Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov

 

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (May 24 [O.S. May 11] 1905 - February 21, 1984) Russian writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Sholokhov's best-known work is the novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1928-40), the finest realist novel about the Revolution. While Leo Tolstoi's novel War and Peace (1863-69) showed how the Napoleonic campaigns united Russians, Sholokhov's great Don epic portrayed the destruction of the old system, and the birth of a new society. After this magnificent work, Sholokhov's career as a writer started to go down and reached its bottom with the novella 'The Fate of a Man' (1956-57). It is among the least impressive works produced by a Nobel writer, along with Hemingway's posthumously published book True at First Light (1999).

"It was the first really warm days of the year. But it was good to sit there alone, abandoning myself completely to the stillness and solitude, to take off my old army cap and let the the breeze dry my hair after heavy work of rowing, and to stare idly at the white big-breasted clouds floating in the faded blue." (in 'The Fate of a Man')

Mikhail Sholokhov was born in the Kruzhlinin hamlet, part of stanitsa Veshenskaya, former Region of the Don Cossack Army. His father was a Russian of the lower middle class. He had many occupations, including farming, cattle trading, and milling. Sholokhov's illiterate mother came from an Ukrainian peasant stock and was the widow of a Cossack. She learned to read and write in order to correspond with her son. Sholokhov attended schools in Kargin, Moscow, Boguchar, and Veshenskaia, but his formal education ended in 1918 when the civil war reached the Upper Don region. Sholokhov joined the Bolshevik (Red) Army, serving in the Don region during civil war. During this period Sholokhov witnessed the anti-Bolshevik uprising of the Upper Don Cossacks and took part in fighting anti-Soviet partisans, remnants of the white army. These experiences were later recounted in his works.
When the Bolsheviks had secured their control of power, Sholokhov went to Moscow, where he supported himself by doing manual labour. He was a longshoreman, stonemason, and accountant (1922-24), but also participated in writers "seminars" intermittently. His first work to appear in print was the satirical article 'A Test' (1922), which was published in the Moscow newspaper Yunosheskaya Pravda. 'The Birthmark,' Sholokhov's first story, appeared when he was nineteen. In 1924 Sholokhov returned Veshesnkaya and devoted himself entirely to writing. In the same year he married Mariia Petrovna Gromoslavskaia; they had two daughters and two sons.

Donskie rasskazy (1925, Tales from the Don), Sholokhov's first book, was a collection of short stories. The dominant theme is the bitter political strife within a village or a family during the civil war and the early 1920s. Sholokhov joined the Communist Party in 1932, and in 1937 he was elected to the Soviet Parliament. He wrote to Stalin about the brutal mistreatment of collective farmers in 1933 and complained about mass arrests in 1938. This letter led to a treason case against the author, but he was spared and promoted as the leading figure of the Soviet literary establishment. Stalin followed closely Sholokhov's literary career and influenced publication of his works.

Sholokhov gained world fame with his novel Tikhiy Don (And Quiet Flows the Don), which won the Stalin Prize in 1941. The work was originally published in serialized form between the years 1928 and 1940. The author was 22 years old when he submitted the first volume for publication and 25 when three-quarters of the work was composed. In the second volume Sholokhov especially relied on documentary material. The third book's frank account of ill treatment of Cossacks by Communists caused the journal Oktiabr to suspend publication in 1929. Permission to resume was only accorded after reference to Stalin himself. Book 4 did not appear in complete form until 1940, 15 years after the young author had first written its early scenes.

"I will be happy if the English reader sees behind descriptions of the life of Don Cossacks, so strange to him, those colossal shifts in everyday existence and human psychology which occurred as the result of the war and the revolution." (Sholokhov in his foreword to the English edition)

And Quiet Flows the Don presents the struggle of the Whites against the Reds more or less objectively. Sholokhov portrays the Cossacks realistically and reproduces their speech faithfully. This also inspired orthodox Communist to accuse the writer of adopting uncritically a conservative Cossack point of view. The story traces the progress of the Cossack Grigory Melekhov, a tragic hero. He is based on a historical prototype, Kharlampii Ermakov, one of the first Cossacks to rise against the communist in 1919. He was later imprisoned and shot in 1929. Like many figures of classical tragedy, Melekhov fate is destined beforehand. He first supports the Whites, then the Reds, and finally joins nationalist guerrillas in their conflict with the Red Army. Back at home he is destroyed by a former friend, a hardline communist.Another line of the plot is the story of Grigory's tragic love. In the narration nature description has a central place.

Sholokhov's prose is ornamental with prolific use of color, figures of speech, and careful attention to details. Peter Seeger's famous song, 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone', was inspired by a lullaby from the first volume, The Don Flows Home to the Sea. A Cossack woman sings: "And where are the reeds? The girls have pulled them up. / Where are the girls? The girls have taken husbands. / Where are the Cossacks? They've gone to the war." Quiet Flows the Don was first translated into English in 1934, and reprinted in 1967, after the Nobel award. 

During World War II Sholokhov wrote about the Soviet war efforts for various journals, among them Pravda and Krasnaia zvedza. He received Stalin Prize for Literature in 1941 and Lenin Prize in 1960. Sholokhov's second novel, Virgin Soil Upturned, appeared in two parts, 'Seeds of Tomorrow' in 1932 and 'Harvest on the Don' in 1960. The novel depicted collectivization of agriculture in a Don Cossack village. It is perhaps the best-known and most sympathetic description of this period. It also became required reading for all collective farm directors. The dramatic events are written in the first volume in rapid sequence with the touch of a journalistic report. The second volume, which covers only the summer of 1930, shows the decline of Sholokhov's artistic ambitions and ideological orthodoxy. The reader learns nothing about the terrorism and famine of 1932-33. During the 1933 famine Sholokhov himself saved thousands of lives by persuading Stalin to send grain to the Upper Don region. No new literary work of his appeared since 1969.

Before the Swedish Academy decided to award the Nobel Prize for Literature to Boris Pasternak
 Dag Hammarskjöld, who was a member of the academy and secretary-general of the United Nations, approached the American and Soviet sides to learn their reactions to Pasternak's candidacy. Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko was asked whether his country would consider acceptable jointly granting the prize to Sholokhov and Pasternak. Gromyko reportedly said, "Yes, Pasternak is well known as a good poet and translator, but Sholokhov is to us personally a greater writer" (Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art by Guy de Mallac, 1983, p. 225). Following Pasternak's expulsion from the Writers' Union, Sholokhov said in an interview that Pasternak got the prize not because of Doctor Zhivago's artistic value but because of its "anti-Soviet tendency."


Sholokhov accompanied in 1959 the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on a trip to Europe and the United States, and in 1961 he became a member of the Central Committee. In most of his speeches and journalistic writings Sholokhov faithfully followed the official policy of the day. Sholokhov died on January 21, 1984 in Veshenskaya, where he had lived from 1924. By 1980 almost seventy-nine million copies of his works had been printed in the Soviet Union in eighty-four languages.

