Persian letters

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Frontispiece of the 1754 edition

Persian Letters ( Lettres Persanes ) is a famous and widely read epistolary novel by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu . He appeared anonymously in Amsterdam in 1721 . In the 161 letters that the novel contains, Montesquieu already addresses many of the historical and political philosophical themes that he will later elaborate. Today the work is considered a key text of the Enlightenment . In addition, there are embedded stories such as the parable of the troglodytes, the story of the Apheridon and the Astarte or the fragment of an ancient mythologist.

content

Title vignette for the German first edition, 1759

The content of the novel is the fictional correspondence between two fictional Persian , Uzbek and Rica, in April 1711 her hometown of Isfahan left in Persia about Qom , the eastern Anatolian Erzurum to Smyrna reach and from there to Livorno embark. The journey continues to France, they land in Marseille, they arrive in June 1712 in Paris , the destination of their journey. Her stay in France begins in the final years of Louis XIV's reign and ends at the beginning of the reign of Philip of Orléans .

Here they describe - this is the enlightenment core of the work - their correspondence partners (e.g. Rustan in Isfahan , Mirza in Isfahan , Nessir in Isfahan , the tomb guardian of Ghom ( Mullah Mehmet Ali ), Ibben in Smyrna or Rhedi in Venice ) the cultural, religious and political conditions, especially in France and especially in Paris, with a mixture of amazement, head shaking, ridicule and disapproval. In addition, Montesquieu has the opportunity to deal with other topics that are important to the Enlightenment, such as religion and priesthood, slavery, polygamy and the like from the different perspectives of his letter writers and those who responded . a. In addition, he weaves a novel-like storyline around the Uzbek harem ladies who stayed at home, which certainly contributed to the success of the book.

shape

The novel consists of a loose series of 161 letters, which are strung together without any intermediate texts or explanations. Correspondents, addressees and topics change abruptly without first recognizing a coherent structure. The events in the Uzbek seraglio serve as a kind of framework, or as a connecting element. At the beginning of the novel he said goodbye to his wives there, they are always present in his thoughts, he writes them many letters, and also receives a few and a great many from the chief eunuch responsible for the harem . The novel ends with the suicide note that his favorite wife Roxane wrote to Uzbek before she died of poison. Interspersed in the letters are completed stories such as the one about the troglodytes (Letter 11-14), the fairy tale of Apheridon and Astarte (Letter 67) as a kind of allegory about cosmopolitanism or a short essay about international law (Letter 94) and reflections on John Law's Financial Policy (Letter 132).

Historical background

From 1714 Montesquieu was employed as a Conseiller at the Parliamentary Court in Bordeaux , in 1716 he became President of the Senate. During this time the novel was written, his first literary work in a series of legal treatises. An anonymous publication in Protestant countries served to avoid interference by censorship or a ban. There was no publication of his novel under his name during his lifetime.

Epistolary novels have a long tradition in France. As a rule, they relate to emotions, moods, personal matters or are designed as travel reports. There are examples of satires such as Pascal's Lettres provinciales (1656/57), novels such as the Lettres portugais by Gabriel de Guilleragues , the first epistolary novel in France, which was long thought to be an authentic correspondence, or the novel published in France in 1684 by the Genoese Giovanni Paolo Marana (1641–1693) L'Espion du Grand seigneur (1684), in which a Turk reports in letters to Constantinople from Europe, especially from France. What is new about Montesquieu's Persian Letters is the polyphonic diversity of the voices and the multitude of philosophical, political, religious and cultural issues that are touched upon.

The author's intention was to allow his readership to view the customs and traditions as well as the religious and political institutions of his home country France from a distanced and critical external perspective and to compare “foreign” circumstances with their own. The view of Montesquieu, as it were the "shell" of the whole, corresponds to the ideas of the first generation of the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

The fact that his travelers come from Persia and also allows harem ladies to perform is explained, among other things, by the fact that the Orient was fashionable at that time after the success of the Tales from Thousand and One Nights (1704–1708).

swell

Montesquieu, who had an extensive working library, used a myriad of sources for the Persian Letters . They range from the Bible and the ancient classics, such as Ciceros De officiis , to the abundance of French memoirs and works by contemporary jurists, historians and philosophers, here primarily the writings of the French enlightener Pierre Bayle . A French translation of the Koran was published in 1674 , and Montesquieu owned a copy and will quote it in his later major work On the Spirit of Laws .

