Black land
Black Land ( French La Brière ) is a novel by the French writer Alphonse de Châteaubriant . The first edition appeared in 1923 and in the same year received the prestigious Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie française . In 1925 it was translated into German by Rudolf Schottlaender .
content
Aoustin, the main character in the novel, is looking for a letter from King Louis XVI. , written in 1784. It confirmed that the Breton Duke Franz II had been granted fishing and hunting rights in 1461. His aim is to prevent the swamp from becoming nationalized. The novel contains extensive descriptions of the landscape of La Brière and the everyday life of its inhabitants.
reception
Shortly after its publication, the novel was extremely popular, which can be seen not only in the translations into German and English, but also in its film adaptation by Léon Poirier. Like many other novels by Châteaubriant, this one was largely forgotten later and was hardly received for its own sake, which is mainly due to the collaboration of its author with the German occupiers in World War II . The Breton nationalism, in which Châteaubriant's sympathies for National Socialism are based, is already clearly visible in the novel.
Editions and translations
- Alphonse de Châteaubriant: La Brière . Éditions Grasset, Paris 1923.
- Black land. Translated by Rudolf Schottlaender. Die Schmiede, Berlin 1925 (series: Romane des XX. Century).
- Passion and Peat. Translated by Frances Mabel Robinson. Thornton Butterworth, London 1927.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kay Chadwick: Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Collaborator on Retrial: Un Non-lieu individuel d'une portee nationale . In: French Historical Studies 18/4, 1994, p. 1064.
- ^ Ian Aitken: European Film Theory and Cinema. A Critical Introduction . Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2001, p. 71.
- ↑ Richard J. Golsan: French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s . Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. 53, 70.