Outrageous queen Francoise Sagan: what did the “old dragonfly” habit of burning life lead to. Recent history of foreign literature A selection of books about Francoise Sagan
Francoise Sagan is a representative of modern women's prose, the founder of a new type of artistic thinking. With her work, this French writer led to the emergence of the newest stereotype of female behavior, the priorities of which were the need for self-improvement and self-realization in various spheres of life.
The writer borrowed her pseudonym from the novel by the famous French writer Marcel Proust “In Search of Lost Time”, one of the heroines of which was the Duchess Saganska.
Francoise Sagan (Cuarez) was born on June 21, 1935 in the family of a wealthy provincial industrialist in the city of Kazhark. She was educated in the best religious educational institutions in France. She studied at the Sorbonne, but left the university for the sake of writing. The first novel "Hello, sadness!" (1954) made her infamous at 19. It was indicative that early and loud fame did not overshadow her mind. F. Sagan came to her father and calmly asked what she should do with the 1.5 million francs received for the publication of the novel. He advised: "Spend them immediately, because money is a big problem for you." She did just that. Travels and yachts, an unsuccessful marriage with the then-famous publisher The Schiller (they soon broke up, he was twenty years older than her), the birth of a son (1962), several more attempts to arrange a family life, an attraction to gambling. At 22, Francoise miraculously survived a major car accident.
Sagan's success seemed incomprehensible to many. Life among the representatives of Bohemia, of which she was a member, the writer successfully combined with hard creative work.
One after another, novels came out from under her pen that brought her worldwide recognition: “A Strange Smile” (1956), “Do you love Brahms?” (1959), "Wonderful Clouds" (1961), "Signal of Surrender" (1965), "A Drop of Sun in Cold Water" (1969).
By the period of the 70s, F. Sagan tried to almost not remind herself, but then the situation changed: she issued a lyrical novel “Bruises on the Soul” (1972), in which she directly addressed the reader, talking about her successes and failures, about morals "bohemians" and her literary preferences.
Subsequently, the Memoirs written in a similar manner and the book Best Wishes (1984) were published. their content confirmed that F. Sagan is not at all like her heroines. She treated life with genuine interest, thought a lot about social progress and the obstacles that met in its path. Sagan warned of the dangers of unbridled and unrestrained consumerism when culture was bought and sold. The writer did not hide her political sympathies: she openly helped President Mitterrand in his election campaign.
F. Sagan managed to save his work from agganzhovannosti. She defiantly refused literary prizes, honorary titles and membership in the Academy.
Among the works written by her during the 80s and 90s, it is worth noting the following: “Lost Profile” (1974), “Spread Bed” (1977), “Sleeping Dog” (1970), “An Immovable Thunderstorm” (1983), Tired of Enduring (1985), Watery Blood (1987).
Her novel, a biography about Sarah Bernhardt (1987), written in the form of letters to the actress, caused a significant resonance in Europe.
Until 1991, the writer published 22 novels, 2 collections of short stories, 7 plays, 3 books of essays. In all these works, she tried to express her thoughts, views on the modern world, customs and literature. It was felt that she was oppressed by the dullness and spiritual squalor of the "society of residence", her description of the bohemian or elite environment was due to the rejection of the philistinism way of life, which acquired global proportions.
F. Sagan was also known as a public figure and publicist. She violated the problems of the moral and spiritual crisis among young people, defended human rights.
The Parisian apartment of the writer became the most famous literary salon in France, which was visited not only by writers, but also by diplomats and prime ministers.
The most famous representative of female prose has always repeated that she loves speed and excitement. However, these hobbies led to negative consequences: partial alcohol dependence, and subsequently drug addiction.
In 1995, F. Sagan was conditionally convicted and prosecuted for the use and possession of cocaine. she was threatened with a more serious punishment if the then President of France F. Mitterrand, who highly appreciated the literary talent of the writer, had not intervened in the matter. In February 2002, she was again given a suspended sentence, this time for tax evasion.
In the last years of her life, Sagan lived in Honfleur, a town in northern France, with her son and a close friend.
The writer died in a local hospital on September 24, 2004 from cardiopulmonary failure.
