The great Meaulnes

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The great Meaulnes or in German also The great comrade (other German titles see web links), French Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) is the only completed novel by the writer Alain-Fournier .

The focus is on the story of the briefly fulfilled but ultimately failing love of the young adventurer Augustin Meaulnes for the beautiful and fragile Yvonne de Galais. The story is mostly told in retrospect from the perspective of the second main character of the novel, Meaulnes' younger friend François Seurel, who admires him and in the end also secretly loves Yvonne.

Le Grand Meaulnes appeared from July to November 1913 in five installments in the magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française ; in autumn it was also published as a book. The success was immediately noticeable: The novel was shortlisted for the Prix ​​Goncourt .

The novel changed its concept several times during its creation before it was completed in early 1913. But even in the final version, the text structure still seems quite heterogeneous: Longer, formally strongly diverging passages have been inserted into the largely chronological first-person narration by François Seurel: Meaulnes' first encounter with Yvonne in the third person, his letters to Seurel and finally the diary entries revealing Meaulnes' liaison with another woman.

Content of the novel

The action takes place in the 1890s and spans about four years.

First part

In the uneventful everyday school life of the provincial town of Sainte-Agathe, everything is different when the 17-year-old Augustin Meaulnes, son of a wealthy widow, comes into the Seurel family's teaching household as a paying guest student on a November day. With his self-confidence and his wordless thirst for enterprise, he electrifies the sheltered François and quickly becomes the leading figure of all other students. When François' grandparents are expected to visit over the Christmas period, Meaulnes gets a horse and carriage to pick them up from a train station 10 km away. During the carriage ride he falls asleep, gets lost, loses his horse and wagon and the next afternoon he walks and disoriented to a little castle where the engagement of Frantz de Galais, the owner's son, is to be celebrated. The guests are mostly children, who determine the course of the festival with their wishes, and young people from the area in Meaulnes' age who celebrate in fantastic costumes with dance, music, walks and good food. During a boat trip, Meaulnes meets the groom's sister, Yvonne de Galais, and both fall fatefully in love without breaking their formal distance. He also gets to know the groom, who ends the party in the evening with the news that his bride, the daughter of a weaver, has left him for lack of trust in the power of his love that transcends social boundaries.

This festival is "the beginning of confusion and devastation": When the general departure, Meaulnes is taken by other guests in the car, believes he hears a pistol shot shortly after departure and sees the injured Frantz, falls asleep and is drunk with sleep near Sainte -Agathe deposed: He neither knows how he got to Yvonne's castle, nor was he able to memorize the way back.

Second part

In the next few weeks Meaulnes tried in vain to reconstruct his journey on a map. At the end of February, Frantz de Galais, who after attempting suicide (this was the pistol shot), moves around as a showman with a clown friend, comes to Sainte-Agathe and even goes to school there for a few days. He recognizes Meaulnes again, but does not reveal himself and, because he is wearing a head bandage, is not recognized by Meaulnes either. But it partially complements Meaulnes' map. Still unrecognized, he makes Meaulnes and François swear eternal friendship with him and the willingness to help in need and disappears after he has identified himself to Meaulnes at the last moment. Meaulnes, the great comrade and “tracker”, continues to search in vain for the location of that dreamlike engagement party, his “lost country”, but then leaves school shortly before Easter. He goes to Paris because before his disappearance Frantz gave him an address where the allegedly now married Yvonne is supposed to live.

Three short letters that Meaulnes wrote to François in the following months report on his further experiences: In Paris, until November, he waited in vain every day until November to see Yvonne again, the incarnation of his longing for wife and family. He meets the young seamstress Valentine Blondeau without knowing that she is Frantz's missing bride, who, despite her escape at the time, still hopes to see Frantz again.

third part

In the summer of the following year, François happened to find out the name and location of the lost property Les Sablonnières , which is only inhabited by the old Monsieur de Galais and his daughter Yvonne. He postponed his vacation stay with relatives in a nearby market town in order to be certain, and in his uncle's shop he met Yvonne de Galais, whose family is now completely impoverished. François immediately sets out to inform Meaulnes, who has resignedly abandoned his search for Yvonne and is now living nearby with his mother, of his discovery and to invite him to a country trip arranged by his uncle. Meaulnes reacts astonishingly cautious and distant and makes mysterious hints about a mistake that he has made and has to correct, but finally accepts the invitation. Although Meaulnes' re-encounter with Yvonne does not seem to be very happy at first, he stops that same evening "sobbing for the hand of Mademoiselle de Galais."

After a five-month engagement period, Meaulnes and Yvonne married in February of the following year and moved into a house in Les Sablonnières, the last remnant of the once large estate. On the wedding evening, Frantz appears and, citing the oath he once made, demands Meaulnes' help in finding his missing bride Valentine, whom he has been looking for all along in vain. The next morning Meaulnes sets out, driven by a “secret feeling of guilt” , and leaves Yvonne alone.

François, who in the meantime has become a teacher himself in a nearby village, visits her regularly in the following months and becomes “her faithful companion ... in a waiting we did not speak of” . He develops an intimate friendship with Yvonne that equates to an unacknowledged love. In October, Yvonne gives birth to the child she conceived on Meaulnes' wedding night. She dies shortly afterwards of the consequences of the difficult birth, without having seen or heard from him again. A little later, her father dies too, and François becomes the little daughter's guardian. One day he finds Meaulnes' diary entries in the attic, which reveal his secret: After months of waiting in vain for Yvonne, Meaulnes had entered into a relationship with Valentine in Paris and wanted to marry her. When he learns on a summer trip that she was Frantz's bride, he leaves her. Since she has given him to understand that the only way out is prostitution, he makes serious accusations for having plunged her into ruin. When François appeared to tell him that he had found Yvonne again, Meaulnes had just started looking for Valentine. So what drove him to leave Yvonne was not just the oath he had made to Frantz, but just as much his guilty feelings towards Valentine.

