Jean Genet: biography, personal life, best books, photos

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

Jean Genet is a famous French poet, writer and playwright. Many readers treat his work ambiguously, so far it causes fierce controversy among critics. The fact is that the main characters of his works are marginal personalities: prostitutes, thieves, pimps, murderers, smugglers.

Writer's biography

Jean Genet was born in 1910 in Paris. His mother, a mentally unstable woman, gave the boy to be raised in a peasant family.

As a child, Jean Genet was an obedient and very pious child. However, at the age of ten he was caught stealing. Later it turned out that he was not involved in the theft. But it was too late, offended by others and the whole world, he firmly decided to go the wrong way and become a thief. Later, Jean Genet himself wrote that he began to deny the world, which denied him.

From an early age, the life of a child was overshadowed by numerous difficulties. Already at the age of 15, he ended up in a juvenile colony due to constant thefts. This fact did not upset him at all. On the contrary, Jean became a favorite among charismatic andstrong teenagers, he himself was proud of the fact that he enjoys their authority. The author described the time spent in the colony in the novel "The Miracle of the Rose", which was published in 1946.

Jailbreak

Meanwhile, at the end of 1927, the writer managed to escape. But Genet could not hide for a long time, he was caught and brought back to prison. To be released, at the age of eighteen, he enrolled in the Foreign Legion. But he did not manage to stay in the service for a long time. According to the biography of Jean Genet, described in official sources, historians have revealed the fact of the theft of the belongings of one of the officers and the escape from the army.

In civilian life, the author had to do odd jobs. Periodically, he was caught on petty thefts. For theft, vagrancy and forgery, he was imprisoned several times. During World War II, while France was under occupation, Genet served another prison term.

Debut

Jean Genet, whose photo you will find in this article, turned to literary work in the early 40s. His very first works were devoted to the very delicate topics of crime and homosexuality for that time.

He managed to publish his very first novel in 1943. It was called "Our Lady of the Flowers". The book immediately became successful, opening up new opportunities for the hero of our article. In many ways, this is an autobiographical novel, in which there are many erotic scenes. It tells about the life of the Parisian bottom. The writer Jean Genet drew the characters of hischaracters from real people.

He began working on the book in 1942, when he was in prison. Genet was serving another term for stealing a volume of Proust from a bookstore. The writer admits that he evoked fantasies of an erotic nature and wrote them down on paper. In the book, they are attributed to the young prostitute Divina, who, dying, remembers her former lovers. This novel is considered one of the best books by Jean Genet.

For the first time, the novel was released unofficially with a circulation of only 350 copies. Only in 1944 was the general public able to get to know him, when a fragment of the work was published in the Arbalet magazine. Interestingly, the book was originally intended for a narrow circle of readers. Therefore, Genet removed the most shocking moments from the novel before the mass printing of the book.

The plot of the novel "Our Lady of the Flowers"

In the very first novel Zhenya tells the story of a transvestite prostitute Divina, whose name in French means "divine". At the beginning of the work, she dies of tuberculosis, and in the end she is canonized as a saint.

Divina shares an attic overlooking the Montmartre cemetery with her many lovers, most often with her pimp Daintyfoot. He brings a killer and a hooligan, nicknamed "Our Lady of the Flowers", who begins to live with them. When the hero is arrested, he is sentenced to death for killing an elderly client.

Fans of talent

The release of the first book by Jean Genet was marked by the appearance of fanshis creativity. By that time, he himself managed to get acquainted with the writer Andre Gide and the publisher Jean Decarnin, who became his lover.

Genet's work was admired by Sartre and Cocteau. They also helped him avoid a life sentence for stealing a rare edition of the 19th-century French poet Paul Verlaine. The incident sobers up the writer, he no longer wants to go to jail. In the next five years, Genet wrote the novels The Miracle of the Rose, The Triumph of the Funeral, Querelle, and The Thief's Diary. A collection of his works is being prepared for publication, for which Sartre himself undertakes to write a preface. Surprisingly, the French philosopher was able to stop only when he had already written 600 pages. It was eventually released separately in 1952 under the title Saint Genet, Comedian and Martyr.

Genet was deeply shocked by the depth of analysis of his work, as well as the unexpected literary fame that fell on him. Jean Genet's books were actively sold out, although many criticized them for being too frank.

For the prose writer himself, all this led to sad consequences, he began a creative crisis that lasted until 1956.

Servants

The rise of Zhenya's popularity was facilitated not only by his novels, but also by his plays. The most famous of them was called "The Handmaids". Jean Genet painted it in 1947. It was first staged in the same year by the French playwright Louis Jouvet. In the Soviet Union, they learned about it thanks to Roman Viktyuk.

I wonder whatThere are two versions of this text. The first was published in the magazine "Crossbow". The second version, according to the playwright himself, was written in anguish and out of vanity.

In this play, Jean Genet tells about the maids in Madame's house: sisters Solange and Claire le Mercier. They secretly inform the police on Monsieur. While there is no mistress, who suffers because of her husband who is in prison, the maids begin to act out the scene of her murder among themselves, dressing in her outfits, trying to parody her manner of speaking.

Monsieur is released suddenly. The maids immediately understand that they are threatened with exposure in the near future. To avoid this, they decide to poison their mistress by mixing deadly poison into the linden broth. However, in the end, Claire dies, who took the poison with Madame.

This work of Genet was filmed more often than others. In 1962, a television show was released in Denmark, then in Germany, Sweden and the UK. In 2006, a television version of Roman Viktyuk's play was released in Russia.

In 1994 The Maids were staged at the Royal Swedish Opera.

Return

Gene returned to literature as both a novelist and a playwright. Since 1956, he has been releasing three of his famous plays one after another: Balcony, Negroes and Screens. In them, he shows a completely different side of his talent, moving from the autobiographical prose for which he became famous, to allegories with political overtones.

Jean Genet's personal life was intertwined withhomosexuals with whom he entered into relationships. At the end of the 50s, he falls in love with the tightrope walker Abdullah of Arab origin. However, their relationship did not last long, Abdullah soon committed suicide, becoming the victim of several injuries and accidents that affected his career. After that, Genet fell into a depression. After this personal tragedy, he wrote nothing more, and became exclusively interested in politics.

The delicacy and quirkiness of many of the themes in Genet's writing led to most of his books being banned in America in the 1950s. Many of these topics were categorically taboo in the US at the time.

Political and social activities

Gene joined the political life of France in the late 60s. He constantly participated in demonstrations for the improvement of the living conditions of African immigrants who live in his country. He supported the famous student unrest that took place in Paris. In addition, Genet did not hide his homosexuality, becoming one of the symbols and inspirers of the movement for the equality of representatives of non-traditional sexual orientation. Even though he didn't want to.

In 1970, Genet was invited to the United States by the leaders of the radical left-wing American black party called the Black Panthers. Their main goal was to promote the civil rights of the black population. There he attended the trials of their leader Huey Newton and also lectured.

Trip to Beirut

In 1982 Genet came to Beirut. ithappened just a few days after the massacre in Shatila and Sabra. The militants of the Lebanese Kataib party staged a military operation there, during which they were engaged in the destruction of Palestinian militants. A year later, he published an essay called "Four Hours in Shatila". As the Egyptian writer Sueif noted, the Palestinians have found a close friend in Zhenya.

The French writer constantly spoke positively about the USSR, considering it a starter for the rest of the world.

Death

For the past few years, Zhene has been battling throat cancer. In April 1986, his body was found in a hotel room in the Arab district of Paris. The writer still lived in hotels, as he did not acquire his own housing, despite the years of his successful work.

He asked to be buried in a Spanish cemetery in the small Moroccan town of Larache, not far from the house where he once lived. He bequeathed the rights to publish his works to his former lover.

After the death of the writer, this young man, who had previously been practically unknown to anyone, appeared from time to time at the Gallimard publishing house to receive roy alties. Those who met him noted that he never talked to anyone, silently took the money and just left. At the same time, he was illiterate, so he could not even sign the statement.

The last years the hero of our article spent in poverty and oblivion, as in the beginning of his life. For most of those around him, he was actually forgotten and abandoned. But after his death, both fellow writers and the government remembered him, awarding him various prizes, recognizing his literary merits and achievements.

Genet had a lot of fans in our country. Among them is the writer and political activist Eduard Limonov, who admired the French writer and tried to imitate him.

Poetry

There are a lot of poems in the work of Jean Genet. Most of his poetic works, like the rest of his work, are dedicated to representatives of the lower strata of society.

One of the poems is dedicated to the 20-year-old murderer Maurice Pilorge.

Screenings of works

Some of Genet's works were filmed by himself. In 1950, he made the feature film Love Song, also acting as a screenwriter.

This picture takes place in a French prison. The guard, who is a voyeur, observes two prisoners. They are in adjacent cells, imagining sex with each other while masturbating.

Critics point out that this quasi-pornographic film was only available to a select few viewers in the middle of the last century. Genet himself wished that this movie would never be seen by a mass audience.

In 1963, an adaptation of Genet's play "The Balcony" by Joseph Strick came out. The main character of the film of the same name is an elite prostitute who works in a brothel. Here, we althy visitors realize their secret erotic desires.

In 1982, the cult German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made a drama"Querelle" based on the novel of the same name by Genet, which tells about the adventures of a murderer and a homosexual psychopath. Starring Brad Davis and Franco Nero.

Poison

In 1991, American director Todd Haynes filmed the drama Poison, inspired by Genet's prose. These were stories about sex, outsiders and violence.

The first story is about a 7-year-old boy who killed his own father. This episode was shot in the pseudo-documentary style of an investigative film with interviews of the main defendants in the case.

The second story, titled "The Horror", is about a researcher of human sexuality. At the same time, he himself becomes a victim of the experiment and turns into a murderer and a freak. This episode was shot in the style of a classic low-brow sci-fi movie from the 1950s.

The third story of "Homo" is dedicated to a homosexual thief who finds himself in prison, in a cell with prisoners who he knew from a boarding school for juvenile delinquents.