"Hello, sadness!" The plot of F. Sagan's first novel was surprisingly simple. Sagan, this "charming little beast" (according to F. Mauriac), through the mouth of her heroine Cecile, told about the rest on the seashore during the holidays in the company of her father, his mistress and friend of the late mother. Without embarrassment, she spoke about bodily pleasures, her amorous relationship with a neighbor, which did not necessarily have to have a logical continuation. Unexpectedly, this idyll was broken by the mother's friend Anna, whose character was distinguished by integrity and depth. Fearing that her father would marry her, Cecile, in the end, was the cause of her death. It is clear that after returning to Paris, both the girl and the father continued to live their former carefree life. Despite the banality of the plot, the story that the writer told had a tangible undertone of sadness, which also appeared in the title of the book. The world of carnal pleasures entered into Sagan's novel of hidden depth.
The novel "Hello, sadness!" became a bestseller, subsequently more than a million of its copies were issued in different languages and in different countries of the world. He immediately grew into a kind of symbol, a sign of the times, and the image of the main character personified the soothsayers of the era of easy morals. He seemed to have absorbed the specific fates of the writer's contemporaries - that's why the term "generation of Françoise Sagan" appeared. In one of his articles. Urden wrote that this novel “reflected the mood and position of the younger generation, which began to live after the huge shock that the world experienced during the war years, when the old ideas about Good and Evil, old moral values, old prohibitions and taboos perished.”
"Do you love Brahms?" This is another story about "fever of the heart", when the heroine must solve a well-known problem in literature: to make a choice between a young, ardent, but inexperienced lover and a calm, balanced middle-aged man. Sagan's work was reminiscent of A. Zhid's novel "Pastoral Symphony", in which the author talked about the impossibility of embodying high spiritual and physical qualities in one person.
Paul is the main character of the novel - a thirty-nine-year-old woman, a master of residential decor, who over time began to understand herself and her life in a new way. She did not have a family, children, she felt her loneliness. Her lover Roger Ferte, a forty-year-old owner of a transport agency, a man with an "irrepressible appetite for life," could never give her what she dreamed of - the warmth of family comfort, the joy of learning the truths of life with children, etc. He was the man who knew how to bring pleasure and self-confidence to a woman, but this feeling lasted only a moment.
After six years of periodic meetings, “of which the concept of freedom became the law,” Paul felt even more alone. An empty apartment, unrumpled sheets, gloomy peace have become attributes of her life and silent companions. The heroine suffered from the fact that no one needed her, no one felt the need for her. “She was left alone, alone again this night ... Lying on the bed, she mechanically extended her hand, wanting to touch the warm shoulder, she held her breath, as if she was afraid to frighten off someone's sleep. Husband or child. It doesn’t matter whose, as long as her living warmth helps them sleep and wake up. But no one really wants it."
Almost by chance, while fulfilling another order to decorate the house of a wealthy sixty-year-old American woman Van den Besh, dreaming of improving her financial situation with this work, the heroine met the twenty-five-year-old son of this lady, Simon. Handsome and charming, the young man immediately attracted the attention of a woman. This was facilitated by the exceptional features of his character - nobility, good breeding, tact. “He embodied the type of young man who evoked the motherly feelings of a woman of her age,” Paul had such an opinion about the hero after the first meeting.
Simon was also impressed by the meeting with the woman decorator. Being a typical embodiment of the "golden youth", performing the duties assigned to him as an assistant to a lawyer - an old acquaintance of Ms. Van den Besch, he constantly struggled with laziness and routine. Among his peers, Simon was distinguished by the fact that he preferred older women, with their own established views on life. It was such a woman (he did not yet know her name) that the young man saw in the one who carried out the order of his mother.
Simon was looking for a meeting with the one that filled his mind. Intoxicated, he broke the generally accepted rhythm of Roger and Paul's dinner, and the next morning, in order to atone for his guilt, he gave the woman an unforgettable breakfast in a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. Although each of them had his own life experience, his own life values, however, at that moment they were united by a feeling of complete satisfaction with life. They joked and talked about the inevitability of loneliness, laughed and felt sad, and were, no doubt, delighted with each other.
Feeling attracted to Simon, Paul continued to love Roger. For her, he remained both the embodiment of vice and perfection. She had long been accustomed to forgiving his fleeting infatuations with other women, but she could not come to terms with his complete absence from her life.
She accepted Simon's advances. she, as a woman, was pleased to feel her need. The heroine was pleased that she saw the enthusiastic eyes of a young man in love with her, but she did not feel completely happy. Allowing Simon to love her, she constantly recalled her meetings with Roger. The heroine was not sure if she had ever loved someone other than herself, loved and continued to love Roger. She was prompted to such thoughts by Simon's invitation to attend a concert at which Brahms' music was to be played. A seemingly ordinary question stirred up a wave of memories in the heroine's soul and made her think about her life. "Do you love Brahms? Does she love at least someone other than herself and her existence? ... Perhaps she only knew that she loved Roger. Just well-learned truths."
