Octave Mirbeau

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Octave Mirbeau

Octave Henri Marie Mirbeau (born February 16, 1848 in Trévières , Calvados ; † February 16, 1917 in Paris ) was a French journalist , art critic and novelist and is one of the most colorful personalities in the literature of the French Belle Époque . His comedy business is business was one of the most frequently performed plays in German theaters after 1903.

Life

Octave Mirbeau was born in Trévières in the Calvados department , his father Ladislaus Francis was a doctor, his grandfather mayor of Rémelard in Le Perche . A year after Octave was born, the family moved in with his grandfather. From 1859 Mirbeau received his school education at a Jesuit college in Vannes . The school administration expelled him from the institution at the age of 15. He was believed to have been a victim of sexual abuse by one of the priests. In 1866 he first studied art, then law. Under pressure from his father, he settled in Rémelard as a notary. His mother died in 1870, and Mirbeau was drafted into the military eleven days later.

He fought in the Franco-German War . After this he worked as a theater critic, but also wrote political articles for various newspapers in Paris , something for L'Ordre de Paris , the monarchist Gaulois and other organs that were often ideologically remote from him. In 1885 Mirbeau adopted the views of anarchism , which he remained true to until his death. As one of the leading anarchist intellectuals, he regularly wrote articles for relevant magazines. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair , he paid the fine that Émile Zola paid for his famous J'accuse ...! had been convicted.

Mirbeau was also a very eminent art critic, writing about the Impressionist and avant-garde movements in Montmartre and Montparnasse , which he believed to be the basis of a cultural revolution in France. The Académie Goncourt was co-founded by him.

Octave Mirbeau is credited with the discovery of the Belgian author and Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck . He also made significant contributions to the careers of Camille Pissarro , Auguste Rodin , Claude Monet , Camille Claudel , Aristide Maillol , Félix Vallotton and other important artists of his time.

One of his best-known literary works is the novel Diary of a Chambermaid (1900), which has been filmed several times, including by Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel . The maid, Céléstine, gets to know the dark side of the big bourgeoisie on a country estate, especially their sexual abnormalities, up to and including infanticide. Mirbeau had delivered an even stronger provocation a year earlier with his work The Garden of Torment (1899): In a paradise garden in China, an Englishwoman, tired of Europe, has people tortured in the most terrible way. The literary scholar Dorit Heike Gruhn recognized a template for Franz Kafka's story In der Strafkolonie in the novel . A formally innovative prose work is the satirical road trip report 628-E8 , which was translated into German in 2013. It was received as “a kind of Franco-German story of understanding” that targets Prussian megalomania just as much as French unfriendliness at the border.

His best-known drama business , which was also very successful on the German stage, is business (1903), mocking the imagined omnipotence of money aristocrats and upstarts. However, the comedy did not meet with understanding everywhere. Otto Flake perceived the text in the Weltbühne as "blatant scenery work" and criticized a "dialogue that is not afraid of the most worn-out phrases."

Octave Mirbeau died in 1917 on his 69th birthday and was buried on the Cimetière de Passy in Paris.

A great biography was written by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet; it is only available in French.

Dedicated writer

As a prototype of the committed, anarchist and individualistic writer, Mirbeau saw through the people and institutions that alienate, oppress and kill. Mirbeau had represented and published anti-Semitic positions, for example in the anti-opportunist and anti-Semitic weekly Les Grimaces , which he directed in 1883 , but he revised this position decisively from 1895 in connection with the Dreyfus affair and campaigned for the rights of Alfred Dreyfus against his anti-Semitically motivated condemnation . He loved scandal, condemned colonialism and wrote evil glosses against the social injustices of his time. He realized an aesthetic of exposure and set himself the goal of “forcing the blind voluntary to look Medusa in the face”.

He challenged not only bourgeois society and the capitalist economy, but also traditional literary forms. In particular, he contributed to the death of the supposedly “realistic” novel. He rejected naturalism, academism and symbolism and found his own way between impressionism and expressionism .

Quotes

  • "Do not hate anyone, not even an evil person, have pity on them because they will never get to know the only pleasure that comforts us in life: doing good."
  • “It is not dying that is sad. It is life when you are not happy. "
  • “The greatest conquest that journalism has made in this century was reporting, that is, we learned one fine morning that Monsieur X ... eats soft-boiled eggs for breakfast and that Madame Z ... at three o'clock a green dress, a pink dress at midnight, has this lover, that coachman. "
  • "Journalism humiliates everything, deforms everything, people and ideas."

Homage

"Octave Mirbeau is the greatest French writer of our time and the one who best represents the spirit of the century in France."

- Leo Tolstoy

Works

Novels

Plays

  • Les Mauvais bergers (1897) ( Bad Shepherds , 1900).
  • Les affaires sont les affaires (1903) ( Business is business , 1903).
  • Farces et moralités (1904) ( The Epidemic ; The Thief , 1904; The Wallet , 1905).
  • Le Foyer (1908) ( The Home , 1909).
  • Les Dialogues tristes (2006).

Other works

Laster , Wiener Verlag, 1903
  • Contes cruels (1990) ( Vice and Other Stories , 1903; The Pastor and Other Stories , 1904).
  • L'Affaire Dreyfus (1991).
  • Lettres de l'Inde (1991).
  • L'Amour de la femme vénale (1994).
  • Combats esthetiques (1993).
  • Correspondance générale (2003-2005).
  • Combats littéraires (2006).
  • Correspondance générale (2003-2005-2009).

Film adaptations

literature

  • Reginald Carr: Anarchism in France. The Case Octave Mirbeau. Manchester University Press, Manchester 1977, ISBN 0-7190-0668-6 .
  • Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet: Octave Mirbeau. L'imprécateur au coeur fidèle. Séguier, Paris 1990, ISBN 2-87736-162-4 .
  • Pierre Michel: Les Combats d'Octave Mirbeau , Université de Besançon, Besançon 1995.
  • Christopher Lloyd: Mirbeau's fictions. University of Durham, Durham 1996, ISBN 0-907310-35-4 .
  • Samuel Lair: Mirbeau et le mythe de la Nature. Presses universitaires de Rennes, Rennes 2004, ISBN 2-86847-927-8 .
  • Cahier's Octave Mirbeau has been published since 1994, ISSN  1254-6879 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Pierre Michel: Octave Mirbaud mirbeau.asso.fr, published by Société Octave Mirbeau (accessed February 15, 2017.)
  2. ↑ The first time? , arte.tv, October 28, 2016 (accessed February 15, 2017)
  3. ↑ a b c d Sven Ahnert: Tormentor of the Belle Époque. Octave Mirbeau, scandal writer of literary decadence , Deutschlandfunk, March 30, 2010 [broadcast manuscript]
  4. ↑ Pierre Michel: Chronology , mirbeau.asso.fr (French)
  5. ^ Josef Hofmiller : Maeterlinck (1904) . In: Ders., Attempts . Second adult Ed., Leipzig 1938
  6. ↑ Dorit Heike Gruhn, Fall of the culture of torture as a conservative cultural criticism? , Munich 1999.
  7. ^ Die Weltbühne , XIX, no. 1, January 4, 1923.
  8. ↑ Octave Mirbeau: de l'antisémitisme au dreyfusisme. Persée, accessed on May 6, 2019 (French).

Web links

Commons : Octave Mirbeau  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Octave Mirbeau  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Mirbeau, Octave
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mirbeau, Octave Henri Marie (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French journalist, art critic and novelist
DATE OF BIRTH February 16, 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Trévières , France
DATE OF DEATH February 16, 1917
Place of death Paris , France