Марсел Пруст: За изкуството и литературата

by Marcel Proust, Марсел Пруст

"Истинското пътешествие на откритието се състои не в търсене на нови пейзажи, а в нови очи."

Марсел Пруст

Genres: Essays, Art, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Nonfiction, France, Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.

Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.

Reviews

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acknowledgment
Introduction, by Terence Kilmartin

Prologue
--Contre Sainte-Beuve

Miscellaneous Writings

Proust the Critic
--Against the young writers of the day
--On taste
--A history of French satire
--A Sunday concert at the Conservatoire
--Patriotism and the Christian Spirit
--On 'La Bonne Hélène'
--Portrait of a writer
--Poet and novelist
--The wane of inspiration
--The artist in contemplation
--The creed of art

Portraits of Painters
--Watteau
--Chardin
--Rembrandt
--Gustave Moreau
--Monet

Proust the Reader
--Goethe
--Chateaubriand
--Joubert
--Notes on Stendhal
--George Eliot
--Tolstoi
--Dostoievski
--Jules Renard
--Robert de Montesquiou
--Henri de Régnier
--Léon Daudet

Translator's Note
Notes

[Özgür Atmaca · Rating 5 out of 5]

“...Beethoven’ın Bach’ın büyüsünü ödünç alır, daha doğrusu, en güzel çeşitlemelerinden birinde yaptığı gibi, Bach’ta bulunmayan bir büyüyü ona verir.

Bir akorla resim yapmak, fügde oyun sahnelemek, üslupla ebedileştirmek; başkalarının bir ezginin çerçevesine sığdırdığı keşif ve icatları, yaratıcı dehayı gam kullanımında sergilemek, gamı tıpkı bir anıtı yıkımdan koruyan asırlık asma gibi bir fikrin etrafına sarmak; böylece, modernliğe soyluluk belgesini arkaizmin bahşetmesini saglamak; ifadesindeki bilge, kendine has, yüce isabetle beylik bir düşünceye yavaş yavaş özgün bir imgelemin değerini kazandırmak; arkaik bir ifadeyi espriye; genel bir fikre, bir uygarlığın özetine, bir ırkın özüne, enstrümanların biçimlendirdiği ya da gökten inmiş bir deha ürününe dönüştürmek; bir prelüde, bir sahneye, bir koroyu napoliten bir ışıkla aydınlatmak, bir marşta Cezayir suitinde sanatla şakalaşmak; bir dini anlatabilmek, bir zorbadan nefret etmek, bir kadına acımak, Erosu görüp Tanrı’yı işitmek icin müziğin de değil, müzik dilinin imkânlarını kullanmak, bir Tanrı gibi, bir Şeytan gibi eğlenerek dünyanın tamamını müziğe, müziği harmoniye, orgun tüm yelpazesini piyanonun daracık alanına sığdırmak... İşte gelenek, yaratıcılık ve deha patlamalarıyla ışıldatan bu müzik hümanistinin maharetli, sersemletici, şeytani ve ilahi oyunları. “

Marcel Proust,
Edebiyat ve Sanat yazıları
Camille Saint - Saens’ için.

[شمس · Rating 4 out of 5]

. . . whose lives are so ordered that every day they can devote some part of their time to the joys of art. (Chardin)
__________
All those who have experienced what is called inspiration know that sudden enthusiasm which is the only indication of the excelling quality of some idea that occurs to us, and whose coming sends us galloping in its train, and makes words malleable and clear and mutually illuminating forthwith. Those who have once known this know that not every idea, however apparently true, nor particular conception, however seemingly ingenious, is worth expressing, and they wait for the renewal of those raptures which are the only indication that what we are about to say is worth saying and may toss other hearts into a like rapture later on . . . those brilliant comparisons, those turns of thought, which belong to no one but ourselves. (The wane of inspiration)

__________
This collection of Proust's writings is split into two parts:

1. Contre Sainte-Beuve
2. Miscellaneous Writings:

Proust the Critic
• Against young writers of the day
• On taste
• A history of French Satire
• A Sunday concert at the Conservatoire
• Patriotism and the Christian Spirit
• On La Bonne Hélène
• Portrait of a writer
• Poet and novelist
• The wane of inspiration
• The artist in contemplation
• The creed of art

Portraits of Painters
• Watteau
• Chardin
• Rembrandt
• Gustave Moreau
• Monet

Proust the Reader
• Goethe
• Chateaubriand
• Joubert
• Notes on Stendhal
• George Eliot
• Tolstoi
• Dostoievski
• Jules Renard
• Robert de Montesquiou
• Léon Daudet
_____
I already wrote some thoughts on Contre Sainte-Beuve, which forms the majority of this volume. The section of Proust's critical writings contains some good thoughts and musings, with his thoughts on Painters and Writers only likely to interest those who are interested in either Proust himself or the Painters/Writers in question, as these are only a few pages each, as opposed to providing some kind of overview or short biography.