The captious judgments of the surrounding people on the age difference between Paul and Simon, the dominance of "established, generally accepted" truths over those that still require their proof, became the reason for the renewal of the relationship between the heroine and her former lover Roger.
The leading motive of the novel was the motive of loneliness. This is the most terrible sentence that a person could receive. The main character of the work was afraid of this state, because she was well acquainted with it: “she was disgusted with these Sunday days of single women: a book that you read in bed, trying to pull off reading, crowded cinemas, perhaps a cocktail or lunch in some company, and at home, upon returning, an unmade bed and a feeling as if not a minute had been lived since morning.
When choosing a title for her novel, the writer was probably guided by the age-old question that sooner or later every person asks herself in private - she loves her life, her loved ones, loved ones. It is the question "Do you love Brahms?" it seemed doomed in advance to the only correct answer: how can one not love something that has long become a classic, what has already become an “established truth”? How can one question those feelings, those relationships that have long been inscribed in the life of each of us by an invisible hand?
Created in the late 60s, the novel "A Drop of Sun in Cold Water" developed a theme characteristic of F. Sagan's early work, although on a different, deeper level.
The heroine of Natalia Silveren's book is able to love and make another person happy, but life brought her together with her ordinary husband, journalist Lantier. He is unable to understand the impulses of a woman who was ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of love. Therefore, the story of their meetings ended with the death of the heroine.
Philosophical works;
Penetration into the depths of female psychology;
Narrators are self-confident women with a well-formed life position;
The image of the complex relationship between a man and a woman, due to the difference in worldview guidelines and the originality of the worldview;
The heroines are sensual natures, dreamy and romantic, capable of feeling the subtlest movements of life.
Francoise was brought up in a wealthy family, received an excellent education. After graduating from school, Francoise entered the philological faculty of the Sorbonne - University of Paris. But there was no time to study. How nice it was to sit in small cozy Parisian cafes, get acquainted and meet with representatives of the Parisian bohemia: artists, actors, poets; fall in love, argue, get drunk, and write your first story at night.
Her first novel, Hello, Sadness, written in 1954, appeared suddenly, like a downpour from heaven. Reading Paris seethed: it cannot be that an 18-year-old girl wrote it! The most incredible assumptions about authorship were made up. But no deceit - it was she, Francoise Coiret, having failed the bachelor's exam, took up the pen. The book needed a surname symbol. The young lady borrowed a pseudonym from the great Proust - Princess Sagan lived in his novel. It suited her just fine. The daughter of wealthy parents, in love with Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Eluard, went with her head and heart into writing. The title of the novel was suggested to her by lines from a poem by Paul Eluard:
hello sadness,
Love of supple bodies
The inevitability of love.
Readers were delighted with the lightness and ease of the story, from her heroine Cecile, who begins to know people, love, betrayal, disappointment. In this novel, it was suddenly revealed to everyone that in addition to the kinship of souls and bodies, there is also the joy of silence, glances, gestures, even laughter and restrained anger. To meet such closeness in a person is an incredible happiness. The novel was translated into 30 languages of the world, and then filmed. A collapse of opinions fell on the girl, very different, and a huge fee - 1.5 million francs. Father advised: "Immediately spend them, because money is a big problem for you." The young novelist bought a used Jaguar XK 140 - "Magnificent, and I was proud of it," Francoise admitted.
This work was followed by other novels, short stories, plays, novels "Do you love Brahms?" (1959), A Little Sun in Cold Water (1969), Lost Profile (1974), The Painted Lady (1981), War Tired (1985) and others
Sagan wrote 22 novels, several plays. She loved her readers, even those who attacked her with criticism, who were dissatisfied with her novels, and never defended herself - she considered their criticism fair.
François Mauriac was struck by her brilliant prose, cheerfully exclaimed: "A charming little monster!". About her novel On a Leash, academician Poirot Delpeche wrote that for the first time since the times of Balzac and Zola, a book has appeared in which the power of money in the sphere of feelings is shown with such frankness and artistic power.
Françoise Sagan married twice. In 1958 for the forty-year-old publisher Guy Schueller, and then in 1962 for the young American Bob Westhoff, a pilot who changed the steering wheel of an airplane to become a model. She has a son, Dani Westhoff, from her second marriage.
Françoise Sagan died on September 24, 2004 from a pulmonary embolism in a hospital in Honfleur, Normandy.
