Prosper Merimee- French writer and translator, one of the first masters of the short story in France.
Born in Paris September 28, 1803. Merimee's father was a chemist, and was seriously fond of painting. Prosper's mother was also a successful artist. A young man who received a law degree in Paris became the secretary of one of the ministers of the French government. Then, having received the post of chief inspector for the preservation of cultural and historical monuments of the country, he did a lot in this field. In 1853, Merimee received the title of senator.
However, a career in Merimee's life played a secondary role, literary creativity became the main thing for him.
His first work was the historical drama Cromwell, which earned Stendhal's approval. The author himself did not like this work of his, which is why he did not publish it. When he was 22 years old, the first collection of dramatic plays, translated by him from Spanish, was published. His famous Gusli was published in 1827. He himself presented them as a collection of folk songs by an unknown bard. Goethe expressed doubts that this work belongs to folk art. Despite this, Merimee's Gusli made a lot of noise in Europe.
In the late 1820s, the drama Jacquerie was published, as well as the short story Matteo Falcone. At this time, the writer collaborated with many French publications, but was burdened by life in a big city. For this reason, in 1929, he went on a trip to Corsica, where he wrote the story "Colombes" and started a travel journal. A year later, he went to Spain, where he became friends with the Comte de Teba, whose daughter later became Empress of France. The most famous work of the writer was the short story "Carmen" (1845), largely due to the successful production of the opera of the same name.
As in "Carmen", and in all subsequent works, Merimee created bright, original images. He made a significant contribution to historical research. So, he wrote the historical chronicle "The Chronicle of the Times of Charles IX". Also, he researched the history of ancient Rome and Greece. The action of the last short story of the writer called "Lokis" took place in Lithuania. After his death, Letters to a Stranger and Recent Novels were published.
Introduction
The movement of French literature - more precisely, French prose - from romanticism to realism in the 30s and 40s is associated with the name of Prosper Mérimée. Merimee's first literary experiments were characterized by a clear passion for the aesthetics and artistic practice of romanticism. Mérimée entered French literature in the mid-1920s. This was the era of the dominance of romanticism, the era of heated discussions between the classics and romantics, and these discussions unfolded around dramatic genres. Stendhal had already written his treatise Racine and Shakespeare by this time, Hugo wrote his first romantic dramas and in 1827 the famous preface to the drama Cromwell as a manifesto of French romanticism at a new stage. The staging of the first dramas by Hugo was accompanied not only by aesthetic, but also by political, scandalous battles. So the romantic drama was the main agenda item in French literature in the 1920s. The history of Merimee's entry into literature is not quite common.
Merime novella creativity
Brief biography of P. Merimee
Prosper Merimee is one of the remarkable French critical realists of the 19th century, a brilliant playwright and master of artistic prose. Unlike Stendhal and Balzac, Merimee did not become the ruler of the thoughts of entire generations; the impact he had on the spiritual life of France was less broad and powerful. However, the aesthetic value of his work is enormous. The works created by him are unfading: the vitality is so deeply embodied in them, however, their form is so perfect.
The future writer was born in 1803 in Paris into a wealthy family. After graduating from the Lyceum, he entered the law faculty of the University of Paris. However, jurisprudence did not occupy him at all. Born into the family of an educated scientist (chemist) and painter, Jean-Francois Leonor M. (whose wife, the writer's mother, also successfully painted), a supporter of a new order of things, brought up in the spirit of the ideas of the 18th century. - young Prosper Mérimée early developed in himself an elegant taste and a cult of art. After graduating from a legal course in Paris, he was appointed secretary of the Comte d'Artoux, one of the ministers of the July monarchy, and then the chief inspector of historical monuments of France. In this post, he contributed greatly to the preservation of historical monuments.
The range of interests and aesthetic views of the young Merimee were determined early, already formed in the family circle: his father was an artist, a follower of Jacques Louis David, a leading representative of the art of revolutionary classicism; mother is also an artist, a woman of versatile education, taught her son how to draw, introduced him to the ideas of the French enlighteners of the 18th century. As a child, Prosper Merimee enthusiastically reads Shakespeare and Byron in the original, and at the age of sixteen, together with his friend Jean-Jacques Ampère (the son of a great physicist), he takes on the translation of an outstanding monument of English pre-romanticism - “The Song of Ossian” by D. MacPherson.
The internal appearance of Merimee, inherent in his worldview of contradiction, the features of his artistic manner cannot be comprehended without taking into account the originality of the evolution he experienced. The artistic development of Merimee turned out to be closely connected with the course of the country's social life. Its main milestones generally coincide with the turning points in the history of France, and above all with the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
Interest in independent literary creativity began to manifest itself in Merime at the beginning of the 20s, during his student days.
