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May 20, Tours, France Died: August 19, Paris , France French novelist. His mother saw the birth of her son as her duty and treated him indifferently. Her lack of affection overshadowed his childhood. He found this place in books. But excessive reading eventually brought on a nervous condition, which affected his health, and he was brought home in The following year his family moved to Paris, France, where he completed his secondary education in law.
Rebelling against his parents, Balzac refused to enter the legal profession and instead declared writing as his profession. Despite disappointment, his father provided a small allowance with the understanding that he had to be financially independent within two years. Working together with friends, Balzac wrote several sensational superficial, appealing to the senses novels, none signed with his own name.
Table des titres de La Comédie humaine : classement de l'édition Furne
These books were without literary merit, but he earned his living by them. Searching for ways to make his fortune more rapidly, Balzac next entered a series of business ventures using borrowed funds. These commercial ventures were also failures, leaving him with very large debts. Thereafter he published the first novel that he signed with his own name. Le Dernier Chouan was a historical novel. Since historical novels were the fashion, the book was well received.
But real fame came to him two years later, when he published La Peau de chagrin, a fantasy that acts as an allegory a symbolic representation of the conflict between the will to enjoy and the will to survive.
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The constant struggle to earn enough to keep his creditors at bay drove him to a timetable of work that eventually ruined his health. He increased his hours from ten to fourteen or even eighteen a day, keeping himself awake with frequent cups of strong coffee. Whenever Balzac took a break from his writing, he would frequent fashionable salons stylish lounges , where he was well received by female readers.
The Human Comedy was subdivided into smaller groups of novels: The novels were linked by both history and character. This practice enhanced the realistic illusion and also permitted Balzac to develop the psychology involving the mind of individual characters more fully than would have been feasible within the limits of a single novel. In a preface to his work in , he defined his function as that of "secretary of French society. Balzac often assigned the basest lowest in value or quality motivations to his characters. The monomaniac — the man obsessed by a purpose or passion, to the point of sacrificing his own comfort and the welfare of his dependents — is constantly encountered in Balzac's more impressive novels.
Balzac was writing in an age when the struggle for existence or social advancement among the poor was at its fiercest. Balzac himself disliked the disorderly individualism that he observed around him. Human nature , in his view, was basically depraved morally wrong; evil ; any machinery — legal, political, or religious — whereby the wickedness of men could be stopped, ought to be repaired and strengthened. During his last years Balzac suffered from poor health, and his morale had been weakened by the disappointments he endured in his one great love affair.
In he had received his first letter from Madame Hanska, the wife of a Polish nobleman. Thereafter they kept up a correspondence, interrupted by occasional vacations spent together in different parts of Europe. In her husband died, but Madame Hanska obstinately refused to marry Balzac. Only when he fell gravely ill did she agree. The long journey back to France took a serious toll on Balzac's health, and he died on August 18, Keim, Albert, and Louis Lumet. Balzac ranks among the great masters of the novel.
Of a bourgeois family, he himself later added the "de" to his name. In he began studying law at the Sorbonne, but after receiving his license in he decided to abandon law for literature. Half starving in a Paris garret, Balzac began writing sensational novels to order, publishing them under a pseudonym. Throughout his life he worked with feverish activity, sleeping a few hours in the evening and writing from midnight until noon or afternoon of the next day.
He was ridden with debts, which were increased rather than relieved by his business ventures. Outweighing Balzac's faults—his lack of literary style, his moralizing, his tendency toward melodrama—are his originality, his great powers of observation, and his vivid imagination. His short stories include some of the best in the language, but his attempts at drama failed. Though an unattractive, awkward man, Balzac formed several famous liaisons.
Only a few months before his death he married the Polish Countess Evelina Hanska, with whom he had conducted a romantic correspondence for 18 years. See The Human Comedy with introductions by G. Hastings, ; biographies by H. Robb ; studies by C. Prendergast and R.
Butler ; bibliography and index comp. One of the greatest novelists of the 19th century, Balzac's first success was Les Chouans More than 90 novels and short stories followed during a lifetime of extraordinary creative effort. The French Revolution of brought a bloody end to the country's long-standing rule by monarchy, with many nobles publicly executed by beheading.
These uncertain times had a profound effect on the fiction Balzac would create. Balzac, born in in Tours, France, had a solitary childhood and received little attention from his parents. He lived with a wet nurse until the age of three, and at eight was sent to board at the Oratorian College at Vendome.
