The secret of pleasure in “Shagreen Skin” by Honore De Balzac. Literary parallels in the images of heroes The symbolic meaning of the title shagreen skin
Written in 1830-1831, the novel “Shagreen Skin” is dedicated to the problem, as old as the world, of the collision of a young, inexperienced person with a society corrupted by numerous vices.
The main character of the work- young, impoverished aristocrat Raphael de Valentin, goes through a difficult path: from wealth - to poverty and from poverty - to wealth, from passionate, unrequited feelings - to mutual love, from great power - to death. The character's life story is depicted by Balzac both in the present tense and in retrospect - through Raphael's story about his childhood, years of studying the art of law, and meeting the Russian beauty Countess Theodora.
The novel itself begins with a turning point in Raphael's life when, humiliated by the woman he loves and left without a single sou in his pocket, the young man decides to commit suicide, but instead acquires a wonderful talisman - a small piece of shagreen leather, the size of a fox. Containing the seal of Solomon on the reverse side and a number of warning inscriptions, they say that the owner of the unusual item receives the opportunity to fulfill all desires in exchange for his own life.
According to the owner of the antiquities shop, no one before Raphael had dared to “sign” to such a strange agreement, which actually resembled a deal with the devil. Having sold his life for unlimited power, the hero, along with it, gives up his soul to be torn to pieces. Raphael's torment is understandable: having received the opportunity to live, he watches with trepidation as the precious minutes of his existence flow away. What until recently was of no value to the hero suddenly became a real mania. And life became especially desirable for Raphael when he met his true love- in the person of a former student, now a young and rich beauty, Pauline Godin.
Compositionally The novel “Shagreen Skin” is divided into three equal parts. Each of them is a constituent element of one great work and, at the same time, acts as an independent, complete story. In "The Talisman" the plot of the entire novel is outlined and at the same time a story is given about the miraculous escape from death of Raphael de Valentin. “A Woman Without a Heart” reveals the conflict of the work and tells the story of unrequited love and the same hero’s attempt to take his place in society. The title of the third part of the novel, “Agony,” speaks for itself: it is both a climax and a denouement, and a touching story about unhappy lovers separated by evil chance and death.
Genre originality The novel “Shagreen Skin” consists of the peculiarities of the construction of its three parts. "Talisman" combines the features of realism and fantasy, being, in fact, a gloomy a romantic fairy tale in the Hoffmannian style. In the first part of the novel, themes of life and death, gambling (for money), art, love, and freedom are raised. “A Woman Without a Heart” is an exceptionally realistic narrative, imbued with a special, Balzacian psychologism. Here we are talking about true and false - feelings, literary creativity, life. “Agony” is a classic tragedy in which there is a place for strong feelings, all-consuming happiness, and endless grief, ending in death in the arms of a beautiful beloved.
The epilogue of the novel draws a line under the two main female images of the work: the pure, gentle, sublime, sincerely loving Polina, symbolically dissolved in the beauty of the world around us, and the cruel, cold, selfish Theodora, who is a generalized symbol of a soulless and calculating society.
Women's images the novel also includes two minor characters who are persons of easy virtue. Raphael meets them at a dinner with Baron Taillefer, a famous patron of young scientists, artists and poets. The majestic beauty Aquilina and her fragile friend Efrasia lead a free life due to their disbelief in love.
The first girl’s lover died on the scaffold, the second girl does not want to tie the knot. Ephrasia in the novel takes the same position as Countess Theodora: they both want to preserve themselves, just at different costs. Poor Efrasia agrees to live as she wants and die, unwanted in the hospital. Rich and noble Theodora can afford to live according to her needs, knowing that her money will give her love at any stage - even in the most severe old age.
Love theme in the novel is closely related to the theme of money. Raphael de Valentin confesses to his friend Emile that in a woman he values not only her appearance, soul and title, but also wealth. The lovely Polina attracts his attention no sooner than she becomes the heiress of a large fortune. Until this moment, Rafael suppresses all the feelings that the young student evokes in him.
Countess Theodora kindles his passion with everything she has: beauty, wealth, inaccessibility. For the hero, love for her is akin to conquering Everest - the more difficulties Raphael encounters on his way, the more he wants to solve Theodora’s riddle, which in the end turned out to be nothing more than emptiness...
It is not for nothing that the Russian countess in her hard-heartedness correlates with high society society: the latter, like Theodora, strives only for contentment and pleasure. Rastignac wants to marry profitably, his literary friend wants to become famous at someone else's expense, the young intelligentsia wants, if not to make money, then at least to eat in the house of a rich patron of the arts.
The true realities of life, such as love, poverty, illness, are rejected by this society as something alien and contagious. It is not surprising that as soon as Raphael begins to move away from the light, he immediately dies: a person who has learned the true values of life cannot exist within deception and lies.
