Marcel Proust

Source

• Born: 10 July 1871
• Birthplace: Auteuil, France
• Died: 18 November 1922 (Pneumonia)
• Best Known As: Author of Remembrance of Things Past

From a well-to-do family, young Marcel Proust was a critic, translator and socialite in Paris at the turn of the century. After the deaths of his parents (in 1903 and 1905), Proust retreated from a busy social life to his notorious cork-lined room and worked the rest of his life on his masterpiece novel, A la Recherche du temps perdu (also known as Remembrance of Things Past, and more recently translated as In Search of Lost Time). The sprawling, autobiographical novel is considered one of the greatest works of French literature.

(click to enlarge)
Marcel Proust, oil painting by Jacques-Émile Blanche; in a private collection. (credit: Permission S.P.A.D.E.M. 1971 by French Reproduction Rights, Inc.; photograph J.E. Bulloz)

(born July 10, 1871, Auteuil, near Paris, France — died Nov. 18, 1922, Paris) French novelist. Born to a wealthy family, he studied law and literature. His social connections allowed him to become an observant habitué of the most exclusive drawing rooms of the nobility, and he wrote social pieces for Parisian journals. He published essays and stories, including the story collection Pleasures and Days (1896). He had suffered from asthma since childhood, and c. 1897 he began to disengage from social life as his health declined. Half-Jewish himself, he became a major supporter of Alfred Dreyfus in the affair that made French anti-Semitism into a national issue. Deeply affected by his mother's death in 1905, he withdrew further from society. An incident of involuntary revival of childhood memory in 1909 led him to retire almost totally into an eccentric seclusion in his cork-lined bedroom to write À la recherche du temps perdu (1913 – 27; In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past). The vast seven-part novel is at once a kind of autobiography, a vast social panorama of France in the years just before and during World War I, and an immense meditation on love and jealousy and on art and its relation to reality. One of the supreme achievements in fiction of all time, it brought him worldwide fame and affected the entire climate of the 20th-century novel.

For more information on Marcel Proust, visit Britannica.com.

The French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) ranks as one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century. He abandoned plot and traditional dramatic action for the vision of the first-person narrator confronting his world.

Marcel Proust was born to wealthy bourgeois parents on July 10, 1871, in Auteuil, a suburb of Paris. The first son of Dr. Adrien Proust and Jeanne Weil, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish financier, he was hypersensitive, nervous, and frail. When he was 9 years old, his first attack of asthma, a disease that greatly influenced his life, nearly suffocated him. In 1882 Proust enrolled in the Lycée Condorcet. Only during his last 2 years of study there did he distinguish himself as a student, attracting the interest of his philosophy professor, Marie-Alphonse Daru. After a year of military service, Proust studied law and then philosophy.

In the meantime, Proust was creating a name for himself in high society as a brilliant conversationalist with an ear for speech patterns that enabled him to mimic others with devastating ease and accuracy. His verve, dark features, pale complexion, and elegant taste fascinated the hosts of the smart Parisian set that he eagerly courted. Although he soon earned the reputation of a snob and social climber, Proust's intimate friends saw him as generous, extremely intelligent, capable of serious thinking, and as an excellent intellectual companion. But he irritated through his eagerness to please, his intensity of emotion, and his indecisiveness. Proust was not indecisive, however, about his commitment to writing.

Early Works

In 1892 and 1893 Proust contributed a number of critical notes and sketches and two short stories to the ephemeral journal Le Banquet and to La Revue blanche. He published his first work in 1896, a collection of short stories, short verse portraits of artists and musicians, and incidental pieces written during the preceding 6 years. Les Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days) received cursory notice in the press despite its preface by Anatole France. The book did little to dispel the prevalent notion of Proust as an effete dandy. His interest in analysis of rare and exquisite feelings, his preoccupation with high society, and his refined style were all too familiar to allow his readers to see a talented and serious writer groping for eternal truths and a personal style.

