The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (26 page)

In 1847 Baudelaire discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Overwhelmed by what he saw as the almost preternatural similarities between the American writer's thought and temperament and his own, he embarked upon the task of translation that was to provide him with his most regular occupation and income for the rest of his life. His translation of Poe's
Mesmeric Revelation
appeared as early as July 1848, and thereafter translations appeared regularly in reviews before being collected in book form in
Histoires extraordinaires
(1856; “Extraordinary Tales”) and
Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires
(1857; “New Extraordinary Tales”), each preceded by an important critical introduction by Baudelaire.

Baudelaire's growing reputation as Poe's translator and as an art critic at last enabled him to publish some of his
poems. In June 1855 the
Revue des deux mondes
published a sequence of 18 of his poems under the general title of
Les Fleurs du mal
. The poems, which Baudelaire had chosen for their original style and startling themes, brought him notoriety. The following year Baudelaire signed a contract with the publisher Poulet-Malassis for a full-length poetry collection to appear with that title. When the first edition of
Les Fleurs du mal
was published in June 1857, 13 of its 100 poems were immediately arraigned for offences to religion or public morality. After a one-day trial on Aug. 20, 1857, six of the poems were ordered to be removed from the book on the grounds of obscenity, with Baudelaire incurring a fine of 300 (later reduced to 50) francs. The six poems were first republished in Belgium in 1866 in the collection
Les Épaves
(“Wreckage”), and the official ban on them would not be revoked until 1949. Owing largely to these circumstances,
Les Fleurs du mal
became a byword for depravity, morbidity, and obscenity, and the legend of Baudelaire as the doomed dissident and pornographic poet was born.

The failure of
Les Fleurs du mal
, from which he had expected so much, was a bitter blow to Baudelaire, and the remaining years of his life were darkened by a growing sense of despair. Although Baudelaire wrote some of his finest works in these years, few were published in book form. In 1859 Baudelaire produced in rapid succession a series of poetic masterpieces beginning with
Le Voyage
in January and culminating in what is widely regarded as his greatest single poem,
Le Cygne
(“The Swan”), in December. In February 1861 a second, and greatly enlarged and improved, edition of
Les Fleurs du mal
was published.

In 1861 Baudelaire made an ill-advised and unsuccessful attempt to gain election to the French Academy. Abandoning verse poetry as his medium, he now concentrated on writing prose poems, a sequence of 20 of which
was published in
La Presse
in 1862. In 1864 he was stricken with paralysis and aphasia from which he would never recover. Baudelaire died at age 46 in the Paris nursing home in which he had been confined for the last year of his life.

At the time of Baudelaire's death, many of his writings were unpublished and those that had been published were out of print. This was soon to change, however. The future leaders of the Symbolist movement who attended his funeral were already describing themselves as his followers, and by the 20th century he was widely recognized as one of the greatest French poets of the 19th century.

(b. Nov. 11, 1821, Moscow, Russia—d. Feb. 9, 1881, St. Petersburg)

F
yodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction.

Unlike many other Russian writers of the first part of the 19th century, Dostoyevsky was not born into the landed gentry. He often stressed the difference between his own background and that of Leo Tolstoy or Ivan Turgenev and the effect of that difference on his work. Dostoyevsky gave up a career as a military engineer (for which he was unsuited) in order to write.

In 1849 he was arrested for belonging to Petrashevsky Circle, a radical discussion group; sentenced to be shot, he was reprieved at the last moment. The mock-execution ceremony was in fact part of the punishment. One of the prisoners went permanently insane on the spot; another went on to write
Crime and Punishment
. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian prison labour camp, to be followed by an indefinite term as a soldier.