- “Shagreen Skin”, a summary of the chapters of the novel by Honore de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac's novel "Shagreen Skin"
French novelist, considered the father of the naturalistic novel. Honore de Balzac was born on May 20, 1799 in the city of Tours (France). Honore de Balzac's father, Bernard François Balssa (some sources indicate Vals's surname), is a peasant who became rich during the revolution by buying and selling confiscated noble lands, and later became an assistant to the mayor of Tours. Having entered the service in the military supply department and finding himself among officials, he changed his “native” surname, considering it plebeian. At the turn of the 1830s. Honore, in turn, also modified his surname, arbitrarily adding to it the noble particle “de”, justifying this with an invention about his origin from noble family Balzac d'Entregues.
In 1807-1813, Honore studied at the college of Vendôme; in 1816-1819 - at the Paris School of Law, while serving as a clerk in a notary's office. The father sought to prepare his son for lawyering, but Honore decided to become a poet. At the family council, it was decided to give him two years to fulfill his dream. Honore de Balzac writes the drama “Cromwell,” but the newly convened family council recognizes the work as worthless and the young man is denied financial assistance. This was followed by a period of material adversity. Literary career Balzac's work began around 1820, when he began publishing action-packed novels under various pseudonyms and composing morally descriptive “codes” of secular behavior. Later, some of the first novels were published under the pseudonym Horace de Saint-Aubin. The period of anonymous creativity ended in 1829 after the publication of the novel “Chouans, or Brittany in 1799.” Honore de Balzac called the novel “Shagreen Skin” (1830) the “starting point” of his work. Since 1830, short stories from modern French life began to be published under the general title “Scenes of Private Life.” Your main literary teachers Honoré de Balzac considered Molière, François Rabelais and Walter Scott. Twice the novelist tried to make a political career, nominating his candidacy for the Chamber of Deputies in 1832 and 1848, but failed both times. In January 1849, he also failed in the elections to the French Academy.
Balzac's main creation is The Human Comedy. It unites all the works of the mature stage of his work, everything he wrote after 1830. The idea of combining his separately published novels, stories, and short stories into a single cycle of works first arose from Balzac in 1833, and initially he planned to call the gigantic work “Social Studies” - a title emphasizing the similarity of the principles of Balzac as an artist with the methodology of science of his time. However, by 1839 he settled on a different title - “Human Comedy”, which expresses author's attitude to the mores of his century, and the literary audacity of Balzac, who dreamed that his work would become for modern times what Dante’s “Divine Comedy” was for the Middle Ages. In 1842, the “Preface to the Human Comedy” was written, in which Balzac outlined his creative principles and described the ideas underlying the compositional structure and figurative typification of the Human Comedy. The author's catalog and final plan date back to 1844, which contains the titles of 144 works; Balzac managed to write 96 of them. This is the largest work literature of the 19th century century, for a long time, especially in Marxist criticism, which became the standard literary creativity. The gigantic edifice of the “Human Comedy” is cemented by the personality of the author and the unity of style determined by it, the system of transitional characters invented by Balzac and the unity of the problematics of his works.
In 1832, Balzac began corresponding with the Polish aristocrat E. Hanska, who lived in Russia. In 1843, the writer went to visit her in St. Petersburg, and in 1847 and 1848 - to Ukraine. The official marriage with E. Ganskaya was concluded 5 months before the death of Honore de Balzac, who died on August 18, 1850 in Paris. In 1858, the writer’s sister, Madame Surville, wrote his biography - “Balzac, sa vie et ses oеuvres d"apres sa correspondance.” The authors of biographical books about Balzac were Stefan Zweig (“Balzac”), Andre Maurois (“Prometheus, or the Life of Balzac"), Wurmser ("Inhuman Comedy" Balzac shagreen leather novel).
“Shagreen Skin” is a work of extraordinary depth. Many researchers are attracted by the sharpness of its problems, unusual aesthetics, and innovative methods of the author against the backdrop of the literature of the era. Each of the novel's many aspects holds great potential and suggests different points of view. Balzac himself gives hints in which directions the scientist’s thought might move. In his notes, he gave the following definitions of the novel: “philosophical study”, “oriental fairy tale”, “system”.
The novel is, of course, a “synthetic” work. In it we will see the vicissitudes of an individual’s life, a stage in the development of society, a historical era, a philosophical idea and an entire ideological system. Each of these meanings deserves detailed study, and together they give an idea of the scale of the novel and Balzac’s work in general.
This work is devoted to the most interesting aspects of the work, and also pays attention to Balzac’s artistic synthesis. The purpose of the work is to familiarize yourself with the various semantic facets of the novel, with the existing points of view of literary scholars and critics.
The novel Shagreen Skin (1831) is based on the conflict of a young man's encounter with his time. Since this novel belongs to the section of the “Human Comedy” called “Philosophical Studies”, this conflict is resolved here in the most abstract, abstract form, moreover, in this novel the connection of early realism with the previous literature of romanticism is more clearly demonstrated than in Stendhal’s. This is one of Balzac's most colorful novels, with a dynamic, whimsical composition, a flowery, descriptive style, and a fantasy that excites the imagination.
