French realism of the 19th century in the work of Honore Balzac. Features of the realistic manner of balzac Ch. Dickens' novel "The Adventures of Oliver Twist"

18.10.2020

We are moving on to a new chapter in nineteenth-century literature, nineteenth-century French realism. To French realism, which began its activity somewhere on the threshold of the 1830s. It will be about Balzac, Stendhal, Prosper Merim. This is a special galaxy of French realists - these three writers: Balzac, Stendhal, Merimee. They by no means exhaust the history of realism in French literature. They just started this literature. But they are a special case. I would call them that: the great realists of the romantic era. Think about this definition. The whole era, up to the thirties and even to the forties, basically belongs to romanticism. But against the background of romanticism, writers of a completely different orientation, a realistic orientation, appear. There are still disputes in France. French historians very often consider Stendhal, Balzac, and Merimee as romantics. For them, this is a special type of romance. Yes, and they themselves ... For example, Stendhal. Stendhal considered himself a romantic. He wrote essays in defense of romanticism. But one way or another, these three, named by me - and Balzac, and Stendhal, and Merimee - are realists of a very special nature. In every possible way it affects that they are the offspring of the romantic era. Not being romantics - they are still the offspring of the romantic era. Their realism is very special, different from the realism of the second half of the 19th century. In the second half of the 19th century, we are dealing with a purer culture of realism. Pure, free from impurities and impurity. We observe something similar in Russian literature. It is clear to everyone what a difference there is between the realism of Gogol and Tolstoy. And the main difference is that Gogol is also a realist of the romantic era. A realist who emerged against the backdrop of the romantic era, in its culture. By the time of Tolstoy, however, romanticism had wilted, had left the stage. The realism of Gogol and Balzac was equally nourished by the culture of romanticism. And it is often very difficult to draw any dividing line.

It is not necessary to think that there was romanticism in France, then it left the stage and something else came. It was like this: there was romanticism, and at some time realists came on the scene. And they didn't kill romanticism. Romanticism was still played out on the stage, although there were Balzac, and Stendhal, and Mérimée.

So, the first one I will talk about is Balzac. The great French writer Honore de Balzac. 1799-1850 are the dates of his life. He is the greatest writer, perhaps the most significant writer that France has ever put forward. One of the main figures in the literature of the 19th century, a writer who left extraordinary traces in the literature of the 19th century, a writer of great fertility. He left a whole horde of novels behind him. A great worker of literature, a man who tirelessly worked on manuscripts and galleys. A night worker who spent whole nights working on the typesetting of his books. And this huge, unheard-of productivity - it kind of killed him, this nightly work on typographical sheets. His life was short. He worked with all his might.

In general, he had such a manner: he did not finish the manuscripts. And the real finishing for him was already beginning in proofs, in layout. Which, by the way, is impossible in modern conditions, because now there is a different way of dialing. And then, with manual dialing, it was possible.

So, this work on manuscripts, mixed with black coffee. Nights with black coffee. When he died, his friend Théophile Gauthier wrote in a wonderful obituary: Balzac died murdered by so many cups of coffee he drank during the night hours.

But what is remarkable, he was not only a writer. He was a man of very intense life. He was passionate about politics, political struggle, social life. Traveled a lot. He was engaged, though always unsuccessfully, but with great fervor he was engaged in commercial affairs. Tried to be a publisher. At one time he set out to develop silver mines in Syracuse. Collector. He has amassed an excellent collection of paintings. And so on and so forth. A man of very wide and peculiar life. Without this circumstance, he would not have had the nourishment for his most extensive novels.

He was a man of the most humble origins. His grandfather was a simple farmer. My father had already made it to the people, he was an official.

Balzac - this is one of his weaknesses - was in love with the aristocracy. He would probably trade many of his talents for a good lineage. Grandfather was simply Balsa, a purely peasant surname. Father has already begun to call himself Balzac. "Ak" is a noble ending. And Honore arbitrarily added the particle "de" to his surname. So from Bals, two generations later, de Balzac turned out.

Balzac is a great innovator in literature. This is a man who opened up new territories in literature that had never been truly cultivated by anyone before him. In what area is his innovation primarily? Balzac created a new theme. Of course, everything in the world has predecessors. Nevertheless, Balzac created an entirely new theme. With such breadth and boldness, his thematic field has not yet been processed by anyone before him.

What was this new theme? How to define it, almost unprecedented in the literature on such a scale? I would say this: Balzac's new theme is the material practice of modern society. On some modest domestic scale, material practice has always been part of literature. But the fact is that Balzac presents material practice on a colossal scale. And unusually diverse. This is the world of production: industry, agriculture, trade (or, as Balzac preferred to say, commerce); any kind of acquisition; the creation of capitalism; the history of how people make money; the history of wealth, the history of money speculation; notary office where transactions are made; all kinds of modern careers, the struggle for life, the struggle for existence, the struggle for success, for material success above all. This is the content of Balzac's novels.

I said that to some extent all these themes have been developed in literature before, but never on a Balzacian scale. All of France, contemporary to him, creating material values - all this France Balzac rewrote in his novels. Plus political life, administrative. He strives for encyclopedism in his novels. And when he realizes that some branch of modern life has not yet been displayed to him, he immediately rushes to fill in the gaps. Court. There is no court yet in his novels - he is writing a novel about courts. There is no army - a novel about the army. Not all provinces are described - the missing provinces are introduced into the novel. Etc.

Over time, he began to introduce all his novels into a single epic and gave it the name "Human Comedy". Not a random name. "The Human Comedy" was supposed to cover the whole of French life, starting (and this was especially important for him) from its lowest manifestations: agriculture, industry, trade - and rising higher and higher ...

Balzac has appeared in literature, like all people of this generation, since the 1820s. His real heyday was in the thirties, like the romantics, like Victor Hugo. They walked side by side. The only difference is that Victor Hugo far outlived Balzac. It is as if everything I have said about Balzac separates him from romanticism. Well, what did the romantics care about industry, before trade? Many of them disdained these items. It is hard to imagine a romance for which the main nerve is trade as such, in which merchants, sellers, agents of firms would be the main characters. And with all that, Balzac, in his own way, approaches the romantics. He was eminently inherent in the romantic idea that art exists as a force fighting reality. Like a force that rivals reality. Romantics viewed art as a contest with life. Moreover, they believed that art is stronger than life: art wins in this competition. Art takes away from life everything that life lives for, according to the romantics. In this regard, the short story of the remarkable American romantic Edgar Allan Poe is significant. It sounds a little strange: American romanticism. For whom romanticism is not befitting, this is America. However, in America there was a romantic school and there was such a wonderful romantic as Edgar Allan Poe. He has a short story "The Oval Portrait". This is a story about how one young artist began to paint his young wife, with whom he was in love. An oval portrait began to be made of her. And the portrait worked. But here's what happened: the further the portrait moved, the clearer it became that the woman with whom the portrait was being painted was withering and withering. And when the portrait was ready, the artist's wife died. The portrait took on life, and the living woman died. Art conquered life, took away all the strength from life; absorbed all her strength. And canceled life, made it unnecessary.

