Dear French literature fans,
I will be your guide through the magnificent world of Les Misérables! I will post my first historical notes later today and continue posting them till we read Chapter 1 on September 1! This is my fourth French tutorial this year!!! While looking at my Balzac and Dumas notes this evening, I found this note I posted in March. Here it is – without any editing – those of you who are new to our group will get a brief and personal introduction to our project!!! The Colonel Chabert, The Red and the Black, and The Count of Monte Cristo Facebook pages – along with all the previous tutorials – will stay up indefinitely!!! Welcome to heaps of literary fun!!!
A few personal thoughts before the start of the reading…
Welcome to 10 Days of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert!!! Those of you who participated in my earlier Facebook readings (100 Days of Decameron, 50 Days of Paradise Lost, 10 Days of Gilgamesh, 100 Days of War and Peace, 100 Days of Brothers Karamazov) – welcome back!!! Those of you who just found our virtual global reading group – welcome!!! The list of books we covered so far is quite eclectic – they happen to be some of my absolutely favourite books ever!!! The rule for choosing these masterpieces is pretty simple – they must be old (who can compete with Gilgamesh at 4,000 years – and counting!!!), LONG (Paradise Lost is a 300 PAGE poem – and War and Peace is sprawled over 1300 PAGES with 600 characters!!!), and considered unconquerable by today’s standards (a medieval collection of 100 quirky tales written during the Great Plague?!?!?! Brothers Karamazov IN 100 DAYS?!?!?!). BUT WE DID IT!!! And proved to ourselves – and the world!!! – that these books are relevant and relatable, totally thrilling, engrossing, and approachable, and still have the power to seduce and conquer the readers centuries after befuddling and beguiling its first admirers!!! We laughed and we cried, we marveled at wisdom and cursed at folly, and, in the words of the immortal Coleridge, emerged sadder but wiser after these unforgettable encounters!!! And I am still bewildered by my ability to churn out daily posts for 250 days last year that totaled over 200,000 words… I never thought I had it in me… Thank you, COVID!!!
So after this Herculean effort in 2020 and 2021 – I decided to have FUN – and introduce readers around the globe to my favorite French novels and writers!!! An honest confession – I don’t speak French – can read a bit – but as a trilingual speaker of English, Russian, and Hungarian (grant it, an odd combination, but there you have it) I simply failed to acquire any other languages. Some of you are asking an honest question – can we trust her on this journey?! I don’t speak Spanish either – but ADORE Quixote!!! Or Latin – but was elated by Virgil and crushed by Tacitus… And the language of Gilgamesh is a mystery to us all – yet the book stands as a testament to our humanity and vulnerability in the face of life and all its unsolvable complexities…
This statement applies to ALL 5 books we are approaching in the next 12 months. Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary could all be summed up thus: they stand as a testament to our humanity and vulnerability in the face of life and all its unsolvable complexities… Two of these books were my ABSOLUTE favorites when I was a teenager – The Red and the Black and The Count of Monte Cristo. I read them under shady lindens seated on the crumbling ruins of a 16th century castle – in Russian!!! And that’s about as magical as it gets for a dreamy kid who didn’t figure how to read till she was 10 (!!!) – and then fell head over heels in love with a world of literary adventures which were thrilling beyond compare!!! My Russian grandmothers ADORED French literature – and subscribed to the collected works of all the 19th century greats – from 15 volume sets of BOTH Stendhal and Hugo to a 5 volume set of Flaubert to a 24 (!!!) volume set of Balzac!!! All in Russian – naturally!!! No wonder I never learned French… I had the world of 19th century France unfold in front of me in vivid and wild Russian translations – that transported me to medieval castles far-far away and Mediterranean islands harboring exiled French emperors… Yes, you guested it, Napoleon lurks in the shadows of all the books we will be reading together!!! Thus the history notes I will be posting this week!!!
And now that I am taking time off from teaching this semester, I wanted to reconnect with the books that ruined me beyond salvation when I was an impressionable youth dreaming my impossible dreams in that fantastic 16th century caste – and completely empathizing with 19th century French scoundrels and dreamers who were so close to me then – and who still thrill my imagination today…
But enough about me – and I promise this will be my only lengthy personal aside…
Young Girl Reading (1770), by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Link to my second 2022 French literary tutorial: https://www.facebook.com/groups/294079019468946
Link to my third 2022 French literary tutorial: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1219707998767926