Only after Meaulnes actually brought Valentine and Frantz back together does he appear again on the estate - more than a year and a half after his wedding and his departure. The novel ends with François' expectation that his friend, who has become a stranger to him, will leave him with his daughter: “I felt that the great Meaulnes had come to take away the only joy he had left me. And already I saw in front of me how he went out on new adventures in the night, his daughter wrapped in his coat. "

Interpretation of the novel

There are clear parallels between the plot of the novel and the author's biography which raise the old question of how far the author's own life experiences lead: the novel could initially deal with the author's disappointed love for a certain Yvonne de Quièvrecourt, which he met on Ascension Day 1905 and then lost sight of it, only to learn two years later that she was now married.

The great Meaulnes is sometimes understood as the evocation of a healthy children's world, as an escape from an unbearable present or as the story of an unhappy childhood sweetheart. These interpretations, which can be based on individual fairy-tale features of the engagement party and on the surface of the motifs of the main characters, can not be sustained if the entire novel is read carefully . Even the less than idyllic attack by classmates on Meaulnes and François is far removed from all child and youth romance. The general dialectic of freedom and responsibility always stands behind the theme of the inevitably failing childhood love.

The defining feature of the novel, on the other hand, is the texture of journeys and adventures that are combined in Meaulnes 'character: his first exit and aberration, the adventurous return to school, the plans to search for the " lost good ", Meaulnes' departure to Paris, his trip with Valentine, the two-time search for Valentine etc. The adventures, the journeys and the freedom and choice of decisions that go with them have an existential and at the same time mythical meaning for Meaulnes and also for his friend François (compare François' feeling of awakening in Chapter 9: In Search of the Lost Path). In them the predestined appropriation of the world is fulfilled and at the same time the tragic entanglement in its dangers, which lead the characters far from their goals and also let them break. Augustin Meaulnes personifies these motifs of exit, probation and painful failure, François Seurel and Yvonne von Galais the passive, amazed suffering of the uncanny destiny of human search. Understood in this way, The Great Meaulnes is the novel of an unheroic odyssey and everyday adventure. How does the French edition of the novel end? With the words: " partant ... pour de nouvelles aventures ".

German editions

The authorized translation of the novel was made by Arthur Seiffhart in 1930. The novel was published in December 1946 in a large-format newspaper print under the title The Great Comrade in the Rowohlt Rotations Romane series (rororo). In August 1956 the work was published again as a paperback by Rowohlt Verlag .

More recent translations, entitled The Great Meaulnes, are by Christina Viragh (1997) and Christiane Landgrebe (2009).

Film adaptations

The novel was filmed in 1967 by the French director Jean-Gabriel Albicocco under the title Le Grand Meaulnes with Brigitte Fossey as Yvonne , Alain Blaise as François Seurel and Alain Libolt as Augustin Meaulnes .

In 2006 , the novel was again adapted for the screen under the direction of Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe as Le Grand Meaulnes with Nicolas Duvauchelle and Jean-Baptiste Maunier in the leading roles.

radio play

In 2013 the novel by Leonhard Koppelmann was staged as a radio play in 2 parts in an adaptation by Manfred Hess for the SWR and the DLF. In the over 140 minutes long version, Alexander Scheer , Maximilian von Pufendorf , Lilith Stangenberg , Andreas Pietschmann and Bernhard Schütz played among others . The music was composed by Hermann Kretzschmar .

expenditure

  • The great comrade . Translated by Arthur Seiffhart. Preface by Alfred Neumann . Transmare Verlag, Berlin 1930.
  • My great friend . Translated from the French by Marielouise von Grothe. Abendlandverlag, Innsbruck 1948.
  • The great Meaulnes . Retransmitted by Walter Widmer . Illustrated by Li Rommel. Origo-Verlag, Zurich 1951; Diogenes, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-257-23361-2 (frequent editions also from other publishers, such as dtv or Reclam etc.).
  • My great friend Augustin . Translated from the French by Noa Kiepenheuer . With an afterword by Herbert Kühn. Kiepenheuer, Weimar 1969.
  • The great Meaulnes . Translated from the French by Cornelia Hasting and Otfried Schulze. With an essay by Hilde Spiel . Manholt, Bremen 1990.
  • The great Meaulnes . Translated from the French by Arthur Seiffhart. Revised by Maria-Sibylla Hesse. With an afterword by Maria-Sibylla Hesse and illustrations by Christopher Smith. Free Spiritual Life Publishing House, Stuttgart 1992.
  • The great Meaulnes . Translated and with an afterword by Peter Schunck. Reclam, Stuttgart 1994.
  • The great Meaulnes . Translated from the French by Christina Viragh . Afterword by Hanno Helbling . Manesse, Zurich 1997.
  • The great Meaulnes Translated from the French by Christiane Landgrebe. Thiele, Munich 2009.
  • Le Grand Meaulnes . Fayard, Paris 1971, ISBN 2-253-00527-4 (French edition)

literature

  • Lesot, Adeline: Le Grand Meaulnes (1913). Alain-Fournier: résumé, personnages, thèmes . Hatier, Paris 1992 (Profil d'une oeuvre 150) ISBN 2-218-03272-4 (French)

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b The great comrade at lewin-fischer.de, accessed on December 10, 2016
  2. ^ Books for a new Europe in: Nordbayerischer Kurier from 10./11. December 2016, p. 61
  3. ↑ Rowohlt Chronik 1931–1949 at rowohlt.de, accessed on December 10, 2016