Titans of History (43 page)

I find people very impertinent when they say I am deep and then try to get to know me in five minutes. Between you and me, I am not deep but very wide, and it takes time to walk around me
.

Balzac, in a letter to Countess Maffei (1837)

Honoré de Balzac was one of the most prolific of literary giants. His masterpiece,
La Comédie humaine
, is made up of nearly 100 works which contain more than 2000 characters and together create an alternative reality that extends from Paris to the provincial backwaters of France. Balzac's works transformed the novel into a great art form capable of representing life in all its detail and color, so paving the way for the ambitious works of writers such as Proust and Zola. Balzac, the plump, amiable, workaholic genius, was in many respects the father of the modern novel.

As the unremarkable child of a beautiful but unpleasant mother and a self-indulgent father, Balzac did not seem marked for greatness. After school he worked as a legal clerk, but this did not excite a young man with grand ambition but little direction in which to channel it, and around the age of nineteen he decided to
become a writer. He went to Paris, determined to adopt a lifestyle appropriate to his new calling. He ran up great debts cultivating the image of a literary man about town, frequently dodging his creditors and flirting with bankruptcy.

One important thing was lacking: success. Balzac's first work,
Cromwell
, a verse tragedy about the leader of the English Commonwealth, was a failure that made his family despair. By 1822 he had written several more, equally unsuccessful, works. His output throughout the 1820s consisted of slushy or sensational potboilers and historical romances in the style of Sir Walter Scott. Some were published under pseudonyms, others under no name at all. None gave any indication that Balzac was about to become a literary titan.

But around 1830 Balzac began to form a new and revolutionary concept of fiction. A few writers had toyed with the idea of placing characters across more than one book, but no one had applied the idea to their life's work. Balzac leapt at the concept, realizing that he could create a self-contained world that stretched across all his novels. When the idea came to him, he is said to have run all the way to his sister Laure's house on the right bank of the Seine, shouting, “Hats off! I am about to become a genius!”

With a focus for his efforts, Balzac swiftly began to produce work of real significance. He was a phenomenally energetic writer, routinely working for eighteen hours at a stretch, fueled by up to fifty cups of coffee a day. He described himself as a “galley slave of pen and ink”; others called him a Napoleon of letters. One story,
The Illustrious Gaudissart
, was produced in a single sitting—14,000 words in a night. He was a furious amender of proofs from his publishers, revising and reworking his stories through six or seven drafts.

The tales that made up
La Comédie humaine
are characterized by Balzac's superb gift for storytelling, his rich sense of humor, and his delicate description of characters, scenes and places. In
Le Père Goriot
(1835), the tale of a penniless young provincial and the old
man who gives up everything for his daughters, Balzac brings Paris to life almost as a character in its own right:

Left alone, Rastignac walked a few steps to the highest part of the cemetery, and saw Paris spread out below on both banks of the winding Seine. Lights were beginning to twinkle here and there. His gaze fixed almost avidly upon the space that lay between the column of the Place Vendôme and the dome of the Invalides; there lay the splendid world that he wished to conquer
.

His imaginative gift and powers of description set the tone for the development of the 19th-century realist novel. As Oscar Wilde said, Balzac “created life, he did not copy it.” The world of
La Comédie humaine
stretched from Paris to the French countryside, and its rich cast included sensitive portraits not only of young provincial men on the make in Paris, such as Rastignac, but also of young and old women, bureaucrats, politicians, courtesans, spinsters, nobles, peasants, actors and innkeepers—in his words, “scenes of private life, Parisian life, political life, military life.” He also created the most unforgettable villain, the bisexual criminal mastermind turned police chief Vautrin, who was based on the real criminal-turned-police-chief Vidocq. It was Balzac who reflected that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” The greatest works in this vast body of stories include
Eugénie Grandet
(1833),
Le Père Goriot
,
Lost Illusions
(1837),
La Cousine Bette
(1846) and
A Harlot High and Low
(1838–47).

