The structure and basic ideas of "human comedy". Human Comedy Honore de Balzac Human Comedy Analysis

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Most of the novels that Balzac intended from the outset for The Human Comedy were written between 1834 and the late 1940s. However, when the idea was finally formed, it turned out that the earlier things were organic for the general author's idea, and Balzac included them in the epic. Subordinated to a single "super-task" - to comprehensively cover the life of society of that time, to give an almost encyclopedic list of social types and characters - "The Human Comedy" has a clearly expressed structure and consists of three cycles, representing, as it were, three interconnected levels of social and artistic-philosophical generalization of phenomena.

The first cycle and foundation of the epic is "STUDIES ON MORES" - the stratification of society, given through the prism of the private life of contemporaries. These include the bulk of the novels written by Balzac, and he introduced six thematic sections for him:

1. "Scenes of Private Life" ("Gobsek", "Colonel Chabert", "Father Goriot", "Marriage Contract", "Luncheon of the Atheist", etc.);
2. "Scenes of provincial life" ("Eugenia Grande", "The Illustrious Godissar", "The Old Maid", etc.);
3. "Scenes of Parisian Life" ("The Story of the Greatness and Fall of Caesar" Birotto "," The Banker's House of Nucingen "," The Glory and Misery of Courtesans "," Secrets of the Princess de Cadignan "," Cousin Betta "and" Cousin Pons ", etc. );
4. "Scenes of Political Life" ("Episode of the Era of Terror", "Dark Business", etc.);
5. "Scenes of military life" ("Shuanas");
6. "Scenes of village life" ("The village doctor". "The village priest", etc.).

The second cycle, in which Balzac wanted to show the causes of the phenomena, is called "PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES" and includes: "Shagreen Skin", "Elixir of Longevity", "Unknown Masterpiece", "Search for the Absolute", "Drama on the Seaside", "Reconciled Melmoth" and other works.

And, finally, the third cycle - "ANALYTICAL STUDIES" ("Physiology of marriage", "Minor adversity of married life", etc.). In it, the writer tries to determine the philosophical foundations of human existence, to reveal the laws of the life of society. This is the external composition of the epic.

Balzac calls parts of his epic "sketches". In those years, the term "etude" had two meanings: school exercises or scientific research. There is no doubt that the author had in mind precisely the second meaning. As a researcher of modern life, he had every reason to call himself a "doctor of social sciences" and "historian." Thus, Balzac argues that the work of a writer is akin to the work of a scientist who carefully examines the living organism of modern society from its multi-layered, constantly moving economic structure to the high spheres of intellectual, scientific and political thought.

Already one list of works included in the "Human Comedy" speaks of the grandeur of the author's plan. “My work,” Balzac wrote, “must embody all types of people, all social positions, it must embody all social shifts, so that not a single life situation, not a single person, not a single character, male or female, no views ... have been forgotten. "

Before us is a model of French society, almost creating the illusion of a full-fledged reality. In all the novels, it is as if the same society is depicted, similar to real France, but not completely coinciding with it, since this is its artistic embodiment. The impression of an almost historical chronicle is reinforced by the second plan of the epic, where real historical figures of that era act: Napoleon, Talleyrand, Louis HUSH, real marshals and ministers. Together with the fictional authors, characters corresponding to the typical characters of the time, they put on the play "The Human Comedy".

The effect of the historical authenticity of what is happening is supported by an abundance of details. Paris and provincial cities are given in a wide range of details, ranging from architectural features to the smallest details of the business life and everyday life of heroes belonging to different social strata and estates. In a sense, an epic can serve as a guide for a specialist historian who appreciates that time.

The novels of "The Human Comedy" are united not only by the unity of the era, but also by the technique of transitioning characters, both major and minor, found by Balzac. If one of the heroes of any novel falls ill, they invite the same doctor Bianchon, in case of financial difficulties they turn to the usurer Gobsec, on a morning walk in the Bois de Boulogne and in Parisian salons we meet the same people. In general, the division into minor and major for the characters of the "Human Comedy" is rather arbitrary. If in one of the novels the character is on the periphery of the narrative, in the other he and his story are brought to the fore (such metamorphoses occur, for example, with Gobsek and Nucingen).

One of the fundamentally important artistic techniques of the author of The Human Comedy is openness, the flow of one novel into another. The story of one person or family ends, but the general fabric of life has no end, it is in constant motion. Therefore, in Balzac, the denouement of one plot becomes the outset of a new one or echoes with previous novels, and the characters that go through create the illusion of the authenticity of what is happening and emphasize the basis of the idea. It consists in the following: the main character of "The Human Comedy" is society, so private destinies are not interesting to Balzac by themselves - they are only details of the whole picture.

Since an epic of this type depicts life in constant development, it is fundamentally incomplete, and it could not have been completed. That is why previously written novels (for example, "Shagreen Skin") could be included in an epic, the idea of which arose after their creation.