Balzac had this idea of a contest with life. Here he is writing his epic, The Human Comedy. He writes it in order to cancel reality. All France will pass into his novels. There are anecdotes about Balzac, very characteristic anecdotes. A niece came to him from the province. He, as always, was very busy, but went out with her to the garden for a walk. He wrote at that time "Eugene Grande". She told him, this girl, about some uncle, aunt ... He listened to her very impatiently. Then he said: enough, let's get back to reality. And he told her the plot of Eugenia Grande. It was called a return to reality.

Now the question is: why was it Balzac who adopted all this huge subject matter of modern material practice in literature? Why was it not in literature before Balzac?

You see, there is such a naive view, which, unfortunately, our criticism still adheres to: as if absolutely everything that exists can and should be represented in art. Everything can be the theme of art and all arts. They tried to portray the meeting of the local committee in a ballet. The local committee is a respectable phenomenon - why shouldn't the ballet imitate a meeting of the local committee? Serious political themes are developed in the puppet theater. They lose all seriousness. In order for this or that phenomenon of life to be able to ENTER into art, certain conditions are needed. This is not done in a direct way at all. How do they explain why Gogol began to portray officials? Well, there were officials, and Gogol began to portray them. But even before Gogol there were officials. This means that the mere existence of a fact does not mean that this fact can become a topic of literature.

I remember once I came to the Writers' Union. And there is a huge announcement: The Union of Counter Workers announces a competition for the best play from the life of counter workers. I don't think it's possible to write a good play about the life of the counter workers. And they thought: we exist, therefore, a play can be written about us. I exist, therefore I can be made into art. And this is not so at all. I think that Balzac with his new themes could have appeared precisely at this time, only in the 1820s and 1830s, in the era of the unfolding of capitalism in France. in the post-revolutionary era. A writer like Balzac is unthinkable in the eighteenth century. Although in the XVIII century there was agriculture, and industry, and trade, etc. And notaries existed, and merchants, and if they were taken out in literature, then usually under a comic sign. And in Balzac they are displayed in the most serious sense. Let's take Molière. When Moliere portrays a merchant, a notary is a comedic character. And Balzac has no comedy. Although he, for special reasons, called his entire epic "The Human Comedy."

So, I ask why this sphere, this huge sphere of material practice, why it is in this era that it becomes the property of literature? And the answer is this. Of course, the whole point is in those upheavals, in that social upheaval and in those individual upheavals that the revolution brought about. The revolution has removed every kind of shackles, every kind of forcible guardianship, every kind of regulation from the material practice of society. This was the main content of the French Revolution: the struggle against all the forces that limit the development of material practice, holding it back.

Indeed, imagine how France lived before the revolution. Everything was under state supervision. Everything was controlled by the state. The industrialist had no independent rights. A merchant who produced cloth - he was prescribed by the state what kind of cloth he should produce. There was a whole army of overseers, state controllers, who saw to it that these conditions were observed. Industrialists could produce only what was provided by the state. In amounts provided by the state. Let's say you couldn't develop production indefinitely. Before the revolution, you were told that your enterprise must exist on some strictly defined scale. How many pieces of cloth you can throw into the market - it's all been prescribed. The same applied to trade. Trade was regulated.

Well, what about agriculture? Agriculture was serfdom.

The revolution canceled all this. It gave industry and commerce complete freedom. She freed the peasants from serfdom. In other words, the French Revolution introduced the spirit of freedom and initiative into the material practice of society. And so the whole material practice began to play with life. She acquired independence, individuality, and therefore was able to become the property of art. Balzac's material practice is imbued with the spirit of powerful energy and personal freedom. Behind material practice, people are visible everywhere. Personalities. Free personalities directing it. And in this area, which seemed to be hopeless prose, a kind of poetry is now appearing.

Only that which comes out of the realm of prose, out of the realm of proseism, in which a poetic meaning appears, can enter into literature and art. A certain phenomenon becomes the property of art because it exists with a poetic content.

And the personalities themselves, these heroes of material practice, have changed a lot after the revolution. Merchants, industrialists - after the revolution they are completely different people. New practice, free practice requires initiative. First and foremost, initiatives. Free material practice requires talent from its heroes. One must be not only an industrialist, but a talented industrialist.

And you look - these heroes of Balzac, these doers of millions, for example, old Grande - after all, these are talented individuals. Grande does not cause sympathy for himself, but he is a big man. This is talent, mind. This is a real strategist and tactician in his viticulture. Yes, character, talent, intelligence - that's what was required of these new people in all areas.

But people without talents in industry, trade - they are dying at Balzac.

Remember Balzac's novel The History of the Greatness and Fall of Cesar Biroto? Why Cesar Biroto could not stand it, could not cope with life? But because he was mediocrity. And Balzac's mediocrity perishes.

And the financiers of Balzac? Gobsek. This is a highly talented individual. I am not talking about its other properties. This is a talented person, this is an outstanding mind, isn't it?

They tried to compare Gobsek and Plushkin. This is very instructive. We in Russia had no grounds for this. Plushkin - what kind of Gobsek is this? No talent, no mind, no will. This is a pathological figure.

Old Goriot is not as mediocre as Biroto. But still, old Goriot suffers a wreck. He has some commercial talents, but they are not enough. Here Grande, old Grande, is a grandiose personality. You can't say that old Grande is vulgar, prosaic. Although he is only busy with his calculations. This miser, this callous soul - after all, he is not prosaic. I would say this about him: this is a big robber ... Isn't it? He can compete in some importance with Byron's Corsair. Yes, he is a corsair. A special corsair of warehouses with wine barrels. Corsair on the merchant class. This is a very big man. Like others ... Balzac has many such heroes ...

The liberated material practice of post-revolutionary bourgeois society speaks in these people. She made these people. She gave them scope, gave them gifts, sometimes even genius. Some of the financiers or entrepreneurs of Balzac are geniuses.