The idea of “Shagreen Skin,” as will be the case with many of Balzac’s works, went through several stages. According to a contemporary, Balzac initially wanted to write a short story in which the idea of the power of the psyche over the vital forces should have been expressed differently. The properties of the talisman, according to this plan, were assumed to be an invention of the antiquarian; the hero believed the gross deception and died only from horror in front of his imaginary ruler. It is clearly visible how far the author was from mysticism - and this feature of the plan has been fully preserved. This plan did not promise much artistic depth, and a major shift occurred. Balzac announced a metamorphosis of the plot: the talisman would be “real.” Science fiction left the basis of the plan intact - the idea of an inextricable connection between the physical and spiritual principles, but complicated it: a contrast between two types of life, “economical” and “wasteful”, appeared, the idea of switching energy from passions to “pure” contemplation and knowledge.
IN workbook Several entries are dedicated to Balzac’s “Shagreen Skin”: “Skin was invented that personifies life. Eastern fairy tale." “Shagreen skin. An expression of human life as such, its mechanics. At the same time, the personality is described and assessed, but poetically.”
The creative history of the novel lay between two milestones: from the “oriental fairy tale” to the “formula this century" The old meaning was synthesized with the burning modernity.
“Shagreen Skin” was written hot on the heels of the July Revolution of 1830, and the time of action in the novel almost coincides with the time of writing. The novel is replete with signs of those years. To depict this time with its spiritual atmosphere meant to portray the discontent and deep disappointment that dominated the minds. “The disease of the century” is lack of faith and longing for integrity, for meaningfulness, involuntary egoism. Longing for an ideal, the young people of the century asked the question in different ways: “Oh world, what have you done to me to cause such hatred? What high hopes have you disappointed? All these sentiments were embodied in the novel.
The main character of "Shagreen Skin" is Raphael de Valentin. The reader gets to know him at the moment when he, exhausted by humiliating poverty, is ready to commit suicide by throwing himself into the cold waters of the Seine. On the verge of suicide, chance stops him. In the shop of an old antique dealer, he becomes the owner of a magical talisman - shagreen leather, which fulfills all the wishes of the owner. However, as wishes are fulfilled, the talisman decreases in size, and with it the owner’s life shortens. Raphael has nothing to lose - he accepts the antiquarian's gift, not really believing in the magic of the talisman, and begins to waste his life in the desires of all the pleasures of his youth. When he realizes that pebbled leather in fact, he is reduced, he forbids himself to desire anything at all, but late - at the height of wealth, when he is passionately loved, and without shagreen skin, charming Polina, he dies in the arms of his beloved. The mystical, fantastic element in the novel emphasizes its connection with the aesthetics of romanticism, but the very nature of the problems and the way they are presented in the novel are characteristic of realistic literature.
Raphael de Valentin is a sophisticated aristocrat by birth and upbringing, but his family lost everything during the revolution, and the action in the novel takes place in 1829, at the end of the Restoration era. Balzac emphasizes that in post-revolutionary French society, ambitious desires naturally arise in a young man, and Raphael is overwhelmed by desires for fame, wealth, and the love of beautiful women. The author does not question the legitimacy and value of all these aspirations, but accepts them as a given; the center of the novel's problems shifts to the philosophical plane: what is the price that a person has to pay for the fulfillment of his desires? The problem of a career is posed in “Shagreen Skin” in the most general form - boiling pride, faith in one’s own destiny, in one’s genius force Raphael to experience two paths to fame. The first is hard work in complete poverty: Raphael proudly tells how for three years he lived on three hundred and sixty-five francs a year, working on the works that were to glorify him. Purely realistic details appear in the novel when Raphael describes his life in a poor attic “for three sous - bread, for two - milk, for three - sausages; you won’t die of hunger, and your spirit is in a state of special clarity.” But passions carry him away from the clear path of the scientist into the abyss: love for the “woman without a heart,” Countess Theodora, who embodies in the novel secular society, pushes Raphael to the gambling table, to insane spending, and the logic of the “hard labor of pleasure” leaves him with the last option - suicide.
The sage antiquarian, handing over the shagreen leather to Raphael, explains to him that from now on his life is only a delayed suicide. The hero has to comprehend the relationship between two verbs that govern not just human careers, but the entire human life. These are the verbs to desire and to be able: “To desire burns us, and to be able destroys us, but to know gives our weak body the opportunity to forever remain in a calm state.” Here is the symbolism of the talisman - in shagreen skin the ability and desire are united, but for its power there is the only possible price - human life.
The main character is the embodiment of Balzac's ideas about the high mission of the artist-creator, combining in himself a “true scientist”, endowed with “the ability to compare and reflect,” who considers it natural to “enter the field of fine literature.”
Balzac called his novel “philosophical.” “Shagreen skin represents a new quality of the genre. In it artistic techniques philosophical story of the 18th century are combined with breadth and ambiguity symbolic images and episodes. Balzac implemented in the novel the idea of freedom from genre restrictions. This novel was an epic, a history, and a pathetic satire; it was a “philosophical study” and a “fairy tale.”