With this principle of constructing an epic, each novel included in it is at the same time an independent work and one of the fragments of the whole. Each novel is an autonomous artistic whole that exists within the framework of a single organism, which enhances its expressiveness and drama of the events experienced by its characters.

The innovation of such an idea and the methods of its implementation (a realistic approach to the reflection of reality) sharply separate Balzac's work from his predecessors, the romantics. If the latter put the singular, the exceptional at the forefront, the author of The Human Comedy believed that the artist should reflect the typical. To grope for a common connection and meaning of phenomena. Unlike the romantics, Balzac does not seek his ideal outside the realm; he was the first to discover the seething of human passions and truly Shakespearean drama in the everyday life of French bourgeois society. His Paris, inhabited by the rich and the poor, fighting for power, influence, money and just for life itself is a breathtaking picture. Behind the private manifestations of life, from an unpaid bill to a landlady by a poor man and ending with the story of a usurer who unjustly made his fortune, Balzac is trying to see the whole picture. The general laws of the life of bourgeois society, manifested through the struggle, the fate and the characters of its characters.

As a writer and artist, Balzac was almost mesmerized by the drama of the picture that opened to him, as a moralist, he could not help but condemn the laws that were revealed to him in the study of reality. In Balzac's "The Human Comedy", in addition to people, a powerful force acts, subjugating not only private, but also public life, politics, family, morality and art. And that's money. Everything can become the subject of money transactions, everything is subject to the law of sale and purchase. They give power, influence in society, the ability to satisfy ambitious plans, just to burn through life. To enter the elite of such a society on an equal footing, to achieve its favor in practice means a rejection of the basic commandments of morality and ethics. Keeping your spiritual world clean means giving up ambitious desires and prosperity.

Almost every hero of Balzac's Etudes on Morals experiences this collision, common for the "Human Comedy", almost everyone withstands a little battle with himself. At the end of it, either the way upward and souls sold to the devil, or downward - to the sidelines of public life and all the tormenting passions that accompany the humiliation of man. Thus, the mores of society, the characters and fates of its members are things not only interconnected, but also interdependent, Balzac argues in The Human Comedy. His characters - Rastignak, Nucingen, Gobsek confirm this thesis.

There are not so many worthy exits - honest poverty and consolations that religion can provide. True, it should be noted that in the depiction of the righteous, Balzac is less convincing than in those cases when he explores the contradictions of human nature and the situation of a difficult choice for his heroes. Loving relatives sometimes become salvation (as in the case of the aged and burnt out Baron Hulot), and the family, but it is also affected by damage. In general, the family plays a significant role in "The Human Comedy". Unlike romantics, who made personality the main subject of artistic consideration, Balzac makes the family so. With the analysis of family life, he begins to study the social organism. And with regret he is convinced that the disintegration of the family reflects the general ill-being of life. Along with the single characters in The Human Comedy, dozens of different family dramas take place in front of us, reflecting various versions of the same tragic struggle for power and gold.

After finishing the novel "Father Goriot" in 1834, Balzac came to a fundamentally important decision: he conceived to create a grandiose artistic panoramic frame of the life of French society in the post-revolutionary period, consisting of novels, stories and short stories related to each other. For this purpose, the previously written works, after appropriate processing, he includes in the "Human Comedy" - a unique epic cycle, the concept and name of which was finally ripe by the beginning of 1842.

Calling the cycle of works "The Human Comedy", Honoré de Balzac, firstly, wanted to emphasize that his creation has the same meaning for the modern French writer as Dante's "Divine Comedy" had for medieval Europe. Secondly, it is quite probable that in the earthly, human life with its “chilling cold” Balzac saw analogs of the allegorical circles of Dante's hell.

The embodiment of this grandiose plan falls on the most fruitful period of the writer's work - between 1834 and 1845. It was during this decade that most of the novels and novellas of The Human Comedy were created, creating which Balzac strove for the “integrity of epic action”. For this purpose, he deliberately divides the "Human Comedy" into three main sections: "Studies of Morals", "Philosophical Episodes", "Analytical Studies".

"Studies of Morals", in turn, are divided into six subsections:

"Scenes of Private Life" ("Gobsek", "Father Goriot", "Thirty-Year-Old Woman", "Marriage Contract", "Colonel Chabert", etc.).
« Scenes of provincial life "("Eugene Gran-de", "Museum of Antiquities", the first and third parts of "Lost Illusions", etc.).
"Scenes of Parisian Life" ("Caesar Biroto", "Nusinjen Trading House", "Glitter and Poverty of Courtesans", etc.).
"Scenes of Political Life" ("Dark Business").
"Scenes of military life" ("Shuanas").
"Scenes of Countryside Life" ("Peasants", "Derevensky Doctor", "Country Priest").

Balzac conceived 111 novels for the Etudes of Morals, but managed to write 72.

