s simply not put, because it’s already clear: “BE!” Hesitation and doubt are possible only in the question “What to hit?”

Making an attempt to highlight what is common to all EIEs, and carefully discarding everything personal, social, and situational, you inevitably end up with the same semantic image. In its content, the central place is occupied by the confidence of each EIE that he personally is something like a “chosen one”, “God-inspired”, that some “ higher power"chose him - one of the entire crowd - to fulfill their high and fatal mission. “Hamlet’s liberated and restless spirit requires God’s blessing. Most likely, it is for the possession of it that the forces of good and evil are fighting. Unfortunately, with varying degrees of success” (statement of one EIE).

It has long been noted that EIE is the most mystical TIM in the socion. We can say that people of this type feel closest to the “highest” throne. Victor Hugo himself more than once inspired the Duke of Orleans with the idea that “a poet is God’s interpreter assigned to princes”; Naturally, by this poet he means none other than himself. “Gott mit uns”, the predetermination of human destiny in Calvinism, religious fanaticism, the Nietzschean statement “God is dead” - all this clearly shows: once you happen to be closer to God, it means you will know more about God than everyone else.

Figuratively speaking, EIE feels himself to be a connecting link between God and people, and while passionately convincing others that all people are “slaves of God,” he does not consider himself a slave at all! He is taller than all people! He alone has the right to speak on behalf of God and judge in his name... But none of the people has the right to judge him - this is an attempt to encroach on the power of a higher power!

Naturally, not all EIEs reach real actions dictated by this confidence: most people are “levelled” by the environment, adjusted to the average level, and they live and act as if with a “blurred” TIM. But if a person manages to “bend the changing world under him,” his TIM “strengthens” along with him. And what was previously latently dormant and barely glimmering in a person becomes real strength.

The broad concept of “DESTINY” runs like a red thread through the EIE worldview. The author somehow came across a leaflet distributed by the German command in the occupied territories. It was called “The Fuhrer's Mission” and contained praise for him by Goering, Himmler and others like them. Here are some quotes:

“People do not have enough words to pay tribute to the enormous work that our Fuhrer has accomplished in these years. Providence, sending Adolf Hitler to our people, called the German people to a great future and blessed them”;

“...When our people found themselves in greatest need, fate sent us the Fuhrer”;

“Never in its history has the German nation felt so united in both thought and will as now: to serve the Fuhrer and carry out his orders.”

“Notre Dame de Paris” by Victor Hugo also begins with “Fate.”

Several years ago, while visiting Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, or, to be more precise, exploring it, the author of this book discovered in a dark corner of one of the towers the following word inscribed on the wall:

ANAGKN

These Greek letters, darkened with time and quite deeply carved into the stone, certain features characteristic of Gothic writing, imprinted in the shape and arrangement of the letters, seemed to indicate that they were inscribed by the hand of a man of the Middle Ages, and in particular the gloomy and fatal meaning, in they contained deeply struck the author.

He asked himself, he tried to comprehend, whose suffering soul did not want to leave this world without leaving ancient church this stigma of crime or misfortune.

Later, this wall (I don’t even remember exactly which one) was either scraped or painted over, and the inscription disappeared. This is exactly what they have been doing for two hundred years with the wonderful churches of the Middle Ages. They will be mutilated in any way - both inside and outside. The priest repaints them, the architect scrapes them; then the people come and destroy them.

And now nothing remained either of the mysterious word carved into the wall of the gloomy tower of the cathedral, or of that unknown fate that this word so sadly denoted - nothing except the fragile memory that the author of this book dedicates to them. Several centuries ago, the person who inscribed this word on the wall disappeared from the living; in turn, the word itself disappeared from the wall of the cathedral; perhaps the cathedral itself will soon disappear from the face of the earth.

This is the preface. The novel itself begins with the words “Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months and nineteen days ago...”.

Let's try to highlight some general TIM properties and behavioral reactions of EIEs, resulting from their model A and the content of supervalue.