“Happiness is fleeting and false, only sadness is eternal” is one of her sayings.
Accustomed to overspending, Sagan repeatedly admitted: "I love money, which for me has always been a good servant and a bad master." At the same time, she was never a money-grubber: she generously distributed money to charitable foundations, her neighbors and fellow writers in need. When there was “suddenly” no money left, Sagan went to the casino, the threshold of which she crossed for the first time, barely reaching the age of majority. The directors of gambling establishments, especially the resort of Deauville, on the Atlantic, spread rumors that Françoise had squandered fortunes from them. "Vraki!" - says the writer and, on the contrary, claims that at one time she bought herself a house in Normandy, having won 8 million francs in roulette in one night.
Recall that Sagan wrote her first novel, Hello Sadness, at the age of nineteen and became famous and rich overnight: the book was translated into thirty languages, and two million copies were published within a few months. Françoise did not know what to do with the money and turned to her father for advice, who said: “Spend it! They are dangerous at your age." Since then, the writer has not changed this principle, although the “dangerous age” has long passed. "I'm an old dragonfly," Sagan sighs with a smile. In addition to the parental hearth and the mansion in Normandy, mortgaged for debts, she does not seem to have any property.
François Mitterrand has always been her great friend and admirer. He came to visit her, invited her on official trips. During a visit to Colombia, Françoise developed severe pleurisy and could have died if Mitterrand had not sent her on his plane to Paris. The late president was known to be a fair heartthrob who loved the company of smart, educated and preferably pretty women. Sagan once told how she once dipped Mitterrand's tie into a glass of white wine to wash a red stain. It is immediately clear that Sagan is a Frenchwoman, secular chroniclers were ironic. If in her place an American, say Monica Lewinsky, she would certainly have kept a tie with a stain ... “The last time we met with Mitterrand a few days before his death and laughed at our illnesses,” the writer recalled in a recent interview. She recently read the first book by Mitterand's illegitimate daughter, Mazarine Penjo, which the press hastened to declare "a second Sagan." She liked the novel very much, but, in her opinion, it has nothing to do with her own works.
For a while, Sagan's confidante was Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom they, leaving his grouchy wife Simone de Beauvoir at home, walked along the Parisian streets, dined in restaurants, and once even ran into a "house of dates" on Brea Street, where everyone came with with your companion. Sagan said: “We talked with him about life and about love. He told me about his mistresses, who were unimportant actresses, but to whom he gave the main roles in his plays.
Neither Sartre, nor Mitterrand, nor Orson Welles, with whom, according to rumor, she had a stormy affair, nor many of her other friends, are already alive, and Francoise is still the same as she was many years ago. An eternal wanderer and fidget, she never sits in one place - even in Paris, where over the past two decades she has moved several times from one apartment to another, and now she prefers hotels at all. The writer, who calls herself a desperate lazy person, is truly happy only when she does nothing: “Paradise lazy life - lying in bed and, as Baudelaire said, looking at the passing clouds. I read detective stories, I go for walks, I go to visit ... There comes a moment when plots, vague ideas and vague silhouettes appear in my head. It gets on my nerves. Suddenly there is some external factor - there is no more money or you have to pay taxes. I have to sit down at the table ... I am often reproached for throwing money out the window. But this is what saved me. If I were a wealthy and financially independent person, I don’t know if I would start writing ... I compose at night with my phone turned off, when nothing and no one bothers me. I write as I breathe, following my instinct, not thinking that I must definitely say something new. Of course, there are also blessed moments when you feel like the queen of the word, and then it seems that you are in a real paradise!”
All her life she had a penchant for outrageousness - she refused to join the Goncourt Academy, rejected a flattering offer to be elected to the French Academy, and in fact only one writer in history was awarded such an honor. “Firstly, the green color of the academic uniform does not suit me,” Sagan laughs. – Secondly, I am always late and thus can delay work on the French dictionary, which our “immortals” have been working on for many decades. Finally, I do not like honors that tire me with their meaninglessness.
“I had a life as a stuntman,” Francoise Sagan sums up the preliminary results of her journey, not without bravado. - True, I regret that it did not turn out to be more measured, harmonious and, perhaps, poetic. Sometimes in my dreams I see myself lying on the beach. And doing nothing. In a word, in a paradise for the lazy, where you don’t have to work ... As for posthumous fame and a place in the literary pantheon, I don’t give a damn about this at all.