The section "Philosophical studies" is not subdivided. For this section, Balzac conceived 27 novels and short stories, and wrote 22 ("Shagreen Skin", "In Search of the Absolute", "Unknown Masterpiece", "Elixir of Longevity", "Gambara", etc.).

For the third section of the epic - "Analytical Studies" - the writer conceived five novels, but only two were written: "The Physiology of Marriage" and "Nevz-Years of Married Life".

In total, for the epic "The Human Comedy", 143 works had to be created, and 95 were written.

In Honore de Balzac's "The Human Comedy" there are 2000 characters, many of whom "live" on the pages of the epic according to the principle of cyclicality, moving from one work to another. The lawyer Derville, Dr. Bianchon, Eugene de Rastignac, Vautrin, the poet Lucien de Rübampre, and many others are “returning” characters. In some novels, they appear before the readers as the main characters, in others - as secondary, in the third, the author mentions them in passing.

Balzac depicts the evolution of the characters of these heroes at different stages of their development: pure souls and reborn under the pressure of circumstances, which often turn out to be stronger than Balzac's heroes. We see them young, full of hope, mature, old, wise in life experience and disillusioned with their ideals, defeated or conquered. Sometimes, in a specific novel, Honoré de Balzac tells us very little about the past of this or that hero, but the reader of The Human Comedy already knows the details of their life from other works of the writer. For example, Abbot Carlos Herrera in the novel "Glitter and poverty of courtesans" is the convict Vautrin, with whom the reader is already familiar from the novel "Father Goriot", and the successful secular dodger Rastignac, who is full of hope and faith in the pages of the novel "Lost Illusions" in people, teaches the young Lucien de Ruebampre, in the novel "Father Goriot" is reborn into a calculating and cynical frequenter of social salons. Immediately we meet Esther, who is in love with Lucien, who turns out to be the grand-niece of the usurer Gobsek, the hero of the story of the same name. Material from the site

In "The Human Comedy" invisible threads were the house of a banker and a beggarly slum, an aristocrat's mansion and a commercial office, a high-society salon and a gambling house, an artist's workshop, a scientist's laboratory, a poet's attic, and a newspaper editorial office, like a robbery den, were interconnected by invisible threads. On the pages of The Human Comedy, readers are presented with political tycoons, bankers, merchants, usurers and cashiers, poets and artists, as well as boudoirs and bedrooms of secular beauties, closets and cheap boarding houses in which disadvantaged people doomed to poverty live.

In the preface to The Human Comedy, Honoré de Balzac wrote: “In order to deserve the praise that every artist should seek, I needed to study the foundations or one common basis of these social phenomena, to grasp the hidden meaning of a huge array of types, passions, events ... My work has its own geography, as well as its genealogy, its families, its localities, its setting, characters and facts, it also has its own coat of arms, its nobility and bourgeoisie, its artisans and peasants, politicians and a dandy, his army, in a word, the whole world. "