Developed sense of self-esteem. “At the Academy, Hugo maintained a serious, important appearance, looked with a stern gaze; his steep chin gave him a courageous and solemn appearance; sometimes he argued and became indignant, but he never lost his dignity.”

EIEs are extremely scrupulous. In her later years, Adele Hugo wrote about her husband during his marriage:

“One less pin pinned up my scarf - and he’s already angry. The very freedom in language offends him. And you can imagine what “liberties” these were in the chaste atmosphere that reigned in our house; Mother didn’t even think about a married woman having lovers - she didn’t believe it! But Victor saw danger for me everywhere, saw evil in many little things in which I did not notice anything bad. His suspicions went far, and I could not foresee everything...”

Frankly speaking, EIEs as a type are not very respectful of other people (in the sense that they do not always consider others to be their equals). Thus, the words “arrogance” and “cattle” are of Polish (ITIM EIE) origin. “I am always above everything. I love “We, Nicholas II.” And this should not seem arrogant, most likely the opposite is true.”

Aristocratic behavior and appearance.

Occupying such an important place in the universe, EIEs simply cannot afford to appear in public in an inappropriate manner. EIE men often prefer formal (often black) suits, white shirts and frilly ties: this style is perceived by many (mainly intuitives) as elegant and very classy. The white sensors imperceptibly turn to the side and frown a little.

Craving for esotericism, mysticism, religion.

Researchers note the strange interest of Victor Hugo's imagination, his penchant for dark fantasy. This can probably be said about each of the EIEs. They love to find fatal coincidences in different life situations and tend to show a serious interest in magic. EIE may doubt the existence of God - but he seems to be more confident in the existence of the devil.

“She loved when Hugo said that we must rely on God, she loved when her lover became a preacher.

Suffering, my angel, is given to us for our sins.
And you pray, pray! And maybe the Creator,
Having blessed the saints, and sinners at the same time,
And he will finally forgive you and me our sins!

Unambiguousness and bias of moral and ethical judgments. For the self-confident eighth function, only one opinion is correct - your own. Likewise, EIE are confident that only they can accurately assess the situation and especially people (connection with in Ida). They make their (almost always indignant) judgments “about current morals” in a peremptory tone that does not tolerate objections.

The tendentiousness of EIEs is also manifested in the fact that they usually present a situation from only one, negative, side, silently bypassing its positive aspects. Just like in the joke: “Evening. The TV is on. Sergei Dorenko appears on the screen and says: .

By the way, in the example of Dorenko, you can see another typical feature - their bulldog grip: if EIE grabs onto someone, it seems he will never let him go.

“In assessing the past, Hugo showed a sarcastic cynicism, generated by the paintings of that time: “The Roman Senate declares that it will not give ransom for prisoners. What does this prove? That the Senate had no money. The Senate came out to meet Varro, who had fled the battlefield, and thanked him for not losing hope in the Republic. What does this prove? The fact that the group that forced Varro to be appointed commander was still strong enough to prevent his punishment..."

The ability to be in the center of events, stormy and drastic () changes. “Revolutionary” events can brew for a long time, under the invisible direction of EIE - but the closer the “time H” is, the closer he is to them, until at one fine moment (chosen and prepared by him) EIE finds himself at their epicenter. The ability to wait is one of the strong qualities of EIE. In this way, he accumulates energy, and then skillfully and accurately directs it to his goal.

This can be seen in ordinary, everyday cases. In any company, even an unfamiliar one, EIE easily becomes the center of attention and admiration of the people around. In his company, it is difficult not to pay attention to him and go about his business if he wants to make an impression: “Hamlet recognizes the right to an exclusive feeling only for himself.”

Unsinkable.