As for Persian geography, the Voyages en Perse by French explorer Jean Chardin were one of his main sources. Montesquieu initially had a two-volume edition, in 1720 he acquired the ten-volume complete edition of the work. Another source was the reports of the French traveler and diamond dealer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier . Between 1628 and 1668 Tavernier undertook extensive trips to the Near East, Turkey and Persia, where he met Shah Abbas II in Isfahan , and he came to India as far as the Mughal Empire . His travel books were very successful in France. The book Relation du Grand Serrail du Grand Signier was published in Paris in 1667, and Montesquieu, like other works by Tavernier, used it for his Persian letters.

reception

The book was a huge hit with the public right from the start. It was reprinted several times in the year of publication, and during the author's lifetime the number of French editions rose to over thirty. Early translations into English and then into German and Russian contributed to the book's European success. Andrew Kahn calls it in his introduction to Margaret Mauldon's retransmission of the Lettres Persanes into English "perhaps the first great popular work of the European Enlightenment".

The Persian letters were ignored by the French censors. According to Edgar Mass, the book does not appear on any official list of books banned in France, but never received a placet and an official stamp that the book was approved by the censors. After Montesquieu's "From the Spirit of Laws" had already been placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1751 , his Persian letters followed in 1761.

Quotes

"The Persian Letters" were so popular at once that the booksellers did everything to get continuations of them. They plucked everyone who came into their litter by the sleeve and said to him: "Sir, write me Persian letters". "

- Adolf Strodtmann. Preliminary remarks on Montesquieu's Persian letters.

“Montesquieu first made himself known through his Lettres persanes. The great effect which they produced was equal to their content and the happy treatment of it. Under the vehicle of a charming sensuality, the author knows how to draw his nation's attention to the most important and dangerous matters. "

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Notes on Rameau's nephew.

“No French author has ever said so perfectly what everyone felt or wanted to say; and as skillfully and entertainingly as if a man were telling a story after dinner. "

- John Davidson: Persian Letters. Introduction.

“More elegant has never been written. The change in taste, the invention of stronger means have not taken anything away from this perfect book. "

- Paul Valery. Préface aux Lettres Persanes.

Reception in England

The first English translation by John Ozell († 1743), published in 1722, was reprinted several times and reached a sixth edition in 1773. This was followed by a series of so-called sequels and imitations in the Montesquieu style. These authors tried to build on the popular success of the Persian Letters, although only a few - as Montesquieu's American translator R. N. MacKenzie notes - come close to the artistic rank and intelligence of Montesquieu.

In 1735 George Lyttleton published anonymously his "Letters From a Persian in England, to His Friend in Ispahan". Correspondents are the same as with Montesquieu, but their observations are friendlier, less pointedly satirical, and the comments on the English constitution are hardly a critical analysis than an open panegyric . This book was also very successful in England and sold well after Lyttleton's death.

In 1760 Oliver Goldsmith published his satire "The Citizen of the World, or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher", in which London and English society are seen through the eyes of a Chinese visitor, and that was the beginning of a number of more or less amusing or bizarre comments about the country and its people in England, in which stories and character sketches of people are only loosely held together by a narrative thread.

Reception in Germany

In 1760 Frederick II wrote under a pseudonym the Relation de Phihihu Emissaire de l'Empereur de la Chine en Europe, traduit du Chinois , published by the fictitious publisher Pierre Marteau, Cologne. In the small text inspired by the Persian Letters, a Chinese traveler, who is traveling with a Jesuit from China via Constantinople to Rome, reports on the manners and bad habits in Europe. Abuses in the Catholic Church are discussed in detail, with special attention to the situation in Rome and the situation of Jewish conversations . Friedrich's short epistolary novel is also full of allusions to current political events and reflections on the differences between living in a Christian or Confucian society.

Herbert Rosendorfer varies the formal approach of the Lettres in his novel Letters in the Chinese Past . In his satire in 985, two Chinese friends who were friends travel to the 1985 Munich with the help of a time machine.

Reception in Austria

Johann Pezzl , a Viennese journalist who belonged to the circle of anti-clerical enlighteners in Vienna, wrote the epistolary novel "Abdul Erzerum's new Persian letters" during his time as librarian to Prince Kaunitz , which was published in 1787 by Stahel in Vienna. He introduces his protagonist, who writes critical and satirical letters from Vienna to Persia, as the grandson of Uzbek.