…
End of the novel
And she finally died. Friday, September 24, 2204. "Finally" not because someone wanted her dead, but because her whole life from her earliest youth was a temptation for the devil - risk, adventures, feverish casino nights and hot love adventures. From terrible accidents (she rushed along the freeways at a speed of 200 kilometers per hour), she came out mutilated, but alive. In one night, she won a fortune in the casino. From this amount, the other would have gone crazy, and she found the determination to leave the "sweet" institution with lightning speed and provided for herself for life by investing in the purchase of Sarah Bernhardt's dacha. She quickly cracked through husbands and lovers who wanted to make money and a career on her, and with lightning, with a suitcase in her hands, she left the feigned bed. A few years ago, she was in a coma, but got out almost from the next world. From a young age, her weakness was drugs. She tried to hide it from the public, but to no avail ...
She burned out in closeness with the powers that be: having received huge intermediary commissions from oil deals between France and Uzbekistan, she did not pay taxes. They started a business. It seemed to many then that the favorite of the public had come to an end, but she was left at large with a suspended sentence for only 6 months. Finding herself broke, she mortgaged an apartment in the center of Paris, deeply experiencing this nasty situation. At the same time, all the diseases of a far from young, smoking woman made themselves felt: blockage of the pulmonary vessels led to death.
I take out my dossier on Françoise Sagan from the shelf. With sadness, I am translating publications related to her, photographs, newspaper clippings. For the umpteenth time I am re-reading our conversations-interviews with her in her apartment at 91 Shersh-Midi. It seems that her aura, her warmth, come from books with Francoise's autographs. I want to remember and remember - to the second, to the smallest detail. I have already told about many things to the readers of "Version" in the first issue of the newspaper for this year in an article under the strange title "I am ready to sit even on your knees." Yes, I was lucky: Francoise was decently late for one of our meetings and, bursting into the room where I was waiting for her, threw this phrase apologetically. Purely Saganovski, frankly, shockingly, with a touch of erotica. At the same time, Sagan was not at all a beauty: a heavy nose gave an aquiline look to her appearance, but openness, naturalness in communication, aphoristic thoughts and words, smart and lively eyes more than compensated for what nature lacked.
Sagan loved to shock the audience. But the most important adventure of her life was still literature, the art of moving pen on paper. Very young, right after the lyceum, she, saddled with inspiration, breathed out her first novel, Hello, Sadness, with which she secured a name in the pantheon of famous citizens of the French Republic. Françoise herself believed that Providence played a trick on her: millions of fees for this trinket - for what? Then there were A Kind of a Smile, Do You Love Brahms?, A Little Sun in Cold Water, and other novels, but Sagan no longer came close to the universal success of the first book. When I asked Françoise why she did not want to join the Academy of the Immortals (French Academy of Fine Arts), which includes the most talented and recognized cultural figures, she said: “I was offered, but I refused. All these academics are old, right-wing and… dead. I won't accept any of them."
Russian blood also flowed in Sagan's veins. On the line of the grandmother. But she was in Russia once. She said that she wanted to meet Mikhail Gorbachev, visit the Kremlin, go to bookstores. She enthusiastically accepted the perestroika events in the USSR, although later she lost her faith in many ways. I was lucky, I was one of the few Russian journalists whom Françoise gave an interview to. But I saw another Sagan, no less exotic - Sagan in a casino. Where, according to the popular expression of Baudelaire, the game costs famous poets both sweat and blood. Where time stands still, because the windows are tightly curtained and there are no clocks on the walls ... Francoise adored excitement and play.
Sagan is no more. France and everyone who cannot imagine their life without books bow their heads before her talent. And this means that the dazzling light of the semaphore of immortality now burns only green for Francoise Sagan.
The last autumn of the old dragonfly
More than anything in the world, Sagan, who until the last hour adored undiluted whiskey, strong cigarettes and breakneck speed, was afraid of poverty and oblivion. But, as Anna Akhmatova once correctly noted, “whoever is afraid of something will happen to him.” She spent the last years of her life in a mortgaged villa on the seashore in absolute loneliness and poverty.
All because of debt. It turned out that she owed the state ... a million francs. Of course, she did not have this money for a long time. Then all her accounts were frozen, real estate was described, and all the money for reprinting books was immediately seized to pay off the debt ...
Misfortune never comes alone. At 68, doctors diagnosed Sagan with pancreatic cancer. Actress Isabelle Adjani, writer Patrick Besson and academician Jean-Marie Rouart, knowing about the plight of the writer, literally begged everyone who cared about the "last classic of French literature" to come to the aid of Francoise Sagan, but it was a voice crying in the desert. On top of that, the “old dragonfly”, as Françoise jokingly called herself, fell, broke her femoral neck, underwent nine (!) Hardest operations, but could no longer move without outside help.