Shortly after meeting Stendhal, Merimee's independent literary activity begins.
For the first time, however, Mérimée gained wide popularity in 1825 by publishing a collection of plays “The Theater of Clara Gazul”. The publication of this work is associated with a daring and much-talked hoax. Merimee gave his collection as a work by a certain - fictional - Spanish actress and Merimee's contemporaries, accustomed to lengthy reasoning, were struck in the writer's plays by the rapid development of the action, the continuous alternation of short expressive scenes, the complete disregard for the rules of the three unities, unexpected and abrupt transitions from satirical episodes to passages.
In 1828, the printing house, then owned by Honore de Balzac, printed Mérimée's historical drama Jacquerie, dedicated to the turbulent events of the distant 16th century.
The first period of Merimee's literary activity ends with his historical novel Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IV (1829) - a kind of result of the writer's ideological and artistic searches in these years.
Prosper Merimee at the beginning of his creative career, as already noted, adjoined the romantic movement. The influence of romantic aesthetics continued to affect the writer's works for a long time: it is felt throughout his entire creative heritage. But gradually Merimee's literary activity took on an increasingly pronounced realistic character. We find a clear embodiment of this trend in the “Chronicle of the reign of Charles 4th”
The drama "Jacquerie" and the novel "The Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IV" by Merimee are vivid examples of that keen interest in historical issues, in the study and understanding of the national past, which embraced the advanced social and artistic thought of France in the twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century. Comprehending the events of the distant past, Merimee did not adjust them to the present, but sought in them the key to the laws of the era that interested him, and thereby to the discovery of broader historical generalizations.
"Chronicle of the reign of Charles 4th" completes the first stage of Merimee's literary activity. The July revolution causes significant changes in the life and work of the writer.
During the years of the Restoration, Merimee was fond of portraying great social cataclysms, reproducing broad social canvases, developing historical plots, and large, monumental genres attracted his attention.
After the creatively exceptionally prolific year of 1829, Merimee's artistic activity develops less rapidly in the future. Now he is not so actively involved in everyday literary life, he publishes his works less often, nurturing them for a long time, painstakingly finishing their form, achieving its utmost precision and simplicity.
Merimee's short stories permeate several leading themes. They contain, first of all, a penetrating and sharp exposure of the mores of the dominant society. These critical tendencies, very diverse in their forms, clearly refer to the years 1829-1830 and later included in the collection Mosaic (1833). In a number of his short stories ("Etruscan Vase", "Double Error", "Arsene Guillot") Merimee reveals the soullessness and callousness of the so-called "light". A vicious and hypocritical secular society, as Merimee shows, does not tolerate bright individuals. It generates in people who are sensitive by nature, a special vulnerability and painful distrust of others.
Throughout his life, Merimee, a rationalist and heir to educational traditions, carried a hostile attitude towards the church and religion. These ideological motifs were also reflected in the writer's short stories, including The Souls of Purgatory (1834).
An essential role in Merime's short stories is played by the writer's artistic embodiment of his positive ideal. In a number of early short stories (for example, Backgammon Party, Etruscan Vase), Merimee connects the search for this ideal with the images of honest, most principled and pure representatives of the ruling society. Gradually, however, Merimee's gaze is more and more insistently turned to the people standing outside the chapel of this society, to representatives of the people's environment. In their minds, Merimee reveals those spiritual qualities dear to his heart, which, in his opinion, have already been lost by bourgeois circles: the integrity of character and the passion of nature, disinterestedness and inner independence. The theme of the people as the custodian of vital energy, the nation as the bearer of high ethical ideals plays a significant role in the work of Merimee in the 30s and 40s. At the same time, Merimee was far from the revolutionary republican movement of his time, he was hostile to the struggle of the working class. Merimee (this “genius of timelessness”, according to the popular expression of A.V. Lunacharsky) that excited his imagination, tried to look for the romance of folk life in countries that had not yet been absorbed by bourgeois civilization - in Corsica (“Mattei Falcone”, “Colomba”) and in Spain ( "Carmen").
An outstanding place in the literary heritage of Merimee (1844), a work in which the main ideological motives of Merimene the novelist merge together: the image of a repulsive egoism that is hidden behind the hypocritical mask of respectable representatives and representatives of bourgeois society. Initially, the revolutionary events did not cause much concern for Merimee, but gradually the mood of the writer is changing, becoming more and more anxious: he anticipates the inevitability of further aggravation of social contradictions and is afraid of it, afraid that it would become fatal for the existing order.
It is the fear of new revolutionary actions of the proletariat that prompts Mérimée to accept Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état. After 1848 Merimee the artist also experienced a severe and prolonged crisis. This does not mean that Merimee's creative activity weakened during these years, became less active. In order to be convinced of the erroneousness of such an assumption, it is enough to familiarize yourself with the most diverse correspondence, which he conducted especially intensively during this period. He found other ways to embody his work - as a historian, literary critic, translator.