From the age of twenty-three, when he fell for the forty-five-year-old mother of some children he was tutoring, Balzac was in search of the ideal woman. He eventually found her in a Polish countess, Evelina Ha
ń
ska, whom he married after a romantic correspondence that lasted fifteen years. By the time he married
her, in March 1850, Balzac had no more than five months to live. He died in August, killed by the strain of his punishingly indulgent working habits. At his funeral, the writer Victor Hugo remembered Balzac as “among the brightest stars of his native land.” It was a fitting tribute.

1799–1837

The poet is dead: a slave to honor
Felled, by slanderous rumor
With a bullet in his breast, and thirsting for revenge
His proud head now bowed down.
The poet's spirit could not bear
The shame of petty calumnies …

Mikhail Lermontov, from his homage to Pushkin, circulated secretly a few days after the great poet's death

Alexander Pushkin is the heroic ideal of the romantic poet. A genius of exuberance, versatility, wit, poignancy and originality, a passionate and promiscuous lover of women, a victim of tyranny who remained true to his art—he personifies the triumph of creativity over the dead hand of bureaucracy. He helped create modern Russia—its culture, its language, its very image of itself. He also wrote history and short stories.

Pushkin is generally considered to be Russia's greatest poet. Translation cannot do justice to the extraordinary way in which
he molded the Russian language to his art, mixing archaic with modern, vernacular with formal, and readily inventing new words when old ones did not suffice. The profound simplicity of Pushkin's poetry transformed the way that Russians—writers and ordinary people—use language.

The precocious son of an old noble family, Pushkin became renowned when, as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, his first poetry was published. His romantic narrative poem
Ruslan and Ludmilla
, written six years later, broke every literary convention of its day and was a runaway success. The leader of Russian poetry's old guard, Vasily Zhukovsky, gave Pushkin a portrait of himself inscribed: “To the victorious pupil from the defeated master.” Barely out of his teens, Pushkin was already recognized as Russia's preeminent poet.

Pushkin's astounding energy and drive transformed Russian literature. He cast off the stifling blanket of religion and censorship, creating works of extraordinary originality that laid the foundations of the modern Russian literary tradition.
Eugene Onegin
(1825–32) his great novel in verse, is considered by many to be the finest Russian novel ever written. Set in a Russian landscape with Russian characters, it was a decisive step away from the allegorical tradition and toward the realism later employed by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov and Bulgakov. This is the story of the doomed love between Tatiana, provincial beauty, and Onegin, cynical nobleman and foppish, bored intellectual. He flirts with her; she falls in love; he rejects her and kills her sister's fiancé in a duel (foreshadowing Pushkin's own death). Many years later, Onegin meets her again. She is now a St. Petersburg
grande dame
, a society beauty, a princess married to an aristocrat. He realizes he loves her—but she replies, “I love you but I am now another's wife.” Onegin is heartbroken—he “stood seared as if by heaven's fire. How deep his stricken heart is shaken. With what a tempest
of desire.” The characters remain eternal but nothing is so timeless as the tragic sadness of Onegin's love for the married Tatiana—and her undying love for him, loves that cannot ever be.

The poet-revolutionary was the image of the romantic hero. He was a sympathetic and social, rather than active, conspiratorial member of the aristocratic set later known as the Decembrists, who conspired to reform the oppressive autocracy of the tsars. The group's members were famed for their drinking, gambling and womanizing as much as for their liberal views.

Pushkin's work revolutionized the way Russians thought about their history and their drama, and especially the way they thought about their writers. Never one to play down his own achievements, Pushkin was one of the first Russian writers to make a collected edition of his various writings. Within a year of his death, a critic was able to declare: “Every educated Russian must have a complete Pushkin, otherwise he has no right to be considered either educated or Russian.”