Now the second. What did the bourgeois revolution change? The material practice of society, yes. You see, people work for themselves. The manufacturer, the merchant - they do not work for state fees, but for themselves, which gives them energy. But at the same time they work for society. To certain social values. They work with some vast social horizon in mind.

The peasant cultivated the vineyard for his master - this was the case before the revolution. The industrialist fulfilled the state order. Now it's all gone. They work for an uncertain market. On society. Not for individuals, but for society. So this is what the content of The Human Comedy is primarily about - in the liberated element of material practice. Remember, we constantly talked to you that romantics glorify the element of life in general, the energy of life in general, as Victor Hugo did. Balzac differs from the romantics in that his novels are also filled with elements and energy, but this element and energy receives a certain content. This element is the flow of material things that exist in business, in exchange, in commercial transactions, and so on and so forth.

Moreover, Balzac makes one feel that this element of material practice is an element of paramount importance. Therefore, there are no comedies here.

Here's a comparison for you. Molière has a predecessor of Gobseck. There is a Harpagon. But Harpagon is a funny, comic figure. And if you shoot everything funny, you get Gobsek. He may be disgusting, but not funny.

Molière lived in the depths of another society, and this making of money might have seemed to him a comic occupation. Balzac is not. Balzac understood that making money is the foundation of the foundations. How could this be funny?

Good. But the question is, why is the whole epic called "The Human Comedy"? Everything is serious, everything is significant. Still, it's a comedy. Ultimately, it's a comedy. At the end of all things.

Balzac comprehended the great contradiction of modern society. Yes, all these bourgeois that he portrays, all these industrialists, financiers, merchants and so on - I said - they work for society. But the contradiction lies in the fact that it is not a social force that works for society, but individual individuals. But this material practice is itself not socialized, it is anarchic, individual. And this is the great antithesis, the great contrast, which is captured by Balzac. Balzac, like Victor Hugo, knows how to see antitheses. Only he sees them more realistically than is typical of Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo does not grasp such basic antitheses of modern society as a romantic. And Balzac grasps. And the first and greatest contradiction is that it is not a social force that is working on society. Scattered individuals work for society. Material practice is in the hands of scattered individuals. And these disparate individuals are forced to wage a fierce struggle with each other. It is well known that in bourgeois society the general phenomenon is competition. This competitive struggle, with all its consequences, Balzac perfectly portrayed. Competitive fight. Bestial relations between some competitors and others. The struggle is for destruction, for suppression. Every bourgeois, every worker in material practice is forced to achieve a monopoly for himself, to suppress the enemy. This society is captured very well in one letter from Belinsky to Botkin. This letter is dated December 2-6, 1847: “The merchant is a creature by nature vulgar, cheesy, low, contemptible, for he serves Plutus, and this god is more jealous than all other gods and has the right to say more than them: whoever is not for me, he against me. He demands for himself a man of everything, without division, and then generously rewards him; he throws the incomplete adherents into bankruptcy, and then into prison, and finally into poverty. A merchant is a creature whose purpose of life is profit, it is impossible to set limits to this profit. It is like sea water: it does not satisfy thirst, but only irritates it more. The trader cannot have interests that are not related to his pocket. For him, money is not a means, but an end, and people are also an end; he has no love and compassion for them, he is more ferocious than the beast, more inexorable than death.<...>This is not a portrait of a shopkeeper in general, but of a genius shopkeeper.” It can be seen that by that time Belinsky had read Balzac. It was Balzac who suggested to him that the shopkeeper could be a genius, Napoleon. This is Balzac's discovery.

So, what should be highlighted in this letter? It is said that the pursuit of money in modern society does not and cannot have a measure. Here in the old society, pre-bourgeois, a person could set limits for himself. And in the society in which Balzac lived, the measure - any measure - disappears. If you earned yourself only a house with a garden, then you can be sure that in a few months your house and garden will be sold under the hammer. A person should strive to expand his capital. It is no longer a matter of his personal greed. In Molière, Harpagon loves money. And this is his personal weakness. Disease. And Gobsek cannot but adore money. He should strive for this endless expansion of his wealth.

Here is the game, here is the dialectic that Balzac constantly reproduces before you. The revolution liberated material relations, material practice. She began by making man free. And it leads to the fact that material interest, material practice, the pursuit of money eats a person to the end. These people, liberated by the revolution, are transformed by the course of things into slaves of material practice, into its captives, whether they like it or not. And this is the real content of Balzac's comedy.

Things, material things, money, property interests eat people up. Real life in this society belongs not to people, but to things. It turns out that dead things have a soul, passions, will, and a person turns into a thing.

Remember old Grande, the arch-millionaire who was enslaved by his millions? Remember his monstrous stinginess? A nephew is coming from Paris. He treats him with almost crow broth. Remember how he raises his daughter?

Dead - things, capital, money become masters in life, and the living become dead. This is the terrible human comedy depicted by Balzac.

Honoré de Balzac (French Honoré de Balzac [ɔnɔʁe də balˈzak]; May 20, 1799, Tours - August 18, 1850, Paris) - French writer, one of the founders of realism in European literature.

The largest work of Balzac is a series of novels and short stories "The Human Comedy", which paints a picture of the life of contemporary French society for the writer. Balzac's work was very popular in Europe and during his lifetime earned him a reputation as one of the greatest prose writers of the 19th century. The works of Balzac influenced the prose of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Zola, Faulkner and others.

Balzac's father made a fortune by buying and selling confiscated noble lands during the years of the revolution, and later became assistant to the mayor of the city of Tours. Has no relation to the French writer Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597-1654). Honore's father changed his surname and became Balzac, and later bought himself a de particle. Mother was the daughter of a Parisian merchant.

The father prepared his son for advocacy. In 1807-1813, Balzac studied at the College of Vendome, in 1816-1819 - at the Paris School of Law, at the same time he worked as a scribe for a notary; however, he abandoned his legal career and devoted himself to literature. Parents did little for their son. He was placed at the College Vendôme against his will. Meetings with relatives there were forbidden all year round, with the exception of the Christmas holidays. During the first years of his studies, he repeatedly had to be in a punishment cell. In the fourth grade, Honore began to come to terms with school life, but he did not stop mocking teachers ... At the age of 14, he fell ill, and his parents took him home at the request of the college authorities. For five years, Balzac was seriously ill, it was believed that there was no hope of recovery, but soon after the family moved to Paris in 1816, he recovered.

After 1823, he published several novels under various pseudonyms in the spirit of "violent romanticism". Balzac strove to follow the literary fashion, and later he himself called these literary experiments "real literary disgust" and preferred not to think about them. In 1825-1828 he tried to engage in publishing, but failed.

