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Zusatztext "Hugo´s genius was for the creation of simple and recognizable myth. The huge success of Les Misérables as a didactic work on behalf of the poor and oppressed is due to his poetic and myth-enlarged view of human nature." —V. S. Pritchett "It was Tolstoy who vindicated [Hugo´s] early ambition by judging Les Misérables one of the world´s great novels! if not the greatest… [His] ability to present the extremes of experience ´as they are´ is! in the end! Hugo´s great gift." —From the Introduction by Peter Washington Informationen zum Autor Victor Hugo Klappentext Victor Hugo (Author) Victor Hugo was born in Besan¿, France in 1802. In 1822 he published his first collection of poetry and in the same year, he married his childhood friend, Ad¿ Foucher. In 1831 he published his most famous youthful novel, Notre-Dame de Paris . A royalist and conservative as a young man, Hugo later became a committed social democrat and was exiled from France as a result of his political activities. In 1862, he wrote his longest and greatest novel , Les Mis¿bles . After his death in 1885, his body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe before being buried in the Panth¿. Robert Tombs (Introducer) Robert Tombs is Professor of History at Cambridge University. His most recent book is The English and Their History (2014). Christine Donougher (Translator) Christine Donougher is a freelance translator and editor. She has translated numerous books from French and Italian, and won the 1992 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for her translation of Sylvie Germain's The Book of Nights. From the Introduction by Peter Washington- Victor Hugo might be regarded as the Mr Toad of French literature: vain, arrogrant, pompous, selfish, cold and stingy; a windbag, a humbug and a fraud, absurdly puffed up with the immensity of his own greatness. But unlike Mr Toad, he was also an astute and energetic promoter of hisown image as a Great Man. The process began early. Writing in Hugo´s lifetime, Virginie Ancelot recalls the reception the young poet received in literary drawing-rooms when he arrived to read his latest ode. "...There was a few moments´ silence; then someone rose and approached him with visible emotion, took his hand and raised their eyes to heaven.The multitude listened. A single word was heard, to the great surprise of the uninitiated. And this word, which echoed in every corner of the salon, was:´Cathedral!´Then the orator returned to his place; another rose and cried out: ´Ogive!´A third looked round him and ventured:´Egyptian Pyramid!´The assembly applauded, and then it was lost in profound reflection." To the Anglo-Saxon mind - and, it should be said, to many Frenchmen - this is Parisian literary life at its worst: the posturing, the pretension, the self-regard, masquerading under the name of art. Yet Hugo is the man who wrote a handful of the most exquisite lyrics - ´Victor Hugo, helas!´said Gide when someone asked him to name the finest French poet - and at least one novel judged to be supreme. In his person, he sums up all that is most monsterous in writerly vanity; in his best work he transcended his failings. How did he do it? How did a monster come to write the masterpiece that is Les Miserables? * In an early essay on Scott, Hugo prophesies that"After the picturesque but prosaic novel of Walter Scott, there will still be another novel to create ... It is the novel which is at once drama and epic, picturesque and poetic, real and ieal, true and great, the novel which will enshrine Walter Scott in Homer."These words were written in 1823, just after the publication of his own first novel, Han d´Islande, and there is no doubt that Hugo had himself in mind as the man who could ´enshrine Walter Scott as Homer´. Anyone who can still get through this book may take a rather different view. ...
