François Mauriac: biography, quotes, aphorisms, phrases

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

F. Mauriac is a 20th-century French writer who was more inspired by the past than the future. So it may seem to those who have read at least a couple of his novels. It can even be considered old-fashioned - few of his contemporaries would agree that Christian morality can withstand the test of numerous cataclysms of the 20th century. He himself admitted that his work seemed to be glued to the past. The action of almost all the works is placed at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, the modern world, it seemed, did not interest the writer at all. Nevertheless, François Mauriac is a Nobel Prize winner, a member of the French Academy and one of the most important writers of the last century.

Geographic coordinates of François Mauriac's life path: Bordeaux

Mauriac François was born in 1885 in Bordeaux. His father Jean Paul Mauriac was a merchant and was involved in the sale of timber. Mother Marguerite Mauriac also came from a family of merchants. François had three brothers and a sister, and as he was the youngest, he received the most attention. Since childhoodhe was brought up in strict Catholic traditions, the loy alty to which he carried until the end of his days.

The boy studied in Coderan, where he made a friend for life - Andre Lacaza. In 1902, the writer's grandmother died, leaving behind an inheritance that the family began to divide before she could bury her. Watching this family drama was the first big shock for Mauriac.

In college Mauriac read the works of Paul Claudel, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Colette and André Gide. His brother-in-law Andre Gide, teacher Marcel Drouin, taught him such a diet. After college, Francois entered the University of Bordeaux at the Faculty of Literature, graduating in 1905 with a master's degree.

In the same year, Mauriac Francois began visiting the Catholic organization of Marc Sagnier. Strongly influenced by philosophy and modernism, its followers considered Jesus as a historical figure and tried to find the sources of faith.

First literary experience: Paris

In 1907, Francois Mauriac moved to Paris, where he was preparing to enter the Ecole de Chartes. At the same time, he begins to try his hand at writing poetry. Hands Folded in Prayer was published in 1909. The poems were rather naive, they too strongly felt the influence of the religious views of the author, but nevertheless they immediately attracted the attention of many writers. The success of the first publication prompted Mauriac to leave his studies and devote himself entirely to literature. Soon the first novel was published - "Child under the burden of chains." It alreadythe main idea of all his subsequent novels was clearly indicated: a young man from the provinces is forced to fight the temptations of the capital and eventually finds harmony in religion.

Activities during the occupation and political views of the writer

Like many other French writers, such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Mauriac actively opposed Nazism. During the occupation of France by the Nazis, he wrote a book directed against collaborationism. However, first of all, he preached the principles of philanthropy, so after the war he called on the French for mercy towards those who collaborated with the Germans.

He also actively opposed the colonial policy and the use of torture in Algeria by the French military. Mauriac supported de Gaulle, his son became the general's personal secretary in the late 1940s.

François Mauriac's Religious Works

The writer had an irreconcilable polemic with Roger Peyrefitte, who accused the Vatican of indulging homosexuality and was constantly looking for hidden Jews among its employees. In addition to fiction, Mauriac left several works on Christian issues: The Life of Jesus, Brief Experiments in Religious Psychology, and On Several Restless Hearts. In The Life of Jesus, the writer explains why he remained faithful to the religion in which he was born and raised. According to the author himself, it is not intended for theologians, nor for scientists, nor for philosophers. This is practically the confession of a man who is looking for a guiding thread for a moral life.

Francois Mauriac: phrases and aphorisms of the great writer

Mauriac left many insightful and wise sayings that reveal the very essence of human nature. He devoted all his work to the study of the dark sides of the soul and the search for the sources of vices. The main object of his close observation was marriage; in the unhappy life of the spouses, he found irritants that push people to sin. He considered religion as a railing, helping to stay over the abyss of human passions. But there are times, he wrote, when even the best in a person rebels against God. Then God shows us our insignificance in order to guide us on the right path. Religion and literature interact so successfully because both help to better understand a person, Francois Mauriac believed. Quotes containing Christian instructions can be found in almost every of his novels.

