What do you think?
Rate this book
Призванието
Откъс от "Призванието"
"Брюж приличаше на призрачен град. Дърветата по крайбрежните улици, високите кули чезнеха, обгърнати от един и същ муселин. Непрогледна мъгла, без светъл прорив! Самият камбанен звън като че ли трябваше да си проправя път, да преминава през покритие от плътен памук, за да зазвучи волно във въздуха, да достигне островърхите покриви, над които на всеки четвърт час камбаните стелеха сякаш лист по лист тъжна музикална есен."
Повестта „Призванието“ описва живота на Ханс Кадзан, наследник на богат брюжки род. След ранната кончина на бащата майката се посвещава изцяло на невръстния Ханс. Прекрасното дете постепенно се превръща в умислен младеж, благочестив и дълбоко религиозен, решен да служи на Бога.
Белгиецът Жорж Роденбах (1855 - 1898) е сред най-оригиналните представители на европейския символизъм. Наричат го певец на тишината, самотата и меланхолията. В поезията и прозата, които създава, неизменно присъстват каналите, затворените пространства, мъглите, мъртвите градове, бегинажите на родната му Фландрия. Познат е на българския читател с романите "Мъртвата Брюге", "Звънарят", "Изкуството в изгнание" и разказите от сборника "Колелото на мъглите".
"Брюж приличаше на призрачен град. Дърветата по крайбрежните улици, високите кули чезнеха, обгърнати от един и същ муселин. Непрогледна мъгла, без светъл прорив! Самият камбанен звън като че ли трябваше да си проправя път, да преминава през покритие от плътен памук, за да зазвучи волно във въздуха, да достигне островърхите покриви, над които на всеки четвърт час камбаните стелеха сякаш лист по лист тъжна музикална есен."
Повестта „Призванието“ описва живота на Ханс Кадзан, наследник на богат брюжки род. След ранната кончина на бащата майката се посвещава изцяло на невръстния Ханс. Прекрасното дете постепенно се превръща в умислен младеж, благочестив и дълбоко религиозен, решен да служи на Бога.
Белгиецът Жорж Роденбах (1855 - 1898) е сред най-оригиналните представители на европейския символизъм. Наричат го певец на тишината, самотата и меланхолията. В поезията и прозата, които създава, неизменно присъстват каналите, затворените пространства, мъглите, мъртвите градове, бегинажите на родната му Фландрия. Познат е на българския читател с романите "Мъртвата Брюге", "Звънарят", "Изкуството в изгнание" и разказите от сборника "Колелото на мъглите".
- GenresShort Stories
118 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1895
1 person is currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
Georges Rodenbach
74 books53 followersGeorges Rodenbach was born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father from the Rhineland (Andernach). He went to school in Ghent at the prestigious Sint-Barbaracollege, where he became friends with the poet Emile Verhaeren. Rodenbach worked as a lawyer and journalist. He spent the last ten years of his life in Paris as the correspondent of the Journal de Bruxelles, and was an intimate of Edmond de Goncourt. He published eight collections of verse and four novels, as well as short stories, stage works and criticism. He produced some Parisian and purely imitative work; but a major part of his production is the outcome of a passionate idealism of the quiet Flemish towns in which he had passed his childhood and early youth. In his best known work, Bruges-la-Morte (1892), he explains that his aim is to evoke the town as a living being, associated with the moods of the spirit, counselling, dissuading from and prompting action. Bruges-la-Morte was used by the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold as the basis for his opera Die Tote Stadt. Albrecht Rodenbach, his cousin, was a poet and novelist as well, and a leader in the revival of Flemish literature of the 19th century.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 15, 2017
FIRST TIER
A sampler of works by the Symbolist writer, the main novella is an interesting (if sad) illustration of the ways love, desire and Catholicism work against each other. The sketches contain a few Decadent gems.
SECOND TIER
A collection of shorter works (a novella and some sketches) by the man who created the strange, melancholy ode to the seaside, Flemish city of Bruges - Bruges-La-Morte - these fall into a zone between Decadent and Symbolist writing, with some focus on Catholicism as a backdrop, but that only informs the main novella and a few of the sketches. If you've read his most famous work, this is a nice taster of further readings.
THIRD TIER
Rodenbach's most famous work, Bruges-La-Morte, was one of the first things I reviewed on Goodreads (you can tell because the review is so brief) and at the time I made a note to read more work by him. Well, thanks to the arcane system that sorts my read list, that time is now. Not a lot of Rodenbach's work has been translated (although there isn't all that much anyway), so I opted for this book from the fine Dedalus folk, containing a novella and some short sketch pieces. Eventually, I need to catch up with The Bells of Bruges.
