Jacques Rivière

Jacques Rivière (born July 15, 1886 in Bordeaux , † February 14, 1925 in Paris ) was a French writer .

Life

Jacques Rivière came from a family of doctors and, after completing his baccalaureate in Bordeaux (1903), attended the preparatory classes for the École normal supérieure at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux near Paris. Here he made friends with a classmate who was also passionate about literature, Alain-Fournier , with whom he kept in constant, often daily, correspondence.

After he, like Alain-Fournier, had not received any of the restricted study places at the entrance exam for the ENS, he returned to Bordeaux in 1905. After a short study period (the two years in Lakanal were creditable), he passed a university examination, the “license ès lettres”, with which one could become a high school teacher on a salaried basis. After that he did his military service.

Then (1907) he went back to Paris to prepare for the agrégation , the recruitment test for permanent high school professors, and at the same time to work on a dissertation. He was already earning money as a moderately paid high school teacher, so that in 1908 he was able to marry Alain-Fournier's sister. He also made contacts in the Parisian literary scene and wrote for the magazine L'Occident . At some point he gave up his career plans at school or university.

In 1912 he became the editorial secretary of the young magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), for which he wrote numerous literary reviews himself. In 1913 he converted to Catholicism .

When the First World War broke out on August 1, 1914, he was drafted and was taken prisoner by Germany on August 24. A failed attempt to escape took him to a prison camp for a while. Towards the end of the war he fell ill and was released to neutral Switzerland, where he was initially held in an internment camp.

After more than four years back in Paris, he restarted the NRF in 1919 and was again its editorial secretary until his death in 1925. He died of typhoid at the age of 39 . His successor for many years was Jean Paulhan , whom he had previously hired as secretary.

Rivière did not make the originally hoped-for breakthrough as an independent author. He only completed one shorter novel ( Aimée ). The rest of his work, which is quite extensive and highly valued by connoisseurs, consists of essayistic texts, literary reviews and author portraits (e.g. by Arthur Rimbaud , Marcel Proust , François Mauriac , Paul Valéry , Saint-John Perse , Jean Giraudoux , Jules Romains or Louis Aragon ) , from diaries and the numerous letters he exchanged with Paul Claudel , Antonin Artaud and Alain-Fournier, among others . A large part of these texts was edited by his widow or published for the first time from the estate.

Works

• L'Allemand , 1918
  German: The German. Memories and reflections of a prisoner of war . (From the French and with an afterword by Daniele Raffaele Gambone), Lilienfeld Verlag, Düsseldorf 2014, ISBN 978-3-940357-12-0 , also available as an e-book: ISBN 978-3-940357-47-2
• Aimée , 1922
• Florence , 1935
• Correspondence 1907-1914.
  German: I want the answer: The poet Paul Claudel's correspondence with a young intellectual. Arena, Würzburg 1966. First as: Correspondence 1907–1914 . 1928.
• Rimbaud .
  German: Rimbaud. From d. Franz. By Armin Volkmar Wernsing. Matthes and Seitz, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-88221-303-5 .
• Carnets 1914-1917. Fayard, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-213-61115-7 .

literature

• Marcel Raymond: Études sur Jacques Rivière . Corti, Paris 1972.
• Michael Einfalt: Jacques Rivière: Literature or God. In other words: nation, God and modernity. Limits of literary autonomy in France 1919–1929. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2001, ISBN 3-484-55036-8 . Pp. 205-258.

Web links

• Literature by and about Jacques Rivière in the catalog of the German National Library
• Photo by Jacques Rivière at the English language Wikipedia