On September 24, 2004, when autumn in France was just beginning to come into its own and the first yellow leaves of chestnut trees slowly swirled outside the windows of the hospital in the small town of Honfleur, Françoise Sagan died quietly in the arms of her son Denis Westhoff. She was 69 years old, but after a serious illness, she looked like the same fragile little teenager that she was at nineteen, telling the world her famous “Hello, sadness!”
When we reread her books today, it seems that the voice of Alexander Grin's heroine comes from the pages: “Good evening, friends! Are you bored on the dark road? I'm in a hurry, I'm running ... "Yes, it's Françoise, running on the waves of sadness ... And sometimes we are on the same path with her.
Biography
She was born in the area of Kazhar. The girl was superior to her peers in terms of intelligence, although she was very undisciplined. After a failure in her studies (in 1953 she did not pass the entrance exam at the Sorbonne), at the age of 19 she became famous thanks to the publication of her first novel, “Hello, sadness” (Bounjour, tristesse) (1954), which was a brilliant success in society and with critics. . Sagan, who François Mauriac called "a charming monster", won the Critics' Award for this novel, among such experienced authors as Jean Guitton (Jean Guitton). Sagan shocked middle-class French teachers with her simple story of a sensitive and immoral underage girl who cheated on her frivolous father along with his disliked mistress, told in a fragmented and disappointed style. This novel depicts, first of all, the inner world of Sagan herself, which has not changed since then: a secular inner world, consisting of idle and superficial people who are in search of a more convincing reality than the world in which they live. This novella was considered not only a reflection of the undoubted sensibility of the era (obviously peculiar in its cheerful difference in the face of the decision of the literary arbitration of other writers, such as Sartre), but also the beginning of a certain style of women's literature.
Sagan's fame was brought by the first story " Hello, Sadness" (), published when she was 19 years old. The story was translated into 30 languages of the world, and then filmed. This work was followed by other novels, and numerous stories, plays, novels, such as "Do you love Brahms?" (), “A little sun in cold water” (), “Lost Profile” (), “Painted Lady” (), “War Tired” ().
All the works of Francoise Sagan are about love, loneliness, dissatisfaction with life; they are distinguished by the clarity of the narrative manner and the accuracy of the psychological drawing.
Françoise Sagan married twice. In 1958, for the forty-year-old publisher Guy Schueller, and then in 1962, for the young American Bob Westhoff, a pilot who changed the steering wheel of an aircraft to become a model. The second marriage left a son, Dani Westhoff.
Creating novels about fragile love, she herself now and then became the heroine of scandalous secular chronicles, calling herself a "life-burner". Her life was full of scandals, unpaid taxes, strange marriages, car accidents, luxury yachts, addiction to drugs and alcohol, suspended prison sentences, gambling - and at the end of her life, poverty, despite all the fees she received. Françoise Sagan died on September 24 from a pulmonary embolism.
Creation
Sagan's novels were received favorably by a no doubt sophisticated public, first due to the folklore of the Latin Quarter, its vaguely existentialist climate, as well as its "objective" writing style, more thought-provoking than persuasive. Her short stories, characterized by a small number of characters and brief descriptions, are distinguished by an open consistency of intrigue, indicated by a love triangle scheme. The psychology of Sagan's characters is believed to be rooted in Fitzgerald's, but he has them in obsessions about their past, while Sagan's characters, such as Gilles in A Little Sun in Cold Water, understand who have always lived in a fraudulent and boring world and do not return to their past. Of course, they are brilliant, this brilliance is primarily intellectual, but also egocentric. In addition, despite the fact that Sagan was for a long time the object of scandals in the press and found throughout her life a clear will to break free from all norms, of course, the female characters she created correspond to the opinions and desires of men. After Hello, Sadness, other successful novels appeared, all based on the theme of love, sadness and melancholy: A Vague Smile (1956); "In a month, in a year" (1957); "Do you love Brahms?" (1959) and "Magic Clouds" (1961). Her other works were Surrender (1965), Guardian of the Heart (1968), A Little Sun in Cold Water (1969), Velvet Eyes (1975), Rumpled Bed (1977), Painted Lady (1981), "Escape" (1991) and "The Disgruntled Passenger" (1994). Charged with fiction, artificial and monotonous, Sagan has demonstrated an ability to work in other literary genres. For example, she wrote the theatrical plays Violinists Sometimes Cause Harm (1961) and The Horse Gone (1966), as well as a biography of Sarah Bernhardt entitled Dear Sarah Bernhardt (1987) and autobiographical works such as "Strikes to the Soul" (1972) and "With My Best Memory" (1984).
