Eugène Dabit

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Eugène Dabit (born September 21, 1898 in Mers-les-Bains , Somme department , † August 21, 1936 in Sevastopol , Soviet Union ) was a French painter and writer. He was best known for his novel Hôtel du Nord , published in 1929 , which is set in a proletarian milieu.

life and work

Dabit, the son of a contract driver and a cleaning lady, grew up in Paris. Military service tore him from an apprenticeship as a locksmith, from which he could only temporarily evade through feigned madness and a suicide attempt. Wounded in fighting near Reims , Dabit was employed in Paris as a radio telegraph operator, and after the war as a draftsman in the army mapping office. The drawing talent was already indicated in the apprentice locksmith.

In 1919 Dabit began studying painting at the Paris Academy Billoul , which he later continued at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière . Friends like Christian Caillard and Georges-André Klein encouraged him to read literature: Baudelaire , Rimbaud , Stendhal , Gide . With Cailliard, Maurice Loutreuil , Beatrice Appia and others, he formed the Groupe du Pré-Saint Gervais circle , which primarily discussed painting at the time.

Through artistic commissions from the silk industry, Dabit was able to earn money beyond his livelihood. With these savings, he supported his parents in 1923 when they bought a small hotel on the St. Martin Canal in north-east Paris. He often worked here himself, especially as a night porter. His observations were later reflected in the novel Hôtel du Nord , with which Dabit (1931) was the first to win the Prix ​​du roman populiste . In it, he describes the everyday life of the lower classes of the population “realistically, soberly, without intrusive social pathos, but sometimes caricatured”, as it is a fairly modest hotel. The film of the same name by Marcel Carné made the book world famous and the building a listed building and a Parisian landmark.

In 1924 Dabit married Beatrice Appia. Since his pictures were not very popular, he switched to writing in 1928 after a trip through Morocco . He found a new muse in the artist Vera Braun , who was born in Hungary . After receiving the award for his debut novel, he received a grant from the Blumenthal Foundation in 1932 . He immersed himself in the circle of “revolutionary” writers and artists.

In the wake of the 1935 Paris International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers (largely organized by Communists and other sympathizers of the Soviet Union), the Russian publisher Artemi Bagratowitsch Chalatov invited him to take part in a group tour of the USSR. In the summer of 1936, Dabit came to the Soviet Union for a few weeks with André Gide (who ran the company) and Louis Guilloux , Pierre Herbart , Jef Last , and Jacques Schiffrin . On this trip - which will cause a stir due to Gide's critical reports - he died in Sevastopol of a sudden illness of typhoid fever four weeks before his 38th birthday. He found his final resting place in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris .

reception

For Kindler's Neues Literaturlexikon the novels that Dabit wrote after his successful debut are wrongly forgotten. La zone verte, for example, published in 1935, is “probably the only work of art of importance that captured the dark period of the economic crisis in France from the workers' point of view”.

Dabit added a quote from Jean Guéhenno's essay Caliban parle (1928) as a motto for his debut , which could serve as a key to his work: “We are neither lovable nor touching. Every single one of us would make a bad novel hero. He is insignificant and his life is mundane. It never escapes the miserable existence to which everyone is inevitably subject. "

Honors

Works

Letters
  • Pierre Bardel (Ed.): Correspondance Eugène Dabit, Roger Martin du Gard . CNRS, Paris 1986 (2 vols.)
  1. 1927-1929. ISBN 2-222-03880-4
  2. 1930-1936. ISBN 2-222-03885-5
prose
  • L'Hôtel du Nord. Novel. 1929
  • Yvonne. Pascuito, Paris 2008 ISBN 978-2-35085-059-7 .
  • Übers. Bernhard Jolles: The little one. Kaden, Dresden 1932 ("Petit Louis", 1930)
    • Translator Julia Schoch: Petit-Louis. Schöffling, Frankfurt 2018
  • Villa Oasis ou Les faux bourgeois. Novel. Gallimard, Paris 1998 ISBN 2-07-075338-7 (reprint of the Paris 1932 edition)
  • L'île. Novel. 1934, Chaleil, Paris 2009 ISBN 978-2-84621-120-8
  • La zone verte. Novel. Gallimard, Paris 1935
  • Train de vie. Gallimard, Paris 1936
  • Faubourgs de Paris. Gallimard, Paris 1990 ISBN 2-07-071963-4 (first Paris 1933)
  • Un mort tout neuf. 1934 novel. 4th edition. Gallimard, Paris 1990 ISBN 2-07-071983-9
  • Le mal de vivre: et autre textes. 1939, Gallimard, Paris 2005 ISBN 2-07-077513-5
Non-fiction
  • Les maîtres de la peinture espagnole. Greco - Velazquez . Gallimard, Paris 1937
Diaries

Film adaptations

literature

  • André Gide : Eugène Dabit. In: Nouvelle Revue Française . Vol. 47 (1936), pp. 581-590, ISSN  0029-4802 .
  • Louis Le Sidaner: Eugène Dabit. Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, Paris 1938.
  • Marcel Arland (Ed.): Hommage à Eugène Dabit . Gallimard, Paris 1939.
  • Margarete Wrana: Eugène Dabit (1898-1936). His life and his work. Dissertation, University of Prague, 1939.
  • Regis Bergeron: Sur Eugène Dabit. In: Europe. Nouveau Revue mensuelle. Vol. 63 (1951), pp. 125-129, ISSN  0014-2751 .
  • Maurice Dubourg: Dabit et André Gide. Pernette, Paris 1953.
  • Pierre Bardel: Un écrivian trop oublié. In: Littérature. Vol. 14 (1967), No. 9, pp. 97-106, ISSN  0563-9751 .
  • David A. Orlando: The novels of Eugène Dabit and French literary "populisme" of the 1930s. Dissertation, University of Stanford, Calif. 1972.
  • Walter Heist: Between the world wars. In: Ders .: The Worker's Discovery. The proletarian in 19th and 20th century French literature . Kindler, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-463-00584-0 , pp. 113-147, here 130-136.
  • Marianne Kvist: Resignation och revolt. Eugène Dabit and “Le mal de vivre”; en study in förfaren's “vision du monde”. Korpen, Göteborg 1976, ISBN 91-7374-028-4 (also dissertation, University of Gothenburg 1977).
  • Pierre-Edmond Robert: D'un hôtel du Nord l'autre. Eugène Dabit (1898-1936) . Bibliothèque de litterature française contemporaine, Paris 1986 (Bibliothèque d'études critiques; 1).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Prix du roman populiste" of the Association Française pour la lecture (PDF; 66 kB), accessed on May 9, 2011.
  2. ^ A b ' Walter Jens (Ed.): Biographical information on Dabit in Kindler's New Literature Lexicon . Kindler, Munich 1988.
  3. ↑ see assessment by Julia Schoch in the podcast of Deutschlandfunk October 26, 2015
  4. ↑ Tilman Krause : Stay in the City of Still , in: Die Literäre Welt , April 11, 2015, p. 8
  5. ^ Reprint of the Paris 1929 edition
  6. ↑ Reviews can be found in the journals: Nouvelle Revue Française , August 1, 1932, ISSN  0029-4802 ; Le journal des débats , August 1, 1932 and Europe. Revue littéraire mensuelle , September 15, 1932 ISSN  0014-2751
  7. ^ First Paris 1934
  8. ↑ Excerpt: End of a life. Translated by Christine Kämmel. In: Frauke Rother, Klaus Möckel (Ed.): French storytellers from 7 decades. Vol. 1. Verlag Volk und Welt , Berlin 1983, 1985, pp. 332-347
  9. ↑ with texts by Marcel Arland, Claude Aveline, Marc Bernard, Jean Blanzat, André Chamson , Léopold Chauveau, Georges Friedmann , André Gide, Jean Giono , Jean Guéhenno , Max Jacob , Marcel Jouhandeau , Frans Masereel , André Maurois , Brice Parain , André Thérive and Maurice de Vlaminck .
personal data
SURNAME Dabit, Eugène
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter and writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 21, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Mers-les-Bains , Somme department
DATE OF DEATH August 21, 1936
Place of death Sevastopol , Crimea