No matter how the situation develops, EIE always tries to have a loophole in reserve - like a fox has an emergency exit from his hole. “I often find myself in extreme situations. This is a completely separate topic. The ability to find adventures out of the blue is my characteristic feature. You won't get bored with Hamlet. Most likely, when conducting combat operations, the best thing is to send him on reconnaissance. I have an innate ability to get out of any, even the most stalemate, situation. This is the key to success even in the most crazy situations. Feeling responsible for his comrades who are nearby and closely united by the task, Hamlet will do everything to ensure that everyone returns back. This will always be the main thing for him, because he most values ​​only the person who takes risks with him. Hamlet is a good comrade, he will not sell in trouble. According to the Druid horoscope, the most typical sign for Hamlet is the hazel tree. This proves what was said above even more convincingly.”

Weakness of rational logic.

For all his (strategic) consistency and determination, EIE is capable of (tactical) illogical and unreasonable actions: “Hamlet is a rather contradictory person. Having achieved something, he can easily remember that he forgot something somewhere and come back. Or swim to some distant shore, and suddenly return back, if this is dictated by some even the most insignificant, but for Hamlet, significant emotion. Hamlet's feelings can be determined solely by the sign "infinity".

This is not particularly pleasant for EIE, but, perhaps, no attempts to correct the situation on their own will achieve anything special. EIE is able to control the situation, control other people - but not himself!

EIEs often have broad, but superficial and unsystematized erudition. Maurois condescendingly called Victor Hugo’s erudition “imaginary” - and this despite the fact that the latter received a good education for his time, was cultured person, read a lot. Such weakness does not come from lack of information, but from a typical inability to build an integral and internally consistent system of knowledge on the basis of disparate facts.

The desire to establish a dictatorship in your family. One word - beta!

“And so began an amazing life, which a woman who was not at all bound by monastic vows would not agree to lead. Victor Hugo promised to forgive and forget the past, but set certain and very harsh conditions for this. Juliette, who yesterday still belonged to the number of sleek Parisian beauties, all in lace and jewelry, now had to live only for him, leave the house somewhere only with him, renounce all coquetry, all luxury - in a word, impose penance on herself . She accepted the condition and fulfilled it with the mystical delight of a sinner who longed for “rebirth in love.” Her master and lover gave her every month in small sums of about eight hundred francs, and she ... kept a record of expenses, which her master carefully checked every night.”

“One day... there was a conversation about adultery, and then there was real ferocity in Victor’s words. He argued that the deceived husband should kill or commit suicide."

But along with the “powerful husband”, the definition of “idyllic father of the family” also fits EIE. EIEs usually treat their children much more gently and give them more freedom.

1 Biographical information about Victor Hugo taken from the book by A. Maurois “Olympio, or the Life of Victor Hugo”
2 The bold text here and below is mine - E.G., the italic text is the text of V. Hugo himself
3 Victor Hugo. Oh, if you were young...
4 Victor Hugo. Sadness Olympio
5 Victor Hugo. Paternity
6 Victor Hugo. Hope in God.
7 Rock (Greek)
8 This is typical, in general, for all men of this type.

Biography (E. D. Murashkintseva)

Victor Hugo (1802-85) - French romantic writer. V. Hugo was born on February 26, 1802, Besançon. Died on May 22, 1885, in Paris. Zodiac sign - Pisces.

Preface to the drama “Cromwell” (1827) - a manifesto of the French romantics. The plays “Hernani” (1829), “Marion Delorme” (1831), “Ruy Blas” (1838) are the embodiment of rebellious ideas. In the historical novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831), anti-clerical tendencies are strong. After the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1851), he emigrated and published the political pamphlet “Napoleon the Lesser” (1852) and a collection of satirical poems “Retribution” (1853).

The novels “Les Misérables” (1862), “Toilers of the Sea” (1866), “The Man Who Laughs” (1869), depicting the life of different strata of French society, are imbued with democratic, humanistic ideals. Collections of poems “Oriental motives” (1829), “Legend of centuries” (vol. 1-3, 1859-83); a novel about the French Revolution, “The Year 93” (1874).