Balzac himself called this novel, later referred to as “philosophical studies,” “the beginning of my whole business.” In it, in the form of a parable, what will later be developed in a realistic sense in dozens of novels is put into the form of a parable. The form of the parable does not change the fact that this work provides a condensed picture, full of contrasts and seething passions real life. Raphael receives a talisman that grants wishes at the cost of his life. “To desire” and “to be able” - between these two words, according to the mysterious antiquarian, is all human life. A young man finds himself at a crossroads and must choose a path. Gaining a position in society means selling your own soul. This is one of many cases when Balzac's artistic generalization rises to the level of myth. A true myth is an image, a situation that is deeply meaningful and has great universal significance. In myth, the eternal and the historical are merged as the general and the specific.
Shagreen leather. “Symbol” for Balzac is a broad concept, one of the central and most stable in his aesthetics. He also refers to his own types or those created by other artists as symbols.
The talisman, created by the imagination of Balzac, has become a widespread symbol and has the widest circulation. It is constantly found in various contexts, in speech and literature, as a generally understood image of necessity and inexorable objective law. What exactly does the talisman represent in the novel? The symbol is far from unambiguous, and many very different answers have been given to this question. Thus, F. Berto sees in shagreen skin only the embodiment of consumption devouring Raphael, turning the symbolism of the novel into a fable-type allegory; B. Guyon is a symbol of the fundamental depravity and immorality of civilization, of any social system. M. Shaginyan and B. Raskin connect the power of the skin with “things,” the power of things over people. I. Lileeva highlights the following idea in the novel: “The image of shagreen skin provides a generalization of bourgeois life, subordinated only to the pursuit of wealth and pleasure, a generalization of the power of money, the terrible power of this world, which devastates and cripples the human personality.” Most of the proposed solutions are not mutually exclusive and find their basis in the text of the novel, which, thanks to its artistic richness, naturally lends itself to many interpretations. All decisions have one common premise: shagreen skin is a symbol of the immutability of objective law, against which any subjective protest of the individual is powerless. But what kind of law is this according to the author’s intention? What did Balzac see as the problematic axis of his novel? There is an Arabic inscription on the shagreen, the meaning of which is explained by the antiquarian: “All forms of two reasons are reduced to two verbs, to desire and to be able... to desire burns us, and to be able destroys us.” Longevity is achieved by a vegetative or contemplative existence, excluding exhausting passions and actions. The more intensely a person lives, the faster he burns out. Such a dilemma leaves a choice, and this choice between opposing decisions determines the essence of a person.
Game. Raphael's visit to the gambling house and losing his last gold is an image of extreme despair caused by poverty and loneliness. The gambling house in all its squalor is a place where “blood flows in streams,” but is invisible to the eye. The word “game” is highlighted twice in the text in large font: the image of the game symbolizes the reckless self-waste of a person in excitement, in passion. This is how the old wardrobe keeper lives, losing all his earnings on the day he receives them; such is the young Italian player, from whose face one could smell “gold and fire”; so is Raphael. In the acute excitement of the game, life flows out like blood through a wound. The hero’s state after the loss is conveyed by the question: “Wasn’t he drunk with life, or perhaps with death?” - a question that is in many ways key to the novel, in which life and death are constantly and acutely correlated with each other.
Antique shop. The antique store stands in opposition to the roulette scene as a symbolic representation of a different way of life. On the other hand, the shop is a hyperbolic collection of values; in the museum world, opposites collide, contrasts of civilizations are outlined. Raphael’s thought, while inspecting the shop, seems to follow the development of mankind; he turns to entire countries, centuries, kingdoms. The shop fully reflects the mutual influence of verbal and fine arts. One of symbolic meanings in that the shop represents a condensed image of world life in all centuries and in all its forms. The antique store is also called “a kind of philosophical garbage dump”, “a vast marketplace of human follies.” The law inscribed on the skin must appear as substantiated by the experience of centuries, therefore an antiquarian shop is a worthy environment for a talisman.
Orgy. The next of the main symbolic scenes of the novel is the banquet on the occasion of the founding of the newspaper. An antique shop is the past of humanity, an orgy is living modernity, which poses the same dilemma to a person in an aggravated form. Orgy - the fulfillment of Raphael's first requirement for a talisman. In the romantic literature of the thirties, descriptions of feasts and revelries were common. In Balzac's novel, the orgy scene has many functions in his "analysis of the ills of society." An excess of luxury expresses reckless waste vitality in sensual passions and pleasures. The orgy is a show of skepticism of the era in the main issues of social and spiritual life - in a “mass stage”, where the characters of the interlocutors are clearly depicted in remarks and author’s remarks. Balzac mastered the art of creating an image with the help of one or two lines, one gesture.
In the complaints of the disappointed “children of the century” about lack of faith and inner emptiness, the main place is occupied by the destruction of religious feeling, disbelief in love; unbelief in other questions of existence seems to be derived from this main thing.
The revelry also has its own poetry; Raphael puts into his mouth a unique experience of explaining it, almost a panegyric. Revelry attracts, like all abysses, it flatters human pride, it is a challenge to God. But, having depicted the intoxication of the senses in its seductiveness, Balzac will also paint the morning in a merciless light. This is the author's usual method - to show both sides of the coin.
