Élémir Bourges
Élémir Bourges (born March 26, 1852 in Manosque ; died November 12, 1925 in Auteuil ) was a French author.
Life
Elémir Bourges attended the Lycée Thiers in Marseille and moved to Paris in 1874 , where he belonged to the circle of Paul Bourget , François Coppée and Barbey d'Aurevilly and took up the contemporary trends of symbolism , decadence and the Wagner cult. He wrote for newspapers such as Gaulois and Parlement and founded La Revue des chefs d'œuvre in 1883 with Henri Signoret . His first novel Sous la hache was also published in 1883 . In 1886 he moved to Samois-sur-Seine , a place that artists preferred outside Paris. Under the influence of Joséphin Péladan , he joined the Rosicrucians and processed their concerns in the novel Les oiseaux s'envolent et les fleurs tombent (1893).
Bourges' best-known work is the novel Le Crépuscule des dieux . This novel is a key work of literary decadence and fin de siècle . The novel, which depicts the decline of a princely family, was published in March 1884, two months before Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel Gegen den Grain ( A Rebours ) , which is considered the “Bible of Décadence” . The protagonist is Charles d'Este, a fabulously wealthy prince and a literary figure whose real model was Charles II of Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel . Numerous decadent motifs such as late-era feelings, aestheticism , incest , dandy , femme fatale and femme fragile as well as allusions to The Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner run through the novel, which was widely received in France. The writer Octave Mirbeau praised his “style brilliant, spirituel et élevé”, Jean Cocteau spoke of an “œuvre magnifique” and the Belgian symbolist Franz Hellens wrote in 1951 that Le Crépuscule de Dieux was known as “assez fameux” ( quite famous ) in his youth applied. A German translation of the novel was published by Manesse Verlag in 2013 under the title Götterdämmerung on the occasion of Richard Wagner's 200th birthday .
Bourges was admitted to the Académie Goncourt in 1900 and thus gained a great influence on literary events in France. Since 1883 he was married to the Czech Anna Braunerová, sister of the painter Zdenka Braunerová. He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris . In Manosque, Marseille and Pierrevert streets are named after him.
Works (selection)
- Sous la hache . Paris: A. Colin, 1883 text
-
Le Crépuscule des dieux. Mœurs contemporaines . Paris, E. Giraud & Cie, 1884 text
- Götterdämmerung . From the French by Alexandra Beilharz , afterword by Albert Gier . Manesse, Zurich 2013, ISBN 978-3-7175-2262-1
- Les oiseaux s'envolent et les fleurs tombent . Paris, 1893 text
- La Nef . Paris: PV Stock, 1904 Text, Part 1 Text, Part 2
- L'Enfant qui revient , novella. Paris: Librairie de la Collection des Dix, 1905
literature
- Mario Praz : love, death and the devil. The black romance. Munich: dtv, 1963. (Italian original: La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, Milano-Roma, 1930.)
- Raymond Schwab: La Vie d'Elémir Bourges . Paris: Stock, 1948.
- André Lebois: La Genèse du Crépuscule des Dieux . Paris: Le Cercle du Livre, 1954.
- Erwin Koppen : Decadent Wagnerism. Studies on European fin de siècle literature . Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 1973.
- Hans Hinterhäuser : Fin de siècle. Figures and myths . Munich: Fink, 1977.
- Wolfgang Rasch: The literary decadence around 1900 . Munich: Beck, 1986.
- Ulrich Prill : "Aren't these signs of decadence?" : on the text constitution of the fin de siècle using the example of Elémir Bourges: Le crépuscule des dieux . Bonn: Romanistischer Verlag, 1988
- Alexandra Beilharz : The Décadence and Sade. Investigations into narrative texts of the French fin de siècle. Metzler, Stuttgart, 1997. 290 pp.
- Alexandra Beilharz : "Elémir Bourges, Carlos Reyles et Robert Musil: la décadence entre refus et adaptation de la modernité" In: La main hâtive des révolutions. Esthétique et désenchantement en Europe de Leopardi à Heiner Müller. Edited by Jean Bessière and Stéphane Michaud. Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 2001. pp. 55-76.
Web links
- Literature by and about Élémir Bourges in the catalog of the German National Library
- Literature by and about Élémir Bourges in the WorldCat bibliographic database
- Short biography and reviews of works by Élémir Bourges at perlentaucher.de
- Élémir Bourges , in: Octave Mirbeau, La France, 7 mars 1885, at: Wikisource
- Antoine Compagnon : Élémir Bourges , at encyclopedie
Individual evidence
- ↑ Élémir Bourges , short biography in ville de Manosque (fr)
- ^ Henri Signoret in the Encyclopedia Britannica
- ↑ Chosen decadence . Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 9, 2013
- ^ Gertrud Lehnert: Götterdämmerung , Deutschlandradio Kultur , May 16, 2013
- ↑ When gods dawn . The daily newspaper , May 18, 2013
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bourges, Élémir |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French author |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 26, 1852 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Manosque |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 12, 1925 |
| Place of death | Auteuil |