Rodenbach was a Belgian Symbolist/Decadent writer. Symbolism and Decadence were terms used interchangeably by creators and reviewers at the time, and it is mostly in retrospect that we see some attempt to untangle them. To my eye, Decadents tend to focus more on the morbid, macabre, criminal and, for the time, socially/culturally/religiously "deviant" subjects such as murder, sickness, sexuality, obsession, etc. Whereas Symbolists tend to focus more on the imagination, melancholia and spirituality, while also delving into areas similar to Decadence, and are more prone to poetic language. There are no decisive definitions that will satisfy all, but that will serve for the moment.
In "Hans Cadzand's Vocation" we return to the brooding, melancholy city of Bruges and are introduced to our titular character, Hans Cadzand. This novella is about how Hans, who loses his father at an early age, develops both a strong emotional connection with his mother, and to the Church, and how those loves are unified in his devotion to the Virgin Mary, and eventually how the friction between them complicates his life. Hans' whole existence as he matures is ensconced within the morbid, stark, fog-choked city, and within the rigid, life-denying worldview of the Church - and his love of the latter is such that, as a bright, dedicated, morally upright student he intends, in a moment of religious fervor, to become a member of the Dominican order. But his mother realizes that this will take him out of her life, and so subtly works to ensnare him in the web of the sensual world, first through a cunning, tactical action that hopefully may ignite a pure, Romantic love - and failing that, through the placement in their household of an earthy, worldly housemaid named Ursula.
This is an interesting read - Rodenbach is religious enough to not make his criticism of Catholicism seem like mere nastiness, yet understanding of psychology enough to emphasize the manner in which Catholic ritual deliberately captures and redirects passion, and also providing us with some of Hans' symbolic dreams of desire. Not to mention the implication, never directly stated, that to some degree his mother is jealous of the boy's devotion to Mary. The "consummation" scene, implied from a remove, must have been a bit shocking to the reader at the time. In the end, this is a sad story of how a mother's smothering devotion, and the cultural echoes of it to be found in the Catholic religion, eventually dead-end a potentially happy life and career in the name of stasis.
The introduction seemed to consider the ten sketches filling out the book to be minor works but I greatly enjoyed a number of them. They tend to be short musings by Rodenbach on a particular personal memory, social foible, sin or emotional character type.
"Out of Season" and "Consecrated Boxwood" were the weakest for me - the former involving a mother who experiences a "late in life" resurgence of attraction to her husband which results in a pregnancy, and her shame at her teen daughters assumed realization that the child implies their mother's sexual being. The latter is essentially a parable about a nun who refuses to supply boxwood from her garden, as all else are doing, and the eventual results of her guilt. Perfectly fine but a bit obviously didactic at the end. "At School", slightly better, is Rodenbach's reminiscence of his Jesuit schooling and the dour, morbid worldview it engendered ("where our souls fell out of love with life by having learned too much of death.")
A number of them are solid. "A Woman In The Jardin De Luxembourg" has a man, out walking on an autumn afternoon, struck by the sad beauty of a melancholic woman. Seemingly intent on escaping some great desperation or turmoil in her life, she reinvents herself as "Nel" and they begin a relationship that lasts two years, he never knowing her true origins or identity. A powerful little piece that resonates with some of the anonymity that city life was bringing into play. "Love And Death" is a fine little decadent gem as a group of gentlemen, prompted by a newspaper report of a suicide pact between lovers, muse over their opinions on love and death. The romantic, pragmatic, cultural and psychological are all floated before one tells a story of an act of desire that was seemingly inflamed by an unexpected death. In "Pride," the death of an aged, much loved and respected Count, leads to the local custom of "the judging of the deceased," which decides the final resting place of the person. But when the positive outcome seems likely, the local priest suddenly reveals the Count's one sacrilegious sin. Nicely done. "The Canons" also concerns itself with the death of an important man, a bishop who greatly helped his local diocese. But the reading of his will reveals his extreme debt and a "bachelor flat" apartment in Paris, to the disdain of the canons - who also discover a problem with the burial of his remains in this piece of morbid, black humor.
