Nicolas Boileau

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Nicolas Boileau
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Nicolas Boileau alias Despréaux or Boileau-Despréaux (born November 1, 1636 in Paris , † March 13, 1711 ibid) was a French author . For a long time Boileau was unreservedly counted among the great French classics, which was later relativized by a literary history that only accepted written evidence. In his day, however, his quality as a performing artist was not fundamentally differentiated from his quality as a man of letters.

life and work

Boileau, as he is usually called in German, was born the fifteenth child (from the second marriage) of his father, a bourgeois Parisian lawyer, who, however, proudly referred to noble ancestors. He lost his mother when he was a year and a half. He was a sickly boy, and clumsy bladder stone removal made him impotent. So he was given the minor orders before the end of his school days at the Collège de Beauvais (which, like the Collège d'Harcourt he had previously attended , was close to Jansenism ) . After brief theology studies, however, he switched to law in 1652 and was admitted to the bar in 1656.

1657 his father died; Boileau inherited and never had to work again. Since he had been composing verse for a long time, he turned to literature and let his older brother Gilles , who also wrote (and in 1659, at 28, was accepted into the Académie française , but died at 38), in introduce aesthetic circles. Here he got to know almost all Parisian authors of the time; H. the years to which the beginning of French classical music will later be dated. He interfered in their quarrels and made friends with some budding successful authors, the older Jean de La Fontaine and Molière and above all the only slightly younger Jean Racine .

Les satires

He himself made his debut in 1661, under the name Despréaux, which distinguishes him from Brother Gilles, with a witty and mocking verse satire, which he had eight more follow over the next seven years. The subject of these texts, which were based on ancient (Horace and Juvenal) and contemporary models (including Brother Gilles), was above all the world of the Parisian salons and the haunted beauties and writers, whose manias and vanities Boileau gleefully impaled, literary opponents by all means also by name. Only satire VI ( Les embarras de Paris , 1664), which dramatically and humorously depicts the confusion of everyday life in the noisy, dirty and overpopulated Paris of the time, has a more real subject. In view of his success as a lecturer who knew how to present his texts effectively and constantly updated at evening parties, Boileau refrained from having them printed for a long time. When a pirated print with six satires appeared in 1666, he was downright indignant and declared it to be inauthentic.

In 1668, after Satire IX (which was only followed by three more around 1700), he tried to cast off his image as the enfant terrible of the Parisian literary scene, and switched from aggressive satire to moralizing and philosophizing epistles (épîtres). The first glorified Louis XIV , who had just occupied Franche-Comté in the so-called war of devolution against the Spanish crown and had parts of Flanders conquered. In 1669 he was allowed to recite the epistle to the king, was given the lovely pension of 2,000 livres a year and joined the circle of quasi state-sponsored writers who rallied around Minister Colbert .

His critical preoccupation with many authors of the time and his aversion to linguistic exaggerations and the wild forms of the Renaissance had repeatedly led him to more fundamental considerations, in which the poetics of the classical Latin poet Horace were an important point of reference for him. In addition, he had found in the estate of his brother Gilles, who died in 1669, a translation of an ancient poetics, the so-called Pseudo-Longinus , which he had begun , completed and published as Traité sur le sublime (1674). From 1669–1674 these literary theoretical interests resulted in a poetics composed as a verse in four “songs”: L'Art poétique . In this, Boileau defines the role and task of the author, demands compliance with general guidelines such as "vraisemblance" (adequacy of reality) or "bienséance" (moral acceptability) and codifies the various lyrical and dramatic genera as well as the epic. He does not take the novel into account; he had already dismissed it as dubious in his Dialogue des héros de roman in 1668 . Boileau was lucky with his Art poétique : thanks to the long-term success of the authors, according to whose poetry he formulated his theories (including his friends La Fontaine, Molière and especially Racine), his work also became an authoritative, “classical” text itself. Later generations considered it to be the epitome of rule poetics : poetics should aim to express the beauty that reason can grasp. In 1674 he had a collective edition printed under the title Œuvres diverses du sieur D *** , which, in addition to the recently completed Art poétique, contained the nine finished satires and four epistles and one of the “Gesänge” I-IV completed “heroic-comic” epic, Le Lutrin (= the music stand ), in which he caricatures the well-known world of the Paris canons in the form of a burlesque epic parody. In Canto I he demands that rhyme must submit to the compulsion of reason; he is a slave and must be tamed, otherwise he will tend to revolt. In Canto 3 he renews the demand for compliance with the three units (place, time and plot) on stage, thereby establishing the (alleged) demands of Aristotelian poetics as the norm of classical French drama . He sharply criticizes Lope de Vega , who portrays his heroes as a child in the first act and as an old man in the last:

“The plot is given a fixed location.
A rhymer can carefree beyond the Pyrenees
One day in the game many years go by [...]
But we, who bind reason to rules,
We want action to join forces with art;
In one place and day, from one deed the picture.
Be the theater filled to the end. "

- Nicolas Boileau : Art poétique ("Poetry")

From then on, he no longer wrote much, skillfully administered his position as a recognized trustee of good literary taste and, turning out the alleged nobility of his family, frequented the best of Parisian circles and at court. In 1676, together with Racine, he was even appointed Historiographe du Roi , that is, the official chronicler of King Ludwig's numerous campaigns. His and Racine's records were later lost in a fire.

In 1683 Boileau published a second edition of his works, increased by four epistles and the last two chants of the Lutrin . In 1684 he was elected to the Académie Française with a little tutoring from Ludwig (because of course he had annoyed many literary colleagues with his reviews) . The acquisition of a country house at Auteuil resulted in his pleasant situation.

When in 1687 Charles Perrault read out his verse treatise Le Siècle de Louis XIV at the Académie , in which he postulated the superiority of his own epoch over classical antiquity, which had been considered exemplary until then, Boileau was one of the spokesmen of the traditionalists who attacked Perrault and thus triggered the famous literary controversy of the " Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes ". As early as 1694, however, he was publicly reconciled with Perrault, because his idea of ​​the superiority of the modern age began to prevail and become common property.

His misogynistic satire X ( Contre les femmes , 1694) in 1692 , in which he, who had been beaten with impotence, probably also processed personal resentment, led to a small exchange of blows between his like-minded comrades and opponents .

After Boileau, like Racine, had first secretly and then openly approached the rigorous and pious Jansenism of his youth in the late 80s and 90s , he withdrew more and more to his small apartment in the monastery of Notre-Dame, where he had lived for many years. The publication of a final verse satire in which he indirectly attacks the Jesuits, those intimate enemies of the Jansenists, was forbidden by the king in 1705.

Sick and bitter for a long time, he died a few years before his ex-protector and King Louis XIV (1638–1715), who was about the same age.

See also

Web links

Wikisource: Nicolas Boileau  - Sources and full texts (French)
Wikiquote: Nicolas Boileau  - Quotes
Commons : Nicolas Boileau  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from Karl Voss: Ways of French Literature. Berlin 1965, p. 92.
personal data
SURNAME Boileau, Nicolas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Despréaux; Bolieau-Despréaux, Nicolas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1636
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH March 13, 1711
Place of death Paris