Balzac wrote a lot. The Human Comedy alone contains over ninety works. This is a real encyclopedia of bourgeois society, a whole world created by the artist's imagination in the image and likeness of the real world. Balzac has his own social hierarchy: noble and bourgeois dynasties, ministers and generals, bankers and criminals, notaries and prosecutors, priests and courtesans of all ranks, great writers and literary jackals, barricade fighters and police officers. There are about two thousand characters in The Human Comedy, many of them moving from novel to novel, constantly returning to the reader's field of vision. But, despite such a variety of characters and situations, the theme of Balzac's works is always the same. He depicts the tragedy of the human person under the yoke of the inexorable antagonistic laws of bourgeois society. This theme and the corresponding way of depicting it is Balzac's independent discovery, his real step forward in the artistic development of mankind. He understood the originality of his literary position. In the preface to a collection of his works of 1838, Balzac states it as follows: "The author expects other reproaches, among them there will be a reproach of immorality; but he has already clearly explained that he is obsessed with an obsessive idea to describe society as a whole, as it is: with its virtuous, honorable, great, shameful sides, with the confusion of his mixed classes, with the confusion of principles, with his new needs and old contradictions ... He thought that there was nothing more surprising to do but describe a great social disease, and it could only be described together with society, since the sick person is the disease itself"

Realism and Balzac's Human Comedy. Features of the artistic style of the writer. The Human Comedy is a cycle of works by the French writer Honore de Balzac, compiled by himself from his 137 works and includes novels with real, fantastic and philosophical plots depicting French society during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy (1815-1848). French writer Honore de Balzac (1799 - 1850) - the largest representative of critical realism (it is generally accepted that critical realism reveals the conditionality of the circumstances of a person's life and his psychology by the social environment (novels by O. Balzac, J. Eliot) in Western European literature. "Human Comedy" , which, according to the ingenious writer's plan, was to become the same encyclopedia of life as Dante's "Divine Comedy" was for his time, unites about a hundred works. Balzac sought to capture "the entire social reality, without bypassing a single situation of human life." "opens the philosophical novel Shagreen Skin, which was, as it were, a prelude to it. Shagreen Skin is the starting point of my work," wrote Balzac. A deep realistic generalization was hidden behind the allegories of Balzac's philosophical novel. The search for artistic generalization, synthesis, determines not only the content, but also the composition of Balzac's works. Some of them are built on the development of two plots of equal importance. In monetary relations, Balzac saw the "nerve of life" of his time, "the spiritual essence of the entire current society." A new deity, a fetish, an idol - money distorted human lives, took children from their parents, wives from their husbands ... All these problems are behind the individual episodes of the story "Gobsek", Anastasi, who pushed the body of her deceased husband out of bed to find his business papers, was for Balzac the embodiment of destructive passions generated by monetary interests. The main feature of Balzac's portraits is their typicality and clear historical concretization. Balzac wrote his work in defense of truly human relationships between people. But the world he saw around him showed only ugly examples. The novel "Eugene Grande" was an innovative one produced precisely because it shows without embellishment "what kind of life happens." In his political views, Balzac was a supporter of the monarchy. Exposing the bourgeoisie, he idealized the French "patriarchal" nobility, which he considered disinterested. Balzac's contempt for bourgeois society led him after 1830 to cooperate with the Legitimist party - supporters of the so-called legitimate, that is, legal, dynasty of monarchs overthrown by the revolution. Balzac himself called this party disgusting. He was by no means a blind supporter of the Bourbons, but nevertheless embarked on the path of defending this political program, hoping that France would be saved from the bourgeois "knights of profit" by an absolute monarchy and an enlightened nobility who was aware of their duty to the country. The political ideas of Balzac the Legitimist were reflected in his work. In the preface to The Human Comedy, he even misinterpreted his entire work, declaring: "I write in the light of two eternal truths: monarchy and religion." Balzac's work did not, however, turn into an exposition of legitimist ideas. Over this side of Balzac's worldview, his irrepressible desire for truth won.

16. Biography of Stendhal. Participation in the Napoleonic campaigns. Treatise on Love.

Biography of Stendhal

The treatise "On Love" is devoted to the analysis of the emergence and development of feelings. Here Stendhal offers a classification of the varieties of this passion. He sees passion-love, passion-ambition, passion-attraction, physical passion. The first two are especially significant. The first is true, the second was born by the hypocritical 19th century. On the principle of correlation of passions and reason, their struggle, Stendhal's psychologism is built. In his hero, as in himself, two faces seem to have united: one acts, and the other watches him. Observing, he makes the most important discovery, which he himself would not be able to fully realize: "The soul has only states, it has no stable properties." We are talking about the dialectic of the soul of a Tolstoy character, but S., forcing his heroes to go through the painful path of knowledge, change their judgments under the influence of circumstances, already in due time approaches the Tolstoy type. Julien Sorel's inner monologues testify to his intense spiritual life. For S. - a student of the Enlightenment - to a greater extent in the spiritual life of a person is interested in the movement of thought. The passions of the heroes are permeated with thoughts. True, sometimes Stendhal nevertheless reproduces the actions of heroes under the influence of passion, for example, Julien's attempt to kill Madame Renal. Here, however, Stendhal avoids the study of states. He sometimes also conveys the subconscious actions of the characters, decisions that suddenly came to them, which he also does not investigate, but only indicates their existence. Stendhal's psychologism is a new stage in the development of the literary study of personality. Its materialistic basis leads to the fact that the writer, who is familiar with the experience of Constant, the author of "Adolf", not only depicts a split personality, the unexpectedness of the character's actions, but also seeks both to describe them himself and to enable the reader to independently assess the situation or character trait. Therefore, Stendhal draws actions, depicts the various reactions of a character or a number of characters to them, showing how different people are, how unexpected their reactions are. About what his means of expression are, in a letter to Balzac, he noted: “I try to write 1 - truthfully, 2 - clearly about what is happening in a person’s heart.”

The formation of French realism, starting with the work of Stendhal, took place in parallel with the further development of romanticism in France. It is significant that the first who came out with support and generally positively assessed the realistic searches of Stendhal and Balzac were Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and George Sand (1804-1876) - bright representatives of French romanticism of the Restoration and Revolution of 1830 era.

In general, it should be emphasized that French realism, especially during its formation, was not a closed and internally complete system.

It arose as a natural stage in the development of the world literary process, as an integral part of it, widely using and creatively comprehending the artistic discoveries of previous and contemporary literary movements and trends, in particular romanticism.