In 1895, even before he published Les Plaisirs et les jours, Proust had made a first attempt at a major work. Unable to handle his material satisfactorily, unsure of himself, and unclear about the manner of achieving the goals he had set, Proust abandoned the work in 1899. It appeared, under the title of Jean Santeuil, only in 1952; from thousands of notebook pages, Bernard de Fallois had culled and organized the novel according to a sketchy plan he found among them. As a consequence the novel is uneven; many passages announce, duplicate, or are variations of passages in Proust's masterpiece, and others are incoherent or apparently irrelevant. Some, however, are beautifully lyric or analytic. Jean Santeuil is Proust's first attempt to come to grips with material that later yielded so much in À la recherche du temps perdu. Jean Santeuil is the biography of an imaginary character who struggles with himself, his family, and his environment in order to discover, justify, and affirm his artistic vocation. Through episodes and sketches Proust traced Jean Santeuil's progress toward maturity, touching upon many of the themes he later developed more fully: the impact of nature upon the sensibility; the silent work of the imagination in involuntary memory; memory bridging gaps in time; the effects of events such as the Alfred Dreyfus case upon society; the snobbery of social intercourse; the self-oriented nature of love; and the liberating power of art.

After abandoning Jean Santeuil, Proust returned to his studies. Although he read widely in other literatures, he was limited to translations. During 1899 he became interested in the works of John Ruskin, and after Ruskin's death (Jan. 20, 1900), Proust published an obituary of the English critic in La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité (Jan. 27, 1900) that established him as a Ruskin scholar. Proust's Pélerinages ruskiniens en France appeared in Le Figaro in February and was followed by several more articles on Ruskin in Le Mercure de France and in La Gazette des beaux-arts. With the help of an English-speaking friend, Marie Nordlinger, and his mother, Proust translated Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906). Grappling with Ruskin's ideas on art and its relationship to ethics helped him clarify his own esthetic ideas and move beyond the impasse of Jean Santeuil.

In 1903 Proust's father died. His own health, deteriorating since 1899, suffered an even greater shock following the death of his mother in September 1905. These setbacks forced Proust into the sanatorium of Dr. Paul Sollier (in December 1905), where he entertained hopes of curing his asthma. Undoubtedly preferring his illness to any cure, Proust left, "fantastically ill, " in less than 2 months. After more than 2 years of seclusion, he emerged once again into society and into print with a series of articles and pastiches published in Le Figaro during 1907 and 1908. From 1905 to 1908 Proust had been mysteriously working on a novel; he abandoned it, too, in favor of a new one he had begun to plan when he realized the necessity of still another dress rehearsal. He wrote pastiches of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Charles Sainte-Beuve, and others (February-March 1908), and this activity led Proust inadvertently to problems of literary criticism and to a clearer formulation of a literary work as an art object. By November 1908 Proust was planning his Contre Sainte-Beuve (published in 1954; On Art and Literature), a rebuttal of Sainte-Beuve, the recognized master of historical literary criticism. The true writer expresses a self, Proust felt, that is completely hidden beneath the one manifested "in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we want to try to understand that self, it is only by trying to re-create it deep in ourselves, that we can succeed." By reacting to Sainte-Beuve, Proust formulated, in terms applicable to the artist as well as to the reader, the notion that lies at the heart of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust finished Contre Sainte-Beuve during the summer of 1909 and began almost immediately to compose his great novel.

Remembrance of Things Past

Although Proust had, by 1909, accumulated and reworked most of the material that was to become À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), he still had not fully grasped the focal point that would enable him to structure and to orchestrate his vast material. In January 1909 he had a series of experiences that bore belated fruit during the early summer of that year. The sudden conjunction of flavors in a cup of tea and toast evoked in him sensations that recalled his youth in his grandfather's garden at Auteuil. Although he had had similar experiences in the past and had considered them important, he had not realized that not only were these experiences a key element in an artist's work but also they could serve as the organizing principle of his novel. They revealed the hidden self that Proust had spoken of in Contre Sainte-Beuve, a present self identical to the one in various moments of past time. This process of artistic resurrection and the gradual discovery of its effectiveness, he realized, was the focal point his novel required. À la recherche du temps perdu, like Balzac's La Comédie humaine, depicts the many facets of a whole society in a specific period of history. Political events, such as the Dreyfus case; social transformations, such as the rise of the bourgeoisie and the decline of the nobility; artistic events; evaluations in music, art, and literature; and different social milieus from the working class to bohemian circles - all found their place in Proust's panorama of French life during the decades around the turn of the century. But Proust was primarily concerned with portraying not reality but its perception by his narrator, Marcel, and its capacity to provoke and reveal Marcel's permanent self, normally hidden by habit and social intercourse. From the very first words of his predominantly first-person narrative, Marcel traces his evolution through a multiplicity of recalled experiences to the final realization that these experiences, processed and stored in his memory, reflect his inner life more truly than does his outer life, that their resuscitation in their immediacy destroys spans of elapsed time, that their telling answers his long search for an artistic vocation, and that they form, in fact, the substance of his novel. A key event in the resolution of the novel is the narrator's discovery of the powers of involuntary memory.