The fantastic image of shagreen skin, a symbol of diminishing life, combined generalization with the possibilities of an entertaining story. Balzac veils the fantasy, depicting the fantastic action of the talisman, leaving room for a possible natural explanation of the events. The fantastic is presented in such a way as not to exclude the substitution of the natural. The second path is truly original: Balzac brought together and correlated the fantasy theme with the scientific one, imbued fantasy with the spirit of science, moving it onto new tracks. Whenever fantasy appears in action, the break from the probable occurs gently. The author achieves the impression of naturalness by various means. For Balzac, the miraculous, equal to the inexplicable, is truly impossible and unthinkable, hence the realistic motivations. His workbook says: “There is nothing fantastic. We imagine only what is, will be or was.”
The artistic symbolism of the novel diverges from tradition and is full of surprises. A pact with diabolical power is a fairly common motif in pre-romantic and romantic literature, but there is no religious feeling in the novel, the pact is irreversible, the talisman is inalienable. While the skin exists outside of the contract, it is neutral, but once connected to the owner, it comes to life.
Balzac's fiction develops in a different sphere than, for example, Hoffmann's fiction. The highest manifestations of life destroy it most of all, bringing it closer to death. This is hidden in everyday life. For Balzac, the truth is obvious that “the negation of life is essentially contained in life itself.” His fiction is like the accelerated scrolling of a film, “compressing” time and making obvious a process that, due to its slowness, is invisible to the eye.
Fantastic symbolism best suited the goal that Balzac set in this novel. And here fantasy is one of the means in his artistic arsenal.
Literature
1. Brahman, S.R. Balzac//History of foreign literature of the 19th century. -M., 1982. - P. 190-207.
2. Griftsov, B. The genius of Balzac // Questions of literature. - 2002. -№3. - P.122-131.
3. Reznik, R. How we see Balzac // Questions of literature. - 1990. -№6. - P.242-250.
4. Reznik, R.A. Balzac's novel "Shagreen Skin". - Saratov, 1971.
5. Elzarova, G.M. “Fantastic” works of Balzac // Bulletin of the Leningrad University. Series 2. - 1986. - Issue 1. - P. 180-110.
The theme of the all-consuming passion that possesses a person - a theme, of course, directly inherited from the romantics - worried Balzac from the very beginning - already as a purely psychological problem, outside the social plane. Evidence of how important this topic was for Balzac is his major work, published in 1831, the novel Shagreen Skin.
In this novel, Balzac unfolds before us a motley picture of contemporary French society. The beginning of the events of the novel is clearly dated - the end of October 1829. This picture is presented in sharp, contrasting contrasts - from the gambling house the action is transferred to secular living rooms; main character- a young talented man - Raphael de Valentin - is opposed to a crowd of corrupt writers and corrupt women; The main female characters of the novel are in sharp contrast - the cold, vain socialite Theodora and the modest, loving worker Polina. Modern society depicted by Balzac as a playground of unbridled low passions, be it the passion for profit or vice. Balzac deliberately thickens these colors, bringing them to a gloomy grotesque, as, for example, in the image of a gambling house or an orgy with the participation of courtesans.
It would be too one-sided to consider this novel only as another Balzac parable about the destructive power of money, gold. The novel's problematics are much broader; it is clearly of a philosophical and symbolic nature, and social pictures here exist only as a necessary background, but not as the main goal.
It was not by chance that Balzac singled out this novel in terms of genre, classifying it as a cycle of the “Philosophical Studies” genre, and he organized the action of the work around an extraordinary, clearly mystical event.
The plot is based on the history of shagreen leather (the skin of a special, unusual breed of wild donkeys living in Persia - onagers). The inscription on the skin reads: “Wish - your desires will be fulfilled. But measure your desires with your life. It is here. With every desire, I will decrease, like your days. Do you want me? Take it!”
Raphael takes this fatal talisman, driven by the first and such natural desire to get out of poverty, out of obscurity. But from the very beginning he makes a psychological mistake, interpreting the concept of “desire” in a very specific sense - at the moment it seems to him that only the desire for a miracle, something supernatural, unusual, roughly speaking, like in a fairy tale, fits into the category of “desire.” about a goldfish. But, having immediately become rich and famous, he suddenly discovers that the effect of shagreen skin extends not only to such “big” desires, but also to the most elementary, habitual movements human soul. It turns out that it is enough for him to let slip about some little thing, to wish for something completely ordinary, some little thing, as happens a thousand times in everyday life, the mechanism of the fatal contract immediately works - the wish is fulfilled, but the skin immediately decreases in size , life is shortened.
It turns out that shagreen skin implies desire in the literal sense, any, the smallest, most involuntary desire. Raphael finds himself in a devil's trap: he - as in another, also folklore, plot - cannot even curse and tell something to hell, so that this desire is not immediately fulfilled and his life is not immediately shortened. And then, overwhelmed by panic, he tries to isolate himself from the outside world, suppress all desires within himself, and exclude the very concept of desire from his psychology. But this already means dying alive, dying even before physical death occurs!