Typicality, in his opinion, reflects in the phenomenon the most important features of the general, and only for this reason the “type” can only be “the creation of the creative activity of the artist”.

"Poetry of fact", "poetry of reality" has become fertile ground for realist writers. The main difference between realism and romanticism became clear. If romanticism, in creating the otherness of reality, repelled from the inner world of the writer, expressing the inner aspiration of the artist's consciousness, directed to the world of reality, then realism, on the contrary, repelled from the realities of the reality surrounding him. It was this essential difference between realism and romanticism that George Sand drew attention to in her letter to Honore de Balzac: “You take a person as he appears to your eyes, and I feel called upon to portray him as I would like to see.”

Hence the different understanding by realists and romantics of the image of the author in a work of art. For example, in the "Human Comedy" the image of the author, as a rule, is not singled out as a person at all. And this is the fundamental artistic decision of Balzac the realist. Even when the image of the author expresses his own point of view, he only states the facts.

The narration itself, in the name of artistic plausibility, is emphatically impersonal: “Although Madame de Langey did not confide her thoughts to anyone, we have the right to assume ...” (“Duchess de Langey”); “Perhaps this story brought him back to the happy days of life…” (“Facino Cane”); “Each of these knights, if the data is accurate…” (“The Old Maid”).

The French researcher of the "Human Comedy", a contemporary of the writer A. Wurmser, believed that Honore de Balzac "can be called Darwin's predecessor", because "he develops the concept of the struggle for existence and natural selection." In the writer's works, the “struggle for existence” is the pursuit of material values, and “natural selection” is the principle according to which the strongest wins and survives in this struggle, the one in whom cold calculation kills all living human feelings.

At the same time, the realism of Balzac, in its accents, differs significantly from the realism of Stendhal. If Balzac, as the “secretary of French society”, “first of all paints its customs, manners and laws, not shying away from psychologism, then Stendhal, as an “observer of human characters”, is primarily a psychologist.

The core of the composition of Stendhal's novels is invariably the story of one person, from which his favorite “memoir-biographical” development of the narrative originates. In the novels of Balzac, especially of the later period, the composition is “eventful”, it is always based on a case that unites all the characters, involving them in a complex cycle of actions, one way or another connected with this case. Therefore, Balzac the narrator embraces with his mind's eye the vast expanses of the social and moral life of his heroes, digging to the historical truth of his age, to those social conditions that form the characters of his heroes.

The originality of Balzac's realism was most clearly manifested in the writer's novel "Father Goriot" and in the story "Gobsek", connected with the novel by some common characters.