Proust began his novel in July 1909, and he worked furiously on it until death interrupted his corrections, revisions, and additions. In 1913, after several rejections, he found in Grasset a publisher who would produce, at the author's expense, the first of three projected volumes (Du Côté de chez Swann, Le Côté de Guermantes, and Le Temps retrouvé; Swann's Way, The Guermantes Way, and Time Regained). After the appearance of the first volume, André Gide, who had earlier rejected Proust's manuscript on behalf of Gallimard, changed his mind and in 1916 obtained the rights to publish the subsequent volumes. Meanwhile, World War I interrupted publication but not Proust's continued expansion of his work. À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Within a Budding Grove), originally only a chapter title, appeared late in 1918 as the second volume and won the Goncourt Prize the following year. As volumes appeared, Proust continually expanded his material, inserting long sections as close to publication as the galley stage. Le Côté de Guermantes appeared in 1920; Sodome et Gomorrhe (Cities of the Plain), Part 1, appeared in 1921 and the two volumes of Part 2 in 1922. Feeling his end approaching, Proust finished drafting his novel and began revising and correcting proofs, expanding the text as he went along with what he called "supernourishment." Proust had completed revisions of La Prisonnière (The Captive) and had begun reworking Albertine disparue (The Sweet Cheat Gone) when, on Nov. 18, 1922, he died of bronchitis and pneumonia contracted after a series of violent asthma attacks. The final volumes of his novel appeared owing to the interest of his brother, Robert, and to the editorial supervision of Jacques Rivière: La Prisonnière, two volumes, 1923; Albertine disparue, two volumes, 1925; and Le Temps retrouvé, two volumes, 1927.

Further Reading

The major critical biography of Proust is George D. Painter, Proust (2 vols., 1959-1965). There are numerous critical studies of Proust's work in English. The most useful general introduction is Germaine Brée, The World of Marcel Proust (1966), which contains an extensive annotated bibliography. Other valuable studies are J. M. Cocking, Proust (1956); William S. Bell, Proust's Nocturnal Muse (1962); and Roger Shattuck, Proust's Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time and Recognition in "A la recherche du temps perdu" (1963). See also the chapters on Proust in Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study in Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931), and Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (1963). For general and historical background see Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France (2 vols., 1957-1961; 3d ed., 3 vols., 1966-1967), and Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914 (1966).

Proust, Marcel (1871-1922). Regarded as the greatest 20th-c. French novelist, Proust owes his fame to one 3, 000-page novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, which he began in his late thirties and on which he continued to work until his death.

He was born into an upper-middle-class Parisian family of strong scientific and artistic interests; these interests were to mark both the subject-matter of his writing and the metaphors through which he would convey his picture of the mind. His father was an eminent physician, conversant with French psychology of the day, and his mother—with whom he had the more intense relationship—was cultured and witty. The letters exchanged between mother and son show the ambivalent intimacy that may have set a pattern for his susceptible and often unhappy sexual relationships. These were homosexual; Proust was to be the first major European novelist to describe in detail the comic and tragic aspects of being a gay in a prejudiced society.

Proust's mother was Jewish; he and his younger brother were brought up as Catholics. He no doubt grew up with an awareness of the diversity of religious and cultural traditions; this awareness is part of what gives A la recherche du temps perdu its breadth. The adult Proust seems to have been an atheist or agnostic (albeit one with a keen sense of awe and mystery); certainly his mature work shows, in religious and other areas, a scepticism by turns quizzical or delighted or anguished. Such scepticism has been part of the French literary tradition for centuries, but Proust was to foreground it in a particularly modern mode.

He was educated at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, then studied law and philosophy; he was a voracious reader, but his scholastic career was some-what idiosyncratic, in part because of ill health (he was asthmatic from the age of 9). Of contemporary influences, he was perhaps most drawn to the philosophy of Bergson (to whom he was related by marriage). But to speak of this influence only would be to make far too narrow an assessment of a catholic taste that had absorbed not only the finest writings of 19th-c. France and England but also the classics of world literature, music, and painting. Direct references in all of Proust's writing (whether letters, articles, or fiction) show his detailed knowledge of, for example, Greek myth, medieval epic, George Eliot, Baudelaire; of plainsong and Bach; of the Italian Renaissance and Turner.