After his return to Russia 10 years later, he wrote a novel based on his prison camp experiences,
Zapiski iz myortvogo doma
(1861–62;
The House of the Dead
). Gone was the tinge of Romanticism and dreaminess present in his early fiction. The novel describes the horrors that Dostoyevsky actually witnessed: the brutality of the guards who enjoyed cruelty for its own sake, the evil of criminals who could enjoy murdering children, and the existence of decent souls amid filth and degradation—all these themes, warranted by the author's own experience, gave the novel the immense power that readers still experience.

In Siberia Dostoyevsky experienced what he called the “regeneration” of his convictions. He also suffered his first attacks of epilepsy. No less than his accounts of being led to execution, his descriptions of epileptic seizures (especially in
The Idiot
) reveal the heights and depths of the human soul. Later he published and wrote for several periodicals while producing his best novels. These novels are concerned especially with faith, suffering, and the meaning of life; they are famous for their psychological depth and insight and their near-prophetic treatment of issues in philosophy and politics.
Igrok
(1866;
The Gambler
) is based on his own gambling addiction. Among his best known is the novella
Zapiski iz podpolya
(1864;
Notes from the Underground
), in the first part of which an unnamed first-person narrator delivers a brilliant attack on a set of beliefs shared by liberals and radicals.

Then there are the great novels.
Prestupleniye i nakazaniye
(1866;
Crime and Punishment
) describes a young intellectual who is willing to gamble on ideas and decides to solve all his problems at a stroke by murdering an old pawnbroker woman.
Idiot
(1869;
The Idiot
) represents Dostoyevsky's attempt to describe a perfectly good man in a way that is still psychologically convincing, while
Besy
(1872;
The Possessed
) presents savage portraits of
intellectuals but expresses great sympathy for workers and other ordinary people ill-served by the radicals who presume to speak in their name.
Bratya Karamazovy
(1879–80;
The Brothers Karamazov
) focuses on the problem of evil, the nature of freedom, and the craving for faith.

In 1876–77 Dostoyevsky devoted his energies to
Dnevnik pisatelya
(“The Diary of a Writer”). A one-man journal, for which Dostoyevsky served as editor, publisher, and sole contributor, the
Diary
represented an attempt to initiate a new literary genre. Issue by monthly issue, it created complex thematic resonances among diverse kinds of material: short stories, plans for possible stories, autobiographical essays, sketches that seem to lie on the boundary between fiction and journalism, psychological analyses of sensational crimes, literary criticism, and political commentary. The
Diary
proved immensely popular and financially rewarding.

In 1880 Dostoyevsky delivered an electrifying speech about the poet Aleksandr Pushkin, which he published in a separate issue of
The Diary of a Writer
(August 1880). After finishing
Karamazov
, he resumed the monthly
Diary
but lived to publish only a single issue (January 1881) before dying of a hemorrhage on January 28 in St. Petersburg. By the end of his life, he had been acclaimed one of his country's greatest writers.

At least two modern literary genres, the prison camp novel and the dystopian novel (works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We
, Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
, and George Orwell's
1984
), derive from Dostoyevsky's writings. His ideas and formal innovations exercised a profound influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, André Gide, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, to name only a few. Above all, his works continue to enthrall readers by combining suspenseful plots with ultimate questions about faith, suffering, and the meaning of life.

(b. De
c
. 12, 1821, Rouen, France—d. May 8, 1880, Croisset)

T
he novelist Gustave Flaubert is regarded as the prime mover of the realist school of French literature and best known for his masterpiece,
Madame Bovary
(1857), a realistic portrayal of bourgeois life.

In 1841 Flaubert was enrolled as a student at the Faculty of Law in Paris. At age 22, however, he was recognized to be suffering from a nervous disease that was taken to be epilepsy. This made him give up the study of law, with the result that henceforth he could devote all his time to literature. Flaubert then retired to his estate at Croisset, near Rouen, on the Seine. He was to spend nearly all the rest of his life there.

