Honore de Balzac – the glory and pride of France


Honore de Balzac is a great French writer-realist. His merit in the development of world literature lies primarily in the fact that he raised the genre of the novel to the heights of artistic perfection and social significance. Stendhal was right to call Balzac “the king of novelists.”

Looking closely at the surrounding reality, relying on the “poetry of fact”, Balzac created in the “Human Comedy” a grandiose artistic panorama of the life of France in the first half of the 19th century. Being a realistic writer, he, at the same time, successfully synthesizes the realistic beginning with elements of romantic aesthetics, being unanimous with romantic writers in hatred of everything bourgeois, who established the power of an “omnipotent coin of five francs”. Balzac stressed: “I do not consider it possible to paint modern society with the rigorous methods of the 17th and 18th centuries.” The introduction of the dramatic element,

image, picture of “description, dialogue seems to me necessary in contemporary literature.” He firmly believed that “in whatever genre it was written work, it remains in the memory of people only in the event that,

Although Honore de Balzac was often called the Doctor of Social Sciences, the writer himself considered himself “the secretary of the French society.” Not in the sense of documentary recreation of reality, but in the sense of creating an artistic truth of otherness of reality under the laws of realistic art, which have nothing in common with the laws of real life.

The grandiose epic cycle of the “Human Comedy”, created by a brilliant artist, original thinker and profound philosopher, along with the “Divine Comedy” of the great Dante, rightfully became an artistic encyclopedia of the human spirit. Having created a whole gallery of immortal artistic images, Balzac discovered the artistic laws of cohesion and interdependence of historical events and the fate of heroes, which allowed him to reveal the characteristic features of the golden

calf epoch with amazing artistic truth and perspicacity.

The works of the great novelist were highly appreciated by AI Herzen and NG Chernyshevsky, ME Saltykov-Shchedrin and FM Dostoyevsky, Lesya Ukrainka and Ivan Franko. “Balzac’s books,” wrote AM Gorky, “are dearest to me by that love for people, by that wonderful knowledge of life, which I always felt with great strength and joy in his work”

On the desk of Balzac stood the bust of Napoleon Bonaparte with the inscription: “What he did not make with a sword, I’ll make a pen.” The writer succeeded brilliantly.


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Honore de Balzac – the glory and pride of France