There has been a widely held picture of the young Proust as a dilettante—this in spite of a collection of short stories, ‘portraits’, and poems, brought out in his twenties (Les Plaisirs et les jours, 1896); the translation and annotation of some Ruskin in his thirties (La Bible d'Amiens, 1904; Sésame et les lys, 1906); the publication at various times of talented articles and pastiches [see Parody And Pastiche]; and, starting 30 years after his death, successive discoveries by scholars of many unpublished sketches or drafts. Of these drafts, the most sustained and ambitious is an unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil, written mainly in Proust's mid-to-late twenties (published 1952). Perhaps the most influential posthumous publication has been that of a short extract from drafts for A la recherche du temps perdu, known as Contre Sainte-Beuve and written c.1909. This extract, in the form in which it was published in 1954, is part essay, part autobiography, part fiction. In it Proust suggests that the kind of literary criticism which seeks close connections between works of art and the artist's own life is at best naïve, at worst wilfully stupid; for (he argues) there is an absolute division between the self which socializes with others and the ‘deeper’ self which creates in solitude. The same idea is present in A la recherche (embodied most notably in the figure of the great composer Vinteuil, despised by his neighbours). But Contre Sainte-Beuve puts the case more forcefully and single-mindedly, and it was only after its publication that mainstream French literary criticism slowly started to move away from the biographical approach. Contre Sainte-Beuve probably prompted, or at least reinforced, important new critical and literary trends in the second half of the 20th c. [see Criticism, 4].

Proust was, then, a more committed writer than his contemporaries and early commentators realized. Nevertheless, it is still true that, although clearly brilliant, he wrote nothing of real artistic importance until A la recherche. His previous writings show that he already had wit, all of his themes, many of his characters, and his gifts for metaphor, parody, and hyperbolic elaboration. But he was still groping towards a structure for these, and still often lacked complete stylistic control. It does seem that, round about 1908-9, he may have had a sudden inspiration comparable to that he gives to the narrator of A la recherche, even if it was only of how to use insights long held. Certainly, from about 1909-10 he devoted himself to a huge task of writing, revising, and expanding, using the ill health of these later years as a way of withdrawing from the fashionable social circles he had once courted. Surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs of A la recherche show how meticulously and purposefully he shaped and reshaped successive drafts.

The first volume (Du côté de chez Swann) was published in 1913, and although well received did not become immediately famous. World War I then interrupted publication. During these four years Proust greatly developed the rest of his novel, partly under the influence of the war itself, partly under that of his most passionate and tragic love-affair, but mainly because he constantly saw newly fertile ways of turning the 1, 500 pages he had already written into the still richer and more sophisticated 3, 000 we now have. With the publication of the second volume (A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1919), and the award of the Prix Goncourt, his fame was assured, and by the time he died he was attracting an international readership which has continued to grow.

Although A la recherche occasionally teases the reader with the idea that it might be Proust's own autobiography, it is not: there are very many differences, small and large, between the life of Proust the man and that of the narrator of A la recherche. The work is a great one because it is an intellectually challenging and aesthetically exquisite fiction.

[Alison Finch]

Bibliography

• Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. P. Kolb (1970- )
• R. Hayman, Proust: A Biography (1990)

Quotes:

"There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind."

"We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes."

"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last."

"Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions"

"We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance."

"For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill."

See more famous quotes by Marcel Proust

"Proust" redirects here. For other uses, see Proust (disambiguation).

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Marcel Proust
Proust in 1900
Born	10 July 1871(1871-07-10) Auteuil, France
Died	18 November 1922 (aged 51) Paris, France
Occupation	Novelist, essayist, critic
Genres	modernism
Notable work(s)	In Search of Lost Time
Influences Pierre Loti, Saint-Simon, Brantôme, Balzac, Baudelaire, Anatole France, Henri Bergson, Dostoevsky, John Ruskin, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Shakespeare
Influenced Ahmet Altan, John Banville, Samuel Beckett, Jean Cocteau, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Naguib Mahfouz, Manuel Mujica Láinez, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Orhan Pamuk, Truman Capote, John Updike,[1] Edmund White, Virginia Woolf.