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BALZAC "HUMAN COMEDY"
Balzac is boundless like an ocean. This is a whirlwind of genius, a storm of indignation and a hurricane of passion. He was born the same year as Pushkin (1799) - just two weeks earlier - but outlived him by 13 years. Both geniuses dared to look into such depths of the human soul and human relations, which no one was capable of before them. Balzac was not afraid to challenge Dante himself, calling his epic by analogy with the main creation of the great Florentine "The Human Comedy". However, with equal grounds it can also be called "Inhuman", because only titanium is able to create such a grandiose combustion.
"The Human Comedy" is a general name given by the writer himself for an extensive cycle of his novels, novellas and short stories. Most of the works combined into the cycle were published long before Balzac found an acceptable unifying title for them. The writer himself talked about his idea as follows:
Calling the work "The Human Comedy", which began almost thirteen years ago, I consider it necessary to clarify its concept, tell about its origin, briefly outline the plan, and, moreover, express it all as if I was not involved in it. "..."
The original idea of "The Human Comedy" appeared to me as a kind of dream, as one of those impossible plans that you cherish but cannot grasp; so a mocking chimera reveals its feminine face, but immediately, spreading its wings, is carried away into the world of fantasy. However, this chimera, like many others, is embodied: she commands, she is endowed with unlimited power, and she has to submit to her. The idea of this work was born from the comparison of humanity with the animal world. "..." In this respect, society is like Nature. After all, the Society creates from a person, according to the environment where he acts, as many diverse species as they exist in the animal world. The difference between a soldier, a worker, an official, a lawyer, a bum, a scientist, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a poor man, a priest is just as significant, although more difficult to discern, as what distinguishes a wolf, a lion, a donkey, crow, shark, seal, sheep, etc. Therefore, species exist and will always exist in human society, just like species of the animal kingdom.
In essence, the above fragment from the famous Preface to The Human Comedy expresses Balzac's credo that reveals the secret of his creative method. He systematized human types and characters, as botanists and zoologists classified flora and fauna. At the same time, according to Balzac, "in the great stream of life, Animality bursts into Humanity." Passion is all of humanity. A person, the writer believes, is neither good nor evil, but is simply born with instincts and inclinations. It remains only to reproduce as accurately as possible the material that Nature herself gives us.
Contrary to traditional canons and even formal logical rules of classification, the writer identifies three "forms of being": men, women and things, that is, people and the "material embodiment of their thinking." But, apparently, it was this "in spite of" that allowed Balzac to create a unique world of his novels and stories, which cannot be confused with anything. And Balzac's heroes, too, cannot be confused with anyone. “Three thousand people of a certain era” - this is how the writer himself characterized them, not without pride.
"The Human Comedy", as Balzac conceived it, has a complex structure. First of all, it is subdivided into three different-sized parts: "Studies on Manners", "Philosophical Studies" and "Analytical Studies". In essence, all the main and great things (with a few exceptions) are concentrated in the first part. It is here that such brilliant works of Balzac as "Gobsek", "Father Goriot", "Eugene Grande", "Lost Illusions", "Glitter and Poverty of Courtesans", etc., are included. In turn, "Studies on Morals" are divided into "scenes ":" Scenes of Private Life "," Scenes of Provincial Life "," Scenes of Parisian Life "," Scenes of Military Life "and" Scenes of Countryside Life ". Some cycles remained undeveloped: Balzac managed to write only The Physiology of Marriage from the “Analytical Studies”, and from “Scenes of Military Life” - the adventurous novel “Chuana”. But the writer was making grandiose plans - to create a panorama of all Napoleonic wars (imagine the multivolume War and Peace, but written from a French point of view).
Balzac claimed the philosophical status of his great brainchild and even singled out a special "philosophical part" in it, which, among others, included the novels "Louis Lambert", "The Search for the Absolute", "Unknown Masterpiece", "Elixir of Longevity", "Seraphite" and the most famous from "philosophical studies" - "Shagreen leather". However, with all due respect to Balzac's genius, one should definitely say that a great philosopher in the proper sense of this word did not come from the writer: his knowledge in this traditional sphere of spiritual life, although extensive, is very superficial and eclectic. There is nothing shameful here. Moreover, Balzac created his own, unlike any other, philosophy - the philosophy of human passions and instincts.
Among the latter, the most important, according to Balzac's gradation, is, of course, the instinct of possession. Regardless of the specific forms in which it manifests itself: among politicians - in a thirst for power; from a businessman - in a thirst for profit; for a maniac - in a thirst for blood, violence, oppression; for a man - in a thirst for a woman (and vice versa). Of course, Balzac felt the most sensitive string of human motives and actions. This phenomenon in its various aspects is revealed in various works of the writer. But, as a rule, all aspects, as in focus, are concentrated in any of them. Some of them are embodied in the unique Balzac heroes, become their bearers and personifications. Such is Gobsek - the main character of the story of the same name - one of the most famous works of world literature.
The name of Gobsek is translated as Zhivogloth, but it was in the French vocalization that it became a household name and symbolizes the thirst for profit for the sake of profit itself. Gobsek is a capitalist genius, he has an amazing flair and ability to increase his capital, while mercilessly trampling on human destinies and showing absolute cynicism and amoralism. To the surprise of Balzac himself, this withered old man, it turns out, is that fantastic figure who personifies the power of gold - this "spiritual essence of all modern society." However, without these qualities, capitalist relations cannot exist in principle - otherwise it will be a completely different system. Gobsek is a romantic of the capitalist element: he enjoys not so much the profit itself as the contemplation of the fall and distortion of human souls in all situations where he turns out to be the true ruler of people who have fallen into the net of the usurer.
But Gobsek is also a victim of a society where cash is reigning: he does not know what a woman's love is, he has no wife and children, he has no idea what it is to bring joy to others. Behind him stretches a train of tears and grief, broken destinies and deaths. He is very rich, but he lives from hand to mouth and is ready to gnaw anyone's throat over the smallest coin. He is the walking embodiment of mindless stinginess. After the death of the usurer, in the locked rooms of his two-story mansion, a mass of rotten things and rotten supplies was discovered: engaging in colonial scams at the end of his life, he received in the form of bribes not only money and jewelry, but all kinds of delicacies, which he did not touch, but locked everything up for a feast of worms and mold.
Balzac's tale is not a textbook on political economy. The writer recreates the ruthless world of capitalist reality through realistic characters and situations in which they act. But without portraits and canvases painted by the hand of a brilliant master, our idea of the real world itself would be incomplete and poor. Here, for example, is a textbook characteristic of Gobsek himself:
My moneylender's hair was perfectly straight, always neatly combed and heavily grayed - ash gray. Facial features, motionless, impassive, like Talleyrand's, seemed cast in bronze. His eyes, small and yellow, like a ferret's, and almost without eyelashes, could not stand the bright light, so he protected them with the large visor of a battered cap. The sharp tip of a long nose, pitted with mountain ash, looked like a gimbal, and the lips were thin, like the alchemists and ancient old men in the paintings of Rembrandt and Metsu. This man spoke quietly, softly, never got excited. His age was a mystery "..." It was some kind of automatic man who was turned on every day. If you touch a woodlouse crawling on the paper, it will instantly stop and freeze; just as this man, during the conversation, suddenly fell silent, waiting until the noise of the carriage passing under the windows died down, since he did not want to strain his voice. Following the example of Fontenelle, he saved life energy, suppressing all human feelings in himself. And his life passed as quietly as the sand streams down in a trickle in an old hourglass. Sometimes his victims were indignant, raised a frantic cry, then suddenly there was a dead silence, like in a kitchen when a duck is slaughtered in it.
A few touches to the characteristics of one hero. And Balzac had thousands of them - several dozen in each novel. He wrote day and night. And yet he did not have time to create everything that he intended. The Human Comedy remained unfinished. She burned the author himself. In total, 144 works were planned, but 91 were not written. If you ask yourself the question: which figure in Western literature of the 19th century is the most ambitious, powerful and inaccessible, there will be no difficulty in answering. This is Balzac! Zola compared The Human Comedy to the Tower of Babel. The comparison is quite reasonable: indeed, there is something primordially chaotic and extremely grandiose in the cyclopean creation of Balzac. There is only one difference:
The Tower of Babel has collapsed, and The Human Comedy, built by the hands of a French genius, will stand forever.

