Prosper Mérimée

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Prosper Mérimée
Signature of Prosper Mérimée.jpg

Prosper Mérimée (born September 28, 1803 in Paris , † September 23, 1870 in Cannes ) was a French writer .

Life and work

Mérimée was the son of middle-class, spiritually interested and very Anglophile parents and attended the Lycée Napoléon alias (after 1815) Henri IV. He then completed a law degree , but also began to work as an author, e. B. with the first dramatic and narrative attempts as well as a transfer of the Poems of Ossian , the then much-read (also appreciated by Goethe ) chants of an alleged ancient Celtic bard , which James Macpherson wanted to have collected around 1770 and translated into English. Mérimée also found access to Parisian circles of artists and writers early on. So he learned in 1822 z. B. Stendhal , with whom he remained friends, and met most of the romantics in the following years, including Victor Hugo , whom he applauded at the memorable bataille d'Hernani (1830). In 1825 and 1826 he toured England and in 1830 Spain , where he met the family of the future wife of the future Emperor Napoleon III. got to know what should be of use to him.

His first printed work was Théâtre de Clara Gazul in 1825 , a collection of plays supposedly written by a Spanish actress of that name, in which, according to the new romantic aesthetic, the classic three units are disregarded. In 1827 La Guzla, ou Choix de poésies illyriques, recueillis dans la Dalmatie, la Croatie et l'Herzégovine , a collection of alleged transfers of alleged Illyrian folk songs , with which Mérimée participated in the romantic fashion genre (folk) song collection, which 1806-08 of Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim with Des Knaben Wunderhorn and introduced in France in 1824/24 by Claude Fauriel with his collection Chants populaires de la Grèce modern . In 1828 Mérimée tried again as a dramatist and published the unperformed plays La Jacquerie, scènes féodales and La Famille Carvajal, drame .

After that he was practically just a narrator. He began, with moderate success, with a historical novel in the style of Walter Scott (which Alfred de Vigny had introduced in France in 1826 with Cinq-Mars ): the one in the year of St. Bartholomew's Night , i.e. H. at the time of the Wars of Religion , gambling 1572: Chronique du règne de Charles IX (1829). He then achieved lasting fame with a series of a good 25 stories , which initially appeared (1829/30) in quick, then only in loose succession, making him a classic of this genre. The best known are: Mateo Falcone , Tamango (both 1829), Le Vase étrusque (1830), La Vénus d'Ille (1837), Colomba (1840) and Carmen (1845; reworked by Georges Bizet into his famous opera in 1874 ).

Prosper Mérimée

After the July Revolution of 1830 , Mérimée had less and less time to write. He had joined the new regime of the “citizen king” Louis-Philippe I and in 1834, following some higher posts in various ministries and after being appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor , he became the highest French monument protector (“Inspecteur des monuments historiques de France "). This made him travel a lot, also abroad, and filled him up more and more. After all, this also gave him the material for a number of longer travel reports , which were popular with audiences and publishers at the time, e. B. Notes d'un voyage dans le midi de la France (1835) or Notes d'un voyage en Corse (1840).

When he was elected to the Académie française by a very narrow majority in 1844 , his literary career was basically over. He survived the February Revolution of 1848 unscathed in his office. After Charles-Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was appointed President for life (December 1851), he benefited from his old acquaintance with his new Spanish wife. In 1852 he was promoted to officer of the Legion of Honor and in 1853, after Bonaparte became Emperor Napoléon III at the end of 1852. had proclaimed, appointed a member of the parliamentary upper house (Sénat). He also frequented the imperial court, which earned him the resentment of many literary colleagues and the hostility of old romantic friends, especially Victor Hugos, who had meanwhile become an opposition republican.

Health restricted from his asthma from 1856 onwards , Mérimée resigned from his position as a monument protector in 1860 after 26 years; In 1863 he avoided a possible appointment as Minister for Education . In his final years he made a name for himself as a mediator of contemporary Russian literature in France. As early as 1849 he had copied a novella by Pushkin ; later he worked as a translator for Pushkin (1856) and Turgenev (1869) in collaboration with the authors themselves . Mérimée only survived the dismissal of his protector Napoléon on September 4, 1870 by a few weeks. He found his final resting place on the Cimetière du Grand Jas in Cannes .

Honors

The plant genus Merimea Cambess is named after him . from the family of the Tännelgewächse (Elatinaceae).

Works (in selection)

Grave in the Cimetière du Grand Jas ( Cannes )

Translations

  • The Venus of Ille. Translated from the French, with notes and an afterword by Ulrich Klappstein. Hanover: jmb-Verlag 2010. ISBN 978-3-940970-76-3

literature

  • Claudia Bork: Femme fatale and Don Juan. A contribution to the history of the motif of the literary seductive figure. Hamburg: from Bockel. 1992. ISBN 3-928770-02-0
  • Christian Chelebourg: Prosper Mérimée. Le sang et la chair. Une poétique du sujet. Paris u. a .: Lettres Modernes Minard. 2003. (= Archives des lettres modern; 280) ISBN 2-256-90474-1
  • Xavier Darcos: Prosper Mérimée. Biography. Paris: Tableronde. 2004. ISBN 2-7103-2666-3
  • Pierre H. Dubé: Bibliography de la critique sur Prosper Mérimée. 1825-1993. Genève: Droz. 1997. (= Histoire des idées et critique littéraire; 358) ISBN 2-600-00199-9
  • Ernst Falke: The romantic elements in Prosper Mérimée's novel and short stories. Halle on the Saale: Niemeyer. 1915. (= Romance works; 6)
  • Ulrich Herzog: Who is Carmen? Munich: Droemer Knaur. 1987. (= Knaur; 3836; non-fiction book) ISBN 3-426-03836-6
  • Monika Kirschbaum: Merimée and the Abbé Prevost. Bonn: Univ. Diss. 1979.
  • Ulrich Mölk : Femme fatale and yellow blossom. About Prosper Mérimée's novella Carmen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht. 1998.
  • Erich Reisen: Rhetorical tropes from a psychoanalytic point of view. Style studies on the language Prosper Mérimées. Stuttgart: Steiner. 1994. ISBN 3-515-06519-9
  • Clarisse Requena: Unité et dualité dans l'oeuvre de Prosper Mérimée. Myth et recit. Paris: Champion. 2000. (= Romantisme et modernités; 32) ISBN 2-7453-0184-5
  • Robert Saitschick : French Skeptics. Voltaire, Mérimée, Renan. On the psychology of modern individualism. Berlin: E. Hofmann u. Co. 1906.
  • Otto Theis: Mérimées' language and style in his short stories. Frankfurt am Main: Univ. Diss. 1929.
  • Gerd Thieltges: Bourgeois Classicism and Romantic Theater. Studies of the early dramas Prosper Mérimées (1803-1870). Genève: Droz. 1975. (= Cologne Romance works; N. F., H. 44)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .

Web links

Commons : Prosper Mérimée  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Prosper Mérimée  - Sources and full texts (French)
personal data
SURNAME Mérimée, Prosper
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH September 28, 1803
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 1870
Place of death Cannes