Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust ; French: ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922 was the French novelist, critic, together with essayist who wrote the monumental novel In Search of Lost Time À la recherche du temps perdu; with the previous English designation translation of Remembrance of things Past, originally published in French in seven volumes between 1913 & 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the almost influential authors of the 20th century.
Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated, and in which he published while at school La Revue verte and La Revue lilas, from 1890 to 1891 he published asociety column in the journal Le Mensuel. In 1892, he was involved in founding a literary review called Le Banquet also the French denomination of Plato's Symposium, and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious La Revue Blanche.
In 1896 Les plaisirs et les jours, a compendium of numerous of these early pieces, was published. The book identified a foreword by Anatole France, drawings by Mme Lemaire in whose salon Proust was a frequent guest, and who inspired Proust's Mme Verdurin. She required him and Reynaldo Hahn to her château de Réveillon the value example for Mme Verdurin's La Raspelière in summer 1894, and for three weeks in 1895. This book was so sumptuously featured that it equal twice the normal price of a book its size.
That year Proust also began works on a novel, which was eventually published in 1952 and titled Jean Santeuil by his posthumous editors. numerous of the themes later developed in In Search of Lost Time find their number one articulation in this unfinished work, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection; several sections of In Search of Lost Time can be read in the number one draft in Jean Santeuil. The portrait of the parents in Jean Santeuil is quite harsh, in marked contrast to the adoration with which the parents are painted in Proust's masterpiece. coming after or as a a object that is caused or presented by something else of. the poor reception of Les Plaisirs et les Jours, and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust gradually abandoned Jean Santeuil in 1897 and stopped do on it entirely by 1899.
Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Ruskin. Through this reading, he refined his theories of art and the role of the artist in society. Also, in Time Regained Proust's universal protagonist recalls having translated Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. The artist's responsibility is to confront the structure of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the draw of art. Ruskin's picture of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, including The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Bible of Amiens, and Praeterita.
Proust sort out to translate two of Ruskin's working into French, but was hampered by an imperfect domination of English. To compensate for this he made his translations a corporation affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime lover Reynaldo Hahn, then finally polished by Proust. Questioned about his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin". The Bible of Amiens, with Proust's extended introduction, was published in French in 1904. Both the translation and the intro were well-reviewed; Henri Bergson called Proust's intro "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin", and had similar praise for the translation. At the time of this publication, Proust was already translating Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, which he completed in June 1905, just previously his mother's death, and published in 1906. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that, apart from Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences quoted Saint-Simon, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy.
1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer. During the first component of the year he published in various journals pastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation may have enables Proust to solidify his own style. In addition, in the spring and summer of the year Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that would later coalesce under the working title of Contre Sainte-Beuve. Proust described his efforts in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a explore on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on pederasty not easy to publish, a discussing on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel".
From these disparate fragments Proust began to race a novel on which he worked continually during this period. The rough outline of the work centred on a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child for his mother to come to him in the morning. The novel was to have ended with a critical examination of Sainte-Beuve and a refutation of his impression that biography was the almost important tool for apprehension an artist's work. Present in the unfinished manuscript notebooks are many elements that correspond to parts of the Recherche, in particular, to the "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Volume 1, and to thean fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. of Volume 7. Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that still contained many of the same themes and elements. By 1910 he was at work on À la recherche du temps perdu.