The composition of
La Tentation de Saint Antoine
provides an example of that tenacity in the pursuit of perfection that made Flaubert go back constantly to work on subjects without ever being satisfied with the results. In 1839 he was writing
Smarh
, the first product of his bold ambition to give French literature its
Faust
. He resumed the task in 1846–49, in 1856, and in 1870, and finally published the book as
La Tentation de Saint Antoine
in 1874.

Madame Bovary
was another work of long gestation. As early as 1837 he had written “Passion et vertu”, a short and pointed story with a heroine, Mazza, resembling Emma Bovary. The novel itself cost the author five years of hard work prior to its appearance, with the subtitle
Moeurs de province
(“Provincial Customs”), in installments in the periodical
Revue
from October 1 to Dec. 15, 1856. For
Madame Bovary
he took a commonplace story of adultery and gave it an unrelenting objectivity—by which Flaubert meant the dispassionate recording of every trait or incident that could illuminate the psychology of his characters and their role in the logical development of
his story—that transformed it into a work that represented the beginning of a new age in literature. The French government, however, brought the author to trial on the ground of his novel's alleged immorality, and he narrowly escaped conviction.

To refresh himself after his long application to the dull world of the bourgeoisie in
Madame Bovary
, Flaubert immediately began work on
Salammbô
, a novel about ancient Carthage. Subsequent works include
L'Éducation sentimentale
(1869), which appeared a few months before the outbreak of the Franco-German War of 1870 and was not appreciated by the public; several unsuccessful plays; and
Trois Contes
(1877), a book held to be his masterpiece that contains the three short stories “Un Coeur simple,” “La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier,” and “Hérodias.” In the 1870s Flaubert sought consolation from financial troubles in his work and in the friendship of George Sand, Ivan Turgenev, and younger novelists—Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and, especially, Guy de Maupassant. Flaubert's long novel
Bouvard et Pécuchet
was left unfinished when he died suddenly of an apoplectic stroke.

(b. March 20, 1828, Skien, Nor.—d. May 23, 1906, Kristiania [formerly Christiania; now Oslo])

H
enrik Ibsen was a major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background and developed with economy of action, penetrating dialogue, and rigorous thought.

At the age of 23 Ibsen got himself appointed director and playwright to a new theatre at Bergen, in which
capacity he had to write a new play every year. First at Bergen and then at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania from 1857 to 1862, Ibsen tried to make palatable dramatic fare out of three incongruous ingredients: the drawing-room drama of the French playwright Eugène Scribe that was then popular; the actors, acting traditions, and language of Denmark; and the medieval Icelandic sagas—Norway's heroic, austere literature of unique magnificence. In addition to writing plays which were uncongenial to him and unacceptable to audiences, he did a lot of directing. In
Kongsemnerne
(1863;
The Pretenders
) he dramatized the mysterious inner authority that makes a man a man, a king, or a great playwright. This one play was in fact the national drama after which Ibsen had been groping so long, and before long it would be recognized as such.

The theatre in Christiania soon went bankrupt, however. In April 1864 he left Norway for Italy. For the next 27 years he lived abroad, mainly in Rome, Dresden, and Munich, returning to Norway only for short visits in 1874 and 1885. For reasons that he sometimes summarized as “small-mindedness,” his homeland had left a very bitter taste in his mouth.

With him into exile Ibsen brought the fragments of a long semi-dramatic poem to be named
Brand
. Its central figure is a dynamic rural pastor who takes his religious calling with a blazing sincerity that transcends not only all forms of compromise but all traces of human sympathy and warmth as well. In Norway
Brand
was a tremendous popular success, even though (and in part because) its central meaning was so troubling. Hard on the heels of
Brand
(1866) came
Peer Gynt
(1867), another drama in rhymed couplets presenting an utterly antithetical view of human nature. If Brand is a moral monolith, Peer Gynt is a capering will-o'-the-wisp, a buoyant and self-centred
opportunist who is aimless, yielding, and wholly unprincipled, yet who remains a lovable and beloved rascal.