Exceedingly well done were: "Who Is It?", where the local female "village idiot" is discovered to be pregnant and the town takes great entertainment from gossiping over the scandal and the identity of the unknown father, only for events to eventually calm down in an unfortunate manner. "The Urban Hunter" is a perfectly droll little decadent sketch of a species of men who travel Paris "hunting" women - pursuing their "prey" (with all symbolic resonances of actual hunting of game illustrated) through the city as they attempt to engage the woman in a discussion and promise of a further meeting, never intended to be attended (sexual conquest is not the point, just the 'triumph' of the 'hunt' - "a hunter does not eat his prey"). The analogy is examined in detail and, it is argued, the hunt is a pursuit indulged in by many men. Finally, "The Dead Town" is something like a return to the theme of Bruges-La-Morte, as a young couple having an affair escape to the seaside, canal-laced city of dolorous church bells to start their life anew, only to find that its spirit of grey stasis engulfs them, tinting and enervating their mutual love, lives and creative passions.
A sampler of works by the Symbolist writer, the main novella is an interesting (if sad) illustration of the ways love, desire and Catholicism work against each other. The sketches contain a few Decadent gems.
SECOND TIER
A collection of shorter works (a novella and some sketches) by the man who created the strange, melancholy ode to the seaside, Flemish city of Bruges - Bruges-La-Morte - these fall into a zone between Decadent and Symbolist writing, with some focus on Catholicism as a backdrop, but that only informs the main novella and a few of the sketches. If you've read his most famous work, this is a nice taster of further readings.
THIRD TIER
Rodenbach's most famous work, Bruges-La-Morte, was one of the first things I reviewed on Goodreads (you can tell because the review is so brief) and at the time I made a note to read more work by him. Well, thanks to the arcane system that sorts my read list, that time is now. Not a lot of Rodenbach's work has been translated (although there isn't all that much anyway), so I opted for this book from the fine Dedalus folk, containing a novella and some short sketch pieces. Eventually, I need to catch up with The Bells of Bruges.
Rodenbach was a Belgian Symbolist/Decadent writer. Symbolism and Decadence were terms used interchangeably by creators and reviewers at the time, and it is mostly in retrospect that we see some attempt to untangle them. To my eye, Decadents tend to focus more on the morbid, macabre, criminal and, for the time, socially/culturally/religiously "deviant" subjects such as murder, sickness, sexuality, obsession, etc. Whereas Symbolists tend to focus more on the imagination, melancholia and spirituality, while also delving into areas similar to Decadence, and are more prone to poetic language. There are no decisive definitions that will satisfy all, but that will serve for the moment.
In "Hans Cadzand's Vocation" we return to the brooding, melancholy city of Bruges and are introduced to our titular character, Hans Cadzand. This novella is about how Hans, who loses his father at an early age, develops both a strong emotional connection with his mother, and to the Church, and how those loves are unified in his devotion to the Virgin Mary, and eventually how the friction between them complicates his life. Hans' whole existence as he matures is ensconced within the morbid, stark, fog-choked city, and within the rigid, life-denying worldview of the Church - and his love of the latter is such that, as a bright, dedicated, morally upright student he intends, in a moment of religious fervor, to become a member of the Dominican order. But his mother realizes that this will take him out of her life, and so subtly works to ensnare him in the web of the sensual world, first through a cunning, tactical action that hopefully may ignite a pure, Romantic love - and failing that, through the placement in their household of an earthy, worldly housemaid named Ursula.
This is an interesting read - Rodenbach is religious enough to not make his criticism of Catholicism seem like mere nastiness, yet understanding of psychology enough to emphasize the manner in which Catholic ritual deliberately captures and redirects passion, and also providing us with some of Hans' symbolic dreams of desire. Not to mention the implication, never directly stated, that to some degree his mother is jealous of the boy's devotion to Mary. The "consummation" scene, implied from a remove, must have been a bit shocking to the reader at the time. In the end, this is a sad story of how a mother's smothering devotion, and the cultural echoes of it to be found in the Catholic religion, eventually dead-end a potentially happy life and career in the name of stasis.
The introduction seemed to consider the ten sketches filling out the book to be minor works but I greatly enjoyed a number of them. They tend to be short musings by Rodenbach on a particular personal memory, social foible, sin or emotional character type.
"Out of Season" and "Consecrated Boxwood" were the weakest for me - the former involving a mother who experiences a "late in life" resurgence of attraction to her husband which results in a pregnancy, and her shame at her teen daughters assumed realization that the child implies their mother's sexual being. The latter is essentially a parable about a nun who refuses to supply boxwood from her garden, as all else are doing, and the eventual results of her guilt. Perfectly fine but a bit obviously didactic at the end. "At School", slightly better, is Rodenbach's reminiscence of his Jesuit schooling and the dour, morbid worldview it engendered ("where our souls fell out of love with life by having learned too much of death.")