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Each of us gets acquainted with the works of Honore Balzac at different ages. Therefore, they are perceived differently. Someone childishly imagines shagreen leather and perceives the work as a fairy tale from the lips of a grandmother, while someone imagines the life of French society already in their youth. But the works of Balzac are those works to which a person will turn to [...] ...
Born in the ancient French city of Tours. At the age of sixteen, Balzac comes to Paris to study law. The young man could not practice law for a long time: he understood his destiny and declared that he wanted to become a writer. To begin with, he tried himself in the field of theater. Balzac's first play, Oliver Cromwell, failed when staged. An angry father deprived his son of moral and material support. […]...
Small in volume, written in the form of a story within a story, the story “Gobsek” is directly related to the novel “Father Goriot”. In this story, we again meet with some of the "returning heroes" of the "Human Comedy" by Honore de Balzac. Among them are the Countess de Resto, the eldest daughter of Father Goriot, as well as the usurer Gobsek and the lawyer Derville, who are mentioned in the novel “Father Goriot”. […]...
Each of us gets acquainted with the works of Honore Balzac at different ages. Therefore, they are perceived differently. After all, it is possible to comprehend all the complexities of human life only with time. However, Balzac's "Human Comedy" is one of those works of human genius that concern, above all, eternal values. The Human Comedy by Honore de Balzac was and still is barely […]
If romanticism began with a theory, then the paths of the formation of classical realism were different. The term itself (from the Latin “corporeal”, “concrete”, “material”, “thing”) will appear only at the end of the 19th century, when realism had already reached the heights of its development. Great realists of the XIX century. (Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray) did not call themselves realists. There is a problem with the timing of the emergence of realism. When he […]...
Honore de Balzac - French novelist, was born in the town of Tours. Balzac is one of the great masters of the novel. Having an affiliation to a noble family, he himself later added a particle - de to his name. Not engaging in the education of the child in childhood, the parents sent him to the gymnasium in Tours and then to the College of Vendôme, where he was a weak student, [...] ...
Honore de Balzac was born on May 20, 1799 in Tours. His grandfather, a farmer, had the surname Balsa, but his father, becoming an official, changed it to an aristocratic one - Balzac. From 1807 to 1813, Balzac studied at the College of Vendôme, and it was here that his love for literature manifested itself. Having moved with his father to Paris in 1814, [...] ...
Realism is a literary and artistic direction, which was finally formed around the middle of the nineteenth century. and developed the principles of analytical comprehension of reality and its vitally reliable depiction in a work of art. Realism revealed the essence of life phenomena through the depiction of characters, situations and circumstances “taken from reality itself”. The writers of this trend studied the external (concrete socio-historical) and internal (psychological) factors of the events they describe, [...] ...
Stendhal's work belongs to the first stage in the development of French critical realism. Stendhal brings into literature the fighting spirit and heroic traditions of the revolution and the Enlightenment that have just died out. His connection with the enlighteners, who are preparing their heads for the upcoming revolution, can be observed both in the writer's work and in his philosophy and aesthetics. In his understanding of art and the role of the artist […]...
Having finished the novel “Father Goriot” in 1834, Balzac came to a fundamentally important decision: he decided to create a grandiose artistic panorama of the life of French society in the post-revolutionary period, consisting of novels, short stories and short stories connected with each other. For this purpose, previously written works, after appropriate processing, he includes in the “Human Comedy” - a unique epic cycle, the idea and the name [...] ...
The story "Gobsek" was written in 1830. Later, in 1835, Balzac edited it and included it in The Human Comedy, linking it to the novel Père Goriot with the help of the so-called "passing character". So, the beautiful Countess Anastasi de Resto, one of the debtors of the usurer Gobsek, turns out to be the daughter of a ruined manufacturer - the “vermicellier” Goriot. Both in the story and in the novel […]
Balzac's Human Comedy. Ideas, idea, embodiment The monumental collection of works by Honore de Balzac, united by a common idea and title - "The Human Comedy", consists of 98 novels and short stories and is a grandiose history of the morals 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 formation and enrichment of the French bourgeoisie, the penetration […]...
The first work created according to the general plan of the epic, the novel “Father Goriot” (1834) was a great reader success. This is perhaps Balzac's most important novel. And because here for the first time several dozen characters meet, who will then travel through the pages of the “Human Comedy”; and because here the link of subsequent events is created; and because in the center of the plot there is a typical [...] ...
In 1831, the Shagreen Skin novel saw the light, which brought Honore de Balzac real fame. Shagreen - the fantastic skin of the onager donkey - has become the same symbol in the imagination of readers as the fabulous images of living and dead water. Fantastic elements were intertwined with a realistic story about a young scientist, Rafael, who tried to conduct experiments, overcoming his shortcomings. Driven into a dead end, [...] ...
The principle of cross-cutting characters. Honore Balzac is the son of a notary who became rich during the Napoleonic Wars. His novels became, as it were, the standard of realism in the first half of the 19th century. Writer of the bourgeoisie, master of the new life. That is why he turned away from the assertion of V. Hugo that “reality in art is not reality in life”, and saw the task of his great work in showing not [...] ...
Laura d'Abrantes (nee Permont) (1784-1838), Balzac's lover, Laura d'Abrantes in August 1835 is dedicated to the “Abandoned Woman”. With the Duchess d'Abrantes, the widow of General Junot, Balzac met, apparently, in 1829 at Versailles. Unaccepted at the Bourbon court and not respected in society, the duchess was hopelessly in debt. She peddles her memoirs. Soon she without [...]
Balzac's most perfect examples are the novels Lost Illusions and The Peasants. In these works, society itself really becomes the historian. In Lost Illusions, for the first time, the writer and the literature of that time seemed to have a “self-movement” of society: in the novel they began to live independently, showing their needs, their essence, the most diverse social strata. The provincial bourgeoisie, represented by the Cuente brothers and Father Seshar, was able to […] ...
In life there is always a place for exploits. M. Gorky The formation and development of realism in Russian literature was undoubtedly influenced by currents emerging in the general mainstream of European literature. However, Russian realism differs significantly from French, English, German, both in the time of its emergence, and in the pace of development, and in structure, and in its significance in national public life. […]...
The image of a miser and a hoarder is not new in world literature. A similar type is depicted in the drama - "The Merchant of Venice" by W. Shakespeare in the comedy "The Miser" by J. B. Moliere. Observations on the life of bourgeois society led to the creation of the image of Gobseck, some moments of the story are autobiographical. The hero of Balzac studies at the Faculty of Law at the Sorbonne and works as a clerk in the lawyer's office, where [...] ...
The novel “The Last Chouan, or Brittany in 1799” (in subsequent editions, Balzac called it shorter - “Chuans”) was published in March 1829. Balzac released this work under his real name. He managed to convey in this novel both the air of the era and the colors of the area. The writer found himself, entered the time of creative maturity. In 1830 […]...
Honore Balzac entered world literature as an outstanding realist writer. Balzac was the son of a petty bourgeois, the grandson of a peasant, he did not receive the upbringing and education that the nobles give their children (the “de” particle was assigned to them). The writer set the main goal of his work "reproducing the features of the grandiose face of his century through the image of the characters of his representatives." He created hundreds, thousands […]
MEETING ON THE ROAD (1972) Anna Zegers (1900-1983) is a vivid example of a writer of socialist realism, who constantly seeks and tests new forms of aesthetic assimilation of reality. Over the years, she turned to the parable form of narration (for example, “Three Trees”, 1940), used elements of fantasy, allegory, and various symbolism in a variety of ways. By introducing into the literature of the GDR classic samples of wide-ranging epic art paintings (“Dead […]...
REALISM is a creative method and literary trend in Russian and foreign literature of the 19th-20th centuries. The main feature of realism is social analysis, artistic understanding of the interactions between the individual and society, the desire to artistically master the laws of social development. Therefore, for realism, the depiction of typical characters and typical circumstances is especially characteristic (see Type, Typical). A variety of writers belonged to realism, so the artistic [...] ...
Reference. Zulma Carro (1796-1889) is a friend of Balzac. In 1838, the novel "The Banking House of Nucingen" is dedicated to her. In the dedication, the following lines are addressed to her: “To you, whose sublime and incorruptible mind is a treasure for friends, to you, who for me are both the public and the most condescending of the sisters.” When the short-lived relationship of the writer with the Duchess d'Abrantes was just beginning, [...] ...
Philosophical studies give an idea - the most general - about the author's attitude to creativity ("Unknown Masterpiece"), passions and the human mind ("Search for the Absolute"), reflections on the "social driving force of all events" ("Shagreen Skin"). Scenes of customs in the forms of life itself recreate reality, revealing its true essence. Because of the prejudiced portrayal of modernity, Balzac was often called an immoral writer by critics, to which [...] ...
The image of a miser and a hoarder is not new in world literature. A similar type is depicted in the drama - "The Merchant of Venice" by W. Shakespeare and in the comedy "The Miser" by J. B. Moliere. Observations on the life of bourgeois society led to the creation of the image of Gobseck, some moments of the story are autobiographical. The hero of Balzac studies at the Faculty of Law at the Sorbonne and works as a clerk in the lawyer's office, [...] ...
On May 20, 1799, in the ancient French city of Tours, on the street of the Italian Army, in the house of the assistant to the mayor and trustee of charitable institutions, Bernard Frarsois, who changed his plebeian surname Balsa to the noble way de Balzac, a boy was born. The mother of the future writer Laura Salambier, who came from a family of wealthy merchants, named the baby Honore and ... entrusted him to the nurse. Balzac recalled: […]
In Père Goriot, completed in forty days of frantic work, so much content was concentrated that its three main characters seem to be cramped in the relatively small space of this novel. Former pastry merchant, passionately and blindly in love with his two daughters; they sold him crumbs of child attention while he could still pay, then threw him out; they tormented him, “like [...]
The authors of the underground (or “underground”) set the requirements for themselves. In choosing topics and looking for a new aesthetic, they did not have to adapt to the requirements of the editors. The writers are “in common” with one very significant circumstance. They are sharply polemical in relation to Soviet reality and to all, without exception, the recommendations of socialist realism on how to depict this reality, first of all [...] ...
The originality of Dickens' realism, for example, in comparison with Flaubert's realism, lies in the attempt to combine the ethical and aesthetic ideals of the writer into a kind of organic whole. This desire of the writer is due, first of all, to the originality of the formation and development of realism in England. If in French literature realism took shape in an independent direction after the era of romanticism, then in English literature romanticism and [...] ...
Chapter 1. Characteristics of European literature of the XVII century 1.2. Literary process: Renaissance realism The 17th century continues to implement the Renaissance traditions in literature in the context of a changing historical picture of the world. Renaissance realism did not form into an independent trend in the 17th century, but it had a significant impact on the artistic worldview of Baroque and Classicist writers. In contrast to the humanism of the Renaissance, Renaissance realism [...] ...
Balzac is one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century. The most important feature of his work is that he wrote not just a large number of novels, but also the history of an entire society. The protagonists of his works - doctors, lawyers, statesmen, usurers, secular ladies, courtesans - look so that the tangibility and reliability of the world created by Balzac is created. In 1834 […]...
Features of a realistic story in Balzac's work "Gobsek". Question - The idea of writing "Gobsek". According to the author's intention, the story "Gobsek" was to be included in the large cycle of novels "The Human Comedy", on which Honore de Balzac worked throughout his life. Creating the "Human Comedy", the author sought to copy the contemporary society for him as it was. This determined the style of writing stories and [...] ...
Reference. Henriette de Castries (1796-1861), marquise, then duchess, beloved of Balzac, The illustrious Godissard (1843) is dedicated to her. If we take on faith the testimony of Balzac himself, his story with Madame de Castries was a tragedy that inflicted on him incurable wounds. “I hate Madame de Castries, she ruined my life by not giving me a new loan,” he wrote. And to an unknown correspondent […]
Balzac is a genius, Balzac is a titan, Prometheus of literature. The personality of the great French writer constantly excites the imagination of posterity. What was the creator of The Human Comedy really like? What inspired him to create? How did Balzac manage under the incessant hail of everyday adversity, under the burden of ever-growing monetary debts, personal troubles, in an atmosphere of offensive misunderstanding on the part of a significant part of the criticism [...] ...
In the same years, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe purpose of creativity also changes. This means that artistic means and the nature of the image inevitably change. In Balzac's prose, from year to year, there was less and less room for conventionality, symbolism, fantasy, and there was more and more lifelikeness, accurate details of everyday life, and social authenticity. French writers of the next generation, and above all Émile Zola, would name such a literary method based on […]...
The story "Gobsek" is a very important link in the ideological and thematic core of the entire "Human Comedy". From the outside, the story “Gobsek” is more comedic than other works of Balzac: regarding the coverage of life material, on the other hand, it is also more symptomatic, demonstrative, “visual”. It contains a concentrated characteristic of stinginess, and not only realistically everyday, but, above all, psychological. The protagonist of the story Gobsek is a millionaire, usurer, one of the shady […]...
The description of events in novels and other works of Lermontov became the subject of in-depth research during the lifetime of the poet. Confirmation of this is two large articles by V. G. Belinsky (1840-1841), dedicated to the novel “A Hero of Our Time” and Lermontov’s lyrics. Many scientists have studied Lermontov's work, hundreds of articles and books are devoted to him. Interestingly, since Belinsky noted that […]
These words belong to one of the heroes of Honore Balzac - Gobsek. Gobsek is the hero of the short story of the same name. His name has become a household name, as a symbol of the unbridled desire for hoarding. Passion for hoarding led Gobsek at the end of his life almost to insanity. Lying on his deathbed, he hears that gold coins have rolled somewhere nearby, and tries to find them. “Zhivoglot”, “man-promissory note”, “gold […]...
THE IMAGE OF THE CORRUPTIVE POWER OF MONEY IN HONORE DE BALZAC’S NOVEL “FATHER GORIO” “All his works constitute a single book, full of life, bright, deep, where our entire modern civilization moves and acts, embodied in images that are quite real, but fanned by confusion and horror, – W. Hugo wrote about "The Human Comedy" by O. de Balzac. And further: - An amazing book, which [...] ...

