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Vote: | Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature. |
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Vote: | As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress. |
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Vote: | Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. |
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Vote: | In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life. |
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Vote: | It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. |
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Vote: | Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. |
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Vote: | Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages. |
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Vote: | Love is space and time measured by the heart. |
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Vote: | People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others. |
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Vote: | People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground. |
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Vote: | The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. |
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Vote: | The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. |
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Vote: | There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. |
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Vote: | We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. |
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Biography
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Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugène-Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871 – November 18, 1922) was a French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time (in French À la recherche du temps perdu, also translated previously as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work in twentieth-century fiction.
Biography
Proust was born in Auteuil, then just outside of Paris, in 1871, the son of Achille Adrien Proust, a famous doctor and epidemiologist. His mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil was Jewish; his father a Roman Catholic. Marcel was raised within a Catholic culture. Throughout his childhood, he spent every summer in the village of Illiers. Elements of both Auteuil and Illiers would later be fictionalised as "Combray", and the village was renamed Illiers-Combray in his honour on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.
At the age of 9, he suffered his first asthma attack, which nearly killed him. From then onwards, his health started deteriorating and sometimes he was even hypersensitive to light and noise. (Nevertheless, he served a year as an enlisted man in the French army, stationed at Coligny Caserne in Orléans.) He spent most of his life after the death of his mother in 1906 in the bed of his Paris apartment because of asthma and extremely sensitive skin and stomach. Earlier, his curative trips to seaside resorts, most often to Cabourg (Calvados), inspired the fictional town of Balbec in one of Proust’s novels.
In Jean Santeuil, an early attempt to write his own life's story, Proust describes his portrait by painter Antonio de La Gandara, whom he much admired.
Proust's In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu, originally translated as Remembrance of Things Past) is one of the greatest achievements of Western imaginative literature. This cycle of seven novels, spanning some 3,200 pages and teeming with more than 2,000 characters, has stirred Graham Greene to say that Proust was the "greatest novelist of the 20th century" and Somerset Maugham to call it the "greatest fiction to date". Proust died before he was able to revise the drafts and proofs of the later books, the last three of which were published posthumously.
Proust's multifaceted vision is enthralling. He was a satirist and a nanoscopic analyst of introspective consciousness, a chronicler and theorist of Eros, exploring nuances of human sexuality, a wise and ethical writer. He was the creator of more than forty unforgettable characters who continue to resonate in the world's literary consciousness. Above all, Proust's central message is the affirmation of life. Contrary to the opinion voiced by some of his contemporaries and critics, Proust's great work teaches that life's "purpose" is not to be sought in artistic artefacts: life is not fulfilled when a painting or a novel is completed, but when it is transmuted, in the very course of quotidian living, into something "artistic" or spiritually mature and wise.
Proust's work shows a heavy influence from Tolstoy, evidenced in the views he gives on art, some of the ways in which he models psychology and social interaction, and in certain episodes such as the trip to Venice (cf. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). In turn, Proust is often compared with German writer Thomas Mann. Regarding writing style, Proust loved the works of John Ruskin, and translated them into French; he read Ruskin's autobiography Praeterita so many times that he almost memorised it. He claimed, also, that In Search of Lost Time was his attempt at writing a French incarnation of The Thousand and One Nights.
Homosexuality is a major theme, especially in The Guermantes Way and subsequent books. Proust himself was homosexual, and had a long-running affair with pianist and composer Reynaldo Hahn. Indeed, it is often easier to understand his fictional creations if one strips off their feminine endings--Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée--and regards these characters instead as young men.
Proust died in 1922 and is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of In Search of Lost Time by editor Charles Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, based on the latest and most authoritative French text. Its six volumes were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. The first four (those which under American copyright law are in the public domain) have since been published in the U.S. under the Viking imprint and in paperback under the Penguin Clasics imprint.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Marcel Proust".
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