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, essayist, and critic, best known as the author of À la recherche du temps perdu (in English, In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Early writing 3 In Search of Lost Time 4 Bibliography 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Biography

Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.

Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family from Alsace ^[2]. She was literate and well-read; her letters demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient for her to provide the necessary assistance to her son's later attempts to translate John Ruskin.^[3]

By the age of nine, Proust had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers. This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle's house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.)

In 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet, but his education was disrupted because of his illness. Despite this he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year. It was through his classmates that he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for In Search of Lost Time ^[4].

Despite his poor health, Proust served a year (1889–90) as an enlisted man in the French army, stationed at Coligny Caserne in Orléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode in The Guermantes' Way, part three of his novel. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting Swann's Way, the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913.

Proust had a close relationship with his mother. In order to appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, Proust obtained a volunteer position at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the summer of 1896. After exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave that extended for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did not move from his parents' apartment until after both were dead.^[3]

Grave of Marcel Proust at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Proust, who was homosexual,^[5] was one of the first European novelists to treat homosexuality openly and at length.

His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family home. His father died in November of the same year ^[6]. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905. She left him a considerable inheritance. (In US dollars circa 2006, the principal amount was worth about $6 million, with a monthly income of about $15,000.) His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate.

Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his cork-lined bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Early writing

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 1890–91 Proust published a regular society column in the journal Le Mensuel. ^[3] In 1892 he was involved in founding a literary review called Le Banquet (also the French title 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 many of these early pieces, was published. The book included a foreword by Anatole France, drawings by Mme. Lemaire, and was so sumptuously produced that it cost twice the normal price of a book its size.

That year Proust also began working on a novel, which was eventually published in 1954 and titled Jean Santeuil by his posthumous editors. Many of the themes later developed in In Search of Lost Time find their first 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 first 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. Following 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 work on it entirely by 1899.

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Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Carlyle, Emerson, and John Ruskin. Through this reading Proust began to refine his own 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 appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's view 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.^[7]

Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French, but was hampered by an imperfect command of English. In order to compensate for this he made his translations a group 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 again finally polished by Proust. Confronted about his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin".^[8] The Bible of Amiens, with Proust's extended introduction, was published in French in 1904. Both the translation and the introduction were very well reviewed; Henri Bergson called Proust's introduction "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin" and had similar praise for the translation.^[3] At the time of this publication, Proust was already at work on translating Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, which he completed in June 1905, just prior to his mother's death, and published in 1906. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that, apart from Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences included Saint-Simon, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy.

1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer. During the first part of the year he published in various journals pastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation may have allowed 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 Saint-Beuve. Proust described what he was working on in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a study 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 study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel".^[3]

Robert de Montesquiou, the inspiration for Baron de Charlus in À la recherche du temps perdu

From these disparate fragments Proust began to shape a novel on which he worked continually during this period. The rough outline of the work centered 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 theory that biography was the most important tool for understanding 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 the final section 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.

In Search of Lost Time

Main article: In Search of Lost Time

Begun in 1909, À la recherche du temps perdu consists of seven volumes totalling around 3,200 pages and featuring more than 2,000 characters. Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century", and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date." Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother, Robert.

The book was translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, appearing as Remembrance of Things Past between 1922 and 1931. Scott Moncrieff translated volumes one through six of the seven volumes, dying before completing the last. This last volume was rendered by other translators at different times. When Scott Moncrieff's translation was later revised (first by Kilmartin, then by Enright) the title of the novel was changed, to the more literal In Search of Lost Time.

In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of the book by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, based on the latest, most complete and authoritative French text. Its six volumes (comprising Proust's seven) were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. The first four (those which under American copyright law are in the public domain) have since been published in the U.S. under the Viking imprint and in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint.