Novels
- Hello sadness! / Bonjour tristesse, Editions Julliard, 1954.
- vague smile / Un certain sourire, 1956.
- In a month, in a year / Dans un mois, dans un an, 1957.
- Do you love Brahms? / Aimez-vous Brahms?, 1959.
- Magic clouds / Les Merveilleux Nuages, 1961.
- Signal for surrender / La Chamade, 1965.
- Guardian angel / Le Garde du cœur, Editions Julliard, 1968.
- A little sun in cold water / Un peu de soleil dans l'eau froide, 1969.
- Bruises on the soul / Des bleus à l "âme, 1972
- Unclear Profile / Un profile perdu, 1974.
- Rumpled bed / Le Lit defait, 1977.
- Pribluda / Le Chien Couchant, 1980.
- woman in makeup / La femme fardee, 1981.
- Immovable Thunderstorm (When the Thunderstorm Approaches, 2010) / Orage immobile, 1983.
- And the cup overflowed De guerre lase, 1985.
- Fish Blood / Un Sang d'aquarelle, 1987.
- Leash / La Laisse, 1989.
- detour / Les Faux-Fuyants, 1991.
- Goodbye sadness / Un Chagrin de passage, 1993.
- In a misty mirror / Le Miroir egare, 1996.
Novels
- Velvet eyes / Des yeux de soie, 1975
- Blue glasses / Les fougères bleues, 1979.
- Music for scenes / Musique de scene, 1981.
- House Raquel Vega / La Maison de Raquel Vega, 1985.
Compositions for the theater
- Le Rendez-vous manque (1958)
- Castle in Sweden / Chateau en Suede (1960)
- Les violons parfois (1961)
- Lilac Valentine's dress / La Robe mauve de Valentine (1963)
- Bonheur, impair et passe (1964)
- The horse is gone / Le Cheval evanoui (1966)
- In the thorn / L "Echarde (1970)
- piano in the grass / Un piano dans l'herbe (1970)
- Il fait beau jour et nuit (1978)
- Other extreme / L'Exces contraire (1987)
Biographies
- Dear Sarah Bernard /Sarah Bernhardt, biography, 1987.
Literature
- Sophie Delassin "Do you love Sagan? Translated from French by T. V. Osipova. M .: AST Publishing House LLC, 2003.- 414 p.
Notes
Links
- Sagan, Francoise in the library of Maxim Moshkov
Categories:
- Personalities in alphabetical order
- Writers alphabetically
- June 21
- Born in 1935
- People from Qajar
- Deceased 24 September
- Deceased in 2004
- Deceased at Honfleur
- Writers in French
- Writers of France
- Dramatists of France
- Died from pulmonary embolism
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010 .
- Volgodonsk
- Monakhov, Sergei Yurievich
See what "Sagan, Francoise" is in other dictionaries:
Sagan Françoise- Francoise Sagan Date of birth June 21, 1935 Place of birth Carjac, France Date of death September 24, 2004 Place of death Normandy Profession writer Genres ... Wikipedia
Sagan, Francoise- Françoise Sagan. Francoise Sagan (born 1935), French writer. Numerous novels, including Hello Sadness (1954), Do You Love Brahms? (1959), A Little Sun in Cold Water (1969), Lost Profile (1974), ... ... Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary
Sagan Françoise- (Sagan) (b. 1935), French writer. Numerous novels, including Hello Sadness (1954), Do You Love Brahms? (1959), "A Little Sun in Cold Water" (1969), "Lost Profile" (1974), "Painted Lady" (1981), ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary
Sagan Françoise- Sagan (Sagan) Françoise (b. 21.6.1935, Kazhark, Lot department), French writer. She graduated from the Catholic Lyceum in Paris. S.'s first novels "Hello, sadness" (1954, Russian translation 1974) and "Similarity of a smile" (1956) expressed the mood of the part ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
SAGAN Françoise- SAGAN (Sagan) Françoise (b. 1935), French writer. Rum. “Hello, sadness” (1954, p. 1974), “A vague smile” (1956, p. 1981), “A month later, a year later” (1957), “Do you love Brahms?” (1959, p. 1974), "Wonderful Clouds" (1961), "Signal ... ... Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary
Sagan\ Francoise- (born 1935), French writer ... Biographical Dictionary of France
Françoise Sagan- Date of birth June 21, 1935 Place of birth Carjac, France Date of death September 24, 2004 Place of death Normandy Profession writer Genres ... Wikipedia
It can be said about many writers of the last century that they have become true legends of the literary world. However, only one girl, who began her pen trials as a child, surpassed many authors, bursting into the world of written art unexpectedly.