"The story of Mikhail Sholokhov's rise to his reign as king of Soviet literary officialdom is none other than a supreme farce. Decade after decade his pen failed to create anything worth reading. Meanwhile, his mouth created nothing but propagandistic banalities." (Vassily Aksyonov, an exiled Russian novelist in the New York Times, March 10, 1985)

And Quiet Flows the Don is Sholokhov most controversial work and it has been alleged by Alexander Solzhenitsyn among others, that much of the novel was plagiarized from the writer Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossak and anti-Bolshevik, who died in 1920 of typhoid fever. Several studies has been published on this subject: R.A. Medvedev's Problems in the Literary Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov (1977) was criticized in Slavic and East European Journal in 1976 by Herman Ermolaev. Additional information is in A Brian Murphy's studies of Tikhiy Don in the New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1975-77) and the Journal of Russian Studies, no. 34 (1977). Sholokhov's other works are not on his masterwork's level, but the accusations remain largely unproven. Critics have argued, that he could not have written all or part of the novel because of his young age and becausehis Don epic described atrocities on both sides impartially. In 1984 Geir Kjetsaa and others published their study The Authorship of the Quiet Don, where computer study supported the authorship of Sholokhov. Most of the manuscripts were lost when the Germans occupied Veshenskaya , but in 1987 some two thousand pages were discovered and authenticated.V.P. Fomenko and T.G. Fomenko have applied quantatitative analysis to the works of Sholokhov, concluding that parts of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, as well as a large section of the part 6 of the novel were not written by Sholokhov. (See History: Fiction or Science. Chronology 2, by Anatoly T. Fomenko, 2005)

May 11, 1905 – February 21, 1984

The Wrapper of the Russian Edition 

“I would like my books to help people become better, obtain clearer souls, discover a love for another person… If I managed to do so, I am very happy.” These words belong to the outstanding 20th century Russian novelist Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov.

Mikhail Sholokhov was born on 11 May 1905 in the Kruzhlinin hamlet of Stanitsa, a Cossack village in Veshenskaya in the Rostov-on-Don Region in Russia (a former administrative region of the Don Cossack Army). Sholokhov is considered one of the greatest writers of the Soviet Union. His life was full of secrets and is still today the subject of much research and investigation.

His early biography is vague at best; even his date of birth cannot be confirmed and some believe he was actually born two years earlier than the official date.

It is known that Mikhail was born into a family of farmers. His father, Aleksandr Sholokhov (1865-1925), was a merchant of Stanitsa; his mother, Anastasia Chernikova (1871-1942), was a Cossack woman. According to some resources, she was illiterate and learned to write at the age of 40 to keep in touch with her son. Mikhail’s parents strived to give their child a good education; they had both the desire and money. Young Sholokhov studied in different schools in various towns and cities, but finished only four years of gymnasium (in 1918). At the age of 17 he worked as a loader, builder, accountant and even, as a teacher of literacy.

Mikhail was determined to become a journalist. In 1922 he went to Moscow, started writing short articles, and became a member of a literature group called the “Young Guard.” It was a difficult time for the country, which was torn apart by the Russian Civil War – a multi-party conflict, with the principal fighting going on between the Bolshevik Red Army (revolutionaries, led by Lenin) and the White Army (Russian forces, opposed to he Bolsheviks and the October Revolution). Young Mikhail took the side of the revolutionaries. According to some sources, he worked as a ration commissar, taking part in confiscation of food supplies from “kulaks” (relatively wealthy farmers, who didn’t support the Bolsheviks). The truthfulness of this biographical fact is still questioned.

In 1924 Mikhail Sholokhov’s first short stories were published in different newspapers. A few years later these works were gathered in the collections “Tales of the Don” and “Lazurevaya Step” (1926). In 1925 he returned to Don where his real masterpieces were created.

Sholokhov’s first novel “Quietly Flows The Don” (“Tikhiy Don”) became one of his most famous works. The four volumes of the novel were created over a span of 14 years, beginning in 1926. The book covers the periods of World War I, the Russian Civil War and the establishment of Soviet rule in the Don Region. In 1965 “Quietly Flows The Don” earned Sholokhov the Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel, despite the clearly communist position of its author, describes the life of the White Cossacks (those Cossacks who were thought to be supporters of the White Army), with a focus on the main character - Grigory Melekhov. The plot and composition show an obvious and painful antagonism between different generations, “red” and “white” supporters, family values and social duties, life and death. Grigory Melekhov strives to stop a pointless existence of chain reactions in a cruel life; he becomes emotionally ruined by the horrors of war and chaos. Readers of those times advised the writer to “end the novel adequately” by having Grigory join the Red Army. But the end greatly differed from what public expectations: Melekhov returns to his family and native land.

“Quietly Flows The Don,” published in 1928 (first and second volumes) and 1940 (third and forth volumes), aroused a furor of comments. Some criticized the ending, which was not suitable to communist ideology; others blamed the author for plagiarism and didn’t believe the 23-year old could have created such a wonderful piece of literature. But these accusations failed due to the absence of documented evidence. In the 1930s Sholokhov was almost arrested, but luckily escaped prison. Only the support of Stalin (who Sholokhov personally met in 1931) gave the green light for the author to continue writing, an unprecedented occurrence for the time when many artists were arrested and even executed because of their “unacceptable” beliefs.

Another of Mikhail Sholokhov’s famous novels “Virgin Soil Upturned” (“Podnyataya Tselina”), which consists of two parts, took more than 28 years to complete (1932-1960). The second part of the book was lost during the Second World War, and was rewritten later. “Virgin Soil Upturned” tells of another historically important and controversial phenomenon of the Soviet Union – collectivization, a policy, pursued between 1928-1940, aimed at the consolidation of individual land and labor into collective farms. Sholokhov clearly supported Stalin’s program in the novel, but he also described the unattractive side effects of the policy. Consequently, after publishing the first part f the novel in 1932, the author was almost arrested. Stalin’s intercession saved Sholokhov one more time.

During the Great Patriotic War (a term, used in post-soviet countries, to describe their part in the Second World War) Mikhail Sholokhov served in the army, and was a military journalist. This experience inspired him to create a series of works. Some of the most prominent were “The Fate of a Man” (“Sudba Cheloveka”, 1956—1957), “They Fought for Their Country” (“Oni Srazhalis Za Rodinu”, 1942-1969, unfinished) and “The Science of Hatred” (“Nauka Nenavisti”, 1942). In the late 1960s he practically stopped writing.

Mikhail Sholokhov was married to Maria Gromoslavskaya. They had four children. The great writer died in 1984, from throat cancer, in his native Veshenskaya

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens [1812-1870]
English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens's works are characterized by attacks on social evils, injustice, and hypocrisy. He had also experienced in his youth oppression, when he was forced to end school in early teens and work in a factory. Dickens's good, bad, and comic characters, such as the cruel miser Scrooge, the aspiring novelist David Copperfield, or the trusting and innocent Mr. Pickwick, have fascinated generations of readers.

"In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice." (from Great Expectations, 1860-61)

Charles Dickens was born in Landport, Hampshire, during the new industrial age, which gave birth to theories of Karl Marx. Dickens's father was a clerk in the navy pay office. He was well paid but often ended in financial troubles. In 1814 Dickens moved to London, and then to Chatham, where he received some education. The schoolmaster William Giles gave special attention to Dickens, who made rapid progress.

In 1824, at the age of 12, Dickens was sent to work for some months at a blacking factory, Hungerford Market, London, while his father John was in Marshalea debtor's prison. "My father and mother were quite satisfied," Dickens later recalled bitterly. "They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge." Later this period found its way to the novel Little Dorritt (1855-57). John Dickens paid his £40 debt with the money he inherited from his mother; she died at the age of seventy-nine when he was still in prison.

In 1824-27 Dickens studied at Wellington House Academy, London, and at Mr. Dawson's school in 1827. From 1827 to 1828 he was a law office clerk, and then a shorthand reporter at Doctor's Commons. After learning shorthand, he could take down speeches word for word. At the age of eighteen, Dickens applied for a reader's ticket at the British Museum, where he read with eager industry the works of Shakespeare, Goldsmith's History of England, and Berger's Short Account of the Roman Senate. He wrote for True Sun (1830-32), Mirror of Parliament (1832-34), and the Morning Chronicle (1834-36).

Dickens gained soon the reputation as "the fastest and most accurate man in the Gallery", and he could celebrate his prosperity with "a new hat and a very handsome blue cloak with velvet facings," as one of his friend described his somewhat dandyish outlook. In the 1830s Dickens contributed to Monthly Magazine, and The Evening Chronicle and edited Bentley's Miscellany. These years left Dickens with lasting affection for journalism and suspicious attitude towards unjust laws.

 His career as a writer of fiction started in 1833 when his short stories and essays to be appeared in periodicals. 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk' was Dickens's first published sketch. It appeared in the Monthly Magazine in December 1833. It made him so proud, that he later told that "I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there." Sketches by Boz, illustrated by George Cruikshank, was published in book form in 1836-37.The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was published in monthly parts from April 1836 to November 1837.

Dickens's relationship with Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a banker, whom he had courted for four years, ended in 1833. Three years later Dickens married Catherine Hogart, the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, who edited the newly established Evening Chronicle. With Catherine he had 10 children. Trying to cure Catherine of her headaches and insomnia, Dickens regularly mesmerised his wife. They separated in 1858; Dickens left their house without informing her in advance, and he never saw her again. Catherine received a substantial annual income.


Some biographers have suspected that Dickens was more fond of Catherine's sister, Mary, who moved into their house and died in 1837 at the age of 17 in Dickens's arms. Eventually she became the model for Dora Copperfield. Dickens also wanted to be buried next to her and wore Mary's ring all his life. Another of Catherine's sisters, Georgiana, moved in with the Dickenses, and the novelist fell in love with her. Dickens also had a long liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan, whom he had met by the late 1850s.

Dickens's sharp ear for conversation helped him to create colorful characters through their own words. In his daily writing Dickens followed certain rules: "He rose at a certain time, he retired at another, and, though no precisian, it was not often that arrangements varied. His hours for writing were between breakfast and luncheon, and when there was any work to be done, no temptation was sufficiently strong to cause it to be neglected. The order and regularity followed him through the day. His mind was essentially methodical, and in his long walks, in his recreations, in his labour, he was governed by rules laid down for himself - rules well studied beforehand, and rarely departed from. " (anonymous friend, in Charles Dickens, An Illustrated Anthology, Cresent Books, 1995)

The Pickwick Papers were stories about a group of rather odd individuals and their travels to Ipswich, Rochester, Bath, and elsewhere. It was sold at 1 shilling the installment (1836-37), and opened up a market for similar inexpensive books. Many of Dickens's following novels first appeared in monthly installments, including Oliver Twist (1837-39). It depicts the London underworld and hard years of the foundling Oliver Twist, whose right to his inheritance is kept secret by the villainous Mr. Monks. Oliver suffers in a poorfarm and workhouse. He outrages authorities by asking a second bowl of porridge. From a solitary confinement he is apprenticed to a casket maker, and becomes a member of a gang of young thieves, led by Mr. Fagin. Finally Fagin is hanged at Newgate and Mr. Barnlow adopts Oliver. Nicholas Nickelby (1838-39) was a loosely structured tale of young Nickleby's struggles to seek his fortune.

David Lean's dark, atmospheric version of Oliver Twist from 1948 is among the best films made from Dickens's novels. Lean's young thieves are as hard and professional as the brutal gang members of Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950). Alec Guinness played the old, big-nosed Fagin. The caricature upset some Jews in England, as Dickens's novel had done one hundred and ten years earlier. The Zionists protested that the character was presented in the same way that Jews were vilified in the Nazi paper Der Sturmer. American critics attacked the film's alleged anti-Semitism, and cuts were made before it was shown, with twelve minutes missing, in the American theatres. Lean's stylised Great Expectations (1946), based on Dickens's novel, had been a great success in the U.S. "Grandfather would have loved it," said Monica Dickens, the granddaughter of the author, of the film. With these works Lean has been considered an authority on Dickens.

A Christmas Carol (1843) is one of Dickens's most loved works, which has been adapted into screen a number of times. The character of Ebenezer Scrooge, the "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching" miser, has attracted such actors as Seymour Hicks, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, George C. Scott and Alastair Sim. In a pornography version from 1975 Mary Stewart was "Carol Screwge". Historical subjects did not much interest Dickens. Barnaby Rudge (1841), set at the time of the 'No Popery' riots of 1780, and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) are exceptions. The latter was set in the years of the French Revolution. The plot circles around the look-alikes Charles Darnay, a nephews of a marquis, and Sydney Carton, a lawyer, who both love the same woman, Lucy.

Among Dickens's later works is David Copperfield (1849-50), where he used his own personal experiences of work in a factory. David's widowed mother marries the tyrannical Mr. Murdstone. David becomes friends with Mr. Micawber and his family. "I went in, and found there a stoutish, middle-aged person, in a brown surtout and black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head (which was a large one, and very shining) than there is upon an egg, and with a very extensive face, which he turned full upon me. His clothes were shabby, but he had an imposing short-collar on." Dora, David's first wife, dies and he marries Agnes. He pursues his career as a journalist and later as a novelist.

Bleak House (1853) belongs to Dickens's greatest works of social social criticism. The novel is built around a lawsuit, the classic case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which affects all who come into contact with it. Much of the story is narrated in the first person by a young woman, Esther Summerson, the illegitimate daughter of the proud Lady Dedlock and Captain Hawdon. The character of Harold Skimpole, an irresponsinbe and lecherous idler, is said to be based on the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt.

Great Expectations (1860-61) began as a serialized publication in Dickens's periodical All the Year Round on December 1, 1860. The story of Pip (Philip Pirrip) was among Tolstoy's and Dostoyevsky's favorite novels. G.K. Chesterton wrote that it has "a quality of serene irony and even sadness," which according to Chesterton separates it from Dickens's other works. "Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.

At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip." 

 Pip, an orphan, lives with his old sister and her husband. He meets an escaped convict named Abel Magwitch and helps him against his will. Magwitch is recaptured and Pip is taken care of Miss Havisham. He falls in love with the cold-hearted Estella, Miss Havisham's ward. With the help of an anonymous benefactor, Pip is properly educated, and he becomes a snob. Magwitch turns out to be the benefactor; he dies and Pip's "great expectations" are ruined. He works as a clerk in a trading firm, and marries Estella, Magwitch's daughter.

Dickens participated energetically in all forms of the social life of the time, "light and motion flashed from every part of it," wrote his friend and future biographer John Forster. In the 1840s Dickens founded Master Humphrey's Cloak and edited the London Daily News. He spent much time travelling and campaigning against many of the social evils with his pamphlets and other writings. In the 1850s Dickens was founding editor of Household World and its successor All the Year Round (1859-70). Although Dickens's works as a novelist are now best remembered, he produced hundreds of essays and edited and rewrote hundreds of others submitted to the various periodicals he edited. Dickens distinguished himself as an essayist in 1834 under the pseudonym Boz. 'A Visit to Newgate' (1836) reflects his own memories of visiting his own family in the Marshalea Prison. 'A Small Star in the East' reveals the working conditions on mills and 'Mr. Barlow' (1869) draws a portrait of an insensitive tutor.

Dickens lived in 1844-45 in Italy, Switzerland and Paris, and from 1860 one his address was at Gadshill Place, near Rochester, Kent, where he lived with his two daughters and sister-in-law. He had also other establishments - Gad's Hill, and Windsor Lodge, Peckham, which he had rented for Ellen Ternan. His wife Catherine lived at the London house. In 1858-68 Dickens gave lecturing tours in Britain and the United States. By the end of his last American tour, Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. In an opium den in Shadwell, Dickens saw an elderly pusher known as Opium Sal, who then featured in his mystery novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

He collapsed at Preston, in April 1869, after which his doctors put a stop to his public performances. Dickens died at Gadshill on suddenly of a stroke on June 8, 1870. Some of his friends later thought the readings killed him. Dickens had asked that he should be buried "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner".

Our Mutual Friend (1865), the second last novel Dickens wrote, started with a murder mystery. In the opening chapter a drowned man is found floating on Thames. The Italian writer Italo Calvino has called the novel "an unqualified masterpiece, both in its plot and in the way it is written." The Mystery of Edwin Droodwas published in 1870, but Dickens did not manage to finish it. He planned to produce it in 12 monthly parts, but completed only six numbers. In March 1870 Dickens had given a private reading to Queen Victoria and offered her the opportunity to know in advance, how the story woud conclude. The Queen declined.


The novel is chiefly set in the cathedral city of Cloisterham and opens in an opium den. "Ye've smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight," the woman goes on, as he chronically complains. "Poor me, poor me, my head is so bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these say! Here's another ready for ye, deary." The choirmaster of the cathedral, John Jaspers, lives a double life, as an opium addict and a respected member of society. His ward, Edwin Drood, disappears on Christmas Eve, after a quarrel with Neville Landless. However, there is no trace of Edwin's body. Dick Datchery, a disguised detective arrives to investigate the case. "It is the complex nature of Dickens's evil men, not their merited fate, that makes them the peers of Dostoyevsky's lost souls. For this reason, I have always been irked by the critical treatment of his last novel as a pure whodunit. ''Endings'' were not his strong suit." (Angus Wilson in The New York Times, March 1, 1981)

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

French journalist and writer, one of the creators of realism in literature. Balzac's huge production of novels and short stories are collected under the name La Comédie humaine, which originated from Dante's
The Divine Comedy. Before his breakthrough as an author, Balzac wrote without success several plays and novels under different pseudonyms. Despite prolific output and large incomes, Balzac was constantly in debt.

"...Well, Balzac was politically a legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the irreparable decay of good society; his sympathies are with the class that is doomed to extinction. But for all that, his satire is never keener, his irony never more bitter, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply – the nobles..." (Friedrich Engels in 1888)

[ Quote of the Day: Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine-.Honoré de Balzac]

Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours. His father, Bernard-François Balssa, named his son after St Honoré whose day had just been celebrated. He had risen to the middle class, and married in 1797 the daughter of his Parisian superior, Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier; she was 31 years his junior. The marriage was arranged by her father. Bernard-François had worked as a state prosecutor and Secretary to the King's Council in Paris. During the French Revolution, he was a member of the Commune, but was transferred to Tours in 1795 because of helping his former royalist protectors.

Bernard-François felt at home in the land of Rabelais, and started energetically to run the local hospital. In 1814 the family moved back to Paris.

Balzac spent the first four years of life in foster care, not so uncommon a practice in France even in the 20th century. From the village of Saint-Cyr, he returned to his parents at the age of four. Balzac was an ordinary pupil at school. He studied at the Collège de Vendôme and the Sorbonne, and then worked in law offices. In 1819, when his family moved for financial reasons to the small town of Villeparisis, Balzac announced that he wanted to be a writer. He returned to Paris and was installed in a shabby room at 9 rue Lediguiéres, near the Bibliothéque de l'Arsenal. A few years later he described the place in La Peau de chagrin (1831), a fantastic tale owing much to E.T.A.Hoffman (1776-1822).

 Balzac's first work was Cromwell. The tragedy in verse made the whole family dispirited. Towards the end of his career his attention turned to drama again, but this time his plays, such as Vautrin (1840) and La Marâtre (1848), were well received by the critics.

By 1822 Balzac had produced several novels under pseudonyms, but he was ignored as a writer. Against his family's hopes, Balzac continued his career in literature, believing that the simplest road to success was writing. Unfortunately, he also tried his skills in business. Balzac ran a publishing company and he bought a printing house, which did not have much to print. When these commercial activities failed, Balzac was left with a heavy burden of debt. It plagued him to the end of his career. "All happiness depends on courage and work," Balzac once said. "I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all."

After the period of failures, Balzac was 29 years old, and his efforts had been fruitless. Accepting the hospitality of General de Pommereul, he spent a short time at their home in Fougères in Brittany in search of a local color for his new novel. In 1829 appeared  Le dernier Chouan (later called Les Chouans), a historical work in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, which he wrote under his own name. Gradually Balzac began to gain notice as an author. Between the years 1830 and 1832 he composed six novelettes titled Scènes de la vie privée. The work, addressed more or less to a female readership, was first published in La Presse.


The Contes drolatiques (1832-37, Droll Stories), a collection of stories written in the bawdy style of Rabelais, was labeled as pornographic, and added to the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1841. The topics of the stories range from necrophilia to nymphomania, and adultery to the bodily functions. Droll Stories was banned in Ireland in 1953. 

Madame Balzac was interested in the writings of mystics. When she miraculously recovered from an illness, Balzac started to study the works of Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, and followed Anton Mesmer's lectures about 'animal magnetism' at Sorbonne. These influences are seen in La peau de chargin, in which the hero character uses magical powers to gain success. The 'philosophical' novel brought Balzac about 5,000 francs.
In 1833 Balzac conceived the idea of linking together his old novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in a series of books.

This plan eventually led to 90 novels and novellas, which included more than 2,000 characters. Balzac's huge and ambitious plan drew a picture of the customs, atmosphere, and habits of the bourgeois France. Balzac got down to the work with great energy, but also found time to pile up huge debts and fail in hopeless financial operations. "I am not deep," the author once said, "but very wide." Once he developed a plan to gain success in raising pineapples at his home at Ville d'Avray (Sevres). After two years, he had to flee from his creditors and conceal his identity under the name of his housekeeper, Madame de Brugnolle.

In the 'Avant-propos' to The Human Comedy (1842) Balzac compares theories of the animal kingdom and human society. "Does not Society make of man, according to the milieu in which his activity takes places, as many different men as there are varieties in zoology?" Like the French naturalist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Balzac sees that human life and human customs are more multifarious and there are dramatic conflicts in love which seldom occur among animals.

Among the masterpieces of The Human Comedy are Le Père Goriot, Les Illusions perdues, Les Paysans, La Femme de trente ans, and Eugénie Grandet. In these books Balzac covered a world from Paris to Provinces. The primary landscape is Paris, with its old aristocracy, new financial wealth, middle-class trade, demi-monde, professionals, servants, young intellectuals, clerks, criminals... This social mosaic included recurrent characters, such as Eugène Rastignac, who comes from an impoverished provincial family to Paris, mixes with the nobility, pursues wealth, has many mistresses, gambles, and has a successful political career. Henry de Marsay appeared in twenty-five different novels. There are many anecdotes about Balzac's relationship to his characters, who also lived in the author's imagination outside the novels. Once Balzac interrupted one of his friends, who was telling about his sister's illness, by saying: "That's all very well, but let's get back to reality: to whom are we going to marry Eugénie Grandet?"

"Balzac himself always speaks of his characters as of natural phenomena, and when he wants to describe his artistic intentions, he never speaks of his psychology, but always of his sociology, of his natural history of society and of the function of the individual in the life of the social body. He became, anyhow, the master of the social novel, if not as the 'doctor of the social sciences', as he described himself, yet as the founder of the new conception of man, according to which 'the individual exists only in relation to society'." (Arnold Hauser in Social History of Art, Vol. 4, 1962)

Le Père Goriot (1835), originally published in the Revue de Paris in 1834, appeared in book form in 1835. The story is an adaptation of Shakespeare's play King Lear, a pessimistic study of bourgeois society's ills after the French Revolution. It tells the intertwined stories of Eugène de Rastignac, an ambitious but penniless young man, and old Goriot, a father who sacrifices everything for his children. His daughters Anastaria and Delphine are married into a rich family. They are ashamed of their father and visit him only to ask for money. Rastignac falls in love with Delphine. Goriot has gradually lost all his money, not having enough for even a proper burial. On his death bed Goriot learns about his daughters' egoism – they don't come to see him. Admitting his own guilt, Goriot forgives his daughters. Rastignac pays the expenses of the burial. Goriot's coffin is followed by the empty luxurious carriages of the daughters. Balzac describes lovingly the topography of Paris, his Muse. The city is one of the characters, and has a language and will of its own: "Left alone, Rastignac walked a few steps to the highest part of the cemetery, and saw Paris spread out below on both banks of the winding Seine. Lights were beginning to twinkle here and there. His gaze fixed almost avidly upon the space that lay between the column of the Place Vendôme and the dome of the Invalides; there lay the splendid world that he wished to conquer." (from Old Goriot, 1835) 

Balzac worked often in Saché, near Tours, although a great part of his work was done in Paris. From 1828-36 he lived at 1 rue Cassini, near the Observatory, on the edge of the city. In 1847 he moved to the Rue Fortunée. Balzac used to energetically write 14 to 16 hours daily, drinking large amounts of specially blended Parisian coffee. After supper he slept some hours, woke up at midnight and wrote until morning. Despite his devotion to his art, Balzac had time for affairs and he enjoyed life. It is told that Balzac once devoured first 100 oysters, and then 12 lamb chops with vegetables and fruits. The characters of his books appreciate good food, too.

La Cousine Bette (1846) contained thinly veiled autobiographical elements of the author's love affairs. In the story a spinster, Cousin Bette, tries to gain revenge for all her disappointments against her family and the beautiful courtesan Valerie Marneffe. The aristocratic Baron Hulot d'Evry, whom Bette had wanted to marry, had married her cousin, Adeline. She also loses her new love, Count Wenceslas Steinbock, to Baron Hulot's daughter. Valerie seduces Hulot, who has several mistresses, and Steinbock. After some financial troubles Hulot escapes into the slums, where Adeline finds him. Bette falls ill with pneumonia and dies. Hulot continues his affairs with a cook, and finally marries the cook's apprentice.

Gervais Charpentier published the best novels of Balzac in a new format, the octodecimo "jésus" – it was much cheaper than the traditional octavo volume. Balzac lived mostly in his villa in Sèvres during his later years. Close to his heart was Madame de Berny, far his senior; her death came as a deep blow to the author. With Eveline Hanska, a rich Polish lady, Balzac corresponded for more than 15 years. The correspondence started in 1832. Eveline Hanska posed as a model for some of his feminine portraits (Madame Hulot in La Cousine Bette). "I cannot put two ideas together that you don't come between them," Balzac wrote in a letter to her.

In the spring of 1837, Balzac went to Italy to recuperate, and to see the bust of Madame Hanska, made by Bartolini. He also asked her permission to have a copy of it, half size, made for himself. In October 1848 Balzac travelled to Ukraine. Madame Hanska's husband had died in 1841 and Balzac could now stay with her a longer time. His health had already broken down, but they were married in March 1850. "Three days ago I married the only woman I have ever loved," Balzac wrote in a letter to a friend, forgetting other women in his life. He returned with his newly wed wife to Paris, where he died on August 18, 1850. At his funeral Victor Hugo delivered an address, saying: "Today we see him at peace. He has escaped from controversies and enmities..... Henceforward he will shine far above all those clouds which float over our heads, among the brightest stars of his native land."

Count Leo Tolstoy

Count Leo Tolstoy

 

          
Russian author, one of the greatest of all novelists. Tolstoy's major works include War and Peace (1863-69), characterized by Henry James as a "loose baggy monster", and Anna Karenina (1875-77), which stands alongside Gustav Flaubert's  Madame Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest as perhaps the most prominent 19th-century European novel of adultery. Tolstoi once said, "The one thing that is necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth." Tolstoy's life is often seen to form two distinct parts: first comes the author of great novels, and later a prophet and moral reformer.

"In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity." (in War and Peace)

Leo Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, in Tula Province, the fourth of five children. The title of Count had been conferred on his ancestor in the early 18th century by Peter the Great. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by relatives. In 1844 Tolstoy started his studies of law and oriental languages at Kazan University, but he never took a degree. Dissatisfied with the standard of education, he returned in the middle of his studies back to Yasnaya Polyana, and then spent much of his time in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1847 Tolstoy was treated for venereal disease. After contracting heavy gambling debts, Tolstoy accompanied in 1851 his elder brother Nikolay to the Caucasus, and joined an artillery regiment. In the 1850s Tolstoy also began his literary career, publishing the autobiographical trilogy Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1857).

One of Tolstoy's earliest stories, 'The Raid', was based on a military manouvre against the Chechen mountain tribesmen, in which Nikolay's unit took part. The story appeared in censored form in 1852. "Can it be that there is not room for all men on this beautiful earth under these immeasurable starry heavens?" Tolstoy asked. "Can it be possible that in the midst of this entrancing Nature feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the desire to exterminate their fellows can endure in the souls of men?" About fifty years later Tolstoy returned to his experiences in Caucasus in the novella Hadji Murad (1904), still a highly insightful introduction to the backgrounds of today's Chechnyan tragedy. It also was an elegiac reprise of the dominant themes of Tolstoy's art and life. The famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein gave the book to his disciple Norman Malcolm, telling him that there was a lot to be got out of it.

During the Crimean War Tolstoy commanded a battery, witnessing the siege of Sebastopol (1854-55). In 1857 he visited France, Switzerland, and Germany. After his travels Tolstoy settled in Yasnaya Polyana, where he started a school for peasant children. He saw that the secret of changing the world lay in education. During further travels to Europe he investigated (1860-61) educational theory and practice, and published magazines and textbooks on the subject. In 1862 he married Sonya Andreyevna Behrs (1844-1919); she bore him 13 children. Sonya also acted as her husband's devoted secretary; she alone could decipher his scribbles.

Tolstoy's fiction grew originally out of his diaries, in which he tried to understand his own feelings and actions so as to control them. He read widely fiction and philosophy. In the Caucasus he immersed himseld in the work of Plato and Rousseau, Dickens and Sterne; through the 1850s he also read and admired Goethe, Stendhal, Thackeray, and George Eliot.

Tolstoy's major work, War and Peace, came out between the years 1865 and 1869. This epic tale depicted the story of five families against the background of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. The story moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoléon, from the court of Alexander to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino.

War and Peace reflected Tolstoy's view that all is predestined, but we cannot live unless we imagine that we have free will. The harshest judgment is reserved for Napoleon, who thinks he controls events, but is dreadfully mistaken. Pierre Bezukhov, who wanders on the battlefield of Borodino, and sees only the confusion, comes closer to the truth. Great men are for him ordinary human beings who are vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, but unable to recognize their own impotence in the cosmic flow. "No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling – the degree of its 'oscillation', the ebb and flow, the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on his part) –  the inner and outer texture and 'feel' of a look, a thought, a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations." (Isaiah Berlin in 'The Hedgehog and the Fox', 1953)

Tolstoy's other masterpiece, Anna Karenina (1873-77), told a tragic story of a married woman, who follows her lover, but finally at a station throws herself in front of an incoming train. The novel opens with the famous sentence: "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy juxtaposed in the work crises of family life with the quest for the meaning of life and social justice. "The Oblonsky home was in turmoil," Tolstoy writes as an introduction to his themes. Anna Karenina comes to Moscow to reconcile the Oblonskys. Her love affair with Vronskii is accompanied with another intertwined plot, Konstantin Levin's courtship and marriage to Kitty Shcherbatskaia, the sister-in-law of Anna.
Tolstoy saw that everywhere the family life of the landed gentry was breaking up, but he did not accept nihilist theories about marriage. Aleksei Karenin, a cold and ambitious man, is unable to save his career or make Anna happy. "For the first time he vividly conjured up her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes; and the idea that she might, and even must have a personal life all her own was so frightening that he hastened to drive it away. This was the chasm into which he dared not look." First Anna agrees to end the affair, but when Vronskii is injured in an accident, she resumes the relationship. Anna gives birth to their child, and Karenin finally agrees to allow Anna to run away to Italy with Vronskii. However, she believes that he no longer loves her, and commits suicide. Through Levin, who seeks the meaning of existence, Tolstoy states that "everything has now been turned upside down and is only just taking shape." He and Kitty learn the values of toil and happiness.

Anna Karenina has been filmed in Hollywood several times. One of the most famous versions, starring Greta Garbo, was born during the period when the film industry was under the censorial agencies of the Catholic Legion of Decency and the Production Code Administration. Thus the love affair of Anna and Vronskii was strongly condemned in the film and all references to the illegitimate child were removed. "At every opportunity, characters step forward to either denounce Anna (Greta Garbo) and Vronsky (Fredric March), or to foretell dire results of the continued affair. The resistance by Karenin (Basil Rathbone) to his wife's affair has none of the duplicity suggested by Tolstoy; rather, he is portrayed as refusing a divorce solely because it would "legalize a sin." (Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, 1999) 

After finishing Anna Karenina Tolstoy renounced all his earlier works. "I wrote everything into Anna Karenina," he later confessed, "and nothing was left over." Voskresenia (1899, Resurrection) was Tolstoy's last major novel, and affirmed his belief in the individual over the collective. Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich Nekhliudov has abandoned the prostitute Ekaterina Maslova with their child as a young man. The novel begins when Maslova is called to court on charges of murdering a client. Nekhliudov is a member of the jury. He realizes that he also is accused but in the court of his own conscience. Maslova is wrongly sentenced to four years' penal service in Siberia. Nekhliudov follows her convoy to Siberia and manages to obtain commutation of her sentence from hard labour with common criminals to exile with the "politicals". Before the emergence of the gulag fiction, the novel  enjoyed a vast popularity during the reign of Stalin. It has been claimed, that while writing the story Tolstoy relived some of his guilt-ridden memories of his youth about a girl he had seduced and abandoned. 

According to Tolstoy's wife Sonia, the idea for The Kreutzer Sonata (1890) was given to Tolstoy by the actor V.N. Andreev-Burlak during his visit at Yasnaya Polyana in June 1887. In the spring of 1888 an amateur performance of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata took place in Tolstoy's home and it made the author return to an idea he had had in the 1860s. The Kreutzer Sonata is written in the form of a frame-story and set on a train. The conversations among the passengers develop into a discussion of the institution of marriage. Pozdnyshev, the chief character, tells of his youth and his first visits to brothels, and his subsequent remorse and self-disgust. He decides to get married and after a brief engagement, he and his wife spend a disastrous honeymoon in Paris. Back at Russia the marriage develops into mutual hatred. Pozdnyshev believes that his wife is having an affair with a musician and he tries to strangle her, and then stabs her to death with a dagger. He accuses society and women who inflame, with the aid of dressmakers and cosmeticians, men's animal instincts.  After writing the novel Tolstoy was accused of preaching immorality. The Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod wrote to the tsar, and this marked the beginning of the process that led ultimately to Tolstoy's excommunication. Tolstoy was forced to write in 1890 a postscript in which he attempted to explain his unorthodox views.

In the 1880s Tolstoy wrote such philosophical works as A Confession and What I Believe, which was banned in 1884. He started to see himself more as a sage and moral leader than an artist. In 1884 occurred his first attempt to leave home. He gave up his estate to his family, and tried to live as a poor, celibate peasant. Attracted by Tolstoy's writings, Yasnaya Polyana was visited by hundreds of people from all over the world. Pilgrims and his disciples enjoyed a smooth ride on a tarmac road, which the Tsarist government ordered to be built down to Tula. Not too worried about his public image, Tolstoy wrote in his diary: "Everyone is writing my biography . . . [but] there will be none of all the terrible filth of my masturbation and worse, [the sins] from my thirteenth to sixteenth years (I do not remember when I began my debauchery in brothels)." In 1901 the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated the author. Tolstoy became seriously ill and he recuperated in Crimea.

Tolstoy's teachings influenced Gandhi   in India, and the kibbutz movement in Palestine, and in Russia his moral authority rivalled that of the tsar. After leaving his estate with his disciple Vladimir Chertkov on the urge to live as a wandering ascetic, Tolstoy died of pneumonia on November 7 (Nov. 20, New Style) in 1910, at a remote railway junction. Eight years after his death, his wife was heard to remark, "I lived with Lev Nikolayevich for forty-eight years, but I never really learned what kind of man he was." Tolstoy's collected works, which were published in the Soviet Union in 1928-58, consisted of 90 volumes.
In his study What is Art? (1898) Tolstoy condemned Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Dante, but not really convincingly; his misreading of Shakespeare is deliberate.

Tolstoy states that art is a conveyor of feelings, good and bad, from the artist to others. Through feeling, the artist 'infects' another with the desire to act well or badly. "Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen." Tolstoy used ordinary events and characters to examine war, religion, feminism, and other topics. He was convinced that philosophical principles could only be understood in their concrete expression in history. All of his work is characterized by uncomplicated style, careful construction, and deep insight into human nature. His chapters are short, and he paid much attention to the details of everyday life. Tolstoy also refused to recognize the conventional climaxes of narrative  – War and Peace begins in the middle of a conversation and ends in the first epilogue in the middle of a sentence.

Tolstoy's form of Christianity was based on the Sermon on the Mount and crystallized in five leading ideas: human beings must suppress their anger, whether warranted or not; no sex outside marriage; no oaths of any sort; renunciation of all resistance to evil; love of enemies. "The main feature, or rather the main note which resounds through every page of Tolstoi, even the seemingly unimportant ones, is love, compassion for Man in general (and not only for the humiliated and the offended), pity of some sort for his weakness, his insignificance, for the shortness of his life, the vanity of his desires... Yes, Tolstoi is for me the dearest, the deepest, the greatest of all artists. But this concerns the Tolstoi of yesterday, who has nothing in common with the exasperating moralist and theorizer of today." (The composer Peter Tchaikovsky in Vladimir Volkoff's biography Tchaikovsky: A Self-portrait, 1975)

Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia (1907-1990) - pseudonym of Alberto Pincherle

Italian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist. Moravia explored in his books sex, social alienation, and other contemporary issues – he was a major figure in the 20th-century Italian literature. Moravia was married to Elisa Morante (1941-1963), who also was a writer, best known for her novel La Storia (1974). Several of Moravia's books have been filmed, among them Two Women by Vittorio De Sica (1960), A Ghost at Noon by Jean-Luc Godard (1964), and The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci (1970).

"Alas, Fausta had told the truth: everything was left exactly as it had been on the day I went away. One seemed to be poking one's nose into the study of one of those long-dead writers whose rooms have been transformed into museums, which are visited by people reverently and hat in hand. Except that there was a difference: those writers whose rooms have been transformed into museums were for the most part real, genuine writers; or were, in their lifetime, sublimated artists of the first water, and their studies are faithful mirrors of their sublimation. I, on the contrary, am desublimated, and my study was clearly a museum of mediocrity, of approximation, of self-didactism, of foolish aspirations, of the near miss, of amateurishness." (from The Two of Us, 1971)

Alberto Pincherle (Alberto Moravia) was born in Rome into a well-to-do middle-class Jewish-Catholic family. His mother was Teresa (de Marcanich) Pincherle, and father, Carlo Pincherle, an architect and a painter. At the age of nine Moravia was stricken with tubercular infection of the leg bones, which he considered the most important factor in his early development. He spent considerable periods from 1916 to 1925 in sanatoriums. During these years Moravia began to write. His first published story, 'Cortigiana stance,' appeared in French in 1927. Gli indifferenti (1929, Time of Indifference), his first major novel, which was written between 1925 and 1929, Moravia published at his own expense. A poor translation into English, under the title The Indifferent Ones appeared in 1932. From the late 1940s, Moravia's regular translator was Angus Davidson, a writer and publisher who was associated with the Bloomsbury Group
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Time of Indifference was a great success and perhaps the first modern European Existentialist novel. It tells about three days in the life of a Roman family, Mariagrazia and her children Carla and Michele, who keep up a bourgeois front while living at the edge of poverty. Mariagrazia lover and her debtor seduces Carla, who is bored. Michele do not seem to care about anything. The condemnation of the Roman bourgeoisie under fascism became a sensation. "It is astonishing that Il Duce should have permitted this morbid and life-denying novel to circulate freely among the inheritors of the tradition of the Caesars", one reviewer said.

Not to arouse more disapproval of the authorities, Moravia adopted an allegorical style, but his increasing involvement in politics at the same time led to his books being banned, although his maternal uncle, Augusto De Marsanich, was an influential Italian National Fascist Party politician and his patron. Moravia utilized the typical characters of an impotent intellectual, his virile rival, a voluptuous seductress, and an aging mistress. Generally Moravia regarded women as being superior to men. He saw sex as the enemy of love. Variations on the women of Time of Indifference are found in La romana (1947, The Woman of Rome), in which the protagonist, Adriana, is a prostitute, and La ciociara (1957, Two Women).

The loose, rambling narrative recounts the war experiences of a calculating, widowed businesswoman, Cesira, and her daughter, Rosetta, who flee into the mountains to escape Fascist soldiers and Allied bombings. There they meet Michele, the son of a shopkeeper, a committed idealist. She starts to feel that if there had been a man who had attracted her "and who I could have loved, love itself would have had a new savor, more profound and more intense". Rosetta is raped by Moroccan soldiers – allies of the liberation army. The American soldiers are "indifferent and distant", and "all of them were chewing gum".

Rosetta becomes a prostitute and her mother a thief, who in her suicidal despair sees a vision of Michele telling her that life is better than death. Moravia's criticism of society is presented on an allegorical level - proletariat is raped by capitalism, Italy loses her innocence under Fascism. The book was adapted for screen by Vittorio De Sica, starring Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Eleonora Brown. In De Sica's film, the relationship between Cesira and Rosetta is paralleled with the image of Madonna and Child; Rosetta is the sacrificial victim. The rape scene is set in a church, with the question where is God?

Moravia and Morante

In the 1930s Moravia worked as a foreign correspondent for La Stampa and La Gazetta del Popolo. He travelled in the U.S., Poland, China, Mexico, and other countries. His works were censored by Benito Mussolini's fascist government, and placed by the Vatican on the Index librorum prohibitarum (Index of Forbidden Books). Moravia sharply criticized the dehumanized, capitalist world. He was especially influenced by the thoughts of Marx and Freud. After the publication of Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935, The Wheel of Fortune), Moravia lost his job at the Gazetta del Popolo.

L'imbroglio (1937), a collection of short stories, included L'Architetto, La Tempesta, and La Provinciale. Several of his stories were first published in newspapers. Racconti romani (1954, Roman Tales) and Nuovi racconti romani (1959, More Roman Tales) include some of Moravia's best sketches of working-class characters in everyday situations.

From 1941 to 1943 Moravia lived in Anacapri (Capri). In 1943 he tried to escape to Naples, but unable to cross the frontier, fled with his wife Elsa Morante into the mountains of Ciociaria. He had written in 1941 a comic parody of the Mussolini government, La mascherata, attacked fascism in his articles in Il Popolo di Roma, and in danger of being arrested, Moravia went into hiding in the peasant community in Fondi, near Cassino, until the Allied Liberation.

In 1944 Moravia began to write Two Women, and took up the work again ten years later, when he had gained more distance from his own experiences. However, the nine months among peasants had strengthened his social conscience and new sympathy for the people, which was evident in the short novel Agostino (1944). Il conformista (1951) portrays a person, Marcello, who has dedicated himself to total conformity. He joins the Fascist party, "as an abstract whole, as a great, existing army held together by common feelings, common ideas, common aims, and army of which it was comforting to form a part". Bernardo Bertolucci's film version was according to the director a "story about me and Godard... I'm Marcello and I make Fascist movies and I want to kill Godard who's revolutionary, and who makes revolutionary movies and who was my teacher..." (Bertolucci in Sight and Sound, Vol. 40, No. 2, Spring 1971)

When Moravia stressed Marcello's inevitable fate and followed a logical chronology, Bertolucci confused the narrative progression of the text. Otherwise the film deviates little from Moravia's storyline. One of the characters was given Godard's phone number, address, and middle name. Also Bertolucci smuggled in his film a line from Godard's Le petit soldat: "The time of reflection is over. Now begins the time of action."
The Woman of Rome, which originally started out as a short story, was in the postwar period the bestselling Italian novel in the United States. It sold well over a million copies. In the 1950s Moravia abandoned the third-person narrative, and used the limited, non-objective first person narrative in tune with the modernist literature theories. 

Il disprezzo (1954, A Ghost at Noon) was the basis of Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris (1963), starring Brigitte Bardot. The director considered the novel "a nice, vulgar one for a train journey, full of classical, old fashioned sentiments in spite of the modernity of the situation. But it is with this kind of novel that one can often make the best films." Godard played with the theme of the book – the adapting of Homer's Odyssey to film – and developed further the triangle drama of Odysseus, Penelope, and Poseidon. In the novel Riccardo Molteni, a not so reliable narrator, tries to keep some sense of balance after the death of his wife, Emilia. "How beautiful Emilia had been, sitting in the stern of my boat, no longer hostile, but full of love, how sweet her words; how disturbing, how violent the feeling I had experienced when I told her I wanted to make love to her and she had answered me with that faint nod of agreement!" In Le Mépris Bardot imitated the gestures of Godard's ex-wife Anna Karina, and the director kept her half-dressed throughout the film, and showed her swimming in the nude. The American actor Jack Palance played Prokosch, a producer, and on another level Poseidon, Odysseus' archenemy. Moravia'a attitude toward cinema was not admiring. "The camera is a less complete instrument of expression than the pen, even in the hands of an Eisenstein," he once said in an interview in The Paris Review.

In 1953 with Alberto Carocci Moravia edited Nuovi Argomenti; he wrote film reviews from 1955 for L'Espresso, and in 1955 he was a State Department lecturer in the United States. Moravia's major novels from the 1960s include La noia (1960, The Empty Canvas), an examination of the relationship between reality and art, and L'attenzione (1965, The Lie), about a novelist writing a work entitled L'attenzione.
Between the years 1958 and 1970 Motavia travelled widely throughout the world, and produced such books as Un mese in URSS (1958), La rivoluzione culturale in Cina (1968, The Red Book and the Great Wall), A quale tribù appartieni? (1972, Which Tribe Do You Belong To?), and Viaggi. Articoli 1930-1990 (1994). In 1982 he edited Nuovi Argomenti with Leonardo Sciascia and Enzo Siciliano. Moravia's later works include Io e lui (1971, The Two of Us), a story of a screenwriter who tries to understand his independently behaving large penis, which constantly leads him into humiliating situations. La vita interiore (1978, Time of Desecration) was composed in the form of an interview between the ostensible narrator and the interviewee, Desideria. To Corriere della Sera, the most prestigious Italian newspaper, he contributed regularly from 1946.

Moravia's autobiography Vita di Motavia came out in 1990. His philosophical and political scepticism did not prevent him from entering politics, nor the voters expected him to be a run-of-the mill politician. In 1984 he was elected Italian representative to the European Parliament. Moravia died in Rome on September 26, 1990. He lived most of his life in Rome; one apartment was situated in the nearby Via dell’Oca, close to the Piazza del Popolo. The city and its people played an important role in his fiction.