The further the 19th century goes into the past, the more inexorably time checks its artistic values, the more obvious it becomes that Mérimée's work passed this strict test, remained one of the most remarkable achievements of French critical realism.
During his first trip to Spain, in 1830, Prosper became friends with the Comte de Teba and his wife, whose daughter, Eugenie, later became Empress of the French. Mérimée, as an old friend of the family of the Countess of Montijo, was during the second empire a close friend at the Tuileries court; Empress Eugenia had a cordial attachment to him and treated him like a father. In 1853, Prosper Merimee was elevated to the rank of senator and enjoyed the full confidence and personal friendship of Napoleon III. Service career and politics, however, played a secondary role in the life and work of such a writer-artist as Merimee was by vocation. While still studying law in Paris, Prosper became friends with Ampère and Albert Stapfer. The latter introduced him to the house of his father, who gathered at his place a circle of people devoted to the sciences and arts. His literary evenings were attended not only by the French, but also by the British, Germans (Alexander Humboldt, Mol) and even Russians (S. A. Sobolevsky, Melgunov).
At Stapfer, Prosper Mérimée met and became friends with Bayle (Stendhal) and Delescluze, who was in charge of the criticism department at the Revue de Paris. Merimee's literary tastes and views were formed under the influence of the Shtapfers and the Delescluse circle. From them he borrowed an interest in studying the literatures of other peoples. The universality of Prosper's literary education markedly distinguished him from other French writers of that time. He was one of the first in France to appreciate the dignity of our literature and began to study in Russian in order to read the works of Pushkin and Gogol in the original. He was a great admirer of Pushkin, whom he translated for the French public and to whom he devoted an excellent study to his appreciation.
The article is devoted to a brief biography of Prosper Mérimée, a French writer, a prominent representative of realism and one of the founders of the short story genre.
Merimee's biography: becoming a writer
Merimee was born in 1803 in Paris. The family of the future writer was very creative; Prosper's childhood passed in this atmosphere. He received a law degree from the University of Paris, but decided to connect his life with culture, taking a great interest in literature, history and archeology. During his studies, the young man attended meetings of prominent figures in science and art, which greatly expanded his knowledge and affected the formation of the writer's personality. Mérimée considered the French Enlighteners his teachers and shared their philosophical and atheistic views.
Merimee read his first work in a small literary circle. The historical drama was approved, but the author himself was dissatisfied and did not publish his essay.
After graduating, Merime received the position of secretary of one of the ministers. Then he was appointed inspector of historical sites. In this post, Merimee did a lot to preserve the monuments of the past.
In 1825 Merimee published six dramatic works. The writer concealed his authorship, naming a fictional Spanish actress as the creator of the dramas, attributing to himself only the translation from Spanish. In these works, Mérimée violates the classical rules of dramatic art that existed at that time. After some time, Merime publishes a new collection of "Gyuzla", consisting of translations of Serbian ballads composed by the writer. Both collections are examples of the greatest literary hoaxes. Spanish dramas and Serbian ballads by Mérimée have long been considered authentic works. The disclosure of the hoax caused amazement among many prominent cultural figures, who were amazed at the skill of the young writer.
In 1829, the writer publishes one of the best historical French novels - "The Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX", which touches upon the events of the confrontation between Catholics and Protestants.
In 1830, Merimee made a trip to Spain, after which he retained his love for this country for the rest of his life. The Spanish theme occupies a large place in the writer's work. In the 30s. most of the writer's time is taken up by his work as an inspector, he devotes a lot of energy to the restoration of cultural monuments.
Biography of Merimee: the heyday of creative activity
Merimee's further work takes place in the genre of short stories. In this area, the writer achieves considerable skill. One of the most significant works of the writer in this genre was the short story "Carmen", which had a great influence on the entire world culture. The image of Carmen has firmly entered the world literature and has become a source of inspiration for many cultural figures.
A characteristic feature of Merimee's work is his desire to depict the original cultural characteristics of various countries that have not received sufficient coverage. The writer is attracted by originality and originality in the development of different cultures. At the same time, he avoids any authorial assessments and does not take the position of an "enlightened European". In the eyes of the writer, any culture has the right to develop and exist. There should not be any uniform rules and norms that are equally applicable anywhere in the world.
A special direction in the work of Merimee is his work in the field of history. He publishes several works on ancient history, which are highly appreciated by experts.
In 1853 the writer was appointed a senator. But state activity did not attract Merimee much; he still devoted all his strength to literature and art. Merimee showed great interest in foreign culture.
