Xavier de Maistre (writer)

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Xavier de Maistre

Xavier de Maistre (born October 10, 1763 in Chambéry , † June 12, 1852 in St. Petersburg ) was an officer and known as a French writer .

Xavier de Maistre was the younger brother of the philosopher and statesman Joseph de Maistre . He was born into an aristocratic family in Chambéry.

As a young man he served in the army of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia , and later in the Russian tsarist army .

In 1790 he wrote his novel Voyage autour de ma chambre (“Journey around my room”, published anonymously in Lausanne in 1795 ) during a stay of 42 days in the city of Turin as a result of an unauthorized duel .

Life

Xavier shared his brother Joseph's political and counter-revolutionary views, and after the French revolutionary army annexed Savoy in 1792, he resigned from military service. When in 1796 Savoy was annexed to the French Republic and the Savoy army disbanded, de Maistre sought refuge in the northern Italian principality of Piedmont to live in Turin . When the French also occupied Turin, he left Piedmont in order to serve in the Russian army under Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov in its battles against the French troops from 1800 . In 1812 he married a Russian aristocrat, Mrs. Zagriatsky, who was related to the Tsarina's family. In the following years he was employed in various posts, such as library director and director of the Museum of the Admiralty in St. Petersburg . Temporarily in military service he was wounded in the Caucasus .

When Suvorov's patroness Tsarina Katharina II of Russia died in 1796, General Suvorov, who was highly gifted in terms of military strategy and who was successful, fell out of favor with the subsequent Tsar Paul I in 1800 and was resigned. The reason is a massacre of 20,000 Poles when the General occupied Warsaw and administrative service regulations were not observed during the campaign. The existence of a staff for waging war had been abolished by the emperor when he took office. Officers shouldn't sit at their desks but fight. Although Tsar Paul I. had given Suvorov a free hand and had instructed the council of war that Suvorov should not receive orders, but only recommendations and information, the monarch returned the favor in this way after Suvorov was no longer needed.

Xavier de Maistre left military service in the rank of major general in 1817 in order to work as a writer, portrait, miniature and landscape painter in St. Petersburg and Paris .

Literary work

Monument to Joseph and Xavier de Maistre in front of the Chambéry castle

His novel Voyage autour de ma chambre ( Journey around my room ) (1794) is a parody of geographical travelogues, a homage . De Maistre countered the trend of great journeys around the world and discovery of that era with the literary type of miniature journey as a "thought walk". The novel could be described as a tour d'horizon , while the traveler “travels” from bed, to the armchair and on to the desk, looks at pictures, writes reflections or stages dialogues between Greek physicians and philosophers. The objects in his detention room are described, explored and develop into objects of the imagination. Dialogues between the body and soul of the author, in which diverging views are discussed, are central. De Maistre's statements were interpreted as reactions to the limitations, trivialities and unreasonable demands of everyday life. The novel can be seen as the prototype of the so-called “room journeys”, which have been found in French literature since the end of the 18th century and which instead of the wide world take the room, garden, desk or drawer, tent or "touring" a library as miniatures or gems .

De Maistre's stay in Turin became the starting point for a second novel in the same style, Expédition nocturne autour de ma chambre (“Nocturnal voyage of discovery around my room”), which was only published in 1825.

His other literary works include:

  • Le Lépreux de la Cité d ' Aoste ("The Leper of Aosta"), 1811
  • Les Prisonniers du Caucase ("The Prisoners of the Caucasus"), 1825
  • La jeune Sibérienne ("The Young Siberian"), 1825

In 1839, after the French edition of “The Young Siberian” was published, Maistre made long trips to Paris and Savoy . He was amazed at the level of his fame in literary circles. Alphonse de Lamartine dedicated a poem to him with the title ( Retour , 1826) to praise his genius. He also met Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve , of whom some entertaining reminiscences of de Maistre have come down to us.

De Maistre is believed to have lived in Naples for some time before returning to St. Petersburg, where he died in 1852.

Uses in other works

  • The title of the novel Journey to My Room is quoted in verse from Carlos Argentino Daneri, a literary figure in Jorge Luis Borges ' short story The Aleph .
  • Elena Quiroga quotes from the novel Journey Around My Room .
  • Journey around my room is addressed in the book The Art of Travel by British writer Alain de Botton (2002, ISBN 0-375-42082-7 ).
  • The poem Hai luli from The Prisoners of the Caucasus was translated into a piece of music by the French composer Pauline Viardot .
  • Alphonse de Lamartine wrote the poem Le Retour when de Maistre came to Paris.
  • Journey around my room inspired the Portuguese writer Almeida Garrett to write Viagens na Minha Terra ( Travels in my Homeland ).
  • Xavier de Maistre and the journey around my room are mentioned by the character Brás Cubas as his main impetus to write his memoirs (in the novella Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis ).
  • Reise um mein Zimmer is quoted in DH Lawrence's work Sons and Lovers : "... She wanted to learn, thinking that if she could read, as Paul said he could read, 'Colomba', or the 'Voyage autour de ma Chambre' , the world would have a different face for her and a deepened respect. "(Part 2, Chapter 7)

literature

  • Charles M. Lombard: Xavier de Maistre. Series: World Authors. Twayne (GK Hall), Boston 1977, ISBN 0-8057-6284-1 .

theatre

  • In 2013 Reise um mein Zimmer was premiered in Switzerland (Zurich) in the Keller 62 theater.

Web links

Commons : Xavier de Maistre  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Xavier de Maistre  - Sources and full texts (French)

swell

This article is based, among other things, on the article Xavier de Maistre of the Encyclopædia Britannica from 1911, archived in: Project Gutenberg

  1. ^ A b Neville Williams, Waller, Philip: Chronology of the Modern World 1763-1992 , 2nd. Edition, Helicon, Oxford 1994, ISBN 0-09-178274-0 , pp. 3, 69.
  2. ↑ Xavier de Maistre: The journey around my room. Structure, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-351-03347-7 .
  3. ↑ Monograph on the genre of 'room trips': Bernd Stiegler :; Traveling standstill. A little history of travel in and around the room. S. Fischer: Frankfurt am Main 2010
  4. ↑ various German editions; as an e-book on google books after the 2nd edition 1825; here without specifying the translator and publisher. Print: Ed. Wilhelm Ungewitter, Meyers Volksbücher, 724. Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig approx. 1896. Bilingual: Aegis-Verlag, Ulm 1948
  5. ↑ e-book at google books based on the edition published by Ph. Bauer, Vienna 1827, transl. Kreisrath (di Franz Xaver) Schnetzler (see following note); the author is entitled "Graf"; the title is "... on the Caucasus". Series: Images of the Heart and the World, 7th; the following title is also included. - "Caucasus" also in the anthology French stories from Chateaubriand to France . Edited by Victor Klemperer , translator Günther Steinig. Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung , Leipzig 1951. Dieterich Collection 124, pp. 38–74. Klemperer goes into the author in the foreword.
  6. ↑ as an e-book, see note on previous title. First as “The girl from Siberia” (sic!) By Friedrich Wagner, Freiburg im Breisgau 1826, together in 1 volume with Caucasus and Aosta . Translator FX Schnetzler. He was editor of the Freyburger (sic!) Newspaper and belonged to the immediate circle of Johann Georg Jacobi online (PDF; 10.3 MB)
  7. ↑ Quiroga, Elena: Escribo tu nombre . Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1993, p. 297.
  8. ↑ http://www.keller62.ch/spielplan/index.html
personal data
SURNAME Maistre, Xavier de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer, painter and military
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1763
PLACE OF BIRTH Chambery
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 1852
Place of death St. Petersburg