"The Human Comedy" by Balzac. Ideas, conception, embodiment

The monumental collection of works by Honoré de Balzac, united by a common concept and title - "The Human Comedy", consists of 98 novels and short stories and is a grandiose history of the mores of France in the second quarter of the 19th century. It is a kind of social epic in which Balzac described the life of society: the process of the formation and enrichment of the French bourgeoisie, the penetration of upstarts and nouveau riche into the aristocratic environment of Parisian high society, their way up, everyday life, customs and philosophy of people professing faith in only one God - money. He gave a dramatic picture of human passions engendered by wealth and poverty, lust for power and complete lack of rights and humiliation.

Most of the novels that Balzac intended from the outset for The Human Comedy were written between 1834 and the late 1940s. However, when the idea was finally formed, it turned out that the earlier things were organic for the general author's idea, and Balzac included them in the epic. Subordinated to a single "super-task" - to comprehensively cover the life of society at that time, to give an almost encyclopedic list of social types and characters - "The Human Comedy" has a clearly expressed structure and consists of three cycles, representing, as it were, three interrelated levels of social and artistic-philosophical generalization of phenomena ...

The first cycle and foundation of the epic is "STUDIES ON MORES" - a stratification of society, given through the prism of the private life of contemporaries. These include the bulk of the novels written by Balzac, and he introduced six thematic sections for him:

"Scenes of Private Life" ("Gobsek", "Colonel Chabert", "Father Goriot", "Marriage Contract", "The Lunacy of the Atheist", etc.);

"Scenes of provincial life" ("Eugenia Grande", "The Illustrious Godissar", "The Old Maid", etc.);

"Scenes of Parisian Life" ("The Story of the Greatness and Fall of Caesar"? Irotto "," The Banker's House of Nusingen "," The Glory and Misery of Courtesans "," Secrets of the Princess de Cadignan "," Cousin Betta "and" Cousin Pons ", etc.) ;

"Scenes of Political Life" ("Episode of the Era of Terror", "Dark Business", etc.);

"Scenes of Military Life" (Shuana);

"Scenes of Countryside Life" ("Country Doctor". Countryside Priest "and others).

And finally, the third cycle - "ANALYTICAL STUDIES" ("Physio-ology of marriage", "Minor adversity of married life", etc.). In it, the writer tries to determine the philosophical foundations of human existence, to reveal the laws of the life of society. This is the external composition of the epic.

Already one list of works included in the "Human Comedy" speaks of the grandeur of the author's plan. “My work,” Balzac wrote, “must embody all types of people, all social positions, it must embody all social shifts, so that no life situation, no face, no character, male or female, no one - or the views ... are not forgotten. "

The effect of the historical authenticity of what is happening is supported by an abundance of details. Paris and provincial cities are given in a wide range of details, ranging from architectural features to the smallest details of the business life and everyday life of heroes belonging to different social strata and estates. In a sense, the epic can serve as a guide for a specialist historian who studies that time.

The novels of "The Human Comedy" are united not only by the unity of the epoch, but also by the technique of transitional characters, both major and minor, found by Balzac. If one of the heroes of any novel falls ill, they invite the same doctor Bianchon, in case of financial difficulties they turn to the usurer Gobsec, on a morning walk in the Bois de Boulogne and in Parisian salons we meet the same people. In general, the division into minor and major for the characters of the "Human Comedy" is rather arbitrary. If in one of the novels the character is on the periphery of the narrative, in the other he and his story are brought to the fore (such metamorphoses occur, for example, with Gobsek and Nucingen).

the main character of "The Human Comedy" is society, so private fates are not interesting to Balzac in and of themselves - they are only details of the whole picture.