The originality of realism as a method occurs in a period when romantics play the leading role in the literary process. Next to them, in the mainstream of romanticism, Merimee, Stendhal, Balzac begin their writing journey. All of them are close to the creative associations of romantics and actively participate in the struggle against the classicists. It was the classicists of the first half of the 19th century, patronized by the monarchical government of the Bourbons, who in these years were the main opponents of the emerging realistic art. Almost simultaneously published the manifesto of the French Romantics - "Preface" to the drama "Cromwell" by V. Hugo and Stendhal's aesthetic treatise "Racine and Shakespeare" have a common critical focus, being two decisive blows to the code of laws of classic art that has already become obsolete. In these most important historical and literary documents, both Hugo and Stendhal, rejecting the aesthetics of classicism, stand up for expanding the subject matter in art, for the abolition of forbidden plots and themes, for representing life in all its fullness and inconsistency. At the same time, for both, the highest model, which should be guided by when creating new art, is the great master of the Renaissance Shakespeare (perceived, however, by both Hugo and Stendhal in different ways). Finally, the first realists of France and the romantics of the 1920s are brought together by a common socio-political orientation, which is revealed not only in opposition to the Bourbon monarchy, but also in a critical perception of bourgeois relations being established before their eyes.

After the revolution of 1830, which was a significant milestone in the development of France, the paths of realists and romantics will diverge, which, in particular, will be reflected in the controversy of the 30s (for example, Balzac's critical reviews of Hugo's drama "Hernani" and his own article "Romantic akathists" ). However, after 1830, the contacts of yesterday's allies in the struggle against the classicists were preserved. Remaining true to the fundamental methods of their aesthetics, the romantics will successfully master the experience of the realists (especially Balzac), supporting them in almost all important undertakings. The realists, in their turn, will follow with interest the work of the romantics, meeting with unfailing satisfaction each of their victories (such, in particular, were the relations between J. Sand and Hugo and Balzac).

The realists of the second half of the 19th century will reproach their predecessors for the “residual romanticism” found in Mérimée, for example, in his cult of the exotic (the so-called exotic novels), in Stendhal, for his passion for depicting bright personalities and exceptional passions (“Italian Chronicles”) , Balzac - in craving for adventurous plots and the use of fantastic techniques in philosophical stories ("Shagreen Skin"). These reproaches are not unfounded, and this is one of the specific features - there is a subtle connection between realism and romanticism, which is revealed, in particular, in the inheritance of techniques or even themes and motives characteristic of romantic art (the theme of lost illusions, the motive of disappointment).