Sayings about love and marriage

What are the relations between a man and a woman in marriage, the moral aspects of their mutual hostility - that's what Francois Mauriac considered first of all. Quotes about love, of which the writer has a great many, indicate that the writer thought a lot on this topic. Like Leo Tolstoy, he considered marriage a sacred union between two people. Love between spouses, wrote Mauriac François, passing through many accidents, is the most beautiful, albeit the most ordinary, miracle. In general, he perceived love as “a miracle invisible to others”, considered it deeply intimate and intimate.the work of two people. He often referred to it as the meeting of two weaknesses.

In Search of the Lost God

An old-fashioned writer can only be called a person who has cast a superficial glance at his work. In fact, the main protagonist of the novels of Francois Mauriac, if we summarize them all, is contemporary bourgeois society. Or, to be more precise, a society that has lost God, that has blindly stepped into the reality revealed by Nietzsche with his postulate that God is dead. The literary legacy of Mauriac is a kind of purification, an attempt to bring humanity back to the understanding of what is Good and what is Evil. The heroes of his novels are frantically rushing about in their cold life and in search of new warmth they stumble upon the cold of the surrounding world. The 19th century rejected God, but the 20th brought nothing in return.

Hometown as a source of inspiration

It is enough to read the writer's novel "The Teenager of Bygone Times" to understand who Francois Mauriac is. His biography is outlined in this last work with scrupulous accuracy. The hero of the novel, like Mauriac, was born in Bordeaux into a we althy family, brought up in a conservative atmosphere, read books and worshiped art. Having escaped to Paris, he began to write himself, almost immediately earning fame and respect in literary circles. The native city firmly settled in the imagination of the writer, moving from work to work. His characters only occasionally travel to Paris, while the main action takes place in Bordeaux or its environs. Mauriac said that an artist who neglects the provincesneglects humanity.

Boiling cauldron of human passions

In the article "The Novelist and His Characters" Mauriac described in detail the scope of his research - this is the psychology of man, the passions that stand in his way to God and himself. Focusing on family and everyday problems, Mauriac "wrote life" in all its diverse manifestations. Snatching out the only one from the symphony of human passions, placing it under the ruthless microscope of his observation, the writer sometimes exposes the base nature of the human desire for accumulation, the thirst for enrichment and selfishness. But only in this way, with a surgical scalpel, you can cut out sinful thoughts from consciousness. Only by standing face to face with his vices can a person begin to fight them.

Francois Mauriac: aphorisms about life and about yourself

Like any person who constantly works with the word, Mauriac was able to surprisingly capaciously convey his life position in one sentence. His chisel sharply outlines the image of an independent personality demanding respect for his space when he writes that he has one foot in the grave and does not want to be stepped on the other foot. Not without his eloquence and wit. For example, one of his most famous aphorisms says that uncorrupt women usually cost the most. Some phrases of the writer turn things familiar to us in a completely unexpected direction. In the aphorism "addiction is the long-term enjoyment of death," dangerous addiction takes on an almost romantic connotation.

Most of lifethe writer lived in Paris and subtly felt this city. However, the phrase that Paris is inhabited loneliness opens the door not so much to its backyard as to the soul of the writer himself. During his long life - Mauriac François lived 85 years - he experienced more than one disappointment and made a shrewd conclusion that it costs nothing to build castles in the air, but their destruction can be very expensive.

Afterword

When Francois Mauriac was told that he was a happy person because he believes in his immortality, he always answered that this faith is not based on something obvious. Faith is a virtue, an act of will, and it requires a lot of effort from a person. Religious enlightenment and grace do not descend on a restless soul at one fine moment, it must itself strive for a source of tranquility. This is especially difficult in conditions when nothing around testifies to at least a small presence of morality and humility. Mauriac said that he managed - with an emphasis on this word - to preserve, touch and feel love that he had not seen.