From 1785 the writer Joseph Richter first wrote a letter novel in two volumes, the so-called Eipeldauer-Briefe (full title Letters from an Eipeldauer to his cousin in Kakran via d'Wienstadt ). Ludwig Plakolb, editor of the Eipeldauer letters, pointed out in the afterword to the edition he published in 1970 that the Persian letters served as a model for judges.

In the book, a farmer from the village of Eipeldau uses a mocking pen to comment on the manners, customs and current events in Vienna, in a stylized Viennese dialect . As the book became extremely popular in Vienna, Richter had further sequels to follow, so that the work gradually took the form of a periodical and local gossip. The Eipeldauer Letters appeared under changing editors until they ceased to appear in 1821.

Expenses (selection)

The Lettres Persanes first appeared on May 28, 1721 in Amsterdam by the Huguenot publisher Jacques Desbordes, albeit anonymously and under the fictitious publisher name Pierre Marteau , Cologne. This first edition, called Edition A, was followed in the same year by a second edition, called Edition B. Edition A serves as the basis for the historical-critical edition of the Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu , which was published in 2004 by the Fondation Voltaire . So far there are no sources why the publisher had a second, revised edition followed after such a short time. Issue B contains three new letters, while thirteen have been removed from the first edition. Neither manuscript has survived. The last edition published during his lifetime, from 1754, contains a foreword by Montesquieu with the title "Quelques reflexions sur les lettres persanes."

During the author's lifetime, d. H. Thirty editions published up to around 1755 use both text versions.

expenditure
  • Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu . 22 volumes [planned]. Vols 1-4, 8-9, 11-13, 16, 18 published by the Voltaire Foundation (Oxford), the Istituto italiano per gli Studi Filosofici (Naples); since 2010 published in ENS Editions , Lyon and Classiques Garnier , Paris.
The first comprehensive and historical-critical edition of the works of Montesquieu.
Volume 1: Lettres Persanes et introduction génerale. 2004.
  • Lettres persanes . Edited by Monika Schlitzer. Unabridged and unedited with explanations of words at the foot of each page, epilogue, etc. Bibliography. Reclam's foreign language texts. Stuttgart: Reclam 1987. (Reclam Universal-Bibliothek. 9226.) ISBN 978-3-15-009226-2
German translations

The first German translation by Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn , the younger brother of the poet Friedrich von Hagedorn , appeared in 1759 under the title Des Herr de Montesquiou [sic!] Persianischebriefe in Frankfurt and Leipzig. The basis of his translation, which he annotated, is version B, published in Amsterdam in 1721. In 1760 a second improved edition appeared.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Sophie Mereau translated parts of the Persian Letters and published them in 1802 and 1803 in continuations in the women's magazine Kalathiskos , which she edited , but had to cease publication after two years. Mereau, in its less careful and abridged edition, et al. a. several letters left out without indicating this. In 1968 the Lambert Schneider publishing house published a facsimile edition with a commentary by Peter Schmidt in its series “Deutsche Neurucke der Goethezeit” .

  • Montesquieu's Persian Letters. German by Adolf Strodtmann. With a biographical introduction by Adolf Stern. With a foreword by Hermann Hettner . Eichhoff, Berlin 1866. (Public library of the literature of the eighteenth century. 4th part.)
  • Charles-Louis de Montesquieu: Persian letters. From the Franz. By Jürgen von Stackelberg. With comments on the text and an afterword. Frankfurt a. M .: Insel-Verl. 1988. ISBN 978-3-458-14337-6
  • Charles-Louis de Secondas, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu: Persian letters . Trans. U. ed. by Peter Schunck. Stuttgart: Reclam, bibliograph. supplementary edition 2004. (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek. 2051.) ISBN 978-3-15-002051-7
  • Montesquieu: Persian Letters. Novel. After the translation by Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn [1759] based on the French original, reviewed a. carefully modernized by Bärbel Brands. Structure Media, Berlin 2005; License edition Weltbild, ISBN 3-8289-7925-4 .

literature

  • Jean Goldzink: Lettres persanes . In: Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires de langue française. Edited by Jean-Pierre de Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty. Bd KP. Paris: Bordas 1994. pp. 116-118. ISBN 2-04-018554-2
  • Wolf Kellerwessel: Montesquieu's criticism of repressive social systems . An interpretation of the harem theme of the letter novel "The Persian Letters". In: Enlightenment and Criticism. No. 1, 2007. pp. 86-96. (Special issue 13.)
  • Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéva: Pour un lecteur éclairé. Les leçons persanes de Montesquieu . In: Rue Descartes. 2015. No. 84. Ed. International College of Philosophy. Pp. 97-127. ISSN  1144-0821 full text