In the 50s. the writer is actively engaged in Russian culture, writes articles and translates the most significant works of Russian literature. Merimee makes great efforts to popularize Russian art in France. The writer publishes several articles on the Time of Troubles and the history of the Cossacks.
Merimee died in 1870, entering the history of world and French literature and art, of which he remained a devoted admirer throughout his life.
French literature
Prosper Merimee
Biography
MERIME, PROSPER (1803−1870), French novelist and short story writer. Born September 28, 1803 in Paris. From his parents-artists, he inherited a typical 18th century. skepticism and fine artistic taste. Parental influence and the example of Stendhal, with whom Merimee was friendly and whose talent he admired, formed an unusual style for the heyday of romanticism - severely realistic, ironic and not without a share of cynicism. Merimee was preparing for the lawyer's career, while seriously studying languages, archeology and history. His first work was the book Clara Gasul Theater (Le Thtre de Clara Gazul, 1825), issued as the creation of a certain Spanish poetess, whose plays were allegedly discovered and translated by Mérimée. Another literary hoax appeared next - the "translation" of the Illyrian folklore Guzla (La Guzla). Both books were of great importance for the development of early Romanticism. But the most significant contribution to French literature was made by masterpieces of a later time, including the Chronicle of the reign of Charles IX (La Chronique du rgne de Charles IX, 1829), the most reliable of all French historical narratives of the romantic era; the ruthlessly realistic story of Corsican life by Mateo Falcone (Mateo Falcone, 1829); excellent descriptive novel The Capture of the Redoute (L "Enlvement de la redoute, 1829); an indignant story about the African slave trade Tamango (Tamango, 1829); an example of a romantic hoax Venus Illskaya (La Vnus d'Ille, 1837); the legend of the Corsican vendetta Colomb (Colomba, 1840); and finally Carmen (Carmen, 1845), the most famous French short story. All these works are permeated with deep pessimism; they are also characterized by a cult of feeling and decisive action, close attention to detail and cold dispassionateness of the story. Mérimée died in Cannes September 23, 1870.
Prosper Merimee - famous French writer, novelist (1803-1870). Prosper Merimee was born on September 28, 1803 in Paris, in a family of artists. From his parents, he inherited skepticism and fine artistic taste, typical of the 18th century.
Merimee graduated from a legal course in Paris and was appointed secretary of the Count d'Artoux, one of the ministers of the monarchy, and later the chief inspector of historical monuments of France. In this position, he strongly contributed to the preservation of the country's historical sights. Merimee was preparing to become a lawyer, studying foreign languages in depth as well as archeology and history.In 1853, Prosper Mérimée was appointed senator.Using full confidence, he had a personal friendship with Napoleon III.
The first work of Prosper Mérimée was the historical drama Cromwell, which he wrote at the age of twenty. However, the drama never went to print, as Merimee was not satisfied with this work. In 1825, the writer published several dramatic plays, combining them into a book: The Theater of Clara Gasul.
>Biographies of writers and poets
Short biography of Prosper Merimee
Prosper Mérimée is an outstanding 19th century French writer, novelist and translator. He is best known as a translator of Russian literature into French and the creator of the short story "Carmen", which formed the basis of the famous opera by J. Bizet. He was also a member of the Académie française and compiler of the register of historical monuments. Mérimée was born in Paris on September 28, 1803. His father was a chemist by profession and a painter in his spare time. The writer's mother was also seriously fond of painting. Merimee received a law degree, after which he worked as the chief inspector of the country's historical monuments.
His first work was the historical drama Cromwell, which earned Stendhal's approval. The author himself did not like this work of his, which is why he did not publish it. When he was 22 years old, the first collection of dramatic plays, translated by him from Spanish, was published. His famous Gusli was published in 1827. He himself presented them as a collection of folk songs by an unknown bard. Goethe expressed doubts that this work belongs to folk art. Despite this, Merimee's Gusli made a lot of noise in Europe.
In the late 1820s, the drama Jacquerie was published, as well as the short story Matteo Falcone. At this time, the writer collaborated with many French publications, but was burdened by life in a big city. For this reason, in 1929, he went on a trip to Corsica, where he wrote the story "Colombes" and started a travel journal. A year later, he went to Spain, where he became friends with the Comte de Teba, whose daughter later became Empress of France. The most famous work of the writer was the short story "Carmen" (1845), largely due to the successful production of the opera of the same name.
As in "Carmen", and in all subsequent works, Merimee created bright, original images. He made a significant contribution to historical research. So, he wrote the historical chronicle "The Chronicle of the Times of Charles IX". Also, he researched the history of ancient Rome and Greece. The action of the last short story of the writer called "Lokis" took place in Lithuania. After his death, Letters to a Stranger and Recent Novels were published. Prosper Merimee died in September 1870 in Cannes, where he was buried.