Bibliography

• 1896 Les plaisirs et les jours ("Pleasures and Days")
• 1904 La Bible D'Amiens; a translation of John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens
• 1906 Sésame et les lys; a translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies
• 1913–27 À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, also Remembrance of Things Past)

Vol.	French titles	Published	English titles
1	Du côté de chez Swann	1913	Swann's Way The Way by Swann's
2	À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs	1919	Within a Budding Grove In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
3	Le Côté de Guermantes (published in two volumes)	1920/21	The Guermantes Way
4	Sodome et Gomorrhe (published in two volumes)	1921/22	Cities of the Plain Sodom and Gomorrah
5	La Prisonnière	1923	The Captive The Prisoner
6	La Fugitive Albertine disparue	1925	The Fugitive The Sweet Cheat Gone Albertine Gone
7	Le Temps retrouvé	1927	The Past Recaptured Time Regained Finding Time Again Remembrance of Things Past

• 1919 Pastiches et mélanges ("Mixtures")
• 1954 Contre Sainte-Beuve ("Against Sainte-Beuve")
• 1954 Jean Santeuil (unfinished)

See also

• Involuntary memory
• "Proust", an essay by Samuel Beckett
• Proust Questionnaire

References

1. ^ James Marcus, review of John Updike's Due Considerations (2007), 28 October 2007, "Updike [is] a self-proclaimed 'Proust-lover'" Link
2. ^ http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/massie_10_07.html
3. ^ ^{a b c d e} Tadié, J-Y. (Euan Cameron, trans.) Marcel Proust: A life. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000.
4. ^ Painter, George D (1959) Marcel Proust A Biography Vols. 1 & 2. London: Chatto & Windus
5. ^ White, Edmund (1999). "Marcel Proust". http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/white-proust.html. Retrieved 2008-06-13. 
6. ^ Carter, William C. (2000) Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press
7. ^ (Tadié 350)
8. ^ (Tadié)

• Adorno, Theodor (1967) "Prisms." The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
• Aciman, André (2004) The Proust Project. New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Albaret, Céleste (Barbara Bray, trans.) (2003) Monsieur Proust. The New York Review of Books
• Alexander, Patrick (2009) 'Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time.' Vintage Books, New York, ISBN 978-0-307-47232-8
• Bernard, Anne-Marie (2002) The World of Proust, as seen by Paul Nadar. Cambridge: MIT Press
• Carter, William C. (2000) Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press
• Davenport-Hines, Richard (2006) A Night at the Majestic. Faber and Faber ISBN 9780571220090
• De Botton, Alain (1998) How Proust Can Change Your Life. New York: Vintage Books
• Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
• Painter, George D (1959) Marcel Proust A Biography Vols. 1 & 2. London: Chatto & Windus
• Shattuck, Roger (1963) Proust's Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in À la recherche du temps perdu. New York: Random House
• Shattuck, Roger (2000) Proust's Way: A Field Guide To In Search of Lost Time, W. W. Norton
• Tadié, Jean-Yves: Marcel Proust: A Life. Viking, New York, 2000
• White, Edmund (1998) Marcel Proust. New York: Viking Books

External links

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Learning resources from Wikiversity

• The Kolb-Proust Archive for Research
• Marcel Proust, a personal site in Italian
• Essay by Stephan Reimertz on Proust in Germany (in French)
• Works by Marcel Proust in English, at Project Gutenberg Australia
• Proust and Deleuze (Madrid)
• Why Proust? And Why Now? - an essay on the lasting relevance of Proust and his work
• Reading Proust- A reader enjoys new translations of In Search of Lost Time.
• TempsPerdu.com- links including to online texts of Lost Time in French and English
• Marcel Proust's Album Proust receives a tribute in this album of "recomposed photographs"
• Proust lu sur Internet : Le Baiser de la Matrice Web-film of the reading of "In Search of Lost Time" online, in French, by 4000 websurfers

Online texts

• Works by Marcel Proust (public domain in Canada)
• Works by Marcel Proust at Project Gutenberg French text of volumes 1-4 and Swann's Way in English translation
• University of Adelaide Library French text of volumes 1-4 and the complete novel in English translation

v • d • e The writings of Marcel Proust Novels and essays Les plaisirs et les jours · Pastiches et mélanges · Contre Sainte-Beuve · Jean Santeuil Translations La Bible D'Amiens (Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens) · Sésame et les lys (Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies) In Search of Lost Time Du côté de chez Swann · À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs · Le Côté de Guermantes · Sodome et Gomorrhe · La Prisonnière · Albertine disparue · Le Temps retrouvé

Persondata
NAME	Proust, Marcel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Proust, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel
SHORT DESCRIPTION	French Novelist, essayist
DATE OF BIRTH	10 July 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH	Auteuil, France
DATE OF DEATH	18 November 1922
PLACE OF DEATH	Paris, France

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