In reality, he was the first who, during the everyday life of French bourgeois society, discovered the seething of human passions and truly Shakespearean drama. His Paris, inhabited by the rich and the poor, fighting for power, influence, money and just for life itself is a breathtaking picture. Behind the private manifestations of life, from an unpaid bill to a landlady by a poor man and ending with the story of a usurer who unjustly made his fortune, Balzac is trying to see the whole picture. The general laws of the life of bourgeois society, manifested through the struggle, the fate and the characters of its characters.

romantics, who made the person the main subject of artistic consideration, Balzac makes the family so. With the analysis of family life, he begins to study the social organism. And with regret he is convinced that the disintegration of the family reflects the general ill-being of life. Along with the single characters in The Human Comedy, dozens of different family dramas take place in front of us, reflecting various versions of the same tragic struggle for power and gold.

List of used literature;

1. B.G. Reizov "Creativity of Balzac". L., 19.39

2. D. D. Oblomievsky Honore Balzac. M., 1967

3. A. Versmuir "Inhuman Comedy". M., 1967

4. "History of Foreign Literature of the XIX century". M., 1982

13. "The Human Comedy" by Balzac.
History of creation, composition, main themes

Balzac Honore de (20 May 1799, Tours - 18 August 1850, Paris), French writer. The epic "The Human Comedy" of 90 novels and short stories is linked by a common concept and many characters: the novel "The Unknown Masterpiece" (1831), "Shagreen Skin" (1830-31), "Eugene Grandet" (1833), "Father Goriot" (1834 -1835), "Caesar Birotto" (1837), "Lost Illusions" (1837-1843), "Cousin Betta" (1846). Balzac's epic is a realistic picture of French society, grandiose in scope.

Origin. The father of the writer Bernard François Balsa (who later changed his surname to Balzac), who comes from a wealthy peasant family, served in the department of military supplies. Taking advantage of the similarity of surnames, Balzac at the turn of the 1830s. began to trace his origin to the noble family of Balzac d "Entregues and arbitrarily added to his surname the noble particle" de. "Balzac's mother was 30 years younger than her husband and cheated on him; Many researchers believe that the attention of Balzac the novelist to the problems of marriage and adultery is due not least to the atmosphere that reigned in his family.

Biography.

In 1807-1813 Balzac was a boarding-man at a college in the city of Vendome; impressions of this period (intense reading, a feeling of loneliness among classmates distant in spirit) were reflected in the philosophical novel "Louis Lambert" (1832-1835). In 1816-1819 he studied at the School of Law and served as a clerk in the office of a Parisian solicitor, but then refused to pursue a legal career. 1820-1829 - years of searching for oneself in literature. Balzac publishes action-packed novels under various pseudonyms, composes moralistic "codes" of secular behavior. The period of anonymous creativity ends in 1829, when the novel "Chouans, or Brittany in 1799" was published. At the same time, Balzac was working on short stories from modern French life, which, starting in 1830, were published in editions under the general title Scenes of Private Life. These collections, as well as the philosophical novel "Shagreen Skin" (1831), bring resounding fame to Balzac. The writer is especially popular among women, grateful to him for penetrating into their psychology (in this Balzac was helped by his first lover, a married woman 22 years older than him, Laura de Bernie). Balzac receives enthusiastic letters from her readers; One of these correspondents, who wrote him in 1832 a letter signed "Foreigner", was the Polish countess, Russian subject Evelina Ganskaya (née Rzhevuskaya), who became his wife 18 years later. ., his life was not calm. The need to pay off debts required intense work; now and then Balzac embarked on commercial adventures: he went to Sardinia, hoping to buy a silver mine there on the cheap, bought a country house, for the maintenance of which he did not have enough money, twice founded periodicals that did not have commercial success. Balzac died six months after his main dream came true, and he finally married the widowed Evelina Hanska.

"The Human Comedy". Aesthetics.

Balzac's vast legacy includes a collection of frivolous novellas in the "Old French" spirit "Mischievous Tales" (1832-1837), several plays and a huge number of journalistic articles, but his main creation is "The Human Comedy". Balzac began to combine his novels and stories into cycles back in 1834. In 1842, he began to publish a collection of his works under the title "The Human Comedy", within which he distinguishes sections: "Studies on Morals", "Philosophical Studies" and "Analytical Studies". All the works are united not only by "cross-cutting" heroes, but also by the original concept of the world and man. On the model of natural scientists (primarily E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire), who described animal species that differ from each other in external features formed by the environment, Balzac set out to describe social species. He explained their diversity by different external conditions and different characters; each of the people is ruled by a certain idea, passion. Balzac was convinced that ideas are material forces, peculiar fluids, no less powerful than steam or electricity, and therefore an idea can enslave a person and lead him to death, even if his social position is favorable. The history of all the main characters of Balzac is the story of the collision of the passion that owns them with social reality. Balzac is an apologist of the will; it is only if a person has a will that his ideas become an effective force. On the other hand, realizing that the confrontation of egoistic wills is fraught with anarchy and chaos, Balzac relies on family and monarchy - social institutions that cement society.