It is quite obvious that Balzac does not mean the corrupting power of money here. The entire mechanism of interaction between shagreen skin and Raphael’s fate is based on something completely different - on purely psychological nature the word "desire". In other words, Balzac is exploring here the mechanism of action of human desires and passions in general. Shagreen skin is an ominous symbol of the fact that every desire, every passion is bought by shortening the life span, decreasing vital energy in man. For any desire a person pays with a piece of his life. And the antiquarian who gifts Raphael with this dubious talisman does not hide its basic meaning from the very beginning. “Man,” he says, “is weakened by two instinctive actions that deplete and dry up the sources of our life. Two verbs express all the forms taken by these two causes of death: to want and to be able. To want burns us, to be able destroys us.”
But Raphael, I repeat, is far from realizing the meaning of this generalization, from listening to the words of the antiquarian. And only through his own experience does he later become convinced of the terrible literalness of these words.
Thus, shagreen skin becomes a sign of the deepest psychological contradiction: desires and passions give us visible satisfaction, it is only temporary, transitory and essentially illusory; the same desires and passions shorten our lives. The flip side of a fulfilled desire is another step on the path to death. Emptyness inevitably follows satiety.
This, of course, is the psychology of a tired person, exhausted by aspirations and exhausted in the pursuit of their fulfillment - a person disappointed in life, a person fed up and devastated by the eternal struggle for existence. Behind the image of Raphael lies life experience young Balzac, who through his own fate had already experienced the withering effect of passions and desires, the pursuit of happiness, endless attempts to rise above the limit set for you by fate and which does not satisfy you. But it is not only the writer’s personal fate that is symbolically summarized here. Balzac's generalization is broader - he summarizes the spiritual experience of an entire generation - a generation of romantic geniuses and dreamers who suddenly discovered a cold zone of emptiness in their souls and around them.
Here we summarize a whole stage in the development of romantic psychology, which began with the early Byron and Chateaubriand and which was then completed by Musset in France, Buchner in Germany, and Lermontov in Russia. Disappointment in romantic ideals gave rise to a reaction of satiety, fatigue, and emptiness. Romantic geniuses increasingly discovered that their combustion took place in an airless environment, that their energy was not used or applied outside. Then the images appeared" extra people" - Russian literature gave especially many formulas for this state, primarily in the poetry of Lermontov: "the barren heat of the soul", "the heat of the soul wasted in the desert", "Desires? What good is it worth wishing for in vain and forever?" etc. Naturally, objectively, the fate of such superfluous people depends on external circumstances. But the intentions of the poets depicting such “superfluous people” were not limited to “criticism of reality,” which oppressed the heroes; An equally important role for them was played by the general philosophical interpretation of the tragedy of a generation - namely, as a generation of people who desired too much and therefore fell victim to their own desires - not in the sense of some reprehensible, vicious passions, but, on the contrary, even sublime passions, but precisely too sublime and too strong. This problem was studied in various aspects by Kleist, Hölderlin, and Byron.
And so Balzac in “Shagreen Skin” tries to give, as it were, a philosophical and psychological form of this dependence between the starting point - passion - and the end point - empty satiety and death.
So, the main initial idea of the novel “Shagreen Skin” is an analysis of a certain stage in the development of romantic psychology. But now it’s time to return to the other side of the issue - to the problem of the external environment, the surrounding circumstances in which this psychology develops. Now we can more accurately understand the function of the social-critical elements of the novel. Balzac's hero himself is already connected by many strong threads with the environment; he does not just burn in the fire of his own desires - his fate, his character is in constant interaction with society.
And society, as, for example, Balzac shows in the image of Countess Theodora, is inherently hostile to the individual. And this hostility is revealed especially clearly when a person suffers. Society is afraid of human suffering, it shuns such people, it pushes a person out of its body like a foreign body, and, on the contrary, surrounds the successful with care and affection. Thus, quite realistic, concrete moments are included in the romantic-abstract philosophical idea of the novel.
The philosophical story “Shagreen Skin” is familiar to us from school. Its author, Honore Balzac, believed that this work revealed the formula for the existence of society contemporary writer France. The work reflects the system of values and relationships in society and reveals the selfishness of an individual. The genius of realism, Balzac resorted to mythology and symbolism to make the reader think about what the true meaning of life is.
Name
The word le chagrin used in the title has two meanings. This ambiguity was played up by the author. Le chagrin is translated as “shagreen” or shagreen leather, and in another meaning it means grief and sadness.
And indeed, a fantastic and omnipotent object gave the main character imaginary happiness, freeing him from the bonds of poverty. However, in reality, he caused even greater trouble for him. This skin deprived the character of the ability to create, deprived him of a sense of compassion and the ability to receive joy from life. As a result, she completely destroyed spiritual world its owner. It is no coincidence that the banker Taillefer, who became rich, killed a man. It is no coincidence that he mocks the tenets of the Magna Carta: the French are not equal before the law, there are people who subjugate the law to themselves.
“Shagreen skin”: analysis of the work
Balzac in his work depicted the life of the country in the 19th century with a high degree of accuracy. The fantastic rebirth of Raphael reveals to the reader the life of a man who has become a hostage to wealth. In fact, he turned into an automaton, an emotionless robot whose only goal is profit. Philosophical fiction combined with realism gives the story a special flavor. By putting on the character what is referred to in the work as “shagreen skin,” Balzac describes the condition and physical suffering of a patient with tuberculosis. They are so real that it gives you chills when you read these lines.
