PROUST, MARCEL. — Writer, born in Paris on 10 July 1871, died there on 18 November 1922.
His life may 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 painstaking work of composing his œuvre: A la recherche du temps perdu. The first volume of the series, Du côté de chez Sivan, 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 volume, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, that P.’s name and fame, confirmed by the « Goncourt » prize (1919), spread throughout France and abroad. The publication of this chronicle-novel continued year by year, accompanied by the preparation of collections of essays and articles (Pustiches et mélanges, 1919, and Les plaisirs et les jours, 1921), earning P. the distinction of renewer of French prose; there thus appeared: Le côté de Guermantes (1920); Sodome et Gonourbe (1922); La prisonnière (1923); Albertine disparue (1925); Le temps retrouvé (1927). More than a “cycle” of novels, this is in reality one long, continuous narrative in which the protagonist, following the slow and shifting flow of consciousness, records the events of his life, from earliest childhood to the period when he withdraws from the world in order to devote himself exclusively to artistic creation. The work conveys, in great frescoes, an image of French society at the end of the century and of the Third Republic, through its disintegration and transformations, up to the First World War; but because of P.’s predominant attention to the degraded, morally censurable, and repugnant aspects of that society, the image is perspectivally distorted and obscured. The long and detailed chronicle must always be referred back to the protagonist’s central focus, in whose extraordinarily sensitive and meditative interiority every external event acquires its definitive colour and weight. His highly personal style, which embraces the subtlest nuances of sensibility and critical thought — with the word understood in its broadest sense — in extensively structured periods rich in sonic suggestion, makes P. the most notable heir to the French and English symbolist and post-Romantic tradition.