Later, his family moved from Tours to Paris, where Balzac completed his studies. He received his law degree in ; however, to his parents' disappointment, he announced that he intended to become a writer. From to Balzac experimented with several different literary forms and later wrote sensational novels and stories under various pseudonyms. He considered these works to be stylistic exercises; they were conscious efforts to learn his craft. They were also his only means of financial support, because he had been estranged from his family. At one point in his career he abandoned writing to become involved in a series of unsuccessful business ventures.
Later, he returned to writing, but despite eventual renown, money problems continued to haunt him throughout his life. Le dernier Chouan; ou, La Bretagne en ; The Chouans was Balzac's first critically successful work and the first to appear under his own name, to which he added, in , the wholly self-bestowed aristocratic particle de. These works also increased his appeal to female readers, who valued his realistic and sympathetic portraits of women as vital members of society.
The writer expressed her. A Parisian Romance , Later this stranger revealed her identity as Madame Hanska, the wife of a wealthy Polish count. Balzac and Madame Hanska carried on an extended liaison through letters and infrequent visits. For nine years after her husband's death in , she refused to remarry; her marriage to Balzac just five months before his death, however, came too late to ease his financial troubles and just soon enough to leave her saddled with a mountain of his unpaid bills.
The Human Comedy, in Life as in Print Commentators on Balzac rarely fail to note his flamboyant lifestyle and eccentric work habits. He never completed a work before sending it to the printer; instead, he sent a brief outline and scrupulously composed the entire work on successive galley proofs. To be free of distractions, he began working at midnight and continued, with only brief interruptions, until midday, fueled by tremendous quantities of strong black coffee. After several months of this solitary, exhausting routine he would cease working and plunge into a frenzy of social activity, hoping to be admitted to the milieu of Parisian aristocracy.
Balzac's ostentatious dress, extensive collection of antiques, outrageous printer's bills, and unsuccessful business kept him perennially short of money.
His preface to the collection outlines the goal of his writings. Balzac considered it possible to classify social species as the naturalists had classified zoological species. By organizing his stories into groups that depict the varied classes and their milieus, Balzac reveals his belief that environment determines an individual's development. He intended to portray all levels of contemporary French society but did not live to complete the task. Balzac died in Paris in Balzac's reputation as an artist is often tainted by the reputation for bad behavior he garnered while alive.
Promiscuous in both romantic and financial affairs, Balzac was constantly in debt, and notorious for disreputable dealings. His life regularly fertilized his fiction; however, his literary reputation might have been still greater had he lacked such an open biography. A Focus on Character Like many great artists, Balzac made changes in the genres in which he worked: While the eighteenth-century novel was dominated by narration, Balzac's work focuses primarily on character and setting, studying society as a whole rather than an individual in particular. Early in his career, Balzac explained that his works had appeared in seemingly random order as a result of changing fashion, or of his desire to fill out a volume, or to satisfy his need for variation or renew his inspiration during the gargantuan labors, and so on.
He put his creations into an explicit, skillfully constructed frame that often limited, defined, and intensified. The frame narrative usually set up a parallel or an opposition with the enclosed story operating rather like a tuning fork , beginning at some point to reverberate. The reader becomes increasingly conscious of the resonances as he or she proceeds through the fiction. One might call this frame its context, whether that means the entire cycle or the reality that served Balzac as a backdrop. Modern critical interest in Balzac attests to his enduring importance.
His influence on the development of the novel in France is unsurpassed.
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Many critics contend that his use of the genre as social commentary steered the novel toward realism, and Balzac is now considered one of the world's greatest novelists. His ability to blend realistic detail, acute observation, and visionary imagination is considered his greatest artistic gift. Many nineteenth-century readers and critics found his work to be depressing, and, more frequently, they considered his representation of life immoral.
Others contended that Balzac was a realist and merely depicted society as he saw it. Few writers who deal directly with life escape that charge. His answer to the accusation was characteristic and conclusive. If you are true in your portraits, if by dint of daily and nightly toil, you succeed in writing the most difficult language in the world, the word immoral is thrown in your face.
One of the key poets of the English Romantic movement, Keats was roundly denounced by critics during his lifetime but exerted a most profound influence on English and world poetry after his death. Ralph Waldo Emerson — The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson was an American poet and philosophical essayist, generally credited with spear-heading the Transcendentalist movement in the United States. An Austrian composer highly regarded for his melodic and harmonic compositions.
Though Schubert died extremely young—at the age of thirty-one—his influence on music has been compared to that of Beethoven. Tsar Nicholas I — Tsar Nicholas was known as the most reactionary of the Russian monarchs, seeing his role as being simply to autocratically rule over his people by whatever means necessary. Many praise Balzac's technique of using the same characters in several novels, depicting them at different stages in their lives. For some critics, this strengthens the believability of Balzac's fictional world and enables him to explore the psychology of individual characters more fully than would have been possible in a single novel.