A number of them are solid. "A Woman In The Jardin De Luxembourg" has a man, out walking on an autumn afternoon, struck by the sad beauty of a melancholic woman. Seemingly intent on escaping some great desperation or turmoil in her life, she reinvents herself as "Nel" and they begin a relationship that lasts two years, he never knowing her true origins or identity. A powerful little piece that resonates with some of the anonymity that city life was bringing into play. "Love And Death" is a fine little decadent gem as a group of gentlemen, prompted by a newspaper report of a suicide pact between lovers, muse over their opinions on love and death. The romantic, pragmatic, cultural and psychological are all floated before one tells a story of an act of desire that was seemingly inflamed by an unexpected death. In "Pride," the death of an aged, much loved and respected Count, leads to the local custom of "the judging of the deceased," which decides the final resting place of the person. But when the positive outcome seems likely, the local priest suddenly reveals the Count's one sacrilegious sin. Nicely done. "The Canons" also concerns itself with the death of an important man, a bishop who greatly helped his local diocese. But the reading of his will reveals his extreme debt and a "bachelor flat" apartment in Paris, to the disdain of the canons - who also discover a problem with the burial of his remains in this piece of morbid, black humor.
Exceedingly well done were: "Who Is It?", where the local female "village idiot" is discovered to be pregnant and the town takes great entertainment from gossiping over the scandal and the identity of the unknown father, only for events to eventually calm down in an unfortunate manner. "The Urban Hunter" is a perfectly droll little decadent sketch of a species of men who travel Paris "hunting" women - pursuing their "prey" (with all symbolic resonances of actual hunting of game illustrated) through the city as they attempt to engage the woman in a discussion and promise of a further meeting, never intended to be attended (sexual conquest is not the point, just the 'triumph' of the 'hunt' - "a hunter does not eat his prey"). The analogy is examined in detail and, it is argued, the hunt is a pursuit indulged in by many men. Finally, "The Dead Town" is something like a return to the theme of Bruges-La-Morte, as a young couple having an affair escape to the seaside, canal-laced city of dolorous church bells to start their life anew, only to find that its spirit of grey stasis engulfs them, tinting and enervating their mutual love, lives and creative passions.
Read
December 25, 2022"If so many lovers feel the desire to die and more and more die each day, while still in love, it is because love and death are linked by analogies, by underground passages, and communicate. One leads to the other. The one makes the other more acute, more intense. There is no doubt that death is a great stimulant of love. How else can one explain the habit village lovers have of leaning against the cemetery wall to take each others’ hands and lips?"
while i was astonished by the subtle beauty of rodenbach's most renowned work, the inimitable bruges-la-morte, i felt rather indifferent to the titular work in this short story collection. bruges-la-morte and 'hans cadzand's vocation' are both set in melancholic city of bruges; the stories also share a focus on unattainability and are thus narratively punctuated by states of enervation and passion — however, the religious lens taken here meant that hans cadzand's vocation lost its fascination for me, as i much preferred bruges-la-morte and its haunting tale of amour fou, as well as the shorter stories which took a satirical approach to religion. the standouts in this collection for me were 'love and death' and 'the dead town', which were short but perfect!
while i was astonished by the subtle beauty of rodenbach's most renowned work, the inimitable bruges-la-morte, i felt rather indifferent to the titular work in this short story collection. bruges-la-morte and 'hans cadzand's vocation' are both set in melancholic city of bruges; the stories also share a focus on unattainability and are thus narratively punctuated by states of enervation and passion — however, the religious lens taken here meant that hans cadzand's vocation lost its fascination for me, as i much preferred bruges-la-morte and its haunting tale of amour fou, as well as the shorter stories which took a satirical approach to religion. the standouts in this collection for me were 'love and death' and 'the dead town', which were short but perfect!
February 17, 2025
Favorite story: "A woman in the jardin du Luxembourg"
April 20, 2020
Жорж Роденбах (1855 ̶ 1898) е сред най-оригиналните представители на европейския символизъм. Наричат го певец на тишината, самотата и меланхолията. В поезията и прозата, които създава, неизменно присъстват каналите, затворените пространства, мъглите, мъртвите градове, бегинажите на родната му Фландрия. Повестта „Призванието“ (1895) описва живота на Ханс Кадзан, наследник на богат брюжки род. След ранната кончина на бащата майката се посвещава изцяло на невръстния Ханс. Прекрасното дете постепенно се превръща в умислен младеж, благочестив и дълбоко набожен, решен да се посвети на монашеското поприще. Писателят проследява отчаяните опити на майката да насърчи у сина си влечения, които да го свържат с мирския свят и да му попречат да последва призванието си. Текстът на Роденбах превръща читателя в протагонист, способен да се взре с разбиране в огледалото на повествованието и да схване истини, които главният герой не провижда.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews