Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) is the
most celebrated of French short-story writers. The brilliance
of his technique is combined with an ethical nihilism.
Guy de Maupassant was born on Aug. 5, 1850, in Normandy;
his exact birthplace has never been established. His father, a
libertine with a roving disposition, and his mother were
legally separated when Guy was still a boy, and he spent a
carefree adolescence under the indulgent surveillance of his cultivated mother. When he
reached man's estate, the place of his father was to some extent taken by the novelist Gustave
Flaubert, who had been a close friend of Madame de Maupassant for many years.
Under Flaubert's tutelage, the young Maupassant underwent a strict course of training in the
craft of literature, at the same time as he was earning his living in the civil service. He became
known to members of the naturalist school and collaborated with Zola and four of his disciples
in producing in 1880 a volume of short stories about the Franco-Prussian War entitled Soirées
de Médan. Maupassant's contribution, Boule de suif, was so superior to the others that his
reputation was made on the spot. In succeeding years his stories were in great demand, for
newspaper publication in the first instance. Collected, they eventually provided material for 16
volumes.
For the subjects of his stories Maupassant drew on his experiences as a boy among the farming
folk and fishermen of Normandy and also on the observations he made of his colleagues and
superiors when he was working as a government official in Paris; though it was Balzac who
first introduced the lowly clerks into literature, it was Maupassant who explored every aspect of
the lives of these underpaid bureaucrats. Maupassant's humor is sometimes racy but more
often bitter; the famous "whiplash ending," which he invented, can be cruel in the extreme. His
work as a whole is permeated by irony and pessimism; humanity is shown motivated more by
greed and snobbery than by any finer passions. Some of his later stories, dealing with eerie
hallucinations, reflect the breakdown in Maupassant's mental health, attributable to syphilis.
In the last 18 months of his life he was confined to a sanatorium for the insane, where he died
on July 6, 1893.
Apart from the short stories, Maupassant published six novels, including Bel-Ami (1885), the
saga of a handsome scoundrel who makes good, and Pierre et Jean (1888), which tells how a
young man's image of his mother is shattered when he discovers that she had conceived his
younger brother out of wedlock. Henry James described Maupassant as a "lion in the path"—
meaning that he represented a formidable barrier to the development of a morally significant
literature.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to
a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on
the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was
a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young
Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a
singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt
father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium
in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University
Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced
general medicine for about ten years.
While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a
pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my
wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first
books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of
writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and
compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical
depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and
precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided
stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by
writers Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian
Academy of Sciences in 1888.
In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of
Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation
about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he
published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and
the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and
quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned
to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera.
Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-
Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the
modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard,"
he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress
of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved
to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was
visited by writers Lev Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, and artists Konstantin Korovin and
Isaac Levitan.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa proved to be one of Japan's most important
intellectuals over his short career during the Taishō period (1912–1926).
Akutagawa is regarded as the "father of the Japanese short story" and
the Akutagawa Prize—Japan's premier literary award—is named after
him. At thirty-five, he committed suicide through an overdose of barbital.
Akutagawa's first name, Ryūnosuke ("Son of Dragon"), was a tribute to
the fact that he was born in the Year of the Dragon, in the Month of the
Dragon, on the Day of the Dragon, and at the Hour of the Dragon.
Ryūnosuke was an introverted child, spending most of his time reading
classical Chinese literature and works by influential Japanese authors Mori Ōgai and Natsume
Sōseki. His second published story, "The Nose," earned a letter of praise from Sōseki, his early
childhood idol.
After studying English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, Akutagawa continued to write
works based on classical and historical texts, as well as haikus under the pen name Gaki. After
serving with the Naval Engineering School as an English instructor, he spent four months in
China to report for Osaka Mainichi Shimbun, a daily newspaper. His physical and mental
health soured as a result of this trip and he never made a full recovery before the end of his
life.
He had been worried about inheriting his mother's mental illness throughout his life and
although his adopted mother, Fuki, played a more significant role in his life, he had always
identified strongly with his biological mother. The theme of impending madness runs
throughout his published works. When he began suffering from visual hallucinations and
nervousness, his fear was cemented. After a failed attempt at suicide with a friend of his wife's,
he ultimately ended his life. His suicide note mentioned a "vague insecurity" about the future.
Although his works have suffered no small amount of unscholarly mistranslation and exoticism
over the years (particularly in the 1950s), newer and better translations are becoming more
widely distributed. Since his first publications, he has never gone out of print, and indeed his
popularity continues to grow.
The novelist Haruki Murakami has noted that stylistic genius, unrivaled depiction of
psychology, aphoristic wit, and a legacy of literary transformation guaranteed Akutagawa's
reputation as "a writer of genuinely national stature" in Japan.
Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali Rabīndranāth Ṭ hākur, (born
May 7, 1861, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died August 7,
1941, Calcutta), Bengali poet, short-story
writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who
introduced new prose and verse forms and the use
of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing
it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing
Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding
creative artist of early 20th-century India. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive
the Nobel Prize for Literature. The son of the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, he early
began to write verses, and, after incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned
to India. There he published several books of poetry in the 1880s and
completed Manasi (1890), a collection that marks the maturing of his genius. It contains some
of his best-known poems, including many in verse forms new to Bengali, as well as some social
and political satire that was critical of his fellow Bengalis.
In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his family’s estates at
Shilaidah and Shazadpur for 10 years. There he often stayed in a houseboat on the Padma
River (the main channel of the Ganges River), in close contact with village folk, and his
sympathy for them became the keynote of much of his later writing. Most of his finest short
stories, which examine “humble lives and their small miseries,” date from the 1890s and have
a poignancy, laced with gentle irony, that is unique to him (though admirably captured by the
director Satyajit Ray in later film adaptations). Tagore came to love the Bengali countryside,
most of all the Padma River, an often-repeated image in his verse. During these years he
published several poetry collections, notably Sonar Tari (1894; The Golden Boat), and plays,
notably Chitrangada (1892; Chitra). Tagore’s poems are virtually untranslatable, as are his
more than 2,000 songs, which achieved considerable popularity among all classes of Bengali
society.
In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal at Shantiniketan (“Abode
of Peace”), where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions. He settled
permanently at the school, which became Visva-Bharati University in 1921. Years of sadness
arising from the deaths of his wife and two children between 1902 and 1907 are reflected in his
later poetry, which was introduced to the West in Gitanjali (Song Offerings) (1912). This book,
containing Tagore’s English prose translations of religious poems from several of his Bengali
verse collections, including Gitanjali (1910), was hailed by W.B. Yeats and André Gide and won
him the Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it in
1919 as a protest against the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre.
From 1912 Tagore spent long periods out of India, lecturing and reading from his work
in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia and becoming an eloquent spokesperson for the cause
of Indian independence. Tagore’s novels in Bengali are less well known than his poems and
short stories; they include Gora (1910) and Ghare-Baire (1916), translated into English
as Gora and The Home and the World, respectively. In the late 1920s, when he was in his 60s,
Tagore took up painting and produced works that won him a place among India’s foremost
contemporary artists.
Naguib Mahfouz is considered one of the foremost writers in modern
Arabic literature. Born in the al-Jamaliyya district of Cairo, Egypt, on
December 11, 1911, he was the youngest of seven children and lived
there until the age of six (or twelve, depending on biographer). He
began his writing career at the age of 17 He published his first novel
in 1939 (The Games of Fate), and since that date has written thirty-
two novels and thirteen collections of short stories. In his old age he
has maintained his prolific output, producing a novel every year. The
novel genre, which can be traced back to the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in Europe, has no prototypes in classical Arabic literature. Although this
abounded in all kinds of narrative, none of them could be described as we understand the term
"novel" today. Arab scholars usually attribute the first serious attempt at writing a novel in
Arabic to the Egyptian author Muhammad Hussein Haykal. The novel, called "Zaynab" after the
name of its heroine, and published in 1913, told in highly romanticized terms the story of a
peasant girl, victim of social conventions. Soon after, writers like Taha Hussein, Abbas Al-
Aqqad, Ibrahim Al-Mazini and Tawfiq Al-Hakim were to venture into the unknown realm of
fiction.
The Arabic novel, however, was to wait for another generation for the advent of the man who
was to make it his sole mission. Naguib, who was born to a middle-class family in one of the
oldest quarters in Cairo, was to give expression in powerful metaphors, over a period of half a
century, to the hopes and frustrations of his nation. Readers have so often identified
themselves with his work, a great deal of which has been adapted for the cinema, theater and
television, that many of his characters become household names in Egypt and elsewhere in the
Arab world. On the other hand, his work, though deeply steeped in local reality, appeals to that
which is universal and permanent in human nature, as shown by the relatively good reception
his fiction has met in other cultures. In English and other languages, since the appearance in
1966 of his first translated novel Midag Alley, he has been widely read.
A study of Mahfouz's output shows his fiction to have passed through 4 distinguishable stages.
The first (1939-44) comprises three novels based on the history of ancient Egypt. They provide
a useful insight into the germination of the then budding young talent. Admittedly written
under the influence of Sir Walter Scott's historical romances, the last of the three, "The
Struggle of Thebes", is particularly interesting for the way in which the novelist brought history
to bear on the political scene at the time. The novel draws on the heroic struggle of the
Egyptians and their patriotic Pharaohs to expel the Hyksos, as foreign ruling invaders, from
their country. The novel bore a relevance to Egyptian sociopolitical reality at the time (British
occupation and a ruling aristocracy of foreign stock) that was all too obvious to be missed.
Mahfouz had meant to write a whole series of novels encompassing the full history of Pharaonic
Egypt; he even did the research required for such a monumental task. In the event, and
perhaps luckily for the development of the Arabic novel, he was voluntarily deflected from his
intended course and the scene of his next novel, "A New Cairo" (1945), was placed in the raw
reality of its day. This marks the beginning of the second stage in the novelist's career, which
culminated in the publication in 1956-57 of his magnum opus, "The Cairo Trilogy". The novels
of this phase include six titles, of which three are English translation, i.e. "Midag Alley", "The
Beginning", and "The End", and Volume 1 of the Cairo Trilogy ("Palace Walk"). In this period of
his writing, the novelist studied the sociopolitical ills of his society with the full analytical
power afforded him by the best techniques of realism and naturalism. What emerges from the
sum total of these novels is a very bleak picture of a cross section of Egyptian urban society in
the twenty or so years between the two World Wars. A work which stands by itself in this phase
is "The Mirage" (1948), in which Mahfouz experimented for the first and last time with writing a
novel closely based on Freud's theory of psycho-analysis. For his Trilogy, the peak of his
realist/ naturalist phase, the Egyptian people will forever stand in their great novelist's debt.
For without this colossal saga novel, in which he gives an eyewitness account of the country's
political, social, religious and intellectual life between the two wars, that period of turmoil in
their nation's life would have passed undocumented. After writing the Trilogy, which met with
instant wide acclaim and served to focus renewed attention on his previous work, Mahfouz fell
uncharacteristically silent for a number of years (1952-59) - the Trilogy having been completed
four years before its publication. Different theories exist as to why this happened. One theory
held by Ghaly Shukri, a well-known Mahfouz scholar, is that by writing the Trilogy Mahfouz
had brought the realistic technique to a point of perfection which he could not possibly
surpass. He thus needed a period of incubation in which to look for a new style. Whatever the
reason, when Mahfouz serialized his next novel in the Cairo daily Al-Ahram in 1959, his
readers were in for a surprise. The people of "Our Quarter" (available in English) as children of
Gebe-lawi, was a unique allegory of human history from beginning to the present day. "The
Thief and the Dogs" (available in English), published in 1982, is in a way like switching from a
Dickens or a Balzac to a Graham Greene or a William Golding, so radical was the change that
this style underwent in the third stage of his development. No longer viewing the world through
realist/naturalist eyes, he was now to write a series of short powerful novels at once social and
existential in their concern. Rather than presenting a full colorful picture of the society, he now
concentrated on the inner working of the individual's mind in its interaction with the social
environment. In this phase his style ranges from the impressionistic to the surrealist, a pattern
of evocative vocabulary and imagery binds the work together, an extensive use is made of the
stream of consciousness, or to use a more accurate term in the case of Mahfouz, free indirect
speech. On the other hand, while the situation is based on reality, it is often given a universal
significance through the suggestion of a higher level of meaning. Just as his realistic novels
were an indictment of the social conditions prevailing in Egypt before 1952, the novels of the
sixties contained much that was overtly critical of that period. In the years following 1967, his
writing ranged from surrealist, almost absurd short stories and dry, abstract, unactable
playlets, to novels of direct social and political commentary. Mahfouz himself was aware of the
new turn his work had taken. In the mid-seventies we find Mahfouz again searching for a new
style. It would appear that, having been diverted by national traumatic events from the course
he had embarked on in the early sixties, he was no longer able to return to it. Or it may be that
in his old age, with a life's experience behind him, he felt at last that he could Arabicize the art
of the novel. For it is since then that we observe the sporadic emergence of a number of novels
which justify the proposition of a fourth stage in his literary development(which has yet to be
studied). What is remarkable about the novels of this stage, of which we can count five, is their
departure from the norms of novel writing as they evolved in Europe over the last two
centuries; these are the norms which conceive of the novel as a work of indivisible unity which
proceeds logically from a beginning to a middle to an end. But Mahfouz no longer wants any of
that. He now harks back to the indigenous narrative arts of Arabic literature, particularly as
found in the Arabian Nights and other folk narratives in which Arabic literature abounds.
While any talk of an organic unity in these works is precluded, the presence of what may be
called, for the lack of a better term, a cumulative unity producing a total effect of sorts, is
undeniable. It is this form that Mahfouz has been experimenting with for the last ten years or
so in novels like The Epic of the Riff-Raff", "The Nights of "The Thousand and One Nights" and
others. In his evocation of both the form and the content of these classical Arabic narrative
types, and his utilization of them to pass judgment of the human condition past and present,
Mahfouz appears to open endless vistas for the young Arab novelist to find a distinct voice of
his own.