Henry James considered Balzac's portraits of people to be his greatest talent. In each of Balzac's memorable portraits, the essential characteristics of an individual are distilled into an embodiment and a reflection of an entire class. Balzac's accurate rendering of detail is generally attributed to his acute powers of observation; however, many critics, notably Charles Baudelaire and George Saintsbury, have emphasized other aspects of his work. They note that while he observed and recorded a wide variety of social milieus with objectivity and accuracy, his work also reveals a profound creative and imaginative power.
Modern critics concur, finding Balzac's work to be a blend of acute observation and personal vision. Here are several works of fiction that represent key moments in the massive life-worlds created by other authors:. The popular author's record-breaking sensation sets up a magical world alongside and intertwined with the mundane world, one which is real only to those with an inborn magical ability. The series of seven Harry Potter volumes, of which this is the first, imagines a world nearly as complex and broad-ranging as many people's experience of our own.
The Sound and the Fury , a novel by William Faulkner. American modernist Faulkner's highly acclaimed fourth novel represents one piece in the enormous puzzle that was Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional county in Mississippi that mirrored and almost exceeded Faulkner's own real-world Lafayette County. The Mayor of Casterbridge , a novel by Thomas Hardy. The British author's fictional Wessex County is one of literature's most carefully sustained imaginary landscapes, and the tragic and moving Mayor of Casterbridge unfolds in the county seat of Dorchester, where town and farmland meet and mingle, collapsing into one another.
University of Toronto Press, Princeton University Press, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert. Cambridge University Press, Tours, 20 May Hanska Eve Rzewuska in Guillonnet de Merville, , and M. Passez, ; writer, editor, magazine writer: Chevalier, Legion of Honor, Contes de toutes les coleurs.
Les Cent Contes Drolatiques. Le Centenaire; ou, Les Deux Beringheld. Le Dernier Chouan; ou, Le Bretagne au Le Peau de chagrin. La Recherche de l'absolu. Une Fille d'Eve includes Massimilla Doni. Illusions perdues part 3. Les Paysans, completed by Mme. Les Petits Bourgeois, completed by Charles Rabou. Les Ressources de Quinola produced A Balzac Bibliography and Index by W. Balzac and the Novel by Samuel G.
Hunt; Balzac the European by Edward J. Hemmings, ; The Hero as Failure: Schilling, ; Balzac by V. Fiction and Melodrama by Christopher Prendergast, ; Balzac: Balzac's Narrative Generations by Janet L. Beizer, ; The Golden Scapegoat: Saylor, ; The Poetics of Death: It is meaningless to impose a rigid distinction between the short stories of to and the longer fictional pieces into which they were often dovetailed or absorbed.
In , when Balzac first became aware of the inner coherence of his work, he thought it would be a general study of human behavior, which he intended to classify in an essay on human energy. Although he did write what were always intended to be short stories, most of Balzac's short fiction originated as drafts or episodes for works that were to be serialized, expanded, or combined into novels. Balzac's short fiction also must be seen against other contemporary vogues, for "scenes," semi-dramatic "proverbs," and for the mocking sketches of the freelance journalism to which, in articles for Le Voleur, La Mode, La Caricature, and Le Charivari, Balzac reverted around What Balzac specifically wrote as short fiction were the "contes," normally focusing on the narration of an event, and the "nouvelles," dealing with a rather more static situation or state of mind.
If Balzac had not gone on to write the novels, it is unlikely that the "Droll Stories" would be remembered. It gave expression to the sturdy, lusty side of his temperament, in some ways also both fastidious and feminine. The idea for the "Droll Stories" is contained in a satirical article printed in La Mode, in February In the course of that year, Balzac conceived the notion of transposing them into French renaissance language and style, both of which he sometimes got wrong, and of writing a hundred of them, as in Boccaccio's Decameron.
Her adventures were going to be the subject of the first droll story, ten of which came out in April , with a further ten in July Most of the third decade was destroyed in a warehouse fire in December and had to be rewritten for publication in , and we have fragments of a fourth and a fifth decade. They are almost all boisterous and often cruel stories of lechery and sexual and pecuniary trickery involving late medieval Touraine, the homeland Balzac shared with Rabelais. Very few of the characters are anything but pruriently enthusiastic at the prospect of erotic pleasure, and the women are as salacious in their attitudes as the men.
It is the rather inept pseudo-medieval pastiche, with the narrative pace and focus of the sixteenth-century conte, its realistic rogues and spontaneous courtiers, which keeps the robust vulgarity from being titillatingly pornographic, and which allows the coarse subject matter, with its mischievous delight in trickery, fraud, and more serious misdemeanor, to be relieved by the occasional intrusion of real delicacy of feeling and lightness of touch.
But there is a foretaste of the novels to come. Sharp perceptiveness about human motivation, wit, and self-parody betray the narrator's amusement at the naivete of his characters and even plots. There are isolated instances of heroism, and of a sense of honor or humor, and dramatic values are exploited.
The narrator sometimes shows true sympathy or feeling for his characters, but on the whole the droll stories do not represent Balzac's sensibility at its most attractive. The nouvelles, while intended for publication in the form in which they were written, differ from the contes, but still represent Balzac's real talent at an inchoate stage of its development.
Of those written in the autumn of , some were concerned to give impressions of domestic life and personal feelings, while others belong to the tradition of mystery, horror, and the fantastic. The story "La Vendetta," about a Corsican family blood-feud, was much strengthened on rewriting years later, when Balzac added the father's gloating joy at the sudden death of the son-in-law who had brought him the news of his daughter's starvation. The money-lender's character is fully developed in the revision, in which he sides with the dying Restaud against the comtesse and her lover.
The comtesse has sold him her diamonds, an episode that links the nouvelle to the novel Old Goriot, but "Gobseck" remains a violent story about adultery, culminating in family break-up, while Old Goriot was the conscious foundation for the later panoramic survey of French society. The best of the nouvelles is generally thought to be "Gloire et malheur," which later became "La Maison du chat-qui-pelote," about the domestic background of Augustine, a draper's daughter who marries a painter but can never rise above her family's shopkeeper values.
It is an early Balzac study of feminine feeling. By , however, Balzac had almost abandoned the short story as a literary form. LibraryThing All topics Hot topics Book discussions. Please use this thread for general information, links to resources, and discussion of Balzac and his works in general. We will have separate threads discussing specific works. Jan 9, , 1: Edwin--thank you so much for setting up this list. I knew The Human Comedy was huge, but it's nice to see the books all together, and to see how they are organized. Does anyone have any recommendations?
I've read Cousin Bette a couple of times, and it is one of my favorite books. I've also read Old Goriot , Eugenie Grandet and Lost Illusions , all of which I've liked, but read so long ago I don't remember much about, other than that they were books I wouldn't mind reading again. I bought Cousin Bette , maybe because you recommended it, Deborah, but I'd love other recommendations too. That was a tremendous job! Thanks edwin for going ahead and creating this thread.
As arubabookwoman mentions, it's nice to see all the books here at once. I have the three following books by him in my TBR pile: I'm thinking I'll start off with that one again and finally just read it. But I doubt I can start in January. Jan 13, , I was wondering if we have the same problem with bowdlerization that exists with the contemporary translations of Zola and other French novelists. It seems that Marriage translated most of Balzac under her own name, but may have used the name James Waring for those volumes that were considered too bold to have a woman's name attached to them.
Those six volumes are: With Google's help I found an review of Marriage's translations that says: Does anyone have information to the contrary? I have three Balzac novels in modern translations, but none of the introductions says anything about previous translations. Actually that should have been "five" bold volumes. I wasn't counting very well this morning. I was just following the links in Edwin's list to check, and it looks like all are available in English translation, but with one exception The Girl with the Golden Eyes the only translations are quite old and in most cases in the public domain.
So it looks like others were willing to translate them even if Miss Marriage was not. Whether they are unexpurgated or not is another matter. Two of the five are the "analytical studies" essays rather than fiction , and the three fiction works are all quite brief Below are links to all works I could find, including the names of the translators: Clara Bell , Ellen Marriage , R. Scott and James Waring. The Commission in lunacy. At the sign of the cat and racket. A Daughter of Eve. Letters of Two Brides translated by R. Scott with a Preface by George Saintsbury facsim A study of women.
Peace in the house. A start in life. Parisians in the country. The Quest of the absolute The seamy side of history A prine of Bohemia. A man of business. The firm of Nucingen. A Woman of thirty. That was a tremendous effort, Edwin. Alas, the Wikipedia page doesn't have the handy list of translations that the Rougon-Macquart page has, and Balzac was so prolific I haven't made much progress on this project.
I might have more time over the weekend to do some research. We could even start a library of reference pages on the works of every author we feature in this group. I guess I'm volunteering to do the work if there's any interest here.
La Comédie humaine - Wikipedia
I thought that was relatively modern and then realized it was over twenty years ago. Still it's reasonably recent. I am really enjoying it. I just finished Le Colonel Chabert in French , and that is really a 5-star read. It was my first by Balzac ever, and I am deeply impressed.