Characters
The story "Shagreen Skin" summary which cannot convey the atmosphere of the era, delights and captivates. To enhance the contrast, Honore uses two female images that are radically different from each other. On the one hand, this is Polina, the embodiment of selfless love and kindness. And on the other - Theodora, characterized by callousness, narcissism, ambition, vanity, experiencing deadening boredom. These are precisely the qualities that are possessed by representatives of a society that worships the world of money, a society in which there is no place for a loving human heart. An important figure in the story is the antiquarian who revealed to Raphael the secret of human life. Critics believe that Balzac himself addresses the reader with his words, who wanted to convey to us his personal thoughts.
Conclusion
“Shagreen Skin” is a complex story. For fairy tale plot a warning is read to all of us. Stop it, people! Look at yourself. Do you really want to live where there is no place for sincere feelings and real joy, and how can wealth, no matter how enormous it may be, replace the meaning of life?
Composition
The clearest example philosophical stories is “Shagreen Leather,” which the author called “the formula of our present century, our life, our egoism,” he wrote that everything in it is “myth and symbol.” The French word Le chagrin itself can be translated as “shagreen,” but it has a homonym almost known to Balzac: Le chagrin – “sadness, grief.” And this is important: the fantastic, all-powerful shagreen skin, having given the hero relief from poverty, was in fact the cause of even greater grief. It destroyed the desire to enjoy life, the feelings of a person, leaving him only selfishness, generated as long as possible to prolong his life slipping through his fingers, and, finally, its owner himself.
That is why Balzac forced the rich banker Taillefer, having committed murder, to be one of the first to greet Raphael de Valentin with the words: “You are ours. “The French are equal before the law” is now for him the lie with which the charter begins. He will not obey the laws, but the laws will obey him.” These words truly contain the formula for life in 19th century France. Depicting the rebirth of Raphael de Valentin after receiving millions, Balzac, using the conventions acceptable in the philosophical genre, creates an almost fantastic picture of the existence of a man who became a servant among wealth that has turned into an automaton. The combination of philosophical fiction and the depiction of reality in the forms of life itself constitutes the artistic specificity of the story.
Connecting the life of his hero with the fantastic shagreen skin, Balzac, for example, describes with medical precision the physical suffering of Raphael, suffering from tuberculosis. In “Shagreen Skin,” Balzac presents a fantastic incident as the quintessence of the laws of his time and, with its help, discovers the main social engine of society - monetary interest, which destroys personality. The antithesis of the two also serves this purpose. female images– Polina, who was the embodiment of the feeling of kindness, selfless love, and Theodora, in whose image the soullessness, narcissism, vanity and deadening boredom inherent in society are emphasized.
One of the most important figures in the story is the image of an antiquarian, whose judgments reflect Balzac’s thoughts that human life can well be defined by the verbs “to desire”, “to be able” and “to know”.
“To desire burns us,” he says, “and to be able destroys us, but to know gives our weak body the opportunity to forever remain in a calm state.” All ambitious people, scientists and poets - Rastignac, Sechar and Valentin - are in a state of “wishing”. The state of “being able” is achieved only by those who know how to adapt to a society where everything is bought and sold. Only Rastignac himself becomes a minister and marries the heiress of millions. Raphael receives shagreen, which works no worse than the convict Vautrin. Those in the state of “knowing” are those who, despising the suffering of others, managed to acquire millions - these are the antiquarian himself and Gobsek. However, in reality, they too turned into servants of their treasures, into people like automata (the antique dealer is 102 years old!). If, like Nucingen, they suddenly find themselves obsessed with desires not related to the accumulation of money (the infatuation with the courtesan Esther), then they themselves become figures, both sinister and comic, because they come out of their natural social role
With the novel Lost Illusions, completed at the time of his greatest artistic maturity (1837), Balzac created a new type novel, - novel disappointment, inevitable destruction life ideals, when confronted with the harsh reality of capitalist society. The theme of the collapse of illusions appeared in the novel long before Balzac: “Red and Black” by Stendhal, “Confession of a Son of the Century” by Musset. The theme was in the air, it was not generated literary fashion, and the social development of France, a country where it was very clearly visible where the political evolution of the bourgeoisie was heading. The heroic time of the French resolution and Napoleon awakened and mobilized the previously dormant energy of the “third estate.” The heroic period gave the opportunity to its best people to put their ideals into practice, to live and die heroically in accordance with these ideals. After the fall of Napoleon, after the Restoration and the July Revolution, this entire era came to an end. Ideals turned into mere decoration; high civic spirit, a necessary product of the previous era, became socially unnecessary.
Balzac saw with courageous clarity the true character of his time. He says: “There was no other phenomenon that would more clearly demonstrate what kind of helots the Restoration turned the youth into. Young people, who did not know what to apply their energies to, spent them not only on journalism, on conspiracies, on literature and on art , but also to the most extraordinary excesses; Being hardworking, this beautiful youth thirsted for power and pleasure; imbued with the artistic spirit, she coveted treasures; in idleness she tried in every way to find a place for herself, and politics did not allow her to find a place anywhere. ".