Leader of the Romantic Movement

Victor Hugo was the third son of a captain (later general) in Napoleonic army. His parents often separated and eventually, on February 3, 1818, received official permission to live separately. Victor was brought up under the strong influence of his mother, whose royalist and Voltairean views left a deep imprint on him. The father managed to win the love and admiration of his son after the death of his wife in 1821. For a long time, Hugo's education was unsystematic. Only in 1814 did he enter the Cordier boarding school, from where he transferred to the Lyceum of Louis the Great. After graduating from the Lyceum, Victor Hugo, together with his brothers, undertook the publication of the two-week magazine “Conservator Literary,” where he published his early poems and the first version of the melodramatic novel “Byug Zhargal” (1821). He became interested in his childhood friend Adele Fouché, but met with his mother's strong disapproval, and only after her death did his father allow the lovers to meet.

The young poet's first collection, Odes and Miscellaneous Poems (1822), won the approval of King Louis XVIII: Victor Hugo was awarded an annual annuity of 1,200 francs, which allowed him to marry Adele. In 1823 he published his second novel, “Gan the Icelander,” written in line with the “Gothic” tradition. This meant a rapprochement with romanticism, which was reflected in literary connections: Alfred de Vigny, Charles Nodier, Emile Deschamps and Alphonse de Lamartine became Hugo's friends. Soon they formed the Cenacle group at the Muses Française magazine, which had a pronounced romantic orientation. The relationship between Hugo and Charles Sainte-Beuve was especially warm, who published a laudatory review of “Odes and Ballads” (1826) in another romantic publication, Globe magazine.

In 1827, Victor Hugo released the play Cromwell, which turned out to be too long to be staged, but its famous “Preface” became the culmination of all the debates that were raging in France about the principles of dramatic art. Having given enthusiastic praise to Shakespeare's theater, Hugo attacked the classicist unities of time, place and action, defended the combination of the sublime with the grotesque and put forward a demand for a more flexible system of versification, abandoning the Alexandrian twelve-syllable. This manifesto of romantic drama in France, as well as the story “The Last Day of the Convict” (1829), imbued with humanistic ideas, and the poetry collection “Oriental Motifs” (1829) brought Hugo enormous fame.

The period from 1829 to 1843 proved to be extremely productive for Hugo. In 1829, the play Marion Delorme appeared, banned by censorship due to its unflattering portrayal of Louis XIII. In less than a month, Victor Hugo wrote his second drama, Ernani. The scandalous production on February 25, 1830 was followed by others that were equally noisy. “The Battle of Hernani” ended not only with the triumph of the author of the play, but also with the final victory of romanticism: the “Bastille of Classicism” in the field of drama was destroyed. Subsequent plays had no less resonance, in particular “The King Amuses himself” (1832) and “Ruy Blas” (1838).

“Notre Dame de Paris” (1831) occupies a special place in the work of Victor Hugo, since here he first demonstrated his magnificent abilities in prose. As in the dramas of this period, the novel's characters are depicted through romantic symbolism: they are exceptional characters in extraordinary circumstances; emotional connections arise between them instantly, and their death is due to fate, which serves as a way of understanding reality, because it reflects the unnaturalness of the “old order”, hostile to the human person. During the same period, Hugo's poetic gift also reached full maturity.

Collections of lyrical poems by Victor Hugo - “Autumn Leaves” (1831), “Songs of Twilight” (1835), “Inner Voices” (1837), “Rays and Shadows” (1840) - arose largely due to personal experiences. At this time, important events took place in Hugo's life: Sainte-Beuve fell in love with his wife, and he himself became passionate about the actress Juliette Drouet. In 1841, Hugo's literary merits finally received recognition from the French Academy, where he was elected after several unsuccessful attempts.

In 1842, Victor Hugo published a book of travelogues, “The Rhine” (1842), in which he outlined his program of international policy, calling for cooperation between France and Germany. Soon after this, the poet experienced a terrible tragedy: in 1843, his beloved daughter Leopoldina and her husband Charles Vacry drowned during a shipwreck on the Seine. Having retired from society for a while, Hugo began to think about the plan for a great social novel, code-named “Adversity.” Work on the book was interrupted by the revolution of 1848: Hugo entered the sphere of active politics and was elected to the National Assembly.

