Everything about Andr Gide totally explained
André Paul Guillaume Gide (French ) (
November 22,
1869—
February 19,
1951) was a
French author and winner of the
Nobel Prize in literature in
1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the
symbolist movement, to the advent of
anticolonialism between the two
World Wars.
Known for his
fiction as well as his
autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a strait-laced education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of
communism after his 1936 voyage to the
USSR.
Early life
Gide was born in
Paris, France on
November 22,
1869, in a middle-class Protestant family. His father was a
Paris University professor of law and died in 1880. His uncle was the political economist
Charles Gide.
Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in
Normandy and became a prolific writer at an early age, publishing his first novel,
The Notebooks of Andre Walter (French:
Les Cahiers d'André Walter), in 1891.
In 1893 and 1894 Gide traveled in northern
Africa. He befriended
Oscar Wilde in Paris, and in 1895 was introduced to homosexual practices by Wilde in Algiers.
The middle years
In 1895, after his mother's death, he married his
cousin Madeleine Rondeaux but the marriage remained unconsummated. In 1896, he became mayor of
La Roque-Baignard, a
commune in
Normandy.
In 1901, Gide rented the property Maderia in St. Brelade's Bay and lived here when he was residing in
Jersey. This period 1901-07 is commonly seen as a period of apathy and disquiet in his life.
In 1908, Gide helped found the literary magazine
Nouvelle Revue Française (
The New French Review). In 1916,
Marc Allégret, 16, became his lover. He was the son of Elie Allegret, best man at Gide's wedding. Of Allegret's five children, André Gide adopted Marc. The two eloped to London, in retribution for which his wife burned all his correspondence, "the best part of myself," as he was later to comment. In 1918, he met
Dorothy Bussy, who was his friend for over thirty years and who would translate many of his works into English.
In the 1920s, Gide became an inspiration for writers like
Albert Camus and
Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1923, he published a book on
Fyodor Dostoyevsky; however, when he defended homosexuality in the public edition of
Corydon (1924) he received widespread condemnation. He later considered this his most important work.
In 1923, he conceived a daughter, Catherine, with Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, a much younger woman, who was the daughter of his closest woman friend Maria Monnom, the wife of the Belgian neo-impressionist painter
Théo van Rysselberghe. This would cause the only crisis in the long-standing and intense friendship between the two men. Gide had known Elisabeth since childhood. This was possibly his only sexual liaison with a woman and was brief in the extreme, but Catherine became his only descendant by blood. He liked to call Elisabeth "La Dame Blanche". She eventually left her husband to move to Paris and manage the practical aspects of Gide's life (she had adjoining apartments built for each of them on the rue Vavin). She worshipped him, but evidently they never had a sexual relationship. Gide's legal wife Madeleine died in 1938. Later he used the background of his unconsummated marriage in his novel
Et Nunc Manet in Te.
After 1925, he began to demand more humane conditions for criminals. In 1926, he published an autobiography,
If it die (French:
Si le grain ne meurt).
Africa
From July 1926 to May 1927, he travelled through the
French Equatorial Africa colony with his lover
Marc Allégret. He went successively to
Middle Congo (now the
Republic of the Congo),
Oubangui-Chari (now the
Central African Republic), briefly to
Chad and then to
Cameroun before returning to France. He related his peregrinations in a journal called
Travels in the Congo (French:
Voyage au Congo) and
Return from Chad (French:
Retour du Tchad). In this published journal, he criticized the behavior of French business interests in the Congo and inspired reform. In particular, he strongly criticized the
Large Concessions regime (French:
régime des Grandes Concessions), for example a regime according to which part of the colony was conceded to French companies and where these companies could exploit all of the area's
natural resources, in particular
rubber. He related for instance how natives were forced to leave their village during several weeks to collect rubber in the forest, and went as far as comparing their exploitation to
slavery. The book had important influence on
anti-colonialism movements in France and helped re-evaluate the
impact of colonialism. .
Russia
During the 1930s he briefly became a
communist, but became disillusioned after his visit to
Soviet Union. His criticism of communism caused him to lose many of his
socialist friends, especially when he made a clean break with it in
Retour de L'U.R.S.S. in 1936. He was also a contributor to
The God That Failed.
The 1940s
Gide left France for
Africa in 1942 and lived in
Tunis until the end of
World War II. In 1947, he received the
Nobel Prize in Literature.
Gide died on
February 19,
1951. The
Roman Catholic Church placed his works on the
Index of Forbidden Books in 1952.
(External Link
)
Partial list of works
- Les cahiers d'André Walter - 1891
- Le traité du Narcisse - 1891
- Les poésies d'André Walter - 1892
- Le voyage d'Urien - 1893
- La tentative amoureuse - 1893
- Paludes - 1895
- Réflexions sur quelques points de littérature - 1897
- Les nourritures terrestres - 1897
- Feuilles de route 1895-1896 - 1897
- El Hadj
- Le Prométhée mal enchaîné - 1899
- Philoctète - 1899
- Lettres à Angèle - 1900
- De l'influence en littérature - 1900
- Le roi Candaule - 1901
- Les limites de l'art - 1901
- L'immoraliste - 1902 (translated by Richard Howard as The Immoralist)
- Saül - 1903
- De l'importance du public - 1903
- Prétextes - 1903
- Amyntas - 1906
- Le retour de l'enfant prodigue - 1907
- Dostoïevsky d'après sa correspondence - 1908
- La porte étroite - 1909 (translated as Strait Is the Gate)
- Oscar Wilde - 1910
- Nouveaux prétextes - 1911
- Charles-Louis-Philippe - 1911
- C. R. D. N. - 1911
- Isabelle - 1911
- Bethsabé - 1912
- Souvenirs de la Cour d'Assises - 1914
- Les caves du Vatican - 1914 (translated as Lafcadio's Adventures)
- La marche Turque - 1914
- La symphonie pastorale - 1919
- Corydon - 1920
- Numquid et tu . . .? - 1922
- Dostoïevsky - 1923
- Incidences - 1924
- Caractères - 1925
- Les faux-monnayeurs - 1925 (translated as The Counterfeiters - 1927)
- Si le grain ne meurt - 1926 (translated as If It Die)
- Le journal des faux-monnayeurs - 1926
- Dindiki - 1927
- Voyage au Congo - 1927
- Le retour de Tchad - 1928
- L'école des femmes - 1929
- Essai sur Montaigne - 1929
- Un esprit non prévenu - 1929
- Robert - 1930
- La séquestrée de Poitiers - 1930
- L'affaire Redureau - 1930
- Œdipe - 1931
- Perséphone - 1934
- Les nouvelles nourritures - 1935
- Geneviève - 1936
- Retour de l'U. R. S. S. - 1936
- Retouches â mon retour de l'U. R. S. S. - 1937
- Notes sur Chopin - 1938
- Journal 1889-1939 - 1939
- Découvrons Henri Michaux - 1941
- Thésée - 1946
- Le retour - 1946
- Paul Valéry - 1947
- Le procès - 1947
- L'arbitraire - 1947
- Eloges - 1948
- Littérature engagée - 1950
Further Information
Get more info on 'Andr Gide'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://andr___gide.totallyexplained.com">André Gide Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