Lost Illusions towers like a cliff above all French literature of the time. Balzac is not limited to observing and depicting tragic or tragicomic social situations. He sees deeper.
He sees the ending heroic period bourgeois development in France at the same time marks the beginning of a broad rise of French capitalism. "Lost Illusions" shows one side of this process. The theme of the novel is the commodification of literature, and with it other areas of ideology. Balzac presents to us this process of turning literature into a commodity in all its expanded and complete completeness: everything, from the production of paper to the beliefs, thoughts and feelings of the writer, becomes part of the commodity world. And Balzac does not stop at stating, in general form, the ideological consequences of the dominance of capitalism, but reveals this specific process at all its stages, in all its areas (newspaper, theater, publishing house, etc.). "What is fame?" - asks the publisher Doria: "12,000 francs for articles and a thousand ecus for dinners." Writers do not lag behind publishers: “So you value what you write?” Vernoux told him mockingly. “But we trade in phrases and live by this trade.
When you want to write a large and beautiful work, in a word, a book, then you can put your thoughts, your soul into it, become attached to it, defend it; but articles, read today, forgotten tomorrow, are worth, in my opinion, exactly as much as they are paid for.”
Journalists and writers are exploited: their skills, turned into commodities, are an object of speculation for the capitalists who sell literature. But these exploited people are corrupted by capitalism: they strive to become exploiters themselves. When Lucien de Rubempre begins his career as a journalist, his colleague and mentor Lousteau gives him the following instructions: “In a word, my dear, the key to literary success is not in working, but in using the work of others.”
The friendship of David Séchard with Lucien de Rubempre, the shattered illusions of their dreamy youth, the interaction of the contradictory characters of both of them form the main contours of the action. Balzac creates images in which the essence of the theme is manifested in the clash of human passions and individual aspirations: the inventor David Sechard finds a new cheap way of producing paper, but he is deceived by the capitalists; the poet Lucien is forced to sell his most refined lyrics on the Paris market. On the other hand, the contrast of characters with amazing plasticity represents a variety of spiritual reactions: David Sechard is a stoic puritan, while Lucien represents the embodiment of the exaggerated thirst for sensual pleasures, the unrestrained and refined epicureanism of an entire generation.
The contrast between the two central figures perfectly expresses the two main types of spiritual reactions of people to the transformation of cultural products and human genius into commodities. Seshar's line is resignation, reconciliation with one's fate. On the contrary, Lucien rushes into Parisian life and wants to achieve power and recognition there. This places him among the numerous images of the youth of the Restoration - young men who died or made a career adapting to a dirty era alien to heroism (Julien Sorel, Rastignac, de Marsay, Blondet, etc.). Lucien occupies a unique place in this series. Balzac, with amazing sensitivity and bold foresight, portrayed in him a new, specifically bourgeois type of artist: a character weak and devoid of any definiteness, a tangle of nerves.
The internal contradiction between poetic talent and lack of character in life makes Lucien a toy. It is this combination of spinelessness, ambition, the desire for an honest and pure life, an immense but indefinite thirst for fame, and exquisite pleasures that makes possible the dazzling success, rapid self-destruction and shameful failure of Lucien.
Balzac never moralizes about his heroes. He objectively depicts the dialectic of their rise and decline, motivating both by the interaction between characters and the totality of objective conditions. Thus, the main thing that binds this novel into one whole is the social process itself. The deepest meaning of Lucien's personal death lies in the fact that this death is a typical fate of a poet in the era of a developed bourgeois system.
D'Artez - Balzac says in "Lost Illusions": "What is art? Nothing more than condensed nature." But this condensation of nature is never a formal “technique” for him; it represents the elevation of the social, human content of a particular situation to a higher level.
At the beginning of his career, Lucien must write an article about Nathan’s novel that delighted him. In a few days he should speak out against him in the second article. This task initially leaves Lucien, a newly minted journalist, confused. But first Lousteau, then Blondet, explain to him what his task is, they present arguments so deftly supported by references to the history of literature and aesthetics that they should seem convincing not only to the readers of the article, but also to Lucien himself. After Balzac, many writers portrayed the dishonesty of journalists and talked about how articles were written that contradicted the beliefs of their authors. But only Balzac reveals the full depth of journalistic sophistry. Depicting the talent of writers corrupted by capitalism, he also shows how they bring to virtuosity the craft of sophistry, the ability to deny and affirm any position with such conviction as to make one believe that they expressed their true views.
The height of artistic expression turns the stock exchange depicted by Balzac, on which spiritual life is speculated, into a deep tragicomedy of the bourgeois class.
Lost Illusions was the first "novel of disillusionment" in the 19th century. Balzac depicts the era, so to speak, of primitive capitalist accumulation in the field of spiritual life; Balzac's followers, even the greatest among them (for example, Flaubert), were dealing with the already accomplished fact of capitalism's subjugation of all human values without taking away. In Balzac we find, therefore, an intense tragedy showing the formation of new relationships, and in his successors we find a dead fact and a lyrical or ironic sadness about what has already happened.