Russia's oppressive autocrats tried to break the will of the fiery radical. Pushkin was, in his own words, “persecuted six years in a row, stained by expulsion from the service, exiled to an out-of-the-way village for two lines in an intercepted letter.” It was not all bad: he adored the exotic romance of Odessa, Moldavia and the Caucasus, which inspired him. He also managed many affairs, keeping lists, sketches and poems to record his conquests, who included Princess Lise Vorontsov, wife of the viceroy of New Russia, Prince Michael Vorontsov and a great-niece of Catherine the Great's minister Prince Potemkin. They probably had a child together (brought up as Vorontsov) and he wrote a poem to her called
The Talisman
.

But Pushkin was keenly aware of the oppressive hand of censorship and surveillance—and its potential to get worse. During the abortive Decembrist uprising of 1825, he could only look on helplessly as his generation's dreams of liberty were ruthlessly smashed
by the dreary martinet Tsar Nicholas I. Finally, beaten down by almost a decade of censorship and exile, Pushkin was wooed into Nicholas's service with the illusory promise of reform. The tsar appointed himself as Pushkin's personal censor.

Imperial favor broke Pushkin even more effectively than imperial displeasure. Personally censored by the tsar, Pushkin was rendered almost speechless. The volatile radical poet fell increasingly out of favor at court, but, despite his increasingly desperate pleas to retire to a life of literary seclusion, he was not allowed to leave. His popularity meant he was still viewed as a loose cannon. Besides, half the court, including the tsar, were infatuated with Pushkin's beautiful wife Natalya. His misery, drinking and gambling increased.

Pushkin's romantic death, the result of a simmering romantic crisis, turned the hero into a legend. In February 1837 the creepy and sleazy French social climber Georges d'Anthès, having been frustrated by Natalya's decisive rejection of his approaches, publicly insulted her and challenged her husband to a duel. Pushkin, who had been itching to fight for months, accepted with alacrity. In the ensuing duel, Pushkin was fatally wounded, dying two days later at the age of thirty-eight.

The volatile, charismatic poet-radical who fought for liberty and died for love is revered in Russia almost as a god. His statue stands in Moscow's Pushkin Square, decked out with flowers even in deep winter. Pushkin had decreed in his great poem “Monument” that “My verses will be sung throughout all Russia's vastness / My ashes will outlive and know no pale decay … ” In this he proved a prophet too.

1802–1870 & 1824–1895

His successes … resound like a fanfare. The name of Alexandre Dumas is more than French, it is European; it is more than European, it is universal … Alexandre Dumas is one of those men who can be called the sowers of civilization
.

Victor Hugo

Alexandre Dumas's soaring imagination holds us spellbound. As vividly drawn in life as one of his own characters, this master storyteller scorned literary pretension. Irrepressible to the end, he swaggered through a life that might have sprung straight from the pages of his books.

Dumas's rip-roaring historical novels are crammed with romance, adventure, courage and daring. At one moment comical and poignant, the next mysterious and terrifying, they induce every emotion except boredom. In
The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers
and
The Man in the Iron Mask
, Dumas created some of the most thrilling stories ever written. He wove together history and fantasy, using scraps gleaned from old books to embroider timeless characters and gripping plots. His fecund imagination has rendered the names d'Artagnan and Dantès as familiar as Louis XIV and Richelieu.

He was the son of a swashbuckling Creole general (himself the illegitimate son of a marquis) and an innkeeper's daughter. Given his ancestry, it is hardly surprising that Alexandre Dumas
père
specialized in tales of romance, derring-do, betrayal and intrigue. The fatherless boy who grew up in the small French town of Villers-Cotterêts was the son of the “Black Count,” a flamboyant and eccentric Napoleonic general whose integrity brought him only disgrace and provoked an early death.

Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was the Creole son of a black slave girl and a minor Norman marquis. Born in French Saint-Domingue in 1762 and raised by his mother's family after she died when he was twelve, at eighteen Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France to be educated as befitted a nobleman. But when he joined the army as an ordinary soldier in 1786, he assumed his mother's surname Dumas in order to avoid embarrassing his father's family.