It is to her, the writer Francoise Coiret (better known under the pseudonym Sagan), that this article is dedicated. About how Francoise Sagan lived and worked, her detailed biography will tell.
Childhood and youth of Mademoiselle Coire-Sagan
The future writer began her life in the French town of Honfleur in the not so distant 1935. Born on June 21, Françoise Sagan, after a few years, introduced a serious imbalance in the lives of her parents. Especially the mother, Madame Coiret, who was the owner of a completely different temperament.
Françoise's parents, representatives of the bourgeois class, were respected people. There was a huge library in their house, to which little Mademoiselle Coiret had full access. Having learned to read, from an early age the girl studied the works of domestic and foreign writers one after another. Among her favorites were Sartre's books. Later, she became acquainted with the memoirs of actress Sarah Bernard, to whom she would later dedicate a biographical story called “Dear Sarah Bernhardt” (1987).
But the works of the young modernist, French writer Marcel Proust, made the greatest impression on her. The cycle of his novels, consisting of seven volumes, told about the life of representatives of the upper class of society - dukes and princes, countesses and duchesses. By the way, the future writer will take the name of one of them (Duchess Dorothea Boson de Sagan) as a pseudonym.
But even this failure did not become a tragedy for the young writer. About a year after the debacle at the university, Françoise Sagan writes his first novel, Hello Sadness. It is worth noting that the novel of a nineteen-year-old Frenchwoman, which was published in 1954, caused mixed reviews from critics and at the same time was a phenomenal success among readers.
The first literary work of Mademoiselle Coiret was nominated for the Critic's Prize at the same time as the works of more eminent authors (for example, Jean Guitton). Moreover, this prize of 1.5 million francs was awarded to the young debutante, Frenchwoman Françoise, after a short discussion of critics.
Meanwhile, the public, admiring the incredibly simple story of the girl from the novel Hello, Sadness, was looking forward to new publications from her creator.
Creative career of Mademoiselle Coiret
Like many of Francoise's books she wrote throughout her life, this novel was translated into several languages of the world, and also became the basis for film adaptations. After the release of the first work of Mademoiselle Coiret, the world got acquainted with many other works of the French writer: she published dozens of stories, novellas, short stories, as well as several novels and plays. At the same time, they were all devoted to one topic - love and suffering due to loneliness.
Throughout the storyline, the dissatisfaction of the characters with their lives was also visible. This, as well as the accuracy and reliability in the description of the psychological states of the characters, made the work of F. Sagan individual.
Some critics, who were biased towards the works of the Frenchwoman, tried to compare the psychological drawing of her characters with the psychology of the heroes of Fitzgerald, whose works the young Mademoiselle Coiret was once fond of. However, these reproaches did not have worthy arguments, because Fitzgerald's characters were haunted by their obsessions about the past. And the heroes of stories, short stories and novels by Sagan were clearly aware of the realities of the world around them, boring and gray, and did not seek to return to the past.
The storyline of the writer's life
Françoise Sagan, whose best books (Hello Sadness, Do You Love Brahms?, Magic Clouds and A Little Sun in Cold Water) can be found on Wikipedia and read in online libraries, has been the subject of numerous scandals, provoked by the media.
The press and critics often accused Sagan of being too explicit about her commitment to fiction. Wanting to refute such reproaches, Francoise decided to reveal other facets of her talent and demonstrated to the world her abilities in other literary genres by writing scripts for theatrical productions with an atypical plot for that time.
In addition, the writer F. Sagan wrote a biographical sketch about one of her favorite actresses - Sarah Bernhardt - and two autobiographical works:
- Published in 1972, a work called "Blows to the Soul."
- Published in 1984, "With my best memory".
Despite the fact that the French writer Francoise Coiret (Sagan) lived most of her life without knowing material need, she met her death in poverty. Ruined and addicted to drugs, France's greatest writer and winner of numerous literary awards died in 2004, on September 24th. The cause of death of the legendary writer was a pulmonary embolism. Author: Elena Suvorova