The great realists see their task as the reproduction of reality as it is, in the knowledge of its internal laws that determine the dialectics and variety of forms. “The French society itself was to be the historian, I had only to be its secretary,” writes Balzac in the Preface. But the objective image is not a passive mirror reflection of this world, because sometimes, as Stendhal notes, “nature shows unusual sights, sublime contrasts” and they can remain incomprehensible to the unconscious mirror. Taking up Stndal's thought, Balzac argues that the task is not to copy nature, but to express it. That is why the most important of the installations - the recreation of reality - for Balzac, Stendhal, Merimee does not exclude such techniques as allegory, fantasy, grotesque, symbolism.

Realism of the second half of the 19th century, represented by the work of Flaubert, differs from the realism of the first stage. There is a final break with the romantic tradition, officially recited already in Madame Bovary (1856). And although bourgeois reality remains the main object of depiction in art, the scale and principles of its depiction are changing. The bright personalities of the heroes of the novel of the 1930s and 1940s are being replaced by ordinary people, not very remarkable. The multi-colored world of truly Shakespearean passions, cruel fights, heartbreaking dramas, captured in Balzac's Human Comedy, the works of Stendhal and Merimee, gives way to the "world of moldy color", the most remarkable event of which is adultery.

Fundamental changes are marked, in comparison with the realism of the first stage, and the relationship of the artist with the world in which he chooses the object of the image. If Balzac, Merimee, Stendhal showed an ardent interest in the destinies of this world and constantly, according to Balzac, "felt the pulse of their era, saw its illnesses", then Flaubert declares a fundamental detachment from the reality unacceptable to him, which he draws in his works. Obsessed with the idea of seclusion in an ivory castle, the writer is chained to the present, becoming a harsh analyst and an objective judge. However, for all the paramount importance that critical analysis acquires, one of the most important problems of the great masters of realism remains the problem of the positive hero, because "vice is more effective ... virtue, on the contrary, shows only unusually thin lines to the artist's brush." Virtue is indivisible, but vice is manifold

The end of the 1820s and the beginning of the 1830s, when Balzac entered literature, was the period of the greatest flowering of Romanticism in French literature. The big novel in European literature by the arrival of Balzac had two main genres: a novel of personality - an adventurous hero (“Robinson Crusoe” by D. Defoe) or a self-deepening, lonely hero (“The Suffering of Young Werther” by W. Goethe) and a historical novel (“Waverley” by V. . Scott).

Realism, on the other hand, is a direction that strives to depict reality. In his work, Balzac departs from both the novel of personality and the historical novel of Walter Scott.

The rise of French realism, starting with the work of Stendhal, took place in parallel with the further development of romanticism in France. It is significant that the first who came out with support and generally positively assessed the realistic searches of Stendhal and Balzac were Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and George Sand (1804-1876) - bright representatives of French romanticism of the Restoration and Revolution of 1830 era.

In general, it should be emphasized that French realism, especially during its formation, was not a closed and internally complete system. It arose as a natural stage in the development of the world literary process, as an integral part of it, widely using and creatively comprehending the artistic discoveries of previous and contemporary literary movements and trends, in particular romanticism.

Stendhal's treatise Racine and Shakespeare, as well as the preface to Balzac's The Human Comedy, outlined the basic principles of the rapidly developing realism in France. Revealing the essence of realistic art, Balzac wrote: "The task of art is not to copy nature, but to express it." In the preface to The Dark Case, the writer also put forward his own concept of an artistic image (“type”), emphasizing, first of all, its difference from any real person. Typicality, in his opinion, reflects in the phenomenon the most important features of the general, and only for this reason the "type" can only be "the creation of the creative activity of the artist."

on the contrary, he repelled from the realities of the reality surrounding him. It was this essential difference between realism and romanticism that George Sand drew attention to in her letter to Honore de Balzac: “You take a person as he appears to your eyes, and I feel a calling to portray him as I would like to see.”

Hence the different understanding by realists and romantics of the image of the author in a work of art. And this is the fundamental artistic decision of Balzac the realist.

The work of Balzac.

Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799, Tours - August 18, 1850, Paris) was a French writer. The real name - Honore Balzac, began to use the particle "de", meaning belonging to a noble family, around 1830.

In 1829, the first book signed with the name of Balzac was published: Chouans. The following year, he wrote seven books, among them Family Peace, Gobsek, which attracted wide attention of the reader and critics. In 1831 he published his philosophical novel Shagreen Skin and began the novel A Woman of Thirty. These two books lift Balzac high above his literary contemporaries.

1832 - a record for fertility: Balzac publishes nine complete works, chapters III and IV of his masterpiece: "A Woman of Thirty" and triumphantly enters literature. Reader, critic and publisher pounce on each new book. If his hope of getting rich has not yet been realized (since a huge debt is weighing down - the result of his unsuccessful commercial enterprises), then his hope of becoming famous, his dream of winning Paris and the world with his talent, has been realized. Success did not turn Balzac's head, as happened to many of his young contemporaries. He continues to lead a hard working life, sitting at his desk for 15-16 hours a day; working until dawn, he annually publishes three, four and even five, six books. However, one should not think that Balzac wrote with particular ease. Many of his works he rewrote and revised many times.

In the works created in the first five or six years of his systematic writing activity (over thirty) the most diverse areas of contemporary French life are depicted: the village, the province, Paris; various social groups. A huge number of artistic facts, which were contained in these books, required their systematization. Artistic analysis had to give way to artistic synthesis. In 1834, Balzac had the idea to create a multi-volume work - a "picture of manners" of his time, a huge work, later entitled by him "The Human Comedy". According to Balzac, The Human Comedy was supposed to be the artistic history and artistic philosophy of France as it developed after the revolution.

Balzac works on this work throughout his subsequent life, he includes in it most of the works already written, and specially reworks them for this purpose. He outlined this huge literary edition in the following form:

Balzac reveals his idea in this way: “The study of morals gives the whole social reality, without bypassing any position of human life, not one type, not one male or female character, not one profession, not one everyday form, not one social group, not one French region, no childhood, no old age, no adulthood, no politics, no law, no military life. The basis is the history of the human heart, the history of social relations. Not fictional facts, but what is happening everywhere.”

Having established the facts, Balzac proposes to show their causes. An Inquiry into Morals will be followed by a Philosophical Investigation. In the Study of Morals, Balzac depicts the life of society and gives "typified individuals", in the "philosophical studies" he judges society and gives "individualized types". The establishment of the facts ("Studies on Morals") and the elucidation of their causes ("Philosophical Studies") will be followed by the substantiation of those principles by which life should be judged. This will serve as "Analytical Research". Thus, a person, society, humanity will be described, judged, analyzed in a work that will represent the "Thousand and One Nights" of the West.