If you would like to read Contre Sainte-Beuve, this is a nice volume to have, containing the supplementary material that it does. The translation is nice, and very readable.
__________
We all come to the novelist as slaves stand before an emperor. He can free us with a word. Through him we abandon our former lot and know what it is to be a general, a weaver, a singer, a country gentleman, to live in a village, to gamble, to hunt, to hate, to love, to go soldiering. Through him we are Napoleon, Savonarola, a peasant—stranger yet, an existence we might never have experienced, we are ourselves . . . Through him, w e become the true Proteus who puts on all forms of life in succession . . . Our good or bad fortune momentarily looses its tyrannical hold on us, we play with it and with that of others. This is why we feel such happiness when we reach the end of some beautiful novel with a tragic theme. (Poet and novelist)

Each time the poet is not switched through to the line of the mysterious laws where he feels an identical life reaching him from all things, he is unhappy. Yet this often happens, since each time he pursues something cold-heartedly, and with a purpose involving a shift of his personality from an inner to an outer world, he is no longer at home in that part of himself where, as in a telephone or a telegraph box, he can be in communication with the beauty of the whole world. Even during those years when he has yet to become aware of this property in his nature, what every one calls pleasure does not please him, and he feels very sad about life. But later on he gives up looking for happiness except in the light of those rarefied moments which seem to him authentic existence; so that after each such moment of bringing forth a thing in which he has lodged his sense of the mysterious laws, he can die without regret . . . What makes a poet’s flash transparent for us and allows us to look at his soul, is not his eyes, nor the events of his life, but his books, into which the one particular thing in his soul that with instinctive passion wanted to perpetuate itself has made its way in order to outlive his decrepitude. And so we see poets scorning to write down their ideas about such and such things, such and such books, however noteworthy these may be, or to record the extraordinary scenes they have witnessed and the historic remarks they have heard from the lips of princes they have known, things, for all that, which are interesting to themselves and make even the reminiscences of cooks and viceroys entertaining. (The artist in contemplation)

Painters . . . are constantly inveighing against writers for talking nonsense about painting, and finding things in pictures which they, the painters, never meant, never wanted, to put there. (Chardin)

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Proust began writing the essay known as "Contre Saint-Beuve," the piece that anchors this volume, he thought he would wind up as a literary critic. By the end of the essay, he had become the Proust known as author of Remembrance of Things Past. Reading "Contre Saint-Beuve" is a breathtaking view on to the transformation of Proust from the one to the other.



Along the way, most of the major themes of the future novel are sketched, together with certain familiar scenes, evocations, and even phrases that will appear in the larger work. What is most striking about Contre Saint-Beuve, and is absent in the novel, is the polemical intent of Proust's literary method, and Proust's own sense of what he was trying to achieve by writing the way he did.



For anyone struggling to progress through all seven volumes of Remembrance, Proust on Art and Literature can therefore serve as a useful and refreshing detour, in which Proust sets his out his theories of artistic beauty, and their origins in involuntary memories, all in a condensed and accessible form. The critical chapters on Baudelaire and Balzac are themselves masterpieces of humanistic criticism, all directed towards correcting the idea that a work of art may be understood exclusively with reference to the an artist's character, personality, or behavior.



To the contrary, Proust argues, literary inspiration, and literary beauty, are so deeply personal in origin that they may have nothing to do with external characteristics of the artists. The surest proof Proust could give of this truth was to construct a world, drawn out of memories triggered solely by sounds and smells, while lying in bed, facing the wall, and not leaving his room. This is what he tests out in Contre Saint-Beuve, and what he accomplishes in the Remembrance.

[Deniz Balcı · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proust'un yazmış olduğu en küçük notlar bile onun muhteşem edebi anlatımına sahip. İnanılmaz bir şey bu. Kayıp Zamanın İzinde'de bulunan tüm incelik, denemelerinde, eleştirilerinde, mektuplarında, gezi yazılarında da mevcut.

Bir yerlere not ettiği en küçük notçuklar bile derlenip; tüm dünya dillerine çevrilip, kitaplaştırılarak geleceğe taşınmalı.

