Proust, Marcel

PROUST, MARCEL. - Writer, b. in Paris on 10 July 1871, d. there on 18 Nov. 1922.

His life can be summed up in his assiduous visits to the most elegant Parisian salons and in the long years of seclusion, caused by a severe form of asthma, until his death, interrupted only by rapid nocturnal excursions through the deserted streets, and in the assiduous work of drafting his work: A la recherche du temps perdu. The first volume of the series, Du côté de chez Swann, rejected by a first publishing house on the advice of A. Gide, who was later to acknowledge his error, was courageously published by Grasset (1913); but it was only with the following one, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, that the name and fame of P., sanctioned by the "Goncourt" prize (1919), spread through France and abroad. The publication of this chronicle-novel continued year by year, flanked by the preparation of collections of essays and articles (Pastiches et mélanges, 1919, and Les plaisirs et les jours, 1921), giving P. the distinction of being a renewer of French prose; there thus appeared: Le côté de Guermantes (1920); Sodome et Gomorrhe (1922); La prisonnière (1923); Albertine disparue (1925); Le temps retrouvé (1927). More than a "cycle" of novels, it is in reality a long, continuous narration in which the protagonist, following the slow and changing flow of consciousness, records the events of his life, from earliest childhood to the time when he withdraws from the world to devote himself exclusively to artistic creation. The work hands down in great frescoes an image of French society at the turn of the century, of the Third Republic, through its disintegrations and transformations, up to the First World War: but because of P.'s prevailing attention to the deteriorated and morally censurable and repugnant aspects of that society, the image turns out to be perspectivally deformed and obscured. The long and minute chronicle must always be traced back to the central focus of the protagonist, in whose highly sensitive and meditative interiority every external event acquires its definitive color and weight. The highly personal style, which welcomes the subtlest shadings of sensibility and of critical thought — the word being understood in its broadest sense — in periods broadly architected and rich in sonorous suggestions, make P. the most conspicuous heir of the French and English symbolist and post-Romantic tradition.

Giulio De Angelis