Racine, Jean

RACINE, JEAN. - Poet, b. at La Ferté-Milon, in Valois, on 21 Dec. 1639, d. in Paris on 21 Apr. 1699. A scion of the petty bourgeoisie, orphaned from infancy, he was cared for more than her own children by his paternal grandmother, Marie Desmoulins, who had him

Then the dates of his life are, for a stretch, those of his works: 1664, La Thébaïde ou Les frères ennemis; 1665, Alexandre le Grand (both performed by Molière's company); 1667, Andromaque; 1668, Les Plaideurs (his only comedy); 1669, Britannicus; 1670, Bérénice; 1672, Bajazet; 1673, Mithridate; 1674, Iphigénie; 1677, Phèdre. A varied chronicle is interwoven with this catalogue: loves that with cold calculation he makes serve also his glory as an author, theatrical rivalries with the great Corneille, cabals and intrigues of protectors and enemies; and an all too bitter and irreconcilable polemic against the rigorism of his Jansenist masters of Port-Royal, the Lettre d'Anteur des Hérésies imaginaires et des deux Visionnaires (1666), in which nevertheless the value of morality and of truth of tragedy is investigated. Having abandoned the theater after Phèdre, he marries in the same year Catherine de Romanet, and, as historiographer of the King together with Boileau, he allows himself to be diverted by new cares, as father of a family and man of the court. To the stage, a college stage, withdrawn from crude publicity, but perhaps more discerning in its echoes, and certainly more precious, he returns at the invitation of Madame de Maintenon, the morganatic wife of Louis XIV; and the young ladies of Saint-Cyr perform Esther in 1689 and, with an execution more of reading than of recitation, Athalie in 1691; tragedies that transfigure the story into a lyrical choralism; and along this path he proceeds toward the Cantiques spirituels (1694). His conduct becomes ever more thoughtful and religious: he composes himself in a great serenity of expectation and dies with exemplary resignation and fortitude. He asked to be buried at Port-Royal.

His life proceeds always attentive to occasions, always detached from them: from when he interprets idyllically the solitudes of Port-Royal to when, even while paying his court to Louis XIV, he does not hide from the King, a fierce anti-Jansenist, his devotion: he insinuates into the sacred drama of Esther courtly allusions to the decline of the royal favorite, the Montespan, and in the letters to his son he applies that method of rigorous education which he himself, as a young man, had cheerfully evaded. He consents to the various circles; but he preserves, at the same time, a virtue and force of ultimate appeal, a voice and prayer that goes beyond the circles that had welcomed and carried him. Thus of his tragedies (and for the only comedy one may note the excess of the comic play, the grotesque tension that sweeps away the very occasion of laughter): amid the thousand entanglements of academic rules (among others, the unities of time, place, and action), of stage conventions (which prescribed the succession of entrances, the measure of dialogues and monologues, the form of elocution, the style of the drama, which summoned the fact from every side and then withdrew from its evidence, the coloring now pathetic now eloquent of the passages), of the thousand echoes that from the city and the Court ran through the stage, without renouncing anything he discovers precisely within the limits his stupendous freedom. He always knows how to place himself beyond the fiction, beyond the very enchantment and abandon to which his creatures yield, a pitiless analyst and a compassionate tragedy.

The themes are most varied, even within a scanty number and with the constant, but apparent, reduction of the tragic creatures to the canon of fashion and the court; and beating and rebeating upon the drama of love: the light of poetry invests even the most subterranean story with clarity; and the most desperate and perverse creatures, from Roxane (Bajazet) to Phaedra, redeem themselves in their very submission to confession: purity of truth, before light of poetic beauty. Every age read in them the confirmation of its own predilections: the Italian eighteenth century, after Metastasio, loved him for his persuasive sweetness; the French nineteenth century, after Baudelaire, for his dauntless firmness. An elusive limpidity he appears to one who observes in him so much heroic and somber life, so much history from the Greeks of Thebes to the Turks of the Seraglio, from the Empire of Nero to the Empire of Titus, from the camp of Aulis to the palace of Ahasuerus, from the Orient of Mithridates to the Orient of Jerusalem and of the Temple (but omnipresent is the court of the Sun King); and a turbid decline toward the infernal zones of being, in comparison with the free will of Corneille's heroes. But behind his guidance the spectator, and more the reader, and better than anyone civilization itself, which from a most polished literary form remains constrained to extreme decisions, travels a bold itinerary toward an ultimate solitude: in a lists of high eloquence the Cornelian hero decided a destiny of greatness; but in his desert the Racinian soul decides an eternal fate.

Jerome of the Illyrians and works in the Roman archives
and in other Italian ones.

In 1860 he returned to Zagreb and with Strossmayer was
one of the founders of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences
and Arts (1866), its first president (1867-85) and its animator
until his death. From 1877 he became a canon, still in Zagreb, and acquired a just fame as a Croatian historian, specially for the period of the national sovereigns (7th-12th cent.).
While in the political-national field he bears the mark of the time
in which he lived, in religious matters he appeared constantly
"a man of a thoroughly ecclesiastical mentality" (Jagić).

He made his debut in ecclesiastical history, especially with his
studies on Sts. Cyril and Methodius (Viek i djelovanje sv. Cyrilla
i Methoda slavjenskih apoštolov, 2 vols., Zagreb 1857 and
1859, and Pismo slavjensko, ibid. 1861); on Croatian history he published a series of dissertations, often very extensive,
for the most part issued by the Yugoslav Academy. Among these
his principal work remains Hrvatska prije XII. vieka
glede na zemljišni obseg i narod (Rad. Jug. Ak., 56 and 57),
to which must be added Nutarnje stanje Hrvatske prije XII.
stoljeća (Rad. 70, 79, 91, 99, 105, 115, 116). Other works
in the Popis izdanja Jugoslavenske Akademije 1867-1950
(Zagreb 1951). Fundamental is the collection Documenta
historiae Chroaticae periodum antiquum illustrantia (Zagreb 1877, published as vol. VII of the collection Monumenta
spectantia historiam Slavorum meridionalium).

Ivan Vitezić