10/8.5

[Blagovest Asenov · Rating 2 out of 5]

За жалост хаотичното и фрагментирано съставителство на настоящото издание не можа да ме накара да съпреживея Прустовото възхищение от изкуството.
Извадени от контекста на повествованието, размишленията дори не следват хронологическата последователност, в която оригинално са писани, а липсата на подобни указания наистина предизвикват читателя по неволя да тръгне по следите на обърканите обстоятелсва, само за да бъде възнаграден с изгубеното време накрая…

[Suni Lundström · Rating 5 out of 5]

След такава книга, човек може само да изпита възбудата от това, че е жив, че чете, и че може да се докосне до изкуство. Наясно съм, че това са само откъси от "По Следите на Изгубеното Време," но това изобщо не е от значение, тъй като малко хора четат Пруст, а и той не е толкова популярен сред нашата аудитория. Жестикулации, любовни изблици, песни, стихове - нищо не може да опише с нужната тежест, сублимното стъпало, върху което Пруст е стъпал. Такива размишлявания върху сладостта от живота, върху лекомислието на новото общество, върху сензорните ни възприятия към красотата и, най-важно, върху Времето, което бавно руинира нашето съзнание. Всяка дума е с мекотата на кадифе и ароматът на карамфили в порцеланова ваза, а сенсуалните танга, които думите изпълняват за да образуват прелестните изречения са ненадминати. Смея да твърдя, че ако Шекспир пишеше проза, щеше да пише като Пруст, но това са приказките на един отдал се на страстите млад мъж.
Това безспорно е "живо изкуство". Да, всеки от нас умира, но в това е сладостта и благоуханието на нашия живот. Всичко е по-красиво, защото знаем, че то ще ни надживее, че то съществува отвъд Времето. А човек за да го победи, трябва безкомпромисно да се отдаде на своите артистични пориви. Човек трябва ��а обича, да твори, да съзерцава, да тъжи, но и да се радва на своят неизбежен край. Защото следите на изгубеното Време са ясно изразени пред нас, а именно, че ние самите сме плод на нечие перо и щом приключим последното изречение, е въпрос на личен избор дали то ще бъде въпрос, заповед или просто посредствен отдих.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is Proust for the Proust completist, I think. It includes the 'Contre Saint-Beuve' essay, kind of an early 'demo recording' of A la recherche, plus a collection of much shorter pieces on art, creating art, artists. They have been collected and arranged posthumously; there are several places where the translator leaves a blank space [ ] where presumably the original manuscript wasn't legible. For example, the final words of 'The wane of inspiration' are:

And they have sat down at the piano. Then the [ ].

And this isn't even the only essay to end like this, mid-sentence. Still it's interesting to see Proust's mind at work developing the characters and themes that would show up throughout his great novel, back in the Saint-Beuve essay. But coming so soon after reading the final volume of the novel I sometimes felt impatient. Most of what he sketched out here he would improve upon later. It was more difficult for me to appreciate Proust in art and literary critic mode, but overall, while I probably wouldn't recommend this book without any hesitation, I am still happy to have read it.

[Ed Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Come on out of the woodworks all you Proustians. This is a mishmash of writings by Proust, somewhat unpublished and somewhat unfinished.

However... Dude, this is Marcel Proust we are talking about. So it is filled with nuggets of insight and wit, and insights into Proust's creative process, art, literature, aesthetics and passages of recherchepressaging fragments (tea with rusk and no madeleines). And, rather than reading the critical lit, here's the man himself.

[Fatma Burçak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bu kitap Proust'u ve Kayıp Zamanın İzinde'yi daha iyi anlamaya, nasıl yazdığını kavramaya yardımcı olan, yazarın düşüncelerinde gezinmeye fırsat veren yazılardan oluşuyor.

[Michael Flick · Rating 2 out of 5]

As titled, thoughts on art and literature, with early versions of what will appear in “...Lost Time” on male homosexuality (“A race accursed”) and regarding the Guermentes.

[Okur Sohbetleri]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgPvN...
Selam kitapçokseverler. Bu bölümümüzde üslubuyla kalemine hayran bırakan yazar Marcel Proust'un, göstergebilimci ve eleştirmen Mehmet Rifat tarafından hazırlanan Edebiyat ve Sanat Yazıları'nı, Marcel Proust ya da Bir Roman Yaratmak yapıtını ve Proust'un Sainte-Beuve'e Karşı eserini konuşuyoruz.