Web links and source

Commons : Persian Letters  - collection of images, videos and audio files

References and comments

  1. ^ Béatrice Guion: L'Espion du Grand Seigneur, ou l'invention du roman épistolaire oriental, accessed on October 23, 2017
  2. ↑ L. Desgraves, C. Volpilhac-Auger: Catalog de la bibliothèque de Montesquieu à La Brède, accessed on October 18, 2017
  3. ↑ Peter Schunk: Afterword, in: Montesquieu: Persische Briefe. Stuttgart: Reclam 2004. pp. 362-363.
  4. ^ Geoffrey C. Gunn: First Globalization. The Eurasian Exchange, 1500 to 1800. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield 2003. pp. 154-155.
  5. ↑ Peter Schunk: Afterword. In: Montesquieu: Persian letters. Stuttgart: Reclam 2012. p. 355.
  6. ↑ Montesquieu: Persian Letters. Oxford's World's Classics. Oxford Univ. Press 2008.
  7. ↑ Edgar Mass: Literature and Censorship in the Early Enlightenment. Production, distribution and reception. Frankfurt a. M .: Klostermann 1981. (Analecta Romanica. 46.)
  8. ↑ Derek Jones: Censorship. A World Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge 2002. p. 1622.
  9. ↑ Montesquieu's Persian Letters. German by Adolf Strodtmann. Berlin: Eichoff 1816. Preliminary remarks on the French edition.
  10. ↑ Notes on people and objects whose nephew is mentioned in the dialogue . All of Goethe's works. Vol 5. Paris: Tétot 1836. p. 384
  11. ^ "No French writer had ever before said so perfectly what all felt and were trying to say; and it was done so skillfully, so pleasantly, like a man telling a story after supper "John Davidson. Montesquieu (1689-1755). Persian Letters. Introduction. 1901.
  12. ^ "Rien de plus élégant ne fut écrit. Le changement du goût, le changement des moyens plus violents n'ont pas de price sur ce livre parfait. ”Quoted from: Paul Valéry : Variété II. Paris: Gallimard 1947.
  13. ↑ Ross Ballaster: Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785. Oxford Univ. Press 2005.
  14. ↑ Montesquieu. Persian Letters: With Related Texts. Ed. Raymond N. MacKenzie. Hackett Classics 2014.
  15. ↑ Montesquieu. Persian Letters: With Related Texts by Montesquieu, ed. Raymond N. MacKenzie Appendix: The Legacy of Montesquieu's Persian Letters. Indianapolis: Hackett 2014. pp. 267-277 (Hackett Classics.)
  16. ↑ Montesquieu. Persian Letters: With Related Texts. Ed. Raymond N. MacKenzie. Hackett Classics. 2014.
  17. ↑ Imagining the Other, Oliver Goldsmith, from The Citizen of the World (1760–1761). Retrieved November 3, 2017
  18. ↑ Eun-Jeung Lee: "Anti-Europe": the history of the reception of Confucianism and Confucian society since the early Enlightenment. Münster: Lit Verl. 2003. S. 59. (Politica et Ars. 6.) ISBN 3-8258-6206-2
  19. ^ Werner Lühmann: Confucius. Enlightened philosopher or moral apostle? Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2003. pp. 115-120. ISBN 3-8258-6206-2
  20. ↑ Kai Kauffmann: It's just a Vienna! City descriptions from Vienna 1700 to 1873. Vienna: Böhlau 1954. Chapter III.2.3: Joseph Richter: Letters of an Eipeldauer .
  21. ↑ Philip Stewart: Lettre Persanes In: A Montesquieu Dictionary , accessed October 15, 2017
  22. ↑ Quelques reflexions sur les lettres persanes, full text accessed on October 23, 2017
  23. ^ Britta Hannemann: World literature for citizens' daughters. The translator Sophie Merau-Brentano. Chapter 2/6: Persian Letters (Montesquieu). Göttingen: Wallstein 2005.
  24. ^ Britta Hannemann: World literature for citizens' daughters. Göttingen: Wallstein 2005. p. 94