"The Human Comedy".

Themes, plots, heroes. The struggle of individual will with circumstances or another equally strong passion constitutes the plot basis of all the most significant works of Balzac. Shagreen Skin (1831) is a novel about how the egoistic will of a person (materialized in a piece of skin that shrinks from each fulfilled desire) devours his life. "The Search for the Absolute" (1834) is a novel about the search for the philosopher's stone, to which the natural scientist sacrifices the happiness of his family and his own. Father Goriot (1835) is a novel about paternal love, Eugene Grande (1833) is about the love of gold, and Cousin Betta (1846) is about the power of revenge that destroys everything around. The novel "A Thirty-Year-Old Woman" (1831-1834) is about love, which has become the lot of a mature woman (the concept of "woman of Balzac's age", which has become entrenched in the mass consciousness, is connected with this theme of Balzac's work).

In society, as Balzac sees and depicts him, either strong egoists (such is Rastignac, a cross-cutting character who first appears in the novel "Father Goriot"), or people animated by love for their neighbor (the main characters of the novels "The Country Doctor", 1833, "The Country Priest", 1839); people weak, weak-willed, such as the hero of the novels "Lost Illusions" (1837-1843) and "The Glory and Poverty of Courtesans" (1838-1847) Lucien de Ruebampre, do not stand the test and perish.

French epic of the 19th century. Each work of Balzac is a kind of "encyclopedia" of this or that class, of this or that profession: "The History of the Greatness and Fall of Caesar Biroto" (1837) - a novel about trade; The Illustrious Godissard (1833) - a short story about advertising; Lost Illusions, a novel about journalism; The Banker's House of Nucingen (1838) is a novel about financial fraud.

Balzac drew in "The Human Comedy" an extensive panorama of all aspects of French life, all strata of society (for example, "Etudes on Morals" included "scenes" of private, provincial, Parisian, political, military and rural life), on the basis of which later researchers began classify his work as realism. However, for Balzac himself, the apology of will and a strong personality was more important, bringing his work closer to romanticism.

Father Goriot

Father Goriot (Le Pere Goriot) - Roman (1834-1835)

The main events take place at the boarding house "Mamashi" Vokė. At the end of November 1819, seven permanent "freeloaders" are found here: on the second floor - the young lady Quiz Tayfer with a distant relative of Madame Couture; on the third - a retired official Poiret and a mysterious middle-aged gentleman named Vautrin; on the fourth - spinster Mademoiselle Michonneau, a former grain merchant of Goriot and a student Eugene de Rastignac, who came to Paris from Angoulême. All tenants unanimously despise papa Goriot, who was once called "master": having settled with Madame Vauquet in 1813, he took the best room on the second floor - then he obviously had some money, and the hostess had the hope of ending her widowhood. She even went into some of the costs of the common table, but the vermicelli did not appreciate her efforts. Disappointed mother Voke began to look askance at him, and he fully justified the bad expectations: two years later he moved to the third floor and stopped heating in winter. The sharp-sighted servants and tenants figured out the reason for such a fall very soon: from time to time, lovely young ladies secretly came to Papa Goriot - obviously, the old lecher was squandering his fortune on his mistresses. True, he tried to pass them off as his daughters - a stupid lie that only amused everyone. By the end of the third year, Goriot moved to the fourth floor and began to walk in rags.

Meanwhile, the measured life of the Voke House begins to change. Young Rastignac, intoxicated by the splendor of Paris, decides to enter high society. Of all his wealthy relatives, Eugene can only count on the Viscountess de Bosean. Having sent her a letter of recommendation from his old aunt, he receives an invitation to the ball. The young man longs to get close to some noble lady, and the brilliant Countess Anastasi de Resto attracts his attention. The next day, he tells his companions at breakfast about her, and learns amazing things: it turns out that old Goriot knows the Countess and, according to Vautrin, recently paid her overdue bills to the usurer Gobsek. From that day on, Vautrin began to closely follow all the actions of the young man.

The first attempt to establish a secular acquaintance turns out to be humiliation for Rastignac: he came to the countess on foot, causing the servants to disdain, could not immediately find the living room, and the mistress of the house made it clear to him that she wanted to be alone with Count Maxime de Tray. The enraged Rastignac is imbued with a wild hatred for the arrogant handsome man and vows to triumph over him. To top it all off, Eugene makes a mistake by mentioning the name of Papa Goriot, whom he accidentally saw in the courtyard of the count's house. The dejected young man goes on a visit to the Viscountess de Bosean, but chooses the most inappropriate moment for this: a heavy blow awaits his cousin - the Marquis d'Ajuda-Pinto, whom she passionately loves, intends to part with her for a profitable marriage. The Duchess de Langeais is pleased to share this news with her “best friend”. The viscountess hastily changes the subject of the conversation, and the riddle that tormented Rastignac is immediately resolved: Anastasi de Resto, in her girlhood, bore the name Goriot. This wretched man also has a second daughter, Delphine, the wife of the banker de Nucingen. Both beauties actually disowned their old father, who gave them everything. The Viscountess advises Rastignac to take advantage of the rivalry between the two sisters: unlike Countess Anastasi, Baroness Dolphin is not accepted in high society - for an invitation to the house of Viscountess de Beauceant, this woman will lick all the dirt on the adjacent streets.

Returning to the boarding house, Rastignac announces that from now on he takes daddy Goriot under his protection. He writes a letter to his family, begging them to send him twelve hundred francs - this is an almost unbearable burden for the family, but the young ambitious needs to acquire a fashionable wardrobe. Vautrin, who guessed Rastignac's plans, invites the young man to pay attention to the Thyfer Quiz. The girl vegetates in the boarding house, because her father, the richest banker, does not want to know her. She has a brother: it is enough to remove him from the stage for the situation to change - Quiz will become the only heiress. The elimination of the young Thyfer Vautrin takes upon himself, and Rastignac will have to pay him two hundred thousand - a mere trifle in comparison with the millionth dowry. The young man is forced to admit that this terrible man rudely said the same thing that said the Viscountess de Bosean. Instinctively sensing the danger of a deal with Vautrin, he decides to win the favor of Delphine de Nucingen. In this he is helped in every possible way by Father Goriot, who hates both sons-in-law and blames them for the misfortunes of his daughters. Eugene meets Delphine and falls in love with her. She reciprocates his feelings, for he rendered her a valuable service by winning seven thousand francs: the banker's wife cannot pay off the debt - her husband, having pocketed a dowry of seven hundred thousand, left her practically penniless.

Rastignac begins to lead the life of a secular dandy, although he still has no money, and the tempter-Vautrin constantly reminds him of Victoria's future millions. However, clouds are gathering over Vautrin himself: the police suspect that under this name the fugitive convict Jacques Collin, nicknamed Deception-Death, is hiding - the help of one of the "freeloaders" of the Vauquet boarding house is needed to expose him. For a solid bribe, Poiret and Michonot agree to play the role of detectives: they must find out if Vautrin has a stigma on his shoulder.

The day before the fatal denouement, Vautrin informs Rastignac that his friend Colonel Francessini has challenged Thyfer the son to a duel. At the same time, the young man learns that papa Goriot wasted no time: he rented a lovely apartment for Eugene and Delphine and instructed the lawyer Derville to put an end to Nusingen's atrocities - from now on, his daughter will have thirty-six thousand francs an annual income. This news puts an end to Rastignac's hesitation - he wants to warn the Thaifer father and son, but the prudent Vautrin tops him with wine mixed with sleeping pills. The next morning, they do the same trick with him: Michonneau mixes a drug in his coffee that causes a rush of blood to his head - the insensitive Vautrin is stripped, and the brand appears on his shoulder after clapping his palm.

Further events are happening rapidly, and mother Voke suddenly loses all her guests. First, they come for Victorina Tayfer: the father summons the girl to him, because her brother is mortally wounded in a duel. Then the gendarmes burst into the boarding house: they were ordered to kill Vautrin at the slightest attempt to resist, but he demonstrates the greatest composure and calmly surrenders to the police. Imbued with an involuntary admiration for this "genius of hard labor", the students dining at the boarding house expel the volunteer spies - Michonneau and Poiret. And father Goriot shows Rastignac a new apartment, begging for one thing - to allow him to live on the floor above, next to his beloved Delphine. But all the old man's dreams are crumbling. Pressed against the wall by Derville, Baron de Nucingen confesses that his wife's dowry was invested in financial fraud. Goriot is horrified: his daughter is completely at the mercy of the dishonest banker. However, Anastasi's situation is even worse: saving Maxime de Tray from a debt prison, she pawns the family diamonds for Gobsek, and Count de Resto finds out about it. She needs another twelve thousand, and her father spent the last money on an apartment for Rastignac. The sisters begin to shower each other with insults, and in the midst of their quarrel, the old man falls as if knocked down - he had a blow.

Papa Goriot dies on the day when the Viscountess de Beauceant gives her last ball - unable to survive the separation from the Marquis d'Ajuda, she leaves the world forever. Having said goodbye to this amazing woman, Rastignac hurries to the old man, who in vain calls his daughters to him. Poor students - Rastignac and Bianchon - are burying the unfortunate father with their last pennies. Two empty carriages with coats of arms escort the coffin to the Père Lachaise cemetery. From the top of the hill, Rastignac looks at Paris and vows to succeed at any cost - and first goes to dinner at the Delphine de Nucingen.

The structure and basic ideas of "human comedy". Human Comedy Honore de Balzac Human Comedy Analysis

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