Edebiyat Yazıları'nda Flaubert, Baudelaire, Chateaubriand, Goethe, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, sembolist şairler ve şiir hakkında Proust'un yorumlarını ve Sanat Yazıları'nda Chardin, Rembrandt, Watteau, Moreau, Monet gibi ressamlara, Saint-Saëns, Reynaldo Hahn gibi müzisyenlere dair Proust'un fikirlerini, onun üslubuna etkileri hakkında sohbet ediyoruz.

Marcel Proust ya da Bir Roman Yaratmak yapıtı çerçevesinde roman türünde devrim yaratan Proust’un ve Kayıp Zamanın İzinde adlı başyapıtı ve romana dair görüşleri hakkında fikirlerimizi paylaşıyoruz.

Son olarak Proust'un Sainte-Beuve etrafında Balzac, Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval okumalarını, onun sanata ve romana bakışını yansıtan yazıları üzerine tartışıyoruz.

Keyifli dinlemeleriniz olması dileğiyle.

okursohbetleri@gmail.com üzerinden görüş ve önerilerinizi bekleriz.

Sevgiler.

[yakup duran · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Ara sıra nüfuz edebildikleri, derinde bir ruhları olan herkes için bu mecburen böyledir. Gizli bir sevinç, tek gerçek anların bu ruhta geçirdikleri anlar olduğunu haber verir kendilerine. Hayatlarının geri kalanı çoğu kez iradi, kederli değilse de asık suratlı bir tür sürgündür. Çünkü onlar zihinsel sürgünlerdir; sürgün edildikleri anda yurtlarının anısı da yok olur, sadece bir yurtları olduğunu, orada yaşamanın daha hoş olduğunu bilirler, ama oraya nasıl döneceklerini. bilmezler. Bir başka yeri arzuladıkları anda yurtlarında olmadıklarını bilirler bir de; çünkü başka şeyi arzulamak, duygu ülkesinin sürgünüdür. Ama kendileri oldukları zaman, yani sürgünde değil, derindeki ruhlarındayken, böceklerin içgüdüsüne benzer, görevlerinin yüceliği ve hayatlarının kısalığı konusunda gizli bir önsezinin eşlik ettiği bir tür içgüdüyle hareket ederler. O zaman bütün diğer işleri bir yana bırakıp kendileri öldükten sonra isimlerinin yaşamaya devam edeceği mekanı yaratırlar ve isimlerini buraya yerleştirirler; artık ölmeye hazırdırlar. Ressamın tuvalini oluşturmak için gösterdiği şevke bakın ve söyleyin: Örümcek, ağını daha büyük şevkle mi örer? “

[Daniel Bashir · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very late update but this was good pairing w/ Tolstoy’s what is art + Sontag against interpretation — Contre Sainte-Beuve is at once this proto-recherche + a work of literary criticism. It’s funny that Proust and Tolstoy speak directly about Baudelaire, Proust looking at B through the lens of Sainte-Beuve’s misguided method of analysis and bad treatment of the poet / Tolstoy quoting passages from Flowers of Evil followed by different ways of asking wtf is this guy on. Though maybe, just maybe, Proust recognizes something in the ineffable quality of B’s words that Tolstoy just doesn’t! “He finds these unmatched phrases for all the pains, for all the balms—phrases torn up by the roots from his own heaven and hell and unfindable in any other man’s, phrases from a planet which he alone has lived in and which is like nothing we know of.”

[Neşe Kalyoncu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marcel Proust benim bu kitabı bitirdiğim günün 102 yıl öncesinde 51 yaşındayken hayata gözlerini yummuştur. Fark etmesi ilginç bir tesadüf oldu, sanatla ve güzellikle dolup taşan ruhlar bir şekilde hep hayatın birbirine yakın koridorlarında yürüyorlar.

Not: Kitabın kapağındaki resim:
Impression, Sunrise
Painting by Claude Monet

[mixedupmary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okurken zorlandığım kısımlar olmadı değil ama mesela Ressamlar özel ilgi alanım olduğu için çok rahatlıkla okudum. Şairler ve edebiyatla ilgili kısımda ufkum genişledi diyebilirim. Ve sanırım bir Proust kitabı okumalıyım

[Evrigon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Proust diye kulak veriyorsunuz, size şiirsel dille fikirlerini anlatıyor. Açıkçası çekilesi bir üslup değil. Romanlarını okumaya devam.

[Murat Can · Rating 4 out of 5]

kayıp zamanın izinde'ye girişmem için gazladı beni, iyi.

[Cumhur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marcel Proust'un çağdaşı kitap, resim, müzik eserlerini yorumladığı blog sayfası (: