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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years.
While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888.
In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera.
Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was visited by writers Lev Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan.- Haruki Murakami graduated from Waseda University, Tokyo, in 1975. Widely considered one of Japan's most important 20th-century novelists. His often solitary, withdrawn, and world-weary protagonists are generally stripped of Japanese tradition. Frequently called postmodern, his fiction, which often includes elements of surreal fantasy and is sprinkled with references to American popular culture, is cool and contemporary; his distinctive style is often characterized as "hard-boiled." His first novel was Hear the Wind Sing (1979). Since then he has published such novels as Pinball 1973 (1980), A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Norwegian Wood (1987), Dance, Dance, Dance (1988), The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995), The Sputnik Sweetheart (1999), and Kafka on the Shore (2002). He has also written short stories, e.g., those collected in The Elephant Vanishes (1993) and After the Quake (2002), and done translations. His first nonfiction book, Underground (2001), is an oral history of the 1995 gas attack by religious extremists in the Tokyo subway and its relation to the Japanese psyche.
- Mo Yan (a pseudonym for Guan Moye) was born in 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in north-eastern China. His parents were farmers. As a twelve-year-old during the Cultural Revolution he left school to work, first in agriculture, later in a factory. In 1976 he joined the People's Liberation Army and during this time began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981. His breakthrough came a few years later with the novella Touming de hong luobo (1986, published in French as Le radis de cristal 1993).
In his writing Mo Yan draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth. This is apparent in his novel Hong gaoliang jiazu (1987, in English Red Sorghum 1993). The book consists of five stories that unfold and interweave in Gaomi in several turbulent decades in the 20th century, with depictions of bandit culture, the Japanese occupation and the harsh conditions endured by poor farm workers. Red Sorghum was successfully filmed in 1987, directed by Zhang Yimou. The novel Tiantang suantai zhi ge (1988, in English The Garlic Ballads 1995) and his satirical Jiuguo (1992, in English The Republic of Wine 2000) have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.
Fengru feitun (1996, in English Big Breasts and Wide Hips 2004) is a broad historical fresco portraying 20th-century China through the microcosm of a single family. The novel Shengsi pilao (2006, in English Life and Death are Wearing Me Out 2008) uses black humour to describe everyday life and the violent transmogrifications in the young People's Republic, while Tanxiangxing (2004, to be published in English as Sandalwood Death 2013) is a story of human cruelty in the crumbling Empire. Mo Yan's latest novel Wa (2009, in French Grenouilles 2011) illuminates the consequences of China's imposition of a single-child policy.
Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition. In addition to his novels, Mo Yan has published many short stories and essays on various topics, and despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors.
The 9th MAODUN Literature Prize in 2011
Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 as "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary". - Writer
Maksim Gorky is a pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, who was born into a poor Russian family in Nizhnii Novgorod on Volga river. Gorky lost his father at an early age, he was beaten by his stepfather and became an orphan at age 9, when his mother died. He was brought up by his grandmother, who helped his development as a storyteller.
He was blessed with a brilliant memory, but failed to enter a University of Kazan. At age 19 he survived a suicide attempt, because the bullet missed his heart. After that Gorky traveled on foot for 5 years all over Central Russia, worked as a sailor on a Volga steamboat, then a salesperson, a railway worker, a salt miller, and a lawyer's clerk. At that time he was arrested for his public criticism of the Tsar and social injustices in Russia. He started writing for newspapers and published his first 'Sketches and Stories' in 1890s. Later he wrote an autobiographic book "My Universities" based on impressions from his travels and jobs. Gorky wrote with sympathy about the simple folks, the outcasts, the gypsies, the hobos and dreamers in the context of social decay in the Russian Empire. He became friends with Anton Chekhov and Lev Tolstoy. His play 'The Lower Depths' (1892) was praised by Chekhov and was successfully played in Europe and the United States. His political activism resulted in cancellation of his membership in the Russian Academy. Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko left the Academy in protest and solidarity with Gorky. He went to live in Europe and America in 1906-13. In America he started his classic novel, 'The Mother', about a Russian Christian woman and her imprisoned son, who both joined revolutionaries under the illusion that revolution follows Christ's messages.
After the Russian revolution in 1917, Gorky criticized Lenin and communists for their "bloody experiments on the Russian people". He wrote, 'Lenin and Trotsky are corrupted with the dirty poison of power. They are disrespectful of human rights, freedom of speech and all other civil liberties". Soon Gorky received a handwritten warning letter from Lenin. Later his friend Nikolai Gumilev, ex-husband of Anna Akhmatova was executed by communists. In 1921 Gorky emigrated to Europe and settled in Capri. He became careful in his critique of communism. In 1932 after a series of brief visits, he returned to Soviet Russia. He was placed in a rich Moscow mansion of the former railroad tycoon Ryabushinsky. His return from the fascist Italy was a victory for Soviet propaganda. He was made the Chairman of the Soviet Writer's Union, and a figurehead of "socialist realism" . After the murder of Kirov in 1934 Gorky was under a house arrest. His son died in 1935. The following year Gorki Gorky died suddenly at the Lenin's dacha in Moscow.- Writer
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José Saramago was born on 16 November 1922 in Azinhaga, Golega, Portugal. He was a writer, known for Enemy (2013), Blindness (2008) and O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo. He was married to Pilar del Río and Ilda Reis. He died on 18 June 2010 in Lanzarote, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain.- Naguib Mahfouz was born on 11 December 1911 in Cairo, Egypt. He was a writer, known for El Fetewa (1957), The Monster (1954) and Between Heaven and Earth (1959). He was married to Atiyyatallah Ibrahim. He died on 30 August 2006 in Cairo, Egypt.
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After school, Pamuk studied journalism and architecture at the Technical University of his hometown. After initially being interested in painting, he discovered his talent for writing in the mid-1970s. Pamuk soon presented his first novel, which won an award in 1979 and was published in 1982. Just a year later, his next novel was published under the title "Sessiz Ev" (1983), which received the "Prix de la découverte européenne" in its French translation in 1991. In 1985 Pamuk moved to New York to teach at Columbia University until 1988. In 1988 he returned to Istanbul. The novel "Beyaz Kale", published in Turkey in 1985, was awarded the "Independent Award for Foreign Fiction" in 1990. In the same year it was also published in German translation under the title "The White Fortress".
Pamuk celebrated his greatest success in Turkey in 1994 with the publication of the novel "Yeni Hayat", which was also published in German in 1998. For his next work, which was published in 1998 as a historical novel under the title "Benim Ad...", he was awarded the "IMPAC Dublin Award" in 2003. The liberal Turkish writer published his first political novel, "Kar", in 2002, whose German translation under the title "Schnee" received great attention in the German-speaking cultural circle in 2005. The work ironically addresses taboo topics in the recent history and present of Turkish society, especially the presence of Islamist tendencies and the murder of Armenians and Kurds. Through this openness, Pamuk provoked controversial reactions in Turkey, including demonstrations and death threats organized against him. Pamuk's work has already been translated into 34 languages and has a total circulation of more than one million copies.
In the Western world he is now considered the "Umberto Eco of Turkey". In 2005, Pamuk was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which was presented to him in October 2005 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. At the same time, the writer was also honored with the Ricardo Huch Prize from the city of Darmstadt for his contribution to European international understanding. At the end of August 2005 it became known that the Turkish writer was threatened with a prison sentence of up to three years in his homeland for "publicly denigrating Turkishness": Pamuk had criticized the Turkish genocide against Armenians and Kurds in an interview with a Swiss newspaper, which is why he declared himself a prisoner He was due to stand trial in an Istanbul court at the end of 2005. The case against him was dropped in January 2006. In December 2006, the Turkish writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Orhan Pamuk is married and has a daughter.- Writer
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, the eldest of five children in a wealthy aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia. His grandfather was a Justice Minister to the Czar Alexander II. His father, named Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal political leader, the editor of a liberal newspaper, and was a friend of Sergei Diaghilev. His mother, named Elena Ivanovna (née Rukavishnikov), was the daughter of the wealthiest Russian goldmine owner.
Nabokov's family was trilingual. As a child he was already reading foreign writers Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, and the Russians Lev Tolstoy, Nikolay Gogol, and Anton Chekhov. He excelled in languages and literature, as well, as in soccer, tennis and chess. He was inspired by his father's studies in lepidoptery from the age of 7, and spent summers collecting butterflies in the family estate of Vyra, near St. Petersburg. He graduated from the most advanced and prestigious Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Nabokov's father was the Secretary of the Russian Provisional Government, when he was arrested during the Russian revolution of October, 1917, and the family estate was confiscated by the communists. The Nabokov family emigrated to London and then to Berlin. There Nabokov's father was murdered at a political meeting while shielding his opponent from assassins. The painful memory of his father's violent death would echo in many of Nabokov's writings. In 1923 Nabokov graduated with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied zoology and literature. He worked as a translator and tutor in Europe for 18 years. In 1925 he married Vera Evseevna Slonim, from a Russian-Jewish family, and their son Dimitri was born in 1934.
Traumatized by the death of his father and the loss of his home country, Nabokov expressed himself in writing. His novel 'The Luzhin Defence' (1930) is alluding to his own story of emigration and the sense of loss. In 1937 his father's killer was released by Adolf Hitler, and Nabokov had to move to Paris. Three years later he fled from the advancing German Armies to the United States, with his wife and son. In 1940 he crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Champlain, where he had a first class cabin, paid with the money from the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. In 1945 Nabokov became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught literature at Cornell University and worked as entomologist at Harvard University, becoming a distinguished lepidopterist.
He published short stories in the Atlantic and the New Yorker magazines in English, while still writing his memoirs in Russian, and agonizing to switch from Russian to English. It took him 6 years to complete "Lolita" (1955), a controversial story of a pedophile's desire for a 12-year-old girl, who reminds him of the little girl he loved as a boy. The novel was banned in America and the UK until 1958. He later wrote a screenplay for the film Lolita (1962), directed by Stanley Kubrick. Lolita and "Pale Fire" (1962) are his best known novels. In 1964 Nabokov published his four-volume translation of 'Eugene Onegin' by Alexander Pushkin, on which he worked for 10 years. He later made English translations of poems by Mikhail Lermontov and Fyodor Tyutchev. His own later works: the artfully constructed 'Ada' (1969), 'Transparent Things' (1972), and the autobiographic 'Look at the Harlequins' (1975), were translated into Russian by his son Dimitri. Nabokov also published scholarly works on Nikolay Gogol, James Joyce and Franz Kafka.
In 1960 Nabokov moved to Switzerland and made his home at the Montreux Palace Hotel. From there he frequently traveled to Milan, Italy, where his son Dimitri Nabokov was an opera singer at the La Scala. Nabokov's main hobby was his immense collection of rare butterflies which grew to a museum-quality with his many entomological expeditions. He never learned to drive a car, and he depended on his wife Vera to drive him around. Nabokov's individualism manifested in his ironic rejection of any mass-psychology, especially Marxism, Freudism, etc. He never used telephones, thus preventing any outside influence over his way of life. He had a rare gift of synaesthesia, cognate with that of composer Alexander Scriabin and artist Wassily Kandinsky. Nabokov also made his name in chess by composing chess problems.
Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux Palace Hotel, and was laid to rest in the Clarens Cemetery, Montreux, Switzerland. His wife and muse, Vera Slonim, died in 1993, and was laid to rest with Nabokov. The family mansion of Nabokov's in St. Petersburg, Russia is now a Nabokov's Museum. His first collection of butterflies is now part of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. His last and most valuable butterfly collection was bequeathed to the Zoology Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.- Thomas Mann was probably Germany's most influential author of the 20th century, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Born on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, his family moved to Munich in 1893, where he lived until 1933 and wrote some of his most successful novels like "Buddenbrocks" (1901), "Death in Venice" (1912) or "The Magic Mountain" (1924). After the Nazi takeover, the humanist and anti-fascist, married to Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a secular Jewish family, emigrated to Switzerland, then to Princeton and Pacific Palisades in the United States, where he finished his great tetra-logy "Joseph and His Brothers" in 1942. Two years later, he became a naturalized US citizen, but finally returned to Europe in 1952. The famous analyst and critique of the German and European soul died on 12 August 1955 in Kilberg near Zurich.
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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia. He was the second of seven children of Mikhail Andreevich and Maria Dostoevsky. His father, a doctor, was a member of the Russian nobility, owned serfs and had a considerable estate near Moscow where he lived with his family. It's believed that he was murdered by his own serfs in revenge for the violence he would commit against them while in drunken rages. As a child Fyodor was traumatized when he witnessed the rape of a young female serf and suffered from epileptic seizures. He was sent to a boarding school, where he studied sciences, languages and literature. He was devastated when his favorite writer, Alexander Pushkin, was killed in a duel in St. Petersburg in 1837. That same year Dostoevsky's mother died, and he moved to St. Petersburg. There he graduated from the Military Engineering Academy, and served in the Tsar's government for a year.
Dostoevsky was active in St. Petersburg literary life; he grew out of his early influence by Nikolay Gogol, translated "Eugenia Grande" by Honoré de Balzac in 1844 and published his own first novel, "Poor Folk", in 1845, and became friends with Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai A. Nekrasov, but it ended abruptly after they criticized his writing. At that time he became indirectly involved in a revolutionary movement, for which he was arrested in 1849, convicted of treason and sentenced to death. His execution was scheduled for a freezing winter day in St. Petersburg, and at the appointed hour he was blindfolded and ordered to stand before the firing squad, waiting to be shot. The execution was called off at the last minute, however, and his sentence was commuted to a prison term and exile in Siberia, where his health declined amid increased epileptic seizures. After serving ten years in prison and exile, he regained his title in the nobility and returned to St. Petersburg with permission from the Tsar. He abandoned his formerly liberal views and became increasingly conservative and religious. That, however, didn't stop him from developing an acute gambling problem, and he accumulated massive gambling debts.
In 1862, after returning from his first major tour of Western Europe, Dostoevsky wrote that "Russia needs to be reformed, by learning the new ideas that are developing in Europe." On his next trip to Europe, in 1863, he spent all of his money on a manipulative woman, A. Suslova, went on a losing gambling spree, returned home flat broke and sank into a depression. At that time he wrote "Notes from Underground" (1864), preceding existentialism in literature. His first wife died in 1864, after six years of a childless marriage, and he adopted her son from her previous marriage. Painful experiences caused him to fall further into depression, but it was during this period that he wrote what many consider his finest work: "Crime and Punishment" (1866).
After completion of "The Gambler" (1867), the 47-year-old Dostoevsky married his loyal friend and literary secretary, 20-year-old Anna Snitkina, and they had four children. His first baby died at three months of age, causing him to sink further into depression and triggering more epileptic seizures. At that time Dostoevsky expressed his disillusionment with the Utopian ideas in his novels "The Idiot" (1868) and "The Devils" (aka "The Possessed") (1871), where the "devils" are destructive people, such as revolutionaries and terrorists. Dostoevsky was the main speaker at the opening of the monument to Alexander Pushkin in 1880, calling Pushkin a "wandering Russian, searching for universal happiness". In his final great novel, "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880), Dostoevsky revealed the components of his own split personality, depicted in four main characters; humble monk Alyosha, compulsive gambler Dmitri, rebellious intellectual Ivan, and their cynical father Fyodor Karamazov.
Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881, of a lung hemorrhage caused by emphysema and epileptic seizures. He lived his entire life under the pall of epilepsy, much like the mythical "Sword of Damocles", and was fearless in telling the truth. His writings are an uncanny reflection on his own life - the fate of a genius in Russia.- Writer
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on 11 November 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Back to School (1986), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) and General Electric Theater (1953). He was married to Jill Krementz and Jane Marie Cox. He died on 11 April 2007 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
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One of the most important Argentinian writers of all time, Julio Cortazar was born in Belgium. When he was a child he went with his parents to Argentina. She stayed in Buenos Aires until 1951, when he went to Paris and he stayed in France until his death. His first book of short stories was "Bestiario" published in 1951. After this, he wrote many books of short stories like "Final del Juego" (1956), "Todos los fuegos el fuego" (1966), "Las armas secretas" (1964). In this last book he wrote the story "El perseguidor" based in the life of the great alto sax player Charlie Parker. His most celebrated book was the novel "Rayuela" (1963). His short story "Las Babas del Diablo" was adapted by Michelangelo Antonioni into the the movie Blow-Up (1966). "La autopista del sur" inspired the movie Weekend (1967) directed by Jean-Luc Godard.- Writer
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Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, named David Poe Jr., and his mother, named Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were touring actors. Both parents died in 1811, and Poe became an orphan before he was 3 years old. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and was sent to a boarding school in London, England. He later attended the University of Virginia for one year, but dropped out and ran up massive gambling debts after spending all of his tuition money. John Allan broke off Poe's engagement to his fiancée Sarah Royster. Poe was heartbroken, traumatized, and broke. He had no way out and enlisted in the army in May of 1827. At the same time Poe published his first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827). In 1829, he became a West Point cadet, but was dismissed after 6 months for disobedience. By that time he published "Al Aaraf" (1929) and "Poems by Edgar A. Poe" (1831), with the funds contributed by his fellow cadets. His early poetry, though written in the manner of Lord Byron, already shows the musical effects of his verses.
Poe moved in with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her teenage daughter, Virginia Eliza Clemm, whom he married before she was 14 years old. He earned respect as a critic and writer. In his essays "The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe formulated important literary theories. But his career suffered from his compulsive behavior and from alcoholism. He did produce, however, a constant flow of highly musical poems, of which "The Raven" (1845) and "The Bells" (1849) are the finest examples. Among his masterful short stories are "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher"(1839) and "The Masque of the Red Death". Following his own theory of creating "a certain unique or single effect", Poe invented the genre of the detective story. His works: "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is probably the first detective story ever published.
Just when his life began to settle, Poe was devastated by the death of his wife Virginia in 1847. Two years later he returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his former fiancée, Sarah Royster, who, by that time, was a widow. But shortly after their happy reconciliation he was found unconscious on a street in Baltimore. Poe was taken to the Washington College Hospital where Doctor John Moran diagnosed "lesions on the brain" (the Doctor believed Poe was mugged). He died 4 days later, briefly coming in and out of consciousness, just to whisper his last words, "Lord, help my poor soul." The real cause of his death is still unknown and his death certificate has disappeared. Poe's critic and personal enemy, named Rufus Griswold, published an insulting obituary; later he visited Poe's home and took away all of the writer's manuscripts (which he never returned), and published his "Memoir" of Poe, in which he forged a madman image of the writer.
The name of the woman in Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" was used by Vladimir Nabokov in 'Lolita' as the name for Humbert's first love, Annabelle Leigh. Nabokov also used in 'Lolita' some phrases borrowed from the poem of Edgar Allan Poe. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was set to music by Claude Debussy as an opera. Sergei Rachmaninoff created a musical tribute to Poe by making his favorite poem "The Bells" into the eponymous Choral Symphony.- Writer
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Borges was born into an upper class family, and received his education in Buenos Aires, Cambridge, and Geneva. He began writing as a student, and when in 1918 he settled in Spain, it was as a member of an experimental literary group. He returned to Argentina in 1921, and had his first poems published in 1923. He loved Buenos Aires. He lost his eyesight during the 1950's, but continued to write prolifically. His works have been translated into many languages. Brilliant, courtly, and thoughtful, Borges was director of the National Library of Argentina for many years. A month before his death he married Maria Kodama, with whom he had collaborated on his last book.- Writer
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John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand and factory worker. In 1925, he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York, where he was a construction worker. From 1926-1928, he was a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, CA. His first novel, "Cup of Gold," was published in 1929. During the 1930s, he produced most of his famous novels ("To a God Unknown," "Tortilla Flat," "In Dubious Battle," "Of Mice and Men," and his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath"). In 1941, he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (b. 1944) and John IV (b. 1946). In 1948, his close friend Ed Ricketts died, he went through a divorce, he took a a tour of Russia, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (1952), and 17 of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. US President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his 75th birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.- Ernest Hemingway was an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, which was made into a 1958 film The Old Man and the Sea (1958).
He was born into the hands of his physician father. He was the second of six children of Dr. Clarence Hemingway and Grace Hemingway (the daughter of English immigrants). His father's interests in history and literature, as well as his outdoorsy hobbies (fishing and hunting), became a lifestyle for Ernest. His mother was a domineering type who wanted a daughter, not a son, and dressed Ernest as a girl and called him Ernestine. She also had a habit of abusing his quiet father, who suffered from diabetes, and Dr. Hemingway eventually committed suicide. Ernest later described the community in his hometown as one having "wide lawns and narrow minds".
In 1916 Hemingway graduated from high school and began his writing career as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. There he adopted his minimalist style by following the Star's style guide: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." Six months later he joined the Ambulance Corps in WWI and worked as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, picking up human remains. In July 1918 he was seriously wounded by a mortar shell, which left shrapnel in both of his legs causing him much pain and requiring several surgeries. He was awarded the Silver Medal. Back in America, he continued his writing career working for Toronto Star . At that time he met Hadley Richardson and the two married in 1921.
In 1921, he became a Toronto Star reporter in Paris. There he published his first books, called "Three Stories and Ten Poems" (1923), and "In Our Time" (1924). In Paris he met Gertrude Stein, who introduced him to the circle that she called the "Lost Generation". F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound were stimulating Hemingway's talent. At that time he wrote "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "A Farewell to Arms" (1929), and a dazzling collection of Forty-Nine stories. Hemingway also regarded the Russian writers Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov as important influences, and met Pablo Picasso and other artists through Gertrude Stein. "A Moveable Feast" (1964) is his classic memoir of Paris after WWI.
Hemingway participated in the Spanish Civil War and took part in the D-Day landings during the invasion of France during World War II, in which he not only reported the action but took part in it. In one instance he threw three hand grenades into a bunker, killing several SS officers. He was decorated with the Bronze Star for his action. His military experiences were emulated in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940) and in several other stories. He settled near Havana, Cuba, where he wrote his best known work, "The Old Man and the Sea" (1953), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. This was adapted as the film The Old Man and the Sea (1958), for which Spencer Tracy was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor, and Dimitri Tiomkin received an Oscar for Best Musical Score.
War wounds, two plane crashes, four marriages and several affairs took their toll on Hemingway's hereditary predispositions and contributed to his declining health. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and insomnia in his later years. His mental condition was exacerbated by chronic alcoholism, diabetes and liver failure. After an unsuccessful treatment with electro-convulsive therapy, he suffered severe amnesia and his physical condition worsened. The memory loss obstructed his writing and everyday life. He committed suicide in 1961. Posthumous publications revealed a considerable body of his hidden writings, that was edited by his fourth wife, Mary, and also by his son Patrick Hemingway. - Writer
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Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria. His parents were Spanish-French-Algerian (pied noir) colonists. His father, Lucien, died in the Battle of Marne (1914) during WWI. His mother, named Catherine Helene Sintes was of Spanish origin, she was a deaf mute due to a stroke, but she was able to read lips and worked as a cleaning lady, providing for her son, who loved her to tears.
Camus studied at Algiers Lycee from 1923-32, then at the University of Algiers, from where he graduated in 1936 with a degree in philosophy. While a student he joined the French Communist Party in 1934, but in 1936 he joined the 'Le Parti du Peuple Algerien' and was denounced by communists as 'Trotskyite'. He was seriously influenced by the writings of 'Andre Malraux', 'Andre Gide' and Plotinus' theory of the "One", which became Camus' graduation thesis (1936).
He was rejected from the French army because of tuberculosis, which he contracted in the 1930's. His first marriage to Simone Hie, a morphine addict, ended due to infidelity from both of them. In 1940 Camus married a pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, whom he loved and patiently tolerated her affair with the actress María Casares. Camus and Francine Faure had twins born in 1945.
During the Second World War Camus was a writer for 'Paris-Soir' magazine. He was in Paris during the Wermacht occupation, and witnessed the execution of the French communist and anti-fascist activist Gabriel Peri by firearm, which turned Camus' mind against Nazi Germany. He moved to Bordeaux, where he finished his early works, 'The Stranger' and 'The Myth of Sisyphus', which opens with his famous statement about the philosophical question of suicide, and deals with the absurdity of existence in the meaningless struggle.
Camus joined the French Resistance cell 'Combat' and edited the eponymous paper under the pseudonym 'Beauchard'. He reported on the fighting when Allies liberated Paris in 1944. Camus continued his work for 'Combat' until 1947, and through this work he became acquainted with Jean-Paul Sartre. For a couple of years Camus was a member of Sartre's circle at the Cafe de Flore on the Boulevard St. Germain, but Camus' criticism of communist doctrine soon alienated Sartre. He highly regarded Franz Kafka and William Faulkner, whose 'Requiem for a Nun' he adopted into a play.
Camus' lectures about French existentialism brought him on a 3-month tour of the United States and Canada in 1946, where he spoke at several universities. He lectured for 3 months in Brazil, Argentina and Chile in 1949, where he became sick and almost suicidal. The return of his tuberculosis forced Camus into seclusion from 1949-1951. It was during those 2 years that he crystallized his analysis of rebels and revolutions and published 'The Rebel'. The book clearly formulates his rejection of communism as well as any violent activity under various Utopian masks of 'social justice'.
Albert Camus' desire for clarity and meaning in the world that offers nothing, but chaos, resulted in his work on the idea of absurdism. It was incorporated in many of his works from 'The Myth of Sisyphus' (1942), 'The Plaque' (1947), 'The Rebel' (1951), and other works. Camus' ideas resulted from his philosophic analysis of the diverse list of sources from 'Epicurus' to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and 'Andre Breton', as well as his own experiences in the war and his studies.
His greatest work 'The Fall' (1956) presents the monologues of a self-proclaimed 'judge penitent' Clamence, whose character alludes to Zarathustra from Friedrich Nietzsche and Grand Inquisitor from the 'Karamasov Brothers' of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Camus challenges the reader with the dilemma of accepting the absurdity of our existence and/or learning how to deal with it as well as with the unpredictable consequences from doing something about it.
Camus was the proponent of the idea of human rights. He resigned from UNESCO in 1952 in protest of the UN acceptance of Spain under 'Edgar Franco 'El General''. He protested against the Soviet crush upon the East Berlin workers in 1953, and against the Soviet repressions in Hungary in 1956. He was a steady supporter of pacifism and was in opposition to capital punishment. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He was killed in a car accident on January 4, 1960, in the small town of Villeblevin, France, in the car driven by his publisher and close friend Michel Gallimard, who also died in the accident.- Writer
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Charles Bukowski, the American poet, short-story writer, and novelist, was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, Jr. in Andernach, Germany on August 1920. He was the son of Henry Bukowski, a US soldier who was part of the post-World War I occupation force, and Katharina Fett, a German woman. His father, his wife and young "Henry Charles" returned to the United States in 1922, settling in Los Angeles, California, the setting of much of "Hank" Bukowski's oeuvre. With Raymond Chandler, Bukowski is the great chronicler of the City of Angels, and after John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers, who influenced Bukowski's poetry, he arguably is the most important and certainly one of the most influential writers produced by the Golden state.
Bukowski's childhood was marred by a violent father, who regularly beat him with a razor strop until his teen years, and then by the Great Depression. When Bukowski went through adolescence, he developed an awful case of acne vulgaris which disfigured his face and made him feel like an outsider. His father frequently was out of work during the Depression, and he took out his pain and anxiety on his son. The younger Bukowski took to drink at a young age, and became a rather listless underachiever as a means of rebellion against not only his father, but against society in general, the society his father wanted him to become a productive member of. The young Bukowski could care less.
During his school years, Bukowski read widely, and he entered Los Angeles City College after graduating from high school to study journalism and literature with the idea of becoming a writer. He left home after his father read some of his stories and went berserk, destroying his output and throwing his possessions out onto the lawn, a lawn that the young Bukowski had to mow weekly and would be beaten for if the grass wasn't perfectly cut. Bukowski left City College after a year and went on the bum, traveling to Atlanta, where he lived in a shack and subsisted on candy bars. He would continue to return to his parents' house when he was busted flat and had nowhere else to go.
At City College, Bukwoski briefly flirted with a pathetic, ad hoc, pro-fascist student group. Proud of being a German, he did not feel inclined to go to war against Hitler's Germany. When America entered World War II, Bukowski resisted entreaties from his friends and father to join the service. He began living the life of a wandering hobo and a bum, frequently living on skid row as he worked his way through a meaningless series of jobs in L.A. and other cities across the U.S. He wound up in New York City during the war after his short story, 'Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,' was accepted by "Story" magazine. He disliked New York and soon decamped for more hospitable climes. He was content to go to public libraries and read -- he discovered the L.A. writer John Fante, whom heavily influenced his own work and whom he would champion when he became famous -- and loaf.
The story, published in "Story" in 1944, was the highlight of the first part of his writing career. He returned to Los Angeles and became a Bottle Baby in his mid-twenties, forsaking the typewriter for John Barleycorn and Janet Cooney Baker, an alcoholic ten years his senior who became his lover, off and on, for the the next decade. They would shack up in a series of skid row rooms until the money and the booze would run out, and Jane would hurt the turf. She was a tortured soul who could match Bukowski drink for drink, and she was the love of his life. They would drift apart in the mid-1950s until coming together again at the beginning of a new decade, before she drank herself to death in 1962.
Bukowski got a temporary Christmas job at the Post Office in 1952, and stuck with his job as a mail carrier for three years. In 1955, he was hospitalized in a charity ward with a bleeding ulcer that nearly killed him. He was told never to drink again, but he fell off the water wagon the day he got out of the hospital and never regretted it.
After recovering from his brush with death -- he would have died if an idealistic doctor hadn't demanded from the nurses that had left Bukowski to die that they give him a massive blood transfusion -- he began to write again: poetry. Bukowski developed into one of the most original and influential poets of the post-War era, though he was never anthologized in the United States (though those that were influenced by him were). Bukwoski, who chronicled the low-life that he lived, never gained any critical respect in America, either in the journals or in academia.
Barbara Frye, a woman born to wealth who published the small poetry magazine "Harlequin," began to publish Bukowski. She sent a letter to him saying she feared no one would marry her because of a congenital conformity essentially leaving her with no neck. Bukowski, who had never met her, wrote back that he would marry her, and he did. The marriage lasted two years. In 1958, he went back to work for the Post Office, this time as a mail sorting clerk, a job he would hold for almost a dozen hellish years.
His first collection of poetry, "Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail" was published as a chapbook in 1959 in a run of 200 copies. The influence of Jeffers is very strong in the early work. One can also detect W.H. Auden, although Bukowski never mentioned him, and he was phlegmatic whereas Auden was dry. But that same sense of an outsider looking in critically at his society was there.
Bukowski's poetry, like all his writing, was essentially autobiographical and rooted in clinical detail rather than metaphor. The poems detailed the desperate lives of men on the verge -- of suicide, madness, a mental breakdown, an economic bust-out, another broken relationship -- whose saving grace was endurance. The relationship between male and female was something out of Thomas Hobbes, and while Bukowski's life certainly wasn't short, one will find in the poetry and prose much that is brutish.
Jon Edgar Webb, a former swindler who became a littérateur with his "The Outsider" magazine, became enamored of Bukowski's work in the early 1960s. Webb, who had published the work of Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs, published Bukowski, then dedicated an issue of his magazine to Buk was "Outsider of the Year," and eventually decided to publish, with his own bespoke hand press, a collection of Bukowski's poetry.
Bukowski began to establish a reputation in the small magazines that proliferated with the "mimeograph revolution" of the late 1960s, micro-circulation "magazines" run off on mimeograph and Gestetner machines. Bukowski began moving away from a more traditional, introspection poetry to more expressionistic, free-form "verse," and began dabbling in the short story, a form he became a master of. He also began a weekly column for an underground Los Angeles newspaper, "Open City," called "Notes of a Dirty Old Man." The texts of his column were collected in a collection of the same title published by Ferlenghetti's City Lights press in 1969. (City Lights also would publish his first book of short stories, entitled "Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness," in 1972).
In the column, Bukowski would introduce ideas, vignettes and stories, many of which would be further developed into the short stories that helped make his reputation. The Bukowski of the mid- to late- 1960s and 1970s became one of the greatest short story writers that America has produced, and his reputation grew steadily in Europe. (Though a literary lion on the West Coast, Buk never was much appreciated in the New York City that he had spurned which was, after all, the arbiter of culture. Since he didn't exist in their ken, he didn't exist at all, with the surprising result for Europeans that the most popular American writer in Europe was little known by Americans.)
There was envy as Bukowski became increasingly popular. Aside from the master of kitsch Rod McKuen, Bukowski was probably the best selling poet America produced after World War II. By the end of the 1970s, he was the most popular American writer in Germany and also had a huge reputation in France and other parts of Europe. Yet, he remained virtually unknown in the United States, except among the core of the Bukowski cult who faithfully bought his books.
Bukowski's success as a writer in the 1970s can be attributed to the patronage of John Martin, a book collector and chap book publisher who offered to subsidize Bukowski to the tune of $100 a month for life. Bukowski took him up on the offer, quit his job at the Post Office in 1969, and set out to be a writer who made his living by the typewriter alone (and an occasional poetry reading). Martin established his Black Sparrow Press to print Bukowski, and Bukowski proceeded to begin his first novel while continuing to write poetry and short stories. The first novel, "Post Office," was published by Black Sparrow in 1971. The Bukowski phenomenon began to gain momentum.
Around the time he quit the Post Office, Bukowski took up with the poet and sculptress Linda King, who was 20 years his junior. They began a tumultuous relationship juiced in equal parts with sadism and masochism that extended into the mid-1970s. In his 1978 autobiographical novel "Women," Bukowski writes about how his alter ego, "Henry Chinaski," had not had a woman in four years. Now, as Bukowski became a literary phenomenon in the small/alternative press world, he became a literary if not literal Don Juan, bedding down his legions of women fans who flocked to his apartment on DeLongre Avenue in the sleaziest part of Hollywood. (It was at this time that Bukowski was friends with a dirty book store manager who was the father of Leonardo DiCaprio.)
Bukowski's alter ego in his novels, Chinaski (who significantly shares Bukowski's real first name, the name he went by; he used his middle name "Charles" for his poetry as it seemed more literary, and possibly to deny his father, who shared the same Christian name), shares an affinity with with the underground denizens of Feodor Dostoyevsky's work and the protagonists of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novels "Journey to the End of Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan." Celine arguably is the largest influence on Bukowski's prose, aside from Hemingway (who influenced Bukowski's entire generation) and Fante. Like Celine, in World War II, Bukowski flirted with fascism (though Bukowski never descended into the anti-semitism of Celine or any other type of racism in his work); like Celine, he despised America and the brand of capitalism once known as "Fordism," assembly line industrialism and the petty consumer society Bukowski found abominable and which he tried to escape.
Chinaski is a hard-drinking, would-be womanizer who is ready to duke it out with the bums, crooks and assorted low-lives he lives and drinks amongst, though occasionally he visits high society through the ministrations of a woman. Like Bukowski himself, he will accept company but prefers to be alone to drink and listen to classical music on the radio: Beethoven, Mozart, and Mahler among others.
Chinaski was introduced in the autobiographical short-story "Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beats," his first published short story, printed in chap book form in 1965. Chinaski's life is chronicled in Bukowski's novels "Post Office" (1971), "Factotum" (1975), "Women" (1978), and "Ham on Rye" (1982). Bukowski is not naturally gifted as a novelist, and while "Women" is superb and the very short "Post Office" is highly readable, "Factotum" and "Ham on Rye" are not up to the standards of Bukowski's short stories.
As his social situation evolved, Bukowski's works broadened from tales of low-lives and bums and losers; he added to his repertoire meditative and sarcastic accounts of his new life. A constant in his work became poems and short stories about the race track, to which he had been introduced by Jane back in the 1950s. The race track as metaphor suited Bukowski as it represented something more than luck or chance. A horse player had to work at it to be any good and beat the odds, and the odds were definitely stacked against the crowd as the track took its vig right off the top, when it wasn't outright and forthrightly fixing the race.
Going with the crowd was to be avoided in order to improve one's odds, and the track, the establishment, was out to f--- the bettor, but spiritual kin to Camus' Sissyphus, the bettor on nags had to have the wit to at least get the stone to the crown of the hill and avoid getting crushed as it courses its way back. The bettor was hip to the fact that the rock always fell back and would always fall back, but a good living or at least survival could be had by beating the track, beating the establishment, if the bettor knew how to play the horses. It was all a matter of developing his own system, and standing aloof from the crowd, whose dumb, manipulated enthusiasms skewed the odds. And knowing when to change to a new system, to keep ahead of the track, and the crowd. Bukowski was the antithesis of Carl Sandburg and Sandburg's "The People."
Bukowski was and would remain a literary outsider. In 1973, Taylor Hackford presented Bukowski to a wider audience via an award-winning documentary for Los Angeles public television station KCET. "Bukowski" won the San Francisco Film Festival's Silver Reel Award after being voted the best cultural film on public TV. After his relationship with Linda King petered out, Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle, a health food restaurateur twenty-five years his junior in 1976. They became a couple and Bukowski's life became more balanced. With a stable relationship and steady royalties in the low six-figure range, Bukowski became a home owner, albeit in a middle class neighborhood in San Pedro. He now had a swimming pool, a hot tub, and drove a black BMW he paid cash for to the track. He palled around with Sean Penn and U2 dedicated a song to him at a Los Angeles concert.
The Muse, whom Buk bet on as faithfully as he did the ponies, left him when it came to the short story sometime in the 1980s. The poetry always ran through his head and down into his fingers, but it became less artful, though the powerful voice remained. Buk wrote a screenplay for Barbet Schroeder, which was made into the movie Barfly (1987), and Bukowski became known in the United States at last. He refused to appear on The Tonight Show (1962) with Johnny Carson, but let "People" magazine interview him as in his reasoning, it would be read by normal people at the supermarket checkout lines. It was the "Crowd" he despised but honored in his own way by refusing to be part of the "better" part of society that kept them down.
Always immensely prolific when it came to his poetry, and aided by a personal computer in the 1980s, Bukowski generated so much material that originals are still being published 10 years after his death. He finished his last novel, an L.A./Chandler/private detective/noir spoof called "Pulp" shortly before he lost his battle with leukemia; it, like the final poetry collection published in his lifetime, "The Last Night of the Earth Poems," is full of intimations of mortality, and of course, his mordant humor.
On March 9, 1994, in his native Los Angeles, the man Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre called America's "greatest poet" died. In his short story collection "Hot Water Music," Bukwoski wrote, "There are so many," she said, "who go by the name of poet. But they have no training, no feeling for their craft. The savages have taken over the castle. There's no workmanship, no care, simply a demand to be accepted." The remarkable endurance of the man who never asked for acceptance, the endurance that took him nearly forty years beyond the near-death his drinking and despair had brought him in 1955, finally gave out, and not to the booze and the carousing and anomie, but to a cancer. Many of his fans thought it was remarkable that the "Dirty Old Man" had made it to 74, but it was a brave front: they greatly mourned the passing of their favorite writer, a man that could be read by anyone of any class or educational background.
His friend, Sean Penn, dedicated his film The Crossing Guard (1995) to Bukowski, with the words felt by many who had loved him: "Hank, I still miss you."
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Nazim Hikmet was born on 15 January 1902 in Salonica, Ottoman Empire [now Thessaloniki, Greece]. He was a writer and director, known for Wings of Desire (1987), Günese dogru (1937) and Dügün gecesi (1933). He was married to Wera Tuljakowa, Münevver and Piraye. He died on 3 June 1963 in Moscow, USSR [now Russia].- Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun was born to a poor family and sent to live with an uncle, a commercial fisherman. He grew up without any formal schooling. Hamsun left Norway for the U.S. twice: once in 1882, and again in 1886. Each time he stayed in the U.S. for two years, holding various jobs including farmhand and Chicago streetcar conductor. He was often poverty-stricken. His first novel "Hunger" is autobiographical and about poverty, alienation, and desperation, and, innovatively: consciousness and intense inner states. He returned to Norway and wrote several more novels, all well-received, original, and successful. He won the Nobel Prize in 1920 for "Growth of the Soil," but gradually became reclusive due to his need to write combined with and his cranky temperament. Norwegians were dismayed when in the 1930's he expressed his support for Hitler. Although he claimed his sentiments were more anti-British than pro-German, he spoke in favor of National Socialism and was vilified in Norway. His rocky relations with his children and second wife are the subject of Hamsun (1996). In 1948, he was briefly imprisoned, and his assets were seized by the state. He died penniless in 1952. Hamsun was rehabilitated posthumously, and is again considered one of the great modern Scandinavian novelists.
- Yasunari Kawabata was born on 11 June 1899 in Osaka, Japan. He was a writer and actor, known for A Page of Madness (1926), Izu no odoriko (1967) and Izu no odoriko (1974). He was married to Hideko Keizo. He died on 16 April 1972 in Zushi, Kanagawa, Japan.
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Charles Baudelaire was a 19th century French poet, translator, and literary/art critic. At his birth, Baudelaire's mother, Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, was 28; his father Francois Baudelaire was 61. Charles' father instilled in him an appreciation for art, taking his young son to museums and galleries, and teaching him to paint. When Charles was six, his father died and Charles became very attached to his mother, but when she remarried, he was sent to boarding school. The school was ruled by military discipline which caused much of Baudelaire's solitude and fits of crushing melancholy. Baudelaire resented the strictures of his life and was, in turn, difficult and rebellious. He frequently fought with students and teachers. He began to write poems, which were not well received by his masters, who felt them examples of precocious depravity, unsuitable for his age. He eventually attended the College Louis-le-Grand, but was expelled in April 1839.
In an attempt to draw him away from the company he was keeping, Baudelaire's stepfather sent him on a voyage to India in 1841. Baudelaire jumped ship and eventually made his way back to France in February of 1842. On his 21st birthday, Baudelaire received his father's inheritance, but his lavish and extravagant lifestyle (including use of hashish and opium) dwindled his fortune. He fell prey to cheats and moneylenders, which led to heavy debt. He also contracted the venereal disease that eventually took his life. His parents obtained a court order to supervise his money and Charles received only a small allowance. In 1842, Charles met a Creole woman named Jeanne Duval, who became his mistress and dominated his life for the next 20 years. Jeanne would inspire Baudelaire's most anguished and sensual love poetry, provoking such masterpieces of the exotic-erotic imagination as "La Chevelure" ("The Head of Hair").
Baudelaire used his writing to shock and astonish society, likely because of his strict upbringing and strong opposition to authority. He often focused on the immoral and cynical. He felt that his ideas where very similar to those of Edgar Allen Poe, who focused on beauty, death, and the bizarre. Baudelaire began to translate volumes of Poe's work into French, and much of Poe's popularity in England and France is attributed to Baudelaire. In 1857, Baudelaire's most well-known work, "Les Fleurs Du Mal" ("The Flowers of Evil") was seized by French authorities and Baudelaire was forced to omit six poems and pay a fine; today, it stands as perhaps the most influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century. He continued to publish "salon" studies and critical reviews of other artists, including Flaubert's "Madame Bovary". In 1860, he began publishing prose poetry, a poetic form unknown in France, and became renowned for his innovation in prose experiments.
Near the end of his life, Baudelaire's agonizing moods of isolation and despair, which he called his moods of "spleen," returned and became more frequent. In 1867, while in Belgium, Baudelaire developed hemiplegia and aphasia. He was brought back to Paris, where he died.- Writer
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Friedrich Nietzsche was raised having five women around him - his mother, grandmother, two aunts and a sister, all living together. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died when Nietzsche was 5 years old. After a Catholic school he studied music and Greco-Roman culture at the famous Schulpfora from 1858-1864, continued at the universities of Bonn, Leipzig and Basel, where he was a professor of classic philology for 12 years. His influences were: classic history, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jesus Christ, whom he called "Superman".
His main books are "The Gay Science", "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", "Beyond Good and Evil", "Twilight of the Idols" and the radical "Antichrist". Nietzsche analyzed foundations of values and morality through transformations of human nature and society. His contention that traditional values, religion and God, are not working in the modernized world, led to his conceptual statement: "God is dead." In replacement of God comes his concept of a superman - a rational, secure and highly independent individual. He lists Jesus, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Goethe and Napoleon as models or prototypes of a superman. His idealistic superman was often misinterpreted as a role for a dictator in a totalitarian society. Nitzsche's goal for this concept was mainly individualistic because of his despise of any crowd and attention to him. He considered any crowd as a main source of lies and manipulations. According to Nietzsche it is the independence that allows a superman to be truly original and creative.
His sarcastic humor and contradictory ideas, often misunderstood in metaphysical context, caused misinterpretations of his personality and his works. His nihilism resulted from frustrations in search of meaning. For self-liberation Nietzsche terminated his German citizenship and remained a stateless person for the rest of his life. He distanced himself from Richard Wagner being repelled by the banality of the Bayreuth shows and the baseness of the crowd. He suffered from migraine headaches and from shortsightedness to the degree of blindness that caused his retirement from University of Basel. After he saw a brutal beating of a horse on a street, Nitzsche had a mental breakdown at age 44, and he retreated into solitude as a self-defense from crowds and manipulations. He lived with his mother and sister until his death of pneumonia in 1900. Most researchers regard his breakdown as irrelevant to his works. He received postmortem recognition by existentialists and by 20th century postmodern philosophers.
Nietzsche's idea of a day in a life repeating itself again, and again, and again was written at the end of the Book IV of "The Gay Science" (1887). It is used in the film 'Groundhog Day (1993)'.
Nietzsche listed laughter and humor as vital qualities of being a superman. He only failed to add a superwoman on his list of models to make it really serious.- Writer
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born on 27 May 1894 in Courbevoie, Seine [now Hauts-de-Seine], France. He was a writer and actor, known for Die Nacht (1985), Par coeur (1998) and Contes modernes (1979). He was married to Lucette Almanzor and Edith Follet. He died on 1 July 1961 in Meudon, Seine-et-Oise [now Hauts-de-Seine], France.- Writer
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Henry Miller was born on 26 December 1891 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Reds (1981), Quiet Days in Clichy (1970) and Quiet Days in Clichy (1990). He was married to Hoki Tokuda, Evelyn Byrd (Keven) McClure, Janina Martha Lepska, June Edith Smith and Beatrice Sylvas Wickens. He died on 7 June 1980 in Pacific Palisades, California, USA.- Writer
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U.S. writer whose novel "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post-World War II generation of college students. His entire corpus of published works consists of that one novel and 13 short stories, all originally written in the period 1948-59. Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and a mother who adopted Judaism, and, like Holden Caulfield, the hero of "The Catcher in the Rye", he grew up in New York City, attending public schools and a military academy. After brief periods at New York and Columbia universities, he devoted himself entirely to writing, and his stories began to appear in periodicals in 1940. After his return from service in the U.S. Army (1942-46), Salinger's name and writing style became increasingly associated with "The New Yorker" magazine, which published almost all of his later stories. Some of the best of these made use of his wartime experiences: "For Esmé - With Love and Squalor" (1950) describes a U.S. soldier's poignant encounter with two British children; "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948) concerns the suicide of the sensitive, despairing veteran Seymour Glass. Major critical and popular recognition came with the publication of "The Catcher in the Rye", whose central character, a sensitive, rebellious adolescent, relates in authentic teenage idiom his flight from the "phony" adult world, his search for innocence and truth, and his final collapse on a psychiatrist's couch. The humor and colorful language of "The Catcher in the Rye" place it in the tradition of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and the stories of Ring Lardner, but its hero, like most of Salinger's child characters, views his life with an added dimension of precocious self-consciousness. "Nine Stories" (1953), a selection of Salinger's best work, added to his reputation. The reclusive habits of Salinger,an obsessively private man especially over the last half-century of his life, made his personal life a matter of speculation among devotees, while his small literary output was a subject of controversy among critics. "Franny and Zooey" (1961) brought together two earlier New Yorker stories; both deal with the Glass family, as do the two stories in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters"; and "Seymour: An Introduction" (1963).- Mikhail A. Bulgakov was a Russian writer and medical doctor known for big screen adaptations of his books, such as Beg (1971) and Master i Margarita (2006).
He was born Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov on May 15, 1891, in Kiev, Russia (now Kiev, Ukraine). He was the first of six children in the family of a theology professor. His family belonged to the intellectual elite of Kiev. Bulgakov with his brothers took part in the demonstration commemorating the death of Lev Tolstoy. Bulgakov graduated with honors from the Medical School of Kiev University in 1915. He married his classmate Tatiana Lippa, who became his assistant at surgeries and in his Doctor's office. He practiced medicine, specializing in venereal and other infectious diseases from 1915 to 1919.
Bulgakov wrote about his experiences as a doctor in his early works "Notes of a Young Doctor." In 1917-1919, he suffered from an infection that caused him an unbearable painful itch requiring him to take morphine; which he became addicted to, but he managed to overcome the dependency and quit. He joined the anti-communist White Army in the Russian Civil War. After the Civil War, he tried to emigrate from Russia, to reunite with his brother in Paris. But he became trapped in Soviet Russia. Several times he was almost killed by opposing forces on both sides of the Russian Civil War, but soldiers needed doctors, so Bulgakov was left alive. He provided medical help to the Chehchens, Caucasians, Cossacs, Russians, the Whites, the Reds... Bulgakov was the Doctor to all the sick people.
In 1921, Bulgakov moved to Moscow. There he became a writer and made friends with Valentin Kataev, Yuriy Olesha, Ilya Ilf, Yevgeni Petrov, and Konstantin Paustovsky. Later, he met Mikhail Zoschenko, Anna Akhmatova, Viktor Ardov, Sergey Mikhalkov, and Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy. Bulgakov's plays at the Moscow Art Theatre were directed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. "Days of the Turbins," about the demise of the White Army, was performed more than 200 times at the Moscow Art Theatre, and also at other Soviet theatres until it was banned.
The play was later restored to the repertoire and at least fifteen performances of this play were attended by Joseph Stalin. Stalin liked the play and later, in his official speeches, he used some of the well-written lines that were spoken from the stage by the Bulgakov's characters. In 1941, after the Nazi invasion in Russia during the Second World War, Joseph Stalin started his first radio address to the people of the Soviet Union with Bulgakov's words from the play, "Brothers and Sisters..."
Bulgakov's political independence was expressed in his article on the death of the first Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin, "He killed a river of people..." wrote Bulgakov in 1924.
Bugakov's own way of life and his witty criticism of the ugly realities of life in the Soviet Union caused him much trouble. In 1925 he released 'Heart of a Dog', a bitter satire about the loss of civilized values in Russia under the Soviet system. Soon after, Bulgakov was interrogated by the Soviet secret service, OGPU. After interrogations, his personal diary and several unfinished works were confiscated by the secret service.
His plays were banned in all theaters, which terminated his income. Being financially broke, he wrote to his brother in Paris about his terrible life and poverty in Moscow. Bulgakov distanced himself from the Proletariat Writer's Union because he refused to write about the peasants and proletariat. He made adaptation of the "Dead Souls" by Nikolay Gogol for the stage; it became a success but was abruptly banned.
He took a risk and wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin with an ultimatum: "Let me out of the Soviet Union, or restore my work at the theaters." On the 18th of April of 1930, Bulgakov received a telephone call from Joseph Stalin. The dictator told the writer to fill an employment application at the Moscow Art Theater. Gradually, Bulgakov's plays were back in the repertoire of the Moscow Art Theatre. But most other theatres were in fear and did not stage any of the Bulgakov's plays for many years.
Joseph Stalin, who was increasingly paranoid, ordered massive extermination of intellectuals during the repressions known as the "Great Terror" (aka.. Great Purge). Many of Bulgakov's friends and colleagues, like Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoschenko and many others were censored, banned, prosecuted, exiled, imprisoned, executed, found dead, or just disappeared without a trace.
At that time Bulgakov started his masterpiece - "Master and Margarita." It was slowly evolving from the series of chapters, initially titled "The Black Magician" in 1929. That was changed to "The Prince of Darkness" in 1930. Then it was changed again to "The Great Chancellor" in 1934. Finally, the novel was titled as "Master and Margarita" in 1934 and was rewritten and updated constantly until the writer's death in 1940.
While writing the novel, Bulgakov met Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya, who became his wife. She was, in part, the model for Margarita in the novel. Secret service agents were spying on Bulgakov and learned about his new novel. Bulgakov was interrogated again and was ordered to destroy the manuscript under the threat from the government agents. He had to be very cautious. Bulgakov split the manuscript in two parts and destroyed one half in a fire.
Soon, he restored the missing part from memory and continued writing the novel. He was writing the novel in secrecy, hiding its manuscript for many years until his death in 1940. The main character in the novel, Voland, alludes to Stalin, or Beria, or any dictator who plays a semi-god. Voland was modeled after Satan in "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The novel has many parallels with the Bible and the "Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri. The characters and events in "Master and Margarita" are alluding to Bulgakov's experiences in Moscow under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin.
Five days before his death, Bulgakov accepted an unusual promise from his loving wife. She swore to live a humble life and wait as long as it would take for Bulgakov's masterpiece to be published. The original manuscript of "The Master and Margarita" was preserved by Bulgakov's wife, Elena Sergeevna, until its first publication in 1966. It is a Menippean satire, a cross-genre comedy, drama, and fantasy, regarded by many as the best of the 20th century Russian novels.
Mikhail Bulgakov died of a kidney failure, on March 10, 1940, in Moscow. He was laid to rest in the Novodevichy Monastery Cemetery, next to other Russian cultural luminaries. - Writer
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Here he grew up in the educated Jewish middle class, together with his brother Alfred. The Zweig family was not religious. He passed his high school diploma at the Wasagymnasium in Vienna. Zweig wrote his first poems here. At that time he was influenced by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannstahl and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1901, Stefan Zweig's first volume of poetry entitled "Silberne Saiten" was published. He also began translating works by French writers at this time. In 1904 he completed his doctorate in German and Romance studies. Until 1910 he traveled extensively through Europe. The focus here was on exchanges with other writers and artists, with whom he mostly maintained friendship through intensive correspondence. By 1911, works such as "Tersites", "The House by the Sea" and "Burning Secret" as well as his first biography "Émile Verhaeren" had been created.
With his work "First Experience. Four Stories from Kinderland," Zweig approached an intuitive psychological style. At the beginning of the First World War, Stefan Zweig signed up as a volunteer. Here he was employed in the war press quarters until 1917. To demonstrate against war in any form, he wrote the drama "Jeremiah", which premiered in Zurich in 1918. From 1918 onwards, Zweig also worked as a journalist and correspondent for the Swiss newspaper "Neue Freie Presse". He also uses this medium to publish his non-partisan views. After the end of the war he settled in Salzburg. His idea was to found a spiritually, holistically and humanistically motivated alliance in Europe. So he began, initially in numerous lectures and essays, to warn against radicalization through nationalism and to call for calm, diplomacy and patience.
In 1920, Zweig published the writings "Fear", "The Compulsion" and, from 1920, three essays about master builders of the world: "Three Masters", in 1925 "The Fight with the Demon" and in 1928 "Three Poets of Their Life". Zweig enjoyed great stage success in 1926 with his adaptation of Ben Jonson's "Volpone". The publication of the book "Star Hours of Humanity" in 1927 was equally successful. In 1928 he traveled to the Soviet Union, where his books were also published in Russian at the instigation of Maxim Gorki, with whom he corresponded. After the NSDAP came to power in Germany, Stefan Zweig fled to London for fear of persecution. The book "Impatience of the Heart" was written here. From 1934 onwards, his works were no longer published in Germany and with the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich in 1938, production in his homeland also stopped. In 1935, Zweig wrote the libretto for the opera "Die schweigsame Frau" for Richard Strauss.
In 1936 the NSDAP immediately banned the sale of all of his works. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1938, and his second marriage was to Charlotte Altmann in 1939. In 1940 he received English citizenship from Great Britain. Nevertheless, he left Europe and traveled on to New York. In 1942 his chess novella and the monograph Brazil were published. After a short stay he visited Argentina and Paraguay. He then settled in Brazil. Here Stefan Zweig fell into deep sadness and depression.
Stefan Zweig committed suicide on February 22, 1942 in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro. In 1944 his autobiography was published posthumously under the title "The World of Yesterday".- Born the son of an Opium Agent in Bengal, Eric Blair was educated in England (Eton 1921). The joined the British Imperial Police in Burma, serving until 1927. He then travelled around England and Europe, doing various odd jobs to support his writing. By 1935 he had adopted the 'pen-name' of 'George Orwell' and had written his first novels. He married in 1936. In 1937, he and his wife fought against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He produced some 3000 pages of essays and newspaper articles as well as several books and programs for the BBC.
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Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in his ancestral estate Yasnaya Polyana, South of Moscow, Russia. He was the fourth of five children in a wealthy family of Russian landed Gentry. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his elder brothers and relatives.
Leo Tolstoy studied languages and law at Kazan University for three years. He was dissatisfied with the school and left Kazan without a degree, returned to his estate and educated himself independently. In 1848 he moved to the capital, St. Petersburg, and there passed two tests for a law degree. He was abruptly called to return to his estate near Moscow, where he inherited 4000 acres of land and 350 serfs. There Tolstoy built a school for his serfs, and acted as a teacher. He briefly went to a Medical School in Moscow, but lost a fortune in gambling, and was pulled out by his brother. He took military training, became an Army officer, and moved to the Caucasus, where he lived a simple life for three years with Cossacs. There he wrote his first novel - "Childhood" (1852), it became a success. With writing "Boyhood" (1854) and "Youth" (1857) he concluded the autobiographical trilogy. In the Crimean War (1854-55) Tolstoy served as artillery commander in the Battle of Sevastopol, and was decorated for his courage. Between the battles he wrote three stories titled "Sevastopol Sketches", that won him wide attention, and a complement from the Czar Aleksandr II.
After the war, Tolstoy returned to St. Petersburg, where he enjoyed the friendship of Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai A. Nekrasov, Ivan Goncharov, and other writers. On his trips to Europe, he had discussions with Gertsen in London, and attended Darwin's lectures. In Brussels he had meetings with philosophers Prudhon and Lelewel. Tolstoy undertook a research of schools in Europe, and later he built and organized over 20 schools for poor people in Russia. At that time the secret police began surveillance, and searched his home. In 1862 he married Sofia Andreevna Bers, and fathered 13 children with his wife. Four of their babies died, and the couple raised the remaining nine children. His wife was also his literary secretary, and also contributed to his best works, "War and Peace" (1863-69) and "Anna Karenina" (1873-77). In his "Confession" (1879) Tolstoy revealed his own version of Christianity, blended with socialism, that won him many followers. Tolstoyan communities sprang up in America and Europe, and he assisted the Russian non-Orthodox Christians (Dukhobors) in migrating to USA and Canada. He split from aristocratic class and developed an ascetic lifestyle, becoming a vegetarian, and a farmer. He sponsored and organized free meals for the poor. He transfered his copyright on all of his writings after 1880 to public domain. In his later age Tolstoy was pursuing the path of a wandering ascetic. He corresponded with Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was directly influenced by Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1894), which was praised by many nonviolent movements.
In 1900 Tolstoy criticized the Tsar's government in a series of publications, calling for separation of Chuch and State. Tsar Nicholas II retaliated through the Church, by expulsion of Tolstoy from Orthodox Cristianity as a "heretic". He fell ill, and suffered from a severe depression; he was suicidal and even had to eliminate all hunting guns from his home, because of his suicidal mode. He was treated by the famous doctor Dahl, and was visited by composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and basso Feodor Chaliapin Sr., who performed for Tolstoy on many occasions. Later he went to convalesce in Yalta, in Crimea, where he spent time with Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. Tolstoy was an obvious candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but was initially omitted by the Nobel Committee for his views. The omission caused a strong response from a group of Swedish writers and artists. They sent an address to Tolstoy, but the writer answered by declining any future prize nomination.
In 1902 Tolstoy wrote a letter to the Tsar, calling for social justice, to prevent a civil war, and in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy wrote a condemnation of war. The Tsar replied by increasing police surveillance on Tolstoy. In November of 1910 he left his estate, probably taking the path of a wandering ascetic, which he had been pursuing for decades. He left home without explanations and took a train, in which he caught pneumonia, and died at a remote station of Astapovo. He was laid to rest in his estate of Yasnaya Polyana, which was made a Tolstoy National Museum.
His youngest daughter, named Alexandra Tolstoy, was the director of the Tolstoy Museum, and was arrested by the Communists five times. She emigrated from Russia to the United States, where she founded the Tolstoy Foundation. She helped many prominent Russian intellectuals, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Rachmaninoff among many others.- Writer
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Although Hugo was fascinated by poems from childhood on, he spent some time at the polytechnic university of Paris until he dedicated all his work to literature. He was one of the few authors who were allowed to reach popularity during his own lifetime and one of the leaders of French romance.
After the death of his daughter Leopoldine in 1843, he started a career in politics and became member of the Paris chamber where he fought for leftist ideas. After the re-establishing of monarchy, he had to go into exile to Guernesey (1851-1870) where his literary work became more important, e.g. "Les Miserables" was written during that period. After his return to Paris he did not join politics anymore.- Nikolai (Mykola) Gogol was a Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist of Ukrainian origin. His ancestors were bearing the name of Gogol-Janovsky and claimed belonging to the upper class Polish Szlachta. Gogol's father, a Ukrainian writer living on his old family estate, had five other children. He died when the Gogol was 15. Young Gogol was fond of the drama class at his high school in Nezhin, Ukraine. He was strongly influenced by his religious mother, as well as by the enchanting beauty of the Ukrainian folklore. He also called himself a "free Cossac".
At age 18 Gogol moved to St. Petersburg, became a student, and later a professor of history at the St. Petersburg University. His short stories, set in St. Petersburg, became a success. His play "Revizor" (1836, The Inspector General) had its premiere in St. Petersburg attended by the Tzar Nickolai I. But it also made him many powerful enemies who hated his satire on the corrupt Russian society. It was his friend Alexander Pushkin who suggested to him the subject for "Revizor". Pushkin also suggested the main idea of "The Dead Souls" (1842), a bitter satirical story of a crook, who was buying the names of dead surfs from various greedy landlords, for a tax-evasion scheme. In his other famous story "Shinel" (1842, The Overcoat) a poor clerk is intimidated both by thieves and by the government. Gogol's discontent against the slavery and social injustices in Russia caused him trouble. He escaped to Europe for 12 years, returning to Russia briefly to publish the 1st part of "The Dead Souls".
His religious beliefs were used by the State-controlled Orthodox Church to place guilt on him and to cause interruption of his literary work. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After his return to Russia, he settled in Moscow, where he fell under the control of the fanatical Orthodox priest, Konstantinovskii, who demanded that Gogol quit writing and destroy the manuscript of the 2nd part of "The Dead Souls". Torn by his inner conflict with guilt and being under the pressure from the fanatical priest, Gogol burned his manuscript. He died nine days later in pain without having any food during his last days. In the 1931 excavation of his tomb, his body was found lying face down, which caused suspicion that Gogol was buried alive.
His style involves the elements of the fantastic and grotesque, with the taste for the macabre and absurd, following the tradition of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaimed, "We all came out from under his Overcoat", referring to Gogol's influence on Russian writers. Sometimes compared with Franz Kafka, Gogol had such followers, as Yevgeni Zamyatin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mikhail A. Bulgakov. - Jack London was the best-selling, highest paid and most popular American author of his time.
He was born John Griffith Chaney, on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco. He was raised by his mother Flora Wellman and his stepfather John London (he didn't know who his father was until his adulthood). After graduation from a grammar school he worked 12 to 18 hours a day at a cannery. Jack had a special relationship with his black foster mother, Virginia (Jenny) Prentiss. She loaned him some money and in 1891 he bought a sloop and became an oyster pirate. A few months later he joined the California Fish Patrol. In 1893 he joined the crew of a sealing schooner, bound for Japan. His first story, "Typhoon off the Coast of Japan", based on his sailing experiences, was published in November of 1893. Still unemployed, he became a tramp and hoboed around the country. In 1894 he was arrested for vagrancy and spent a month in jail, where he was a witness to "awful abysses of human degradation." His entire life, after these events, became a race to erase the traumatizing memories of his childhood and youth.
He continued his self-education at the Oakland Public Library. Among his readings were works by Gustave Flaubert and Lev Tolstoy. In 1896 he was admitted to the University of California, but after a year was forced to leave due to financial reasons. In 1897 he went to the Canadian Yukon and joined the Klondike Gold Rush. There he experienced all the hardships of uncivilized life and suffered from--among other things--severe frostbite, scurvy, malaria and dysentery. This left his health seriously impaired. London's struggles for survival inspired "To Build a Fire" (1902), which is considered his best short story. Writing became his ticket out of poverty; a way, in his words, to "sell his brains". His first marriage to Bess Maddern began as a friendship, not love, and ended 3 years later, leaving her with two daughters. His second marriage to Charmian Kittrdge, an editor, lasted until his death.
"The Call of the Wild" (1903) was his biggest success. "The Sea-Wolf" (1904) was turned into the first full-length American movie. Later came "The Iron Heel" (1908), a premonition of the Orwellian world, and the autobiographical "Martin Eden" (1909). The highest-paid writer of his time, he earned over $2 million yet he was always broke. In 1905 he bought a ranch in California, where he designed the first concrete silo in the state. His books provided operating income. He once said, "I would write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate." His ecological approach and effort to adapt the ideas of Asian sustainable agriculture was ahead of his time. In 1913 his Big House was ruined by a devastating fire and Jack was financially and mentally hurt. He built a small cottage and made big plans, but he lived only 3 more years. His 1400-acre ranch is now a National Historic Landmark, named Jack London State Historic Park. The writer's cottage was preserved by his wife Charmian, who lived there until her death in 1955.
His changing views and philosophy were often misunderstood as he grew out of his own mistakes. At one time he wrote, "I have been more stimulated by [Friedrich Nietzsche] than by any other writer in the world." Later London disregarded the "superman" theory of Nietzsche, calling himself Nietschze's "intellectual enemy." His readings of Carl Jung contributed to his complex philosophy. His other influences ranged from Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley and Karl Marx. While sympathizing with the Mexican revolution in "The Mexican", he wrote differently about it when he was sent to Mexico as a reporter in 1914. By age 40, somewhat disillusioned, he resigned from the Socialist party and from various clubs. During his last years London was in extreme pain, caused by complications from kidney failure (uremia is recorded on his death certificate). He was laid to rest at his ranch according to his will: "And roll over me a red boulder from the ruins of the Big House." - Writer
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Ivan Turgenev was born into a wealthy landowning family with many serfs, in the city of Oryol in Southern Russia. His father, a cavalry colonel, died when he was 15, and he was raised by his abusive mother, who ruled her 5000 serfs ruthlessly with a whip. He never married, but fathered a daughter with one of their family serfs. Turgenev studied at Universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, and later in his life received a Doctorate degree from Oxford. Turgenev lived in Western Europe for most of his life and admired the advancements of the Western civilization. He advocated modernization of Russia and liberation of serfs. In "A Sportsman's Sketches" (1852) he bitterly criticized serfdom, and in "A Nest of Nobles" (1859), and "On the Eve" he focused on the social and political troubles brewing in Russia. In his masterpiece "Fathers and Sons" (1862) Turgenev presented a man of the new generation, an educated and open-minded medical student Basarov, in a conflict with the old generation of 'fathers', who are standing for the ultra-conservative Russia. After being wildly attacked by Russian critics, Turgenev retired in Europe, living in Baden-Baden and Paris where he had a life-long affair with the celebrated singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot. His late stories "First Love", "Asya", "Torrents of Spring", and a collection of "Poetry in Prose" are among the finest in all of the Russian literature. He died in Bougival, near Paris, and was buried in St. Petersburg, Russia. Turgenev's influence may be found in Western literature; in the works of Gustave Flaubert, and also Ernest Hemingway, who regarded "A Sportsman's Sketches" as his favorite book. .- Franz Kafka was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austrian Empire, in 1883. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a business owner and a domestic tyrant, frequently abusing his son. Kafka later admitted to his father, "My writing was all about you...". He believed that his father broke his will and caused insecurity and guilt, that affected his whole life. Their tensions come out in "The Trial" and in "The Castle" in form of a hopeless conflict with an overwhelming force. His mother, Julie Lowy, came from an intellectual, spiritual family of the Jewish merchant and brewer Jakob Lowy. Although her influence was diminished by his dominating father, she shared her son's delicate nature. Kafka had a few relationships with women and was engaged, but never made a family.
He finished the German National Gymnasium in 1901, and graduated from the German University in Prague as Doctor of Law in 1906. He worked for insurance companies for the rest of his life. His profession shaped the formal, cold language of his writings which avoided any sentimental interpretations, leaving it to the reader. In 1908 Kafka published eight short stories compiled under the title "Meditation". In 1911 he became interested in Yiddish theater, that absorbed him more than abstract Judaism. In 1912 he began writing "The Judgment", which was more than an autobiography, providing a therapeutical outlet for his wrecked soul. The same year he started "Metamorphosis" about a traveling salesman, who transformed into a giant bug. In 1914 he wrote "In the Penal Colony" and "The Trial", which is regarded to be his best work. His style remains unique, though literary connections may be traced to Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Nikolay Gogol, as well as to Chinese parables, to the Bible and Talmud.
As a Jew Kafka experienced social tensions and isolation from the German community, so very few of his writings could find readers during his life. His three sisters later died in the Nazi concentration camps. He suffered from clinical depression, social anxiety, insomnia, and tuberculosis, complicated by laryngitis, that caused him the loss of his voice before his death in 1924. He was comforted by his girlfriend Dora Diamant, who had broken away from her Hasidic shtetl in Poland. She was 19 when they met in 1923 and Kafka wrote to her parents, asking for their permission to marry her. Their answer was negative, because Kafka presented himself as a non-religious Jew. He asked Dora to destroy his manuscripts after his death, but she kept about 20 notebooks of his writings and 35 private letters, that were reportedly confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 and are not yet recovered. His university friend Max Brod became his editor, biographer and literary agent, who preserved and published most of Kafka's works posthumously, including the unfinished novels "The Trial", "The Castle", and "America". - Writer
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Hermann Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was a writer, known for The Hours (2002), Siddhartha (1972) and Poem: I Set My Foot Upon the Air and It Carried Me (2003). He was married to Ninon Ausländer, Ruth Wenger and Maria Bernoulli. He died on 9 August 1962 in Montagnola, Switzerland.- Bertrand Russell was born on 18 May 1872 in Ravenscroft, Trelleck, Monmouthshire, Wales, UK. He was a writer, known for Reductio: Adventures in Ideas (2019), Filosofix (2018) and Aman (1967). He was married to Edith Finch, Patricia Spence, Dora Russell and Alys Pearsall. He died on 2 February 1970 in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merioneth, Wales, UK.
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Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey on February 3rd 1947. His father was a landlord, who owned buildings with his brothers in Jersey City. The family was middle-class and the parents' marriage was not a happy one. Auster grew up in the Newark suburbs of South Orange and Maplewood. He read books enthusiastically and developed an interest for writing.
Auster attended high school in Maplewood, some twenty miles southwest of New York City. After his parents' divorce, during his senior year in high school, his mother moved, with his sister and him, to an apartment in the Weequahic section of Newark. Instead of attending his high-school graduation, Auster headed for Europe. He visited Italy, Spain, Paris and naturally James Joyce's Dublin. While he travelled he worked on a novel.
He returned to the United States in time to start at Columbia University in the fall. In early 1966 he began his relationship with Lydia Davis. Davis, who is now also a writer, was at that time attending Barnard College and was a good match for Auster's intellect. In 1967 Auster again left the US to attend Columbia's Junior Year Abroad in Paris. Auster became disillusioned with the dull existence within the programme and quit college. But he was still reinstated at Columbia when he returned to New York.
Auster's undergraduate years at Columbia coincided with a period of social unrest but he didn't participate actively in student politics. He supported himself with a variety of freelance jobs and wrote articles for university magazines. In June of 1969 Auster was granted a B.A. in English and comparative literature. The following year he received his M.A. from Columbia.
A high lottery number saved Auster from having to worry about the Vietnam draft and he took a job with the Census Bureau. During this period he also began work on the novels "In the Country of Last Things" and "Moon Palace", which he would not complete until many years later. In February 1971 Auster left once again for Paris. He supported himself there with a variety of odd jobs and minor literary tasks. He also worked on several film projects, one of them being in Mexico. In 1973 he moved with Davis to Provence where they became caretakers of a farmhouse.
After returning to the US in 1974, Auster has written poems, essays, novels, screenplays and translations. He directed his first motion picture in 1995. He lives in Brooklyn, New York City with his wife and two children.- Milan Kundera was born on April 1st 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He wrote his first poems during his high school years. After World War II he worked as a jazz musician before going to college. He studied music, film and literature at university in Prague. He moved on to become a professor at the film faculty of the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. He also published poems, essays and stage plays. In the same period of time he joined the editorial staff at the literature magazines "Literarni noviny" and "Listy". Kundera joined the Communist Party in 1948, as many other Czech intellectuals did at that time. In 1950 he got expelled from the Party because of "individualistic tendencies".
After graduation in 1952 he was appointed lecturer in world literature at the Film Academy. He joined the Communist Party once again and stayed on from 1956 to 1970. In 1953 he published his first book of poems. Kundera got known after collections of poems through his three volumes "Laughable Loves", written and published between 1958 and 1968. In his first novel, "The Joke" from 1967, he dealt with Stalinism. After the Soviet invasion in the spring of 1968 Kundera lost his permission to teach and his books were removed from all public libraries in the country.
Kundera moved to France and became a guest professor at the University of Rennes in 1975. In 1979 he was deprived of his Czechoslovakian citizenship by the government as a reaction to his "Book of Laughter and Forgetting".
The following novels were not allowed to be published in Czechoslovakia. Since 1981 he is a French citizen. During his years in France he has also written material in French. He resides in Paris with his wife, Vera Hrabankova. - Writer
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Italo Calvino was born on 15 October 1923 in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba. He was a writer, known for Boccaccio '70 (1962), Ti-Koyo e il suo pescecane (1962) and L'amore difficile (1962). He was married to Esther Calvino. He died on 19 September 1985 in Siena, Tuscany, Italy.- Writer
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Homer is the name traditionally ascribed to the brilliant Greek bard that authored, most notably, the Iliad and the Odyssey (Western civilization's first complete stories). Nothing concrete is known of his life, but he is traditionally thought to be blind and was probably born in either Chios or Smyrna. His epic poems were most likely memorized and recited in bardic lays and only later written down. While the details and dates of Homer's life have been lost in the mists of time, the Iliad and Odyssey were probably composed in the late eighth century B.C.- Writer
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Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer from Edinburgh. His most popular works include the pirate-themed adventure novel "Treasure Island" (1883), the poetry collection "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885), the Gothic horror novella "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" (1886) which depicted a man with two distinct personalities, and the historical novels "Kidnapped" (1886) and "The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses" (1888). Stevenson spend the last years of his life in Samoa, where he tried to act as an advocate for the political rights of Polynesians.
In 1850, Stevenson was born in Edinburgh. His father was Thomas Stevenson (1818-1887), a civil engineer, lighthouse designer, and meteorologist. Thomas was a co-founder of the Scottish Meteorological Society, and one of the sons of the famed engineer Robert Stevenson (1772-1850). Thomas' brothers were the engineers David Stevenson and Alan Stevenson. Stevenson's mother (and Thomas' wife) was Margaret Isabella Balfour, a member of a centuries-old gentry family. Stevenson's maternal grandfather was Lewis Balfour (1777-1860), a minister of the Church of Scotland. Lewis was himself a grandson of the philosopher James Balfour (1705-1795).
Both Stevenson's mother and his maternal grandfather had chronic problems with coughs and fevers. Stevenson demonstrated the same problems throughout his childhood. His contemporaries suspected that he was suffering from tuberculosis. Modern biographers have suggested that he was instead suffering from bronchiectasis (a congenital disorder of the respiratory system) or sarcoidosis (an autoimmune disease which affects the lungs).
Stevenson's parents were Presbyterians, but they were not particularly interested in indoctrinating their son. Stevenson's nurse was Alison "Cummy" Cunningham, a fervently religious woman. While tending to Stevenson during his recurring illnesses, she read to him passages from the Bible and from the works of the Puritan preacher John Bunyan (1628-1688). She also narrated to him tales of the Covenanters, a 17th-century religious movement.
Stevenson's poor health as a child kept him away from school for extended periods. His parents had to hire private tutors for him. He did not learn to read until he was 7 or 8-years-old. However, he developed an interest in narrating stories in early childhood. When he learned to write, he started writing tales as a hobby. His father Thomas was happy about this hobby, as he was also an amateur writer in his early life. In 1866, Stevenson completed his first book. It was "The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666", a historical narrative of a Covenanter revolt. It was published at his father's expense.
In November 1867, Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering. He showed little interest in the subject matter. He joined both the debating club Speculative Society, and an amateur drama group organized by professor Fleeming Jenkin (1833-1885). During the annual holidays, Stevenson repeatedly joined his father in travels to inspect the family's engineering works. He displayed little interest in engineering, but the travels turned his interests towards travel writing.
In April 1871, Stevenson announced to his father that he wanted to become a professional writer. His father agreed, on the condition that Stevenson should also study to gain a law degree. In the early 1870s, Stevenson started dressing in a Bohemian manner, wore his hair long, and joined an atheist club. In January 1873, Stevenson explained to his father that he no longer believed in God, and that he had grown tired of pretending to be pious. He would eventually rejoin Christianity, but remained hostile to organized religion until his death.
In late 1873, Stevenson visited London. He had an essay published in the local art magazine "The Portfolio" (1870-1893), and started socializing with the city's professional writers. Among his new friends was the poet William Ernest Henley (1849-1903). Henley had a wooden leg, due to a childhood illness which led to amputation. Stevenson later used Henley as his inspiration for the one-legged pirate Long John Silver.
Stevenson qualified for the Scottish bar in July 1875, at the age of 24. He never practiced law, though his legal studies inspired aspect of his works. In September 1876, Stevenson was introduced to the American short-story writer Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne (1840-1914). She had separated from her unfaithful husband, and lived with her daughter in France. Fanny remained in his thoughts for months, and they became lovers in 1877. They parted ways in August 1878, when she decided to move back to San Francisco.
In August 1879, Stevenson decided to travel to the United States in search of Fanny. He arrived to New York City with little incident. The journey from New York City to California negatively affected his health, and he was near death by the time he arrived in Monterey, California. He and Fanny reunited in December 1879, but she had to nurse him to recovery. His father cabled him money to help in his recovery.
Stevenson and Fanny married in May 1880. Th groom was 29-years-old, and the bride was 40-years-old. They spend their honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena. The couple sailed back to the United Kingdom in August 1880. Fanny helped Stevenson to reconcile with his father.
Stevenson and his wife moved frequently from place to place in the early 1880s. In 1884, they settled in their own home in the seaside town of Bournemouth, Dorset. Stevenson named their new residence "Skerryvore". He used the name of a lighthouse which his uncle Alan had constructed. In 1885, Stevenson reacquainted himself to his old friend, the novelist Henry James (1843-1916). James had moved to Bournemouth to care for his invalid sister. Stevenson and James started having daily meetings to converse over various topics. Stevenson wrote several of his popular works while living in Bournemouth, though he was frequently bedridden.
In 1887, Thomas Stevenson died. Stevenson felt that nothing tied him to the United Kingdom, and his physician had advised him that a complete change of climate might improve his health. Stevenson and much of his surviving family (including his widowed mother) traveled to the state of New York. They spend the winter at a cottage in the Adirondacks, with Stevenson starting to work on the adventure novel "The Master of Ballantrae" (1889).
In June 1888, Stevenson chartered the yacht "Casco" to transport him and his family to San Francisco. The sea air helped restore his health for a while. Stevenson decided to spend the next few years wandering in the Pacific islands. He visited the Hawaiian Islands, and befriended the local monarch Kalakaua (1836-1891, reigned 1874-1891) and his niece Ka'iulani (1875-1899). Stevenson's other voyages took him to the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the Samoan Islands.
In December 1889, Stevenson and his family at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands. He decided to settle in Samoa. In January 1890, he purchased an estate on the island. He started building Samoa's two-story house, and also started collecting local folktales. He completed an English translation of the moral fable "The Bottle Imp".\
Stevenson grew concerned with the ongoing rivalry between Britain, Germany and the United States over their influence in Samoa. He feared that the indigenous clan society would be displaced by foreigners. He published various texts in defense of the Polynesians and their culture. He also worked on "A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa" (1892), a detailed chronicle of the Samoan Civil War (1886-1894) and the international events leading up to it.
Stevenson's last fiction writings indicated his growing interest in the realist movement, and his disdain for colonialism. In December 1894, Stevenson suffered a stroke while conversing with his wife. He died hours later, at the age of 44. The local Samoans provided a watch-guard to protect his body until a tomb could be prepared for it. Stevenson was buried at Mount Vaea, on a spot overlooking the sea. A requiem composed by Stevenson himself was inscribed on the tomb.
Stevenson was seen as an influential writer of children's literature and horror fiction for much of the 20th century, but literary critics and historians had little interest in his works. He was re-evaluated in the late 20th century "as an artist of great range and insight", with scholarly studies devoted entirely to him. The Index Translationum, UNESCO's database of book translations, has ranked him as the 26th most translated writer on a global level. Stevenson ranked below Charles Dickens (25th) in the index, and ahead of Oscar Wilde (28th). His works have received a large number of film adaptations.- Writer
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Writer, born in Bromley, Kent. He was apprenticed to a draper, tried teaching, studied biology in London, then made his mark in journalism and literature. He played a vital part in disseminating the progressive ideas which characterized the first part of the 20th-c. He achieved fame with scientific fantasies such as The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898), and wrote a range of comic social novels which proved highly popular, notably Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Both kinds of novel made successful (sometimes classic) early films. A member of the Fabian Society, he was often engaged in public controversy, and wrote several socio-political works dealing with the role of science and the need for world peace, such as The Outline of History (1920) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind- Writer
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Charles Dickens' father was a clerk at the Naval Pay Office, and because of this the family had to move from place to place: Plymouth, London, Chatham. It was a large family and despite hard work, his father couldn't earn enough money. In 1823 he was arrested for debt and Charles had to start working in a factory, labeling bottles for six shillings a week. The economy eventually improved and Charles was able to go back to school. After leaving school, he started to work in a solicitor's office. He learned shorthand and started as a reporter working for the Morning Chronicle in courts of law and the House of Commons. In 1836 his first novel was published, "The Pickwick Papers". It was a success and was followed by more novels: "Oliver Twist" (1837), "Nicholas Nickleby" (1838-39) and "Barnaby Rudge" (1841). He traveled to America later that year and aroused the hostility of the American press by supporting the abolitionist (anti-slavery) movement. In 1858 he divorced his wife Catherine, who had borne him ten children. During the 1840s his social criticism became more radical and his comedy more savage: novels like "David Copperfield" (1849-50), "A Tale of Two Cities" (1959) and "Great Expectations" (1860-61) only increased his fame and respect. His last novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", was never completed and was later published posthumously.- Writer
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Alexandre Dumas fils was born on 27 July 1824 in Paris, France. He was a writer, known for Traviata '53 (1953), Camille (1921) and Zorro: New Orleans (2020). He was married to Henriette Régnier de la Briére and Baroness Nadejda "Nadine" (von Knorring) Naryschkine. He died on 27 November 1895 in Marly-le-Roi, Yvelines, France.- Writer
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A gifted poet, playwright and wit, Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in 19th-century England. He was illustrious for preaching the importance of style in life and art, and of attacking Victorian narrow-mindedness.
Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin before leaving the country to study at Oxford University in England when he was in his early 20s. His prodigious literary talent was recognized when he received the Newdegate Prize for his outstanding poem "Ravenna". After leaving college his first volume of poetry, "Patience", was published in 1881, followed by a play, "The Duchess of Padua", two years later. It was around this time that Wilde sparked a sensation.
On his arrival to America he stirred the nation with his flamboyant personality: wearing long silk stockings--an unusual mode of dress--long, flowing hair that gave the impression to many of an effeminate and a general air of wittiness, sophistication and eccentricity. He was an instant celebrity, but his works did not find recognition until the publication of "The Happy Prince and Other Tales" in 1888. His other noted work was his only novel, was "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1890), which caused controversy as the book evidently attacked the hypocrisy of England. It was later used as incriminating evidence at Wilde's trial, on the basis of its obvious homosexual content.
Wilde was a married man with children, but his private life was as a homosexual. He had an affair with a young snobbish aristocrat named Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensberry, did not approve of his son's relationship with the distinguished writer, and when he accused Wilde of sodomy, Wilde sued the Marquess in court. However, his case was dismissed when his homosexuality--which at the time was outlawed in England--was exposed. He was sentenced to two years hard labor in prison. On his release he was a penniless, dejected man and soon died in Paris. He was 46.
Wilde is immortalized through his works, and the stories he wrote for children, such as "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant", are still vibrant in the imagination of the public, especially "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the story of a young handsome man who sells his soul to a picture to have eternal youth and beauty, only to face the hideousness of his own portrait as it ages, which entails his evil nature and degradation. The book has been interpreted on stage, films and television.- Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, then Kingdom of Prussia, German Confederation. His father, Hershel Mordechai, was the son of a rabbi. Karl converted to Lutheran Christianity because Jews were not allowed to practice law. He graduated from the Trier Gymnasium, then studied law at the University of Bonn, where he was briefly a president of the Trier Tavern Club. He transfered to the Fridrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in Berlin, from which he graduated in 1841 with a doctorate in philosophy. He abandoned a university career and became an editor of a liberal newspaper, "Rheinische Zeitung", in Cologne. A year later the paper was shut down by the Prussian government. Marx moved to France, where he wrote "Zur Judenfrage" ("On the Jewish Question", 1843), a critique of civil rights in his time.
In Paris Marx met Friedrich Engels. Engels was the son of a wealthy capitalist and supported Marx throughout his life. Together they developed the communist ideology. Police forced him to leave Paris and he moved with Engels to Brussels. There he developed the materialist conception of history and wrote "The German Ideology" and "The Poverty of Philosophy", which was a critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's socialist thought. On February 21, 1848, Marx and Engels published "The Communist Manifesto", which called for revolution instead of reforms. It described all human history as a class struggle. It was commissioned by the Communist League of German emigrants in London. Marx himself was active in London.
Police arrested Marx and expelled him from Belgium. He returned to Paris. There he managed to get the French government money to subsidize four hundred German immigrants' return tickets. In 1849 the French government collapsed and Marx returned to Cologne. There he was on two trials for his calls for armed rebellion of the poor. He was acquitted twice, but his newspaper was closed. He returned to Paris again, but was forced out. With the money from Engels he moved to London. There Marx lived for the rest of his life on financial contributions from Engels.
In London he became the central figure in a new organization called "The International Working Men's Association", which surfaced in 1864. Marx authored its first public statement in 1864, and many declarations and manifestos that followed. "Das Kapital"--his main work on economics--was drafted in three volumes. Only the first volume was completed and published in 1867. The second and third volumes remained unfinished and were published posthumously.
Marx and his wife Jenny von Westphalen had six children, three of whom died at young age. His daughter Eleanor was a socialist and assisted Marx in editing his works. She committed suicide in 1898. His other daughter, Laura, committed suicide in 1911. Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. - Writer
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Marcel Proust was a French intellectual, author and critic, best known for his seven-volume fiction 'In search of Lost Time'. He coined the term "involuntary memory", which became also known as "Proust effect" in modern psychology.
He was born Valentin Louis Georges Eugéne Marcel Proust, on July 10, 1871, in Paris, France. His father, Achille Proust, was a famous doctor. His mother, Jeanne Weil, was from a rich and cultured Jewish family. Proust's interests in art and literature were encouraged by his mother, who read and spoke English. He was fond of Carlyle, Emerson and John Ruskin, whose two works he also translated into French. From age 9 Proust suffered from severe allergy and asthma attacks, and eventually developed a chronic lung disease which caused his disability and affected his career and mobility. He was lucky to survive such a life threatening condition due to professional help from his doctor father. Proust's physical disability imposed serious restrictions on his lifestyle, and he expressed himself in writing. He was blessed with talent and imagination and also with a very large inheritance, that allowed him to write without any pressure. During the most years of his adult life Proust was confined to his cork-wood paneled bedroom, where he was attended mostly by his close friend, pianist and composer Reynaldo Hahn.
Proust's main work, 'A la recherche du temps perdu' was begun in 1909 and finished in 1922, just before the author's death. It also became known in English as 'In Search of Lost Time' (aka.. Remembrance of Things Past). The novel's life-like complexity and delicate fabric of language is influenced by his reading of Lev Tolstoy, especially by 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina', and it bears some structural and contentual resemblance of Tolstoy's major novels. It is spanning over 3000 pages in seven volumes and teeming with more than 2000 names. Proust's novel is set in the fictional town of Combray, near Paris, and covers all aspects of life of the upper class; nobility, sexuality, women, men, art and culture. It was praised from Graham Greene, W. Somerset Maugham and Ernest Hemingway, as being the greatest fiction of their time.
Marcel Proust died at age 51, of complications related to pneumonia and his chronic health condition, on November 18, 1922, and was laid to rest in Cimetiére du Pére-Lachaise, Paris, France. The town of Illiers, which became the model for imaginary town of Combray in the novel, was renamed Illiers-Combray in commemoration of the Proust's masterpiece.- Writer
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He is a professor of semiotics, the study of communication through signs and symbols, at the University of Bologna. Also a philiosopher, a historian, literary critic, and an aesthetician. He is an avid book collector and owns more than 30,000 volumes. The subjects of his scholarly investigations range from St. Thomas Aquinas, to James Joyce, to Superman. He lives in Milan.- Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion, Crete (Greece). He studied Law in Athens and in Paris, but soon he studied philosophy and literature. He travelled almost everywhere; he learnt many foreign languages and left his scientific research for Nitsche. At philosophy: "Ascetics" (Salvatores Dei, 1927), script that expresses the writer's belief for metaphysics. At poetry: "The Odyssey" (1938) "Tertsines" and also some poetic works for theatre: "Protomastoras" (=foreman) "Melissa" (=Bee) "Julian" "Prometheus" etc. His novels are: "Alexis Zorbas" (1946) "O Xristos xanastavronetai" (=Christ is recrucified) (1948) "O ftoxoulis tou Theou" (=The God's poor man) (1952-3) "Anafora ston Greco (=Reference to Greco) (1961) He died in 1957.
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Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, at Laleham in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the third of four children. His brother Julian Huxley was a biologist known for his theories of evolution. His grandfather, named Thomas Henry Huxley, was a naturalist known as "Darwin's Bulldog." His father, named Leonard Huxley, was a writer. His mother, named Julia Arnold, was related to poet Matthew Arnold. Young Huxley graduated from the Hillside School, where his mother was supervisor. He was traumatized by the death of both his mother and sister in 1908. He then followed in the footsteps of his brothers by going to Eaton and then to Balliol College, Oxford University. At age 16 he contracted keratitis which left him practically blind for two years, and disqualified him from service in WWI. Upon his recovery he graduated with a First in English Literature, he taught English literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Huxley's literary life began in 1915, when he joined the circle of Lady Ottoline Morell at Garsington Manor. There he met Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield. He also met and fell in love with a Belgian refugee Maria Nys. In 1919 she became his wife, and they had a son, named Matthew. In 1920 Huxley began writing for Conde Nast at House and Garden to support his family, and later contributed to Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. He soon established himself as a successful writer and social satirist with his novels: Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925, and Point Counter Point (1928). The latter novel brought him international fame and was lated included in the Modern Library list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century.
His best known novel 'Brave New World' (1932) was actually preceded by "We" (written in 1920, published in English in 1924), which was the very first anti-Utopian novel in literature, written by Yevgeni Zamyatin. Both novels describe the futurist idea of One World State, where totalitarian government manipulates people's lives by eliminating individual freedom, family, art, literature, religions and cultural diversity. Totalitarian government controls humans from their conception and regulates assisted reproduction, as well, as education, indoctrination, and also enforces the medical drug use for pacification. Huxley himself called it a "negative utopia" which was written as a parody on 'Men Like Gods' (1923), a Utopian novel by H.G. Wells, which was also preceded by writings of Yevgeni Zamyatin.
In 1937 Huxley moved to Hollywood, California, with wife Maria and a life-long friend Gerald Heard. There Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti and became one of his disciples, adopting a blend of eastern philosophical traditions with modernized mysticism. He also joined the circle of 'Swami Prabhavadanta' and became influenced by Vedanta and meditating. Huxley dramatically updated his lifestyle, become a vegetarian and practiced yoga. He also experimented with non-addictive psychedelic drugs and wrote about these experiences extensively. He even reported that his eyesight had improved for the first time in over 25 years. After the Second World War Huxley applied for the United States citizenship, but was denied for refusing to take up arms to defend the country. He remained a British Citizen for his entire life. Later in the 1950's he turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the British government.
In 1955 his wife, Maria, died of breast cancer. A year later Huxley became married to Laura Archera Huxley who was herself a writer and also became his biographer. In 1960 Huxley was diagnosed with throat cancer. In his last Utopian novel 'Island' (1962), Huxley re-visited and updated his basic ideas from the 'Brave New World' and from his other novels. In 'Island' Huxley summarized his views on the modern world and society, including his position on medical drug use and his political stands on democracy, modernity, ecology and pacifism. The novel served as an inspiration for the 1960's psychedelic culture and was also incorporated in ideology of the New Age Movement. Huxley's opposition to the rigid social organization and self-destructive nature of modern class society and inevitable fatality of the modern world was paralleled by that of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Aldous Huxley volunteered in experimental drug use in research carried by his friend Dr. Humphry Osmond since 1953. Huxley repeatedly experimented with mescaline injections and described his observations in 'The Doors of Perception' (1954) and 'Heaven and Hell' (1956). His own health deteriorated dramatically in the early 1960's. Huxley spent his last days bedridden, almost blind, and unable to speak. On his deathbed he made a written request to his wife for an intramuscular injection of 100 mg of LSD. Laura Archera Huxley followed his instruction, and Huxley died peacefully in a few hours after the injection. That was on November 22, 1963, in his home in California. His death was obscured by the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day.
Huxley wrote the original screenplay for Disney's animated 'Alise in Wonderland' (1951), and co-wrote the screenplays for 'Pride and Prejudice' (1940) and 'Jane Eyre' (1944). Many of his novels were adapted for film or television: two TV productions of 'Brave New World' (in 1980 and in 1998), a BBC production of 'Point counterpoint' (1968) and 'The Devils' (1971) starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by Ken Russell, as well as other film and TV adaptations.- "There are no second acts in American lives," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, who himself went from being the high priest of the Jazz Age to a down-and-out alcoholic within the space of 20 years, but not before giving the world several literary masterpieces, the most famous of which is "The Great Gatsby" (1924).
He was born in 1896 to a mother who spoiled him shamelessly, leading him to grow up an especially self-possessed young man. While he was obsessed by the image of Princeton University, he flunked out, less interested in Latin and trigonometry than bathtub gin and "bright young things". The brightest was an unconventional young lady from Montgomery, Alabama named Zelda Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald invoked the jealousy of numerous local boys, some of whom had even begun a fraternity in Zelda's honor, by snagging her shortly before the publication of his first novel, "This Side of Paradise". The novel was a huge success, and Fitzgerald suddenly found himself the most highly-paid writer in America.
During the mid-to-late '20s the Fitzgeralds lived in Europe among many American expatriates including Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway and Thornton Wilder. He wrote what is considered his greatest masterpiece, "The Great Gatsby", while living in Paris. It was at the end of this period (1924-30) that his marriage to the highly strung, demanding and mentally unstable Zelda began to unravel. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent much of the rest of her life in a variety of mental institutions. Fitzgerald turned more and more to alcohol. In 1930 a major crisis came when Zelda had a series of psychotic attacks, beginning a descent into madness and schizophrenia from which she would never recover. Much of Fitzgerald's income would now be dedicated to keeping his wife in mental hospitals. Emotionally and creatively wrung out, he wrote "Tender is The Night" (1934), the story of Dick Diver and his schizophrenic wife Nicole, that shows the pain that he felt himself. In the mid-30s Fitzgerald had a breakdown of his own. He had become a clinical alcoholic, something he would detail in his famous "The Crack-Up" series of essays.
With Zelda institutionalized on the East Coast, it was Hollywood that proved to be Fitzgerald's salvation. Although he had little success in writing for films, which he had attempted several times previously, he was paid well and gained a new professional standing. His experiences there inspired "The Last Tycoon", his last--and unfinished--novel which some believe might have been his greatest of all. Fitzgerald died at the home of his mistress, writer Sheilah Graham, of a heart attack in 1940, believing himself to be a failed and broken man. He never knew that he would one day be considered one of the finest writers of the 20th century. - Writer
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born into a family of old provincial nobility. Failing his final exams at a preparatory school, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, he began military service in the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs, and sent to Strasbourg for pilot training. The next year, he obtained his license, and was offered a transfer to the air force. But his fiancée's family objected, so he settled in Paris and took an office job. His engagement ultimately broke off, and he worked at several jobs over the next few years without success.
By 1926, he was flying again. He became one of the pioneers of international postal flight in the days when aircrafts had few instruments and pilots flew by the seat of their pants. He worked on the Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar. His first tale, L'Aviateur (The Aviator), was published in the magazine Le Navire d'Argent. In 1928, he published his first book, Courrier-Sud (Southern Mail), and flew the Casablanca/Dakar route. He became the director of Cap Juby airfield in Rio de Oro, Sahara. In 1929, he moved to South America where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina Company. In 1931, Vol de Nuit (Night Flight), which won the Prix Femina, was published. He married Salvadoran artist and writer Consuelo Suncin Sandoval de Gómez, who became the model for the temperamental Rose in Le Petit Prince. Theirs was a stormy union as Saint-Exupéry traveled frequently and indulged in numerous affairs.
During World War II, he was in New York City, but returned to France to join a squadron based in the Mediterranean. Now 44, he agreed to collect data on German troop movements in the Rhone River Valley. He took off the night of July 31, 1944, and was never seen again. A lady reported having seen a plane crash around noon on August 1st near the Bay of Carqueiranne. A body wearing a French uniform was found several days later, and buried. In 1998, a fisherman found a silver chain bracelet south of Marseille which was identified as being Saint-Exupéry's. On April 7, 2004, officials confirmed that the wreckage of a Lockheed Lightning P-38 found on the seabed off the coast of Marseille in 2000 was Saint-Exupéry's.
Further research in 2006 by the dive team which recovered the wreckage located a German pilot who was flying a mission at the Bay of Carqueiranne at the time Saint-Exupéry's plane went down. Horst Rippert acknowledged that he shot at the plane, but did not report it, possibly because he was not sure he actually downed it. When the Germans heard American radio broadcasts that Saint-Exupéry was missing, Rippert said he knew that the plane he downed was his. Rippert idolized Saint-Exupéry, read all his books, and had been bothered by the incident his whole life. He told the dive team he would not have shot at the plane had he known it was Saint-Exupéry's.- Writer
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Born between January 13 and January 15 of the year 1622, from a 25yo tapestry-maker, Jean Poguelin (who worked for the King of France from 1631), and a 20yo woman, Marie Cresé, in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin lost his mother when he was 10. From 1638 to 1640, he studied in the Jesuit college of Clermont, then started a brief lawyer career and pursued his father's work under Louis XIII, especially in Narbonne, until the King's death in 1643, when Jean-Baptiste co-founded L'Illustre Théâtre, installed at the jeu de paume des Métayers (faubourg Saint-Germain, Paris). He chose his nom-de-plume Molière in 1644 but his company had some financial difficulties due to a lack of success: Molière was imprisoned twice in 1645 for debts. The troupe moved several times in different parts of France (Lyon, Grenoble, Dijon, Narbonne...) and they became the troupe of the Prince de Conti in 1653 (in Pézenas, Languedoc).
In 1654, Molière presented his first play, "L'Etourdi", in Lyon, then "Le Dépit amoureux" in Béziers in 1656. But the same year the troupe lost its grants from de Conti, who was becoming extremely unfavorable to theater creation. Back to Paris in 1658, under the protection of the King's brother, they played "Nicomède" and "Le Docteur amoureux" at the Vieux-Louvre in front of the King (Louis XIV) and his court. Louis XIV offered Molière to play at the Petit-Bourbon where his first 2 plays eventually had great success. In 1659, Molière presented his third play, "Les Précieuses Ridicules". After his younger brother's death, Molière re-took in charge the familial tapestry-making business and kept it until his death. The same year, he presented "Sganarelle ou le Cocu imaginaire" and the troupe was moved to the Palais-Royal. Rival comedians tried to divide Molière's troupe but failed. Molière successively presented "L'Ecole des maris" in 1661 and "L'Ecole des femmes" in 1662.
He married Armande Béjart in 1662 (the year Molière and his troupe were accepted at the King's court), they had a son Louis in 1664 (Louis XIV was his godfather) but the latter died before his first birthday. The same year, members of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement tried to ban Molière's play "Le Tartuffe" but it was shown in May. Molière's troupe also presented Jean Racine's first play "La Thebaïde" then "Alexandre" the following year, but the troupe learnt that Racine made his play been performed elsewhere too, which brought a tension between the two authors. Armande gave birth to their daughter Esprit-Madeleine in 1665. Molière premiered "Dom Juan" in 1665, "Le Misanthrope" and "Le Médecin malgré lui" in 1666. In 1667 the troupe plaid Pierre Corneille's "Attila" and Molière's "L'Imposteur", which was only presented once because immediately banned. Molière had his first health problems. The troupe presented "Amphitryon", "George Dandin" and "L'Avare" in 1668, "Tartuffe" again in 1669 (the year Molière's father died), "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" in 1670, "Les Fourberies de Scapin" and "Psyché" in 1671, "Les Femmes savantes" in 1672.
Molière had a quarrel with Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1672 over the right of using music in plays since Lully ruled the music utilization with his "académie royale de musique". Molière's second son, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste-Armand, was born the same year but died a few days after his baptism. In February 1673, during the 4th performance of his last play, "Le Malade Imaginaire", Molière fell and died a few hours later in his house (rue de Richelieu, Paris). His wife obtained from the King the right to bury his corpse in a cemetery, which was normally unauthorized for a comedian. Her daughter was his only child to live long enough to have children but didn't, therefore Molière had no direct descendants.- Writer
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Borges was born into an upper class family, and received his education in Buenos Aires, Cambridge, and Geneva. He began writing as a student, and when in 1918 he settled in Spain, it was as a member of an experimental literary group. He returned to Argentina in 1921, and had his first poems published in 1923. He loved Buenos Aires. He lost his eyesight during the 1950's, but continued to write prolifically. His works have been translated into many languages. Brilliant, courtly, and thoughtful, Borges was director of the National Library of Argentina for many years. A month before his death he married Maria Kodama, with whom he had collaborated on his last book.- Writer
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Jerzy Kosinski was born on 14 June 1933 in Lódz, Lódzkie, Poland. He was a writer and actor, known for Being There (1979), Reds (1981) and The Painted Bird (2019). He was married to Kiki von Fraunhofer-Kosinski and Mary Emma (Hayward) Weir. He died on 3 May 1991 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
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William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation (the other two being his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings and attended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to the climate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used to house the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took his undergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelled inwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposed to lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of a patrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg and chesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His political options generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).
Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to study medicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in 1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewish woman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen. The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to the U.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in New York City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughs formally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.
Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism in Adolf Hitler's Germany that raised Burroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanisms used by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for the United States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.
A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. he drifted from job to job while continuing his education as an autodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which he claimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the young Lucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelist Caleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") and David Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior who had been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessively afterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed by Kammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by the attention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, he would fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attend Columbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammerer inevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.
Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change his life: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, and Columbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea of becoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr and Kammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment of Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Kerouac Parker, who shared the flat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.
Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting with morphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and he subsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and the vitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wan and dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughs began conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided and abetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriended and let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playing Virgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would become part of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that was World War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character in Naked Lunch (1991), was a thief and drug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot a storekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after being arrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and had turned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture and possibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughs began to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habit and fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves that spilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs, with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" of heroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.
Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot of time at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. He particularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyed having them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would play roles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, and Kerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land, ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and it fed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had any inclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaborated on a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on a fire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after the book was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New York publishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lost interest in writing.
In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a stroll along the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was a notorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms, Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposed of it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs, soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a good lawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac as an accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released without being prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent off to the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.
New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became known to the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved to Louisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventually they moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier to come by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party in which they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot and killed Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted to mimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As the story is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head after Burroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for the guests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs later ruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head. Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventure caused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory. Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously or subconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any use for, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was in love, involved in a heavy gay affair.
After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying through Central and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", which like peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors of perception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributed it among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs into print under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel, "Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, Carl Solomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original (its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Adict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back with another paperback original in the same volume). Returning to Mexico City, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up with his drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scion of the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writing the sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In 1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was even cheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventually returned to the US in the 1960s.
"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to be prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written in Mexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote while addicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barred use of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drew the line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the good fight to get James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the works of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller before the American public so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. Grove Press acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until 1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenity trials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl", which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angry fix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court starting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protect literature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages in the works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to be utterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth of Massachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.
For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressive list of "experts" such as Norman Mailer to defend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, was declared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book would be destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by the police). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirs v. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without social value, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that began in the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the charge for stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and state governments came to an end.
By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed by critics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced by punk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. He died in 1997 at the age of 83.- Writer
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Ray Bradbury was an American science fiction writer whose works were translated in more than 40 languages and sold millions of copies around the world. Although he created a world of new technical and intellectual ideas, he never obtained a driver's license and had never driven an automobile.
He was born Ray Douglas Bradbury on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. He was the third son in the family. His father, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, was a telephone lineman and technician. His mother, Esther Marie Bradbury (nee Moberg), was a Swedish immigrant. His grandfather and great-grandfather were newspaper publishers. In 1934, his family settled in Los Angeles, California. There, young Bradbury often roller-skated through Hollywood, trying to spot celebrities. He attended Los Angeles High School, where he was involved in the drama club and planned to become an actor. He graduated from high school in 1938 and had no more formal education. Instead, he learned from reading works of such writers as Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others.
From 1938-1942, he was selling newspapers on the streets of Los Angeles, spending days in the local library and nights at the typewriter. At that time, he published his stories in fanzines. In 1941, he became a paid writer when the pulp magazine Science Stories published his short story, titled "Pendulum", and he was a full-time writer by the end of 1942. His first book - "Dark Carnival" - was a collection of stories published in 1947. That same year, he married Marguerite McClure (1922-2003), whom he met at a bookstore a year earlier. Maggie, as she was affectionately called, was the only woman Bradbury ever dated. They had four daughters and, eventually, eight grandchildren.
Ray Bradbury shot to international fame after publication of "The Martian Chronicles" (1950), a collection of short stories partially based on ideas from ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Then he followed the anti-Utopian writers Yevgeni Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley in his best-known work, "Fahrenheit 451" (1953). The film adaptation (Fahrenheit 451 (1966)) by director François Truffaut, starring Julie Christie, received several nominations. However, Bradbury was not happy with the television adaptation (The Martian Chronicles (1980), starring Rock Hudson) of his story "The Martian Chronicles". His other novels and stories also have been adapted to films and television, as well as for radio, theatre and comic books. Bradbury had written episodes for Alfred Hitchcock's television series, as well as for many other television productions. His total literary output is close to 600 short stories, more than 30 books and numerous poems and plays. He was writing daily.
In 2004, Bradbury received a National Medal of Arts. He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6644 Hollywood Boulevard. An asteroid was named in his honor, "9766 Bradbury", and the Apollo 15 astronauts named an impact crater on the moon "Dandelion Crater", after his novel, "Dandelion Wine". He also received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from Science Fiction Writers of America, an Emmy Award for his work as a writer on "The Halloween Tree", and many other awards and honors. Ray Bradbury died on June 6, 2012, at the age of 91, in Los Angeles, California.- Writer
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Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) was one of the most famous French novelists of all time. His major work is the "Extraordinary Journeys", a series of more than sixty adventure novels including "Journey to the Center of the Earth", "Around the World in 80 Days", "20.000 Leagues under the Seas" and "The Mysterious Island" which had multiple cinematographic adaptations. Nicknamed "The father of science fiction", he is the second most translated author in the world after Agatha Christie.- Writer
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Versatile Greek poet and tragic dramatist. He was the son of Sophilus, a wealthy arms manufacturer. Sophocles studied tragedy under Aeschylus, whom he subsequently defeated in the dramatic festival of 468 BC, thus gaining his first victory at these competitions. He became a general under Nicias and after the failure of the Athenian expedition to Syracuse (413) was appointed one of the special commissioners to deal with the emergency. He was a priest of Amynos, a god of healing, and offered his own house as a place of worship for the healing deity Asclepius until his temple was ready. In addition, he founded a literary and musical society. His descendants were also tragedians - his son Iophon and grandson Sophocles the younger. Unlike his rival Euripides, he had very early acquired a favorable public. About 130 plays were attributed to him, (7 of which were subsequently reckoned spurious). In the dramatic competitions he probably won 24 victories--that is to say, 24 of his tetralogies (each comprising 3 tragedies and a satyr play) were successful. Seven of his tragedies have survived viz. Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Electra, the Trachinian Women, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus (his last play performed in 401 after his death). Sophocles died just before the catastrophic end of the Peloponnesian War.- Writer
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A foremost French writer of the Romantic era, Stendhal was born Marie-Henri Beyle in Grenoble, France in 1783. A loyal Bonapartist he followed Napoleon closely during his military campaigns Stendhal's novels reflect his intense love of Italy, his political convictions and the moral and philosophical dilemmas of his time. His most popular works Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme have been transfered to the screen several time and show an immediacy which transcends centuries.- Fromm came from a strictly religious Jewish family that had already produced numerous rabbis. He, too, originally wanted to pursue this career. Erich Fromm was already studying the Talmud at the age of 13. His reading also included the works of Ernst Bloch. He attended high school in Frankfurt and graduated with a high school diploma. From 1918 he studied law at the University of Frankfurt am Main. After two semesters he left Frankfurt and moved to Heidelberg. There he continued his studies in psychology, philosophy and sociology. The Free Jewish Teaching House was founded in 1920. Fromm was also among the founders. During this time a collaboration with Walter Benjamin emerged. In 1922 he completed his studies with a doctorate. He wrote his dissertation on the topic "Jewish Law. A Contribution to the Sociology of Diaspora Jewry". In 1926 he married the psychoanalyst Frieda Reichmann. During this time he also turned away from Orthodox Judaism. He began studying psychology and psychiatry in Munich. Among other things, he was a student of Karl Landauer.
In 1929 he completed his studies at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin. With others he founded the South German Institute for Psychoanalysis based in Frankfurt am Main. He followed Max Horkheimer's call to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. There he worked with Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. He separated from his wife in 1941 and they divorced in 1942. Fromm fell ill with tuberculosis and went to Davos, Switzerland, in 1932 for almost a year. A year after the National Socialists came to power, he moved to New York, where the Institute for Social Research also emigrated. Fromm ran a psychoanalysis practice in New York. From 1934 to 1939 he taught at Columbia University in New York. When Adorno wanted to join the Institute for Social Research as a full member in 1939, Fromm declared his resignation. The following year he became a US citizen.
His work entitled "The Fear of Freedom" was published in 1941. It distinguishes him as the most established representative of neo-psychoanalysis. It differs from Siegmund Freud's psychoanalysis and focuses on social aspects as well as other drives. From 1941, Fromm held a professorship in psychology in Vermont. After his divorce, Fromm married Henny Gurland in 1944. Three years later, in 1947, his treatise "Psychoanalysis and Ethics" was published. In 1949 he left the USA and moved to Mexico. There he founded a practice in Mexico City. Two years later he was an associate professor of psychoanalysis at the university there. In 1952 his wife died. The following year he married Annis Freemann. His work "The Art of Loving" was published in 1956. The work not only received positive reviews from experts, but was also well received by the general public. Erich Fromm joined the American peace movement in 1957 and spoke out against the USA's political commitment to nuclear weapons.
In 1963 he founded the Mexican Psychoanalytic Institute. Two years later he retired. In the same year, the joint work "Humanist Socialism" was created, in which Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch, among others, appear as authors. In 1974 he left Mexico and moved back to Europe. There he settled in Muralto in Ticino, Switzerland. In 1976 his work "Having and Being" was edited. The following year he suffered his second heart attack. In 1979 Fromm was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize.
Erich Fromm died on March 18, 1980 in Muralto.
Shortly after his death, the complete edition of his works was published. In 1981 he was posthumously awarded the Goethe plaque from the city of Frankfurt. - Actor
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Louis Ginsberg, the moderate Jewish Socialist and his wife Naomi, who was a radical Communist and irrepressible nudist are the parents of Irwin Allen Ginsberg, the poet and man of many other things eg. actor. Poems he written eg. Howl, Six gallery, Sunflower Sutra ... His themes: drugs, against Vietnam War, politics, "beat generation", hippies, buddhism, ... In 1970 he met with a Tibetan guru and he accepted Trungpa Rinpoche as his personal guru. He created a poetry school 'Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics'. He has remained active, publishing poems, realising musical recordings. He published a book with his own photos.- Writer
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Major Latin-American author of novels and short stories, a central figure in the so-called magical realism movement in Latin American literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. Studied law and journalism in Bogotá and Cartagena. He began his career as a journalist in 1948, was a foreign correspondent in Europe during the late 1950s, Cuba and N.Y. early 1960s, and a screenwriter, journalist and publicist in Mexico City during the 1960s. During the 1980s he moved to Mexico when restrictions where imposed on his continued traveling due to his left-view political views.- Writer
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The Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, acquired a reputation as the greatest dramatist in the English language during the first half of the 20th Century for the plays he had written at the height of his creativity from "Mrs. Warren's Profession" in 1893 to "The Apple Cart" in 1929. His works have been revived on Broadway from 1894 to 2010. His most famous work in the 21st Century is My Fair Lady (1964), the musical adaptation of Pygmalion (1938).
A Shavian drama (his reputation was so great, he had his own adjective ascribed to his works) had a biting social critique leavened by humor. According to his Nobel Prize citation, "His ideas were those of a somewhat abstract logical radicalism; hence they were far from new, but they received from him a new definiteness and brilliance. In him these ideas combined with a ready wit, a complete absence of respect for any kind of convention, and the merriest humor - all gathered together in an extravagance which has scarcely ever before appeared in literature."
He was a major international celebrity and a force in British politics, being a charter member of the Fabian Society. The Fabians were committed to democratic socialism, that is, using parliamentary mechanisms to encourage a gradual adoption of socialist policies through political reform rather than revolution.- Writer
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Jean-Paul Charles-Aymard Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France. His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, was an officer in the French Navy. His mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, was the cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Sartre was one year old when his father died. He was raised in Meudon, at the home of his tough grandfather Charles Schweitzer, a high school professor. His early education included music, mathematic, and classical literature. He studied at the Lycee Montaigne and at Lycee Henri IV in Paris. In 1917 his mother married an engineer at the naval yards in La Rochelle. There young Sartre suffered under his controlling stepfather, whom he called an "intruder". Such experiences shaped his character to rebel against any restrictions and domination.
The happiest part of his childhood was when Sartre met Paul Nizan, who was his classmate at the Lycee Henri IV in Paris. They became constant companions and best friends. Sartre continued his studies in Paris at Lycee Louis-Le-Grand, then at Ecole Normale Superieure and Sorbonne. There Sartre advanced in his studies of philosophy, absorbing mainly from the "Gifford Lectures" by Henri Bergson and "The Principles of Psychology" by Harvard philosopher William James, as well as from Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger.
Sartre saw the artificiality of grown-ups in the bourgeois class as the outcome of their spiritually destructive conformity. His Sorbonne classmate and girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir was also an unrestricted thinker and later one of the founders of contemporary feminism. Both learned to hate the restrictions of upper-class life. Both favored an "authentic state of being". In 1932 Sartre proposed to Beauvoir, but she turned him down and went on teaching alone. In 1935 she introduced Sartre to her 18-year-old student Olga Kozakiewich and the three formed the "family". Sartre was used by Beauvoir, who merged both relationships into a trio, that led to an unexpected and overwhelming outcome. While they imagined the trio would illustrate the 'authenticity' of their relationships; in reality the inevitable competition from the younger and independent-minded Olga became a growing threat. Beauvoir saw Olga as an object, a mere cast member of the game. She also overestimated her own tolerance. Eventually the trio failed before the challenge to reciprocate in recognition of each one's "authentic" consciousness. Each member wrote a different account of the same events in their "family" life. In Sartre's trilogy "Les chemins de la liberte" (The Roads to Freedom 1945-1949) Olga is disguised as the character of Ivich.
Sartre and de Beauvoir continued experimenting with their "open family" by including several former students of both Beauvoir and Sartre, forming a unique social group with Olga Kazakiewich, Nathalie Sorokine and Jacques-Laurent Bost. The complex manner of relationships in the "family" was somewhat based on the intellectual connection between students and teachers, who also shared cooking and other domestic duties. Other family members' "authentic" consciousness added to social inventiveness and developed a sort of a survival group-therapy during the occupation of Paris in WWII. "Existence precedes transformation of consciousness" - commented Sartre.
In 1938 he wrote "La Nausee" (Nausea), which became the canonical work of existentialism. It was partially influenced by Franz Kafka and Edmund Husserl, reiterating the belief that human life has no purpose. The book is set in a French town where Antoine, a 30-year-old historian, is doing his research on an 18th-century politician. He is gradually overtaken by a sickness he calls nausea. This alters his senses, thoughts and emotional experiences of the past and present in an uncommon way. Antoine is anxiously searching for the lost meaning of things, people and events. The character of Antoine embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and his own search through the chaos of things and events; that are crowding the human life.
Sartre was initially torn between his pacifism and his anti-Nazi position. In 1939 he was drafted into the French army and assigned to the 70th Division in Nancy, then transferred to Morsbonn military camp. There he started writing his "L'etre et neant". He was captured by the Germans and imprisoned from 1940-1941. While in prison he reread Martin Heidegger and wrote the play "Bariona". In March of 1941 he escaped from the Nazi POW camp. He and Beauvoir traveled to the south of France where they wooed André Gide and André Malraux to their underground group, "Socialisme et Liberte". Their active resistance was soon tamed into mere writing for "Combat", published by Albert Camus. Sartre became a teacher in Lycee Condorcet from 1941-1944 and supported the "family" of five during the occupation of Paris. At that time his opus magnum "L'etre et neant" (Being and Nothingness, 1943) was completed and published. He also wrote a play, "No Exit", as an attempt "to repeat 'Being and Nothingness' in different words". It premiered in May of 1944. In 1945 Sartre with his intellectual friends co-founded "Les Tempes Modernes", a leftist journal named after Charles Chaplin's film Modern Times (1936). Sartre published Beauvoir's works first, giving her a steady platform and publicity. In 1945 he published "L'age de raison" (The Age of Reason), beginning the trilogy of "The Roads to Freedom".
His "Reflexions sur la question juive" (Reflections on the Jewish Question) was written after the liberation of Paris from the Nazi occupation in 1944. The first part (The Portrait of the Anti-Semite) was published in December of 1945 in Les Temps Modernes. Sartre deals with anti-Semitism and reaction to it on all levels. In 1962 Sartre adopted a Jewish musician, Arlette El Kaim, and later took his adopted daughter along on his visit to Israel, where he accepted an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University in 1976. Through his life Sartre expressed his interest in Messianic Judaism. A few months before his death he began a study of Jewish history. In his last interview with his friend and associate Benny Levy, Sartre said that "the messianic idea is the base of the revolutionary idea", but violent revolution is not the way.
In 1950 Sartre denounced Soviet labor camps, known as gulag prison camps. In 1955 he and Beauvoir went on official visits to the Soviet Union and to communist China. As left-leaning academics they accepted the official invitations from the communist governments. Sartre and Beauvoir met with Nikita Khrushchev. Beauvoir was commissioned by the Communist governments to write positively about communism and the 1917 revolution. Beauvoir took their money and published her shameful book, for which she and Sartre were ostracized in the West. In 1960 the two visited Cuba on the invitation of Fidel Castro. "Every man is a political animal," stated Sartre when he started as an editor of La Liberacion.
Sartre came to disaffection with the bourgeois lifestyle, as one of the perpetual ceremony that can strip people from their identity. For a similar reason he saw religion as a prison, although he was baptized Catholic. He lived a very modest life in a small apartment which he shared with Beauvoir on Rue Bonaparte in Montparnasse. There were attacks on his home in 1961, most likely by right-wing elements outraged by his position on Algerian independence (he was for it). Sartre spoke out on behalf of the Hungarians in 1956 and on behalf of the Czechs in 1968. He presided over the International War Crimes Tribunal set up by Bertrand Russell in 1967. He turned down prizes and took no money for any of his political positions; unlike his partner Beauvoir. Such independence made his voice more credible.
Jean-Paul Sartre quit writing literature after decades of success and misunderstanding. Ambiguity of his ideas and political evolution only reflected an effort to keep up with the rapidly changing times. His existentialism became a philosophy of the beatniks. His works were prohibited by the Catholic "index". "If God does not exist, everything is permitted", quoted Sartre from Fyodor Dostoevsky. He finally renounced literature as a "machine for producing words", and refused to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded in 1964. He exhausted himself during the work on "Critique de la raison dialectique" (Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1960), the work he wanted to be remembered for. He left the unfinished massive biography of Gustave Flaubert, and over 300 personal letters to Beauvoir, who published them all after his death.
Sartre underwent his transformation from being a disciple of Andre Gide to a complete break-away. In his many incarnations--the philosopher, novelist, playwright, journalist, song lyricist, magazine editor, political activist--Sartre moved ahead by breaking old rules. He even used hard psychotropic drugs to "break the bones in his head" and think big. Sartre's opposition to the rigid social organization and self-destructive nature of class society and inevitable fatality of the modern world was paralleled by that of Aldous Huxley.
Jean-Paul Sartre exhausted himself with overwork, stress, drugs and alcohol. He died of edema of the lungs on April 15, 1980. His funeral was attended by 50,000 people, when he was laid to rest in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse in Paris, France. Six years later Beauvoir, who refused his marriage proposal in their youth, joined him in his grave forever.- Writer
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Etgar Keret was born on 20 August 1967 in Ramat Gan, Israel. He is a writer and director, known for The Middleman (2019), A Brief History of Us (2021) and Jellyfish (2007). He is married to Shira Geffen. They have one child.- Greek slave. Many of the 200+ fables attributed to him may not have been his own, but since his name is synonymous with fables they were credited to him anyway. Sentenced to death for heresy. Was thrown from the edge of a cliff, c. 560 BC. The excepted dates of his birth and death would mean that he lived to around 60, remarkable for his time.
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer who was imprisoned for his criticism of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and later exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile.
He was born Aleksandr Isaakovich Solzhenitsyn on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Southern Russia. He was born six months after the tragic death of his father, who was an Army artillery officer. His mother spoke English and French, she encouraged Solzhenitsyn's interest in literature and science. Since 1937 he was writing chapters for his book about the First World War. In 1936-1941 he studied at the Rostov State University, graduating with degrees in mathematics and physics. In 1939- 1941 he also took correspondence courses in literature from the
During the Second World War Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery captain in the Red Army. He was involved in major battles at the front as a commander of an artillery unit, and was twice decorated for courage. In February of 1945 he was fighting against the Nazis on the territory of East Prussia. There he was arrested by the Soviet secret service, because they opened all his private letters and found one line critical of Joseph Stalin. Solzhenitsyn was tried in his absence by a three-man tribunal of the Soviet security police and was sentenced to 8 years of prison just for describing Joseph Stalin as a "man with mustache" in a private letter to a friend.
Solzhenitsyn spent 8 years in Soviet Gulag prison-camps. There he was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach. He was forced to work as a miner, a bricklayer, a foundry-man, and as a mathematician. His mathematical skills really saved his life, because he was released from prison-camp and was eventually used in the secret "sharashka" prison-camp for scientists. After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 he was sent to a Tashkent hospital for tumor removal and radiation therapy. He described his experience of the treatment and recovery from cancer in his novel 'Cancer Ward'. Solzhenitsyn was secretly writing a thorough account of his life in prison-camps. That became the content of his first official publication in 1962. He gave Aleksandr Tvardovsky his autobiographical story 'One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' which was allowed for publication after personal permission from Nikita Khrushchev. That one sensational publication gave Solzhenitsyn a brief chance to publish one more small work during the "Thaw" that was initiated by Nikita Khrushchev.
In 1964 Nikita Khrushchev was dismissed by Leonid Brezhnev and neo-Stalinist hard liners. Solzhenitsyn fell under suspicion and was in danger again. At that time he took a risk and arranged that his manuscripts of autobiographical books 'First Circle' and 'Cancer Ward' were secretly smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and published in the West. But at home, his writings were confiscated by the KGB in 1965 and banned. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but could not go outside of the Soviet Union, and could not receive the award until several years later. Meanwhile he was wanted by the KGB, because he was officially restricted from being in Moscow and was secretly living in the dacha of Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya.
Solzhenitsyn was one of the leading dissidents in the Soviet Union, and was active against the Soviet Communist regime. His main work 'Gulag Archipelago' (1973), being inspired by the academic work of Anton Chekhov titled 'Island of Sakhalin' (1895). After the publication of 'Gulag Archipelago' abroad in 1973, he was arrested again, and charged with "anti-Soviet" treason, then exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He lived mostly in Cavendish, Vermont, USA, until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then he was invited by the new Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his Russian citizenship was restored. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and was granted a suburban house in Moscow. His wife and three sons remained American citizens.
Back in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn enjoyed full recognition and wide publication of all his works. He was an active and important figure in Russian society, because of his independent position and sharp criticism of the declining state of affairs in Russia. He refused to take award from the Russian president Boris Yeltsin. His weekly TV show was canceled. His provocative and controversial two-volume history of Russian-Jewish relations ignited debates, which included little praise, but substantial criticism from both sides. His autobiographical novel 'First Circle' was made into a TV-movie and shown on the Russian national TV in 2006.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at age 89, on August 3, 2008, at his home near Moscow. His death caused a considerable mourning in Russia, especially among the Russian conservatives and Orthodox Christians. Solzhenitsyn received a state funeral and was laid to rest in Donskoy Convent cemetery in Moscow, Russia. - Writer
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Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890 into an artistic family of Russian-Jewish heritage. His father was an acclaimed artist named Leonid Pasternak, who converted to Christianity, and his mother was a renown concert pianist named Rosa Kaufman. Their home was open to family friends such as composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Aleksandr Skryabin as well as writers Rilke and Lev Tolstoy. Pasternak had a happy childhood, being brought up by prominent intellectuals in a cosmopolitan atmosphere. He studied music at the Moscow Conservatory and philosophy at the University of Marburg, Germany. In 1914 he returned to Moscow and published his first collection of poems. His work at a chemical factory in the Urals during WWI was later used as material for his novel "Doctor Zhivago".
In 1917 he fell in love with a Jewish girl and wrote "My Sister Life", a collection of passionate metaphoric poems that brought him international recognition and had an impact upon Russian Symbolist and Futurist poetry. Pasternak cautiously supported the Russian revolution, but was shocked with the brutality of communists. His parents and sisters emigrated to Europe in 1921. During the "Great Terror" of 1930s, Pasternak became disillusioned with the Soviet reality. He came under severe political attack and devoted himself to making translations of classic works: Shakespeare's "Hamlet", "Macbeth", "King Lear", Goethe's "Faust", as well as Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke and other Western poets. His translations of Georgian poets favored by Joseph Stalin probably saved his life. Stalin spoke with Pasternak in 1934 over the phone, and questioned his association with poet Osip Mandelstam, who was executed upon Stalin's order. Later Stalin crossed Pasternak's name off the arrest list, quoted as saying "Don't touch this cloud dweller", alluding to his book "The Twin in the Clouds".
During 1940s-50s Pasternak wrote his autobiographic novel "Doctor Zhivago". A model for Lara in the novel was the poet's muse, beautiful and kind Olga Iwinskaja, an editor at "Novy Mir" magazine. In 1949, when she was pregnant by Pasternak, she was arrested by KGB on false accusations of "spying" and spent 4 years in prison-camp. Their unborn baby was lost, and Pasternak suffered a heart attack. After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Olga Iwinskaja was released and reunited with Pasternak, who completed "Doctor Zhivago". He tried to publish it in the Soviet magazine "Novy Mir", but was rejected. The manuscript of "Doctor Zhivago" was secretly smuggled out of the Soviet Union and was first published in Italy in 1957.
Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. But Soviet authorities declared him a "traitor" and attacked him with a campaign of persecution, terrorizing Pasternak up until his death in 1960. He was so abused by the Soviet authorities, that he became unable to go to accept the Nobel Prize and was forced to decline the honor. He lived the life of fear and insecurity that was imposed upon him and millions of others under the Soviet totalitarian system. He ended his life in poverty and a virtual exile in an artist's community of Peredelkino near Moscow. His last poems are devoted to love, to freedom, and to reconciliation with God. Pasternak was rehabilitated posthumously in 1987. In 1988, after being banned in the Soviet Union for three decades, "Doctor Zhivago" was published in the same "Novy Mir" magazine as a sign of changing times. In 1989 Pasternak's son accepted his father's Nobel Prize medal in Stockholm.- Writer
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Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He attended the University of Tokyo. His first work of fiction, a short story, was published when he was a first-year student. For the rest of his life he wrote - to enormous popular and critical acclaim - plays, poetry, essays, and novels. His first full-length novel, the autobiographical "Confessions of a Mask," is considered a classic of modern Japanese fiction. In it, a young man grapples with his homosexuality, the intensity of his inner states, the ways he must conceal himself, and the difficulties of not conforming to Japanese society. Mishima, educated in Japan and deeply influenced by European and Russian literature, developed his consuming obsession: a longing for unvanquished, imperial Japan; its samurai traditions, and heroic ideals of beauty, nationalism, and honor, including the traditionally enviable fate of dying for one's country. Mishima led by example. Along with writing energetically and passionately, he founded an elite right-wing organization for 100 males, the Shield Society, dedicated to 'Bushido,' the Samurai code of honor. Mishima became an expert in traditional martial arts, despaired of modern Japan and bemoaned the post-war suppression of its traditional past. Control - of the self, of art and of society - was of the utmost importance to Mishima. On travel, Mishima wrote in "Mask" : "...at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process by which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless." Twenty-six years later, Mishima, intense and disturbed as ever, and in complete 'possession' of his life, committed suicide in a shocking and internationally-reported public event. He was forty-five.- Writer
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Ursula K. Le Guin was born on 21 October 1929 in Berkeley, California, USA. She was a writer, known for Tales from Earthsea (2006), The Lathe of Heaven (1980) and The Telling. She was married to Charles A. Le Guin. She died on 22 January 2018 in Portland, Oregon, USA.- Chingiz Aitmatov was a Russian-Kyrgyz writer and statesman known for such films as The First Teacher (1965), Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalim (1977) and Jamila (1995).
He was born Chingiz Torekulovich Aitmatov on December 12, 1928, in Kirgizia, Soviet Union. His family was bilingual, Russian-Kyrgyz. His father, Torekul Aitmatov, was one of the first Kyrgyz communists and a regional party secretary. In 1937, while attending the Institute for Red Professorship in Moscow, Torekul was arrested and executed on charges of anti-Soviet bourgeois nationalism. Young Aitmatov was brought up by a single mother. He attended the Russian school, then Kyrgyz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but changed from the study of livestock to the study of literature at the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.
He made his literary debut in Russia, in 1952, with publication of his stories in Russian. From 1958 to 1966 he was roving correspondent for the leading Soviet Newspaper Pravda. In 1967 he became a member of the Executive Board of the Soviet Writers Union, and in 1968 he won the Soviet State Prize for literature for his novel Farewell, Gulsary!, a tale of an old man reminiscing about the parallel lives of himself and his old horse, which is dying. Aitmatov won two more State Prizes in 1977 and 1983, and was named a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1978.
From 1964 to 1985 he was Chairman of the Cinema Union of Kyrgyzian SSR, and in 1985 he was named Chairman of the Kyrgyz Writers Union. In 1990-1991 he served as an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and in 1990 was appointed Soviet Ambassabor to Luxemburg. He served as the Soviet and then Russian ambassador to Belgium from 1990 to 1993. In 1995, he became Kyrgyzstan's ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and also represented his home country in the European Union, NATO and UNESCO. During the 1990s, Chingiz Aitmatov was member of the Kyrgyzstan's parliament.
His representative works : 'Jamila' (1958), 'The First Teacher' (1967), 'Farewell, Gyulsary!' (1967), 'The White Ship' (1972), and 'The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years' (1988) were translated in more than 20 languages across the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Aitmatov's novels found a new audience in the West and gained popularity in Germany. He died of pneumonia and kidney failure on June 10, 2008, in Nuremberg, Germany, and was laid to rest in Kyrgyzstan. - London-born Virginia Woolf came from a wealthy family and, unlike her brothers, received her education at home, an unusual step for the times. Her parents had both had children from previous marriages, so she grew up with a variety of siblings, stepbrothers and stepsisters. Her father was a well-respected editor and author and the former son-in-law of William Makepeace Thackeray. Author James Russell Lowell was her godfather, and Henry James and George Elliott were regular visitors and guests at the family home. As she recalled later in life, her most pleasant childhood memories were of the summers spent at the family home in Cornwall, by Porthminster Bay (the Godrevy Lighthouse there was the basis for her novel "To the Lighthouse").
The sudden death of Virginia's mother in 1895, when she was 13, and the passing of her sister two years later led to the first of Virginia's mental breakdowns. In 1904 her father died, which caused a complete mental and physical collapse and for a while she was sent to a mental institution to recover. Nervous breakdowns and bouts of severe depression tormented Virginia throughout her life, and the fact that as children she and her sister Vanessa were sexually abused by two of their stepbrothers added to her already considerable feelings of guilt and inferiority.
She studied at London's Kings College, where she became acquainted with such literary figures as Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Leonard Woolf. She married Woolf in 1912. Virginia was always ashamed of what she termed her "unattractive countenance", and once wrote that "being wanted [was] a pleasure that I have never felt". In 1922 she met Vita Sackville-West, and the two women began a relationship that lasted for almost ten years. She was said to have written her novel "Orlando" as a love letter to West.
After the publication of her novel "Between the Acts" she fell into a deep depression, exacerbated by the destruction of her London home by Nazi planes during the bombing of that city, and the less than enthusiastic critical reaction to her biography of her close friend Roger Fry. Her condition deteriorated to the point where she was unable to write or even read. She finally had a full-blown nervous breakdown. Unable and unwilling to continue, she wrote a note to her husband saying that "I am certain I am going mad again" and "I shan't recover this time . . . I can't fight any longer . . . I can't go on spoiling your life any longer." On March 28, 1941, she left her home, walked to the banks of the nearby River Ouse, loaded heavy stones into her pockets and walked into the water. She was 59 years old. - Writer
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A recurring theme in Heinrich Böll's novels is the German society during the decades following WWII. In his early novels, like 'Wo warst du Adam?' he writes about the meaningless of war, its sufferings and horrors. The moral decay of post-war Germany is the theme for the following novels, 'Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit' and 'Haus ohne Hüter'. In the 1960s he wrote the conspicious consumption of the blossoming German economy. In his 'Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum' he wrote about a German society who had to deal with terrorist attacks.- Writer
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Samuel Beckett is an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator.
A resident of Paris for most of his life, he wrote in both French and English.
Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragi-comic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humor, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd".
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature.- Writer
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Gustave Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen, Seine-Inférieure, France. His father was a Medical Doctor and practiced surgery in Rouen, in Hôtel-Dieu (where Flaubert was born). His mother was from an aristocratic Norman family. Young Flaubert received a good private education with emphasis on literature. In 1840 he went to Law School in Paris. There he met Victor Hugo and made his plan of becoming a writer. In 1846 he abandoned Paris and the study of law, after a probably nervous disease. From 1846-1854 he had an affair with the poet Louise Colet, which was his only relationship, and he never married. Flaubert traveled about several countries in Europe and in Africa. His travel experiences, especially those in Greece, Egypt, and Tunisia, gave him material for his writings.
Flaubert's first masterpiece, 'The Temptation of St. Anthony' (1849), was at first rejected by his friends Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp and its publication was postponed. From 1850-1856 he was writing 'Madame Bovary', which was published in 1856. Flaubert and his publisher were charged of immorality in a law suit brought by the French government in 1957, but both were acquitted. In 1862 he published 'Salammbo', which became material for the eponymous opera by 'Modest Mussorgsky'. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, Flaubert's home was occupied by Prussian soldiers, and he suffered from a nervous breakdown. In 1872 his mother died, which caused him a depression. At that time he was supported by his close friend Ivan Turgenev, a Russian writer of decent means, who lived in Europe. Flaubert also enjoyed a friendship by correspondence with George Sand. After the traumatic events of war and the death of is mother, Flaubert lived a life of an ascetic monk for the rest of his life. He rarely visited Paris, and his health deteriorated rapidly. He died on May 8, 1880, in his mother's home in Croisset, and was laid to rest in the Flaubert family vault in the cemetery of Rouen, France.
Flaubert's comprehensive biography by Jean-Paul Sartre is considered definitive. Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand and Ivan Turgenev has been studied ever since as an immensely valuable historic and literary material. His books has been translated in many languages and sold millions of copies around the world. Flaubert's classic novel 'Madame Bovary' was adapted for film and television more that ten times. The 1991 adaptation, starring Isabelle Huppert, was nominated for Oscar.- Émile Zola was born on April 2, 1840, in Paris, France. His father was an Italian engineer. Young Zola studied at the Collége Bourbon in Provence, where his schoolmate and friend was Paul Cezanne. In 1858 Zola returned to Paris and became a student at the Lycée Saint-Louis, from which he graduated in 1862. After working at clerical jobs, he began to write a literary column for a Parisian newspaper. Zola's main literary work was "Les Rougon-Macquart", a monumental cycle of twenty novels about Parisian society during the French Second Empire under Napoleon III and after the Franco-Prussian War.
Zola was the founder of the Naturalist movement in 19th-century literature. His medicinal approach in scrupulous description of the lives of ordinary people was based on the contemporary theory of hereditary determinism, which he used to demonstrate how genetic and environmental factors influence human behavior. His most notable novels, "L'assommoir" (1877), "Nana" (1880) and "Germinal" (1885), displayed Zola's concerns of both scientific and artistic nature, as well as his stances on social reform. His life in the Parisian intellectual elite was that of a statesman and a bon vivant. He lived in a villa in Medan on the Seine and had a home in Paris. He was a political apprentice and follower of Victor Hugo in his stand against the corrupt monarchy of Napoleon III. Zola was among the strongest proponents of the Third Republic and was elected to the Legion of Honour. At the same time he was an important figure in the Parisian cultural milieu. He entered a circle of realist writers such as Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgenev and Gustave Flaubert, his literary mentor and a close friend. After his novels brought him critical and financial success, Zola himself became surrounded by such followers as Guy de Maupassant and Paul Alexis, among others.
Zola shook the Parisian art world with his novel "L'Oevre" ("The Masterpiece") in 1886. Its protagonist, named Claude Lantier, was actually an amalgam of several artists including Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet and Claude Monet. Zola also portrayed himself and his friend and mentor Gustave Flaubert. However, the personality and artistic career of painter Paul Cezanne was shown with a closer resemblance, especially when it came to intimate personal characteristics. Zola and Cezanne were schoolmates and close friends from childhood, which gave the writer a wealth of material for the novel. Cezanne's reticent personality, his self-doubt, his artistic anxieties and his more hidden sexual anxieties all came out in Zola's narrative. He revealed Cezanne's "passion for the physical beauty of women, and insane love for nudity desired but never possessed", his almost misogynistic perception of the "satanic female beauty", which affected his sexuality, and sublimated in his brush-strokes that he laid on his paintings. He showed Cezanne's work on his numerous sketches of nudes and impressionistic bathers as an outlet to artist's masculinity. He also hinted on Cezanne's countless depictions of apples as a sublimation and displacement of the artist's erotic interests. Zola used Cezanne's inner struggles of artistic and sexual nature and the interdependence of his sexual and artistic anxiety, to show some intricate parts of an eternal conundrum where lies one of the mysterious sources of creativity. In Zola's novel the artist fails to depict a perfectly beautiful nude, his wife has a baby that has a disfigured head and dies, then artist presents a painting of his dead child to the Salon, then artist commits suicide. In real life Cezanne, as a highly sensitive and refined individual, took Zola's novel too personally. The book ended their life-long friendship. Even the wise and friendly comments by Claude Monet and Camille Pisarro failed to help their reconciliation. Zola's powerful literary image had formed a lasting perception of Cezanne among his fellow artists, as well as among critics and public. Cezanne fled from the Parisian art world into a self-imposed isolation.
Zola risked his career in February of 1898, when he defended army Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer who was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for treason. Zola accused the French government of anti-Semitism in an open letter to François Félix Faure, the President of France. Zola's "J'Accuse" was published on the front page of the Paris daily "L'Aurore". Zola declared that Dreyfus' conviction was based on false accusations and forged "evidence" of espionage, which the court that convicted him knew was false, and was a misrepresentation of justice. Zola was brought to trial for libel for publishing "L'Accuse" and was convicted two weeks later, sentenced to jail, and removed from the Legion of Honour. Zola managed to escape to England. He returned during the collapse of the government and continued defending Dreyfus, who was imprisoned on the hellish penal colony in South America called Devil's Island. France became deeply divided by the case, known as the Dreyfus affair. Zola stood together with the more liberal commercial society opposite the reactionary army and Catholic church. Zola's open letter formed a major turning point in the Dreyfus affair. The case was reopened and Dreyfus was acquitted, then convicted again, but ultimately freed and completely exonerated by the French Supreme Court.
Zola's strange and tragic death from carbon monoxide poisoning was caused by a stopped chimney and remained an unresolved mystery. His enemies were blamed, but nothing was proved. He died on September 29, 1902, in Paris, and was initially laid to rest in the Cimetiere de Montmartre in Paris. On June 4, 1908, Zola's remains were laid to rest in the Pantheon in Paris, France. - Writer
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Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville-Mézières, Ardennes, France. He was a writer, known for Ein großer graublauer Vogel (1970), Ardiente paciencia (1983) and Criminal Lovers (1999). He died on 10 November 1891 in Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.- Writer
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Slavoj Zizek was born on 21 March 1949 in Llubljana, Slovenia, Yugoslavia [now Slovenia]. He is a writer and actor, known for Bliss (2021), The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012).