Exile and triumph

After the coup d'etat on December 2, 1851, the writer fled to Brussels, from there he moved to the island of Jersey, where he spent three years, and in 1855 to the island of Guernsey. During his long exile, Victor Hugo created his greatest works. In 1852, the journalistic book “Napoleon the Lesser” was published, and in 1853 “Retribution” appeared - the pinnacle of Hugo’s political lyrics, a brilliant poetic satire with devastating criticism of Napoleon III and all his henchmen.

In 1856, the collection “Contemplations” was published - a masterpiece of Hugo’s lyric poetry, and in 1859 the first two volumes of “Legends of the Ages” were published, which established his fame as a great epic poet. In 1860-1861, Victor again turned to the novel “Adversity,” significantly reworking and expanding it. The book was published in 1862 under the title Les Misérables. Such characters from this famous novel gained worldwide fame as the noble convict Jean Valjean, convicted of stealing a loaf of bread, turned into a beast and reborn to a new life thanks to the mercy of a good bishop; Inspector Javert, pursuing a former criminal and the embodiment of callous justice; the greedy innkeeper Thenardier and his wife, torturing the orphan Cosette; the young Republican enthusiast Marius, in love with Cosette; the Parisian tomboy Gavroche, who died heroically on the barricades.

During his stay in Guernsey, Victor Hugo published the book "William Shakespeare" (1864), a collection of poems "Songs of Streets and Woods" (1865), as well as two novels - "Toilers of the Sea" (1866) and "The Man Who Laughs" ( 1869). The first of them reflects V. Hugo’s stay in the Channel Islands: the main character of the book, endowed with the best features of national character, shows extraordinary stamina and perseverance in the fight against the ocean elements. In the second novel, Hugo turned to the history of England during the reign of Queen Anne. The plot is based on the story of a lord who was sold at an early age to human traffickers (comprachicos), who turned his face into an eternal mask of laughter. He travels around the country as a traveling actor together with the old man and the blind beauty who shelter him, and when his title is returned to him, he gives a fiery speech in the House of Lords in defense of the disadvantaged to the mocking laughter of the aristocrats. Having left a world alien to him, he decides to return to his former wandering life, but the death of his beloved leads him to despair, and he throws himself into the sea.

After the collapse of Napoleon III's regime in 1870, at the very beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, Victor Hugo returns to Paris, accompanied by his faithful Juliette. For many years he embodied opposition to the empire and became a living symbol of the republic. His reward was a deafeningly solemn meeting. Having the opportunity to leave the capital before the advance of enemy troops, he chose to remain in the besieged city.

Elected to the National Assembly in 1871, Hugo soon resigned as a deputy in protest against the policies of the conservative majority. In 1872, Victor published the collection “The Terrible Year,” testifying to the loss of illusions regarding Germany, to an alliance with which he had called on France since 1842.

In 1874, Hugo, completely indifferent to new trends in prose, again turned to the historical novel, writing “The Ninety-Third Year.” Despite a lot of accurate information about revolutionary France, romantic symbolization once again triumphs in the novel: one of the heroes embodies mercilessness towards counter-revolutionaries, and the second - mercy, which is above all civil strife; The writer calls the revolution a “purifying crucible,” where the sprouts of a new civilization make their way through chaos and darkness.

At the age of 75, Victor Hugo published not only the second part of “The Legend of the Ages,” but also the collection “The Art of Being a Grandfather,” the creation of which was inspired by his grandchildren Georges and Anna. The final part of “The Legend of the Ages” was published in 1883. That same year, Juliette Drouet died of cancer, and this loss crippled Hugo’s strength.

After his death, Victor Hugo received a state funeral, and his remains were placed in the Pantheon - next to Voltaire and Rousseau.

Date of publication on the site: February 18, 2011.
Content correction: July 20, 2012.