The symbolic capacity of the title of the novel
On the manuscript of the completed novel, published under the name “Red and Black,” Stendhal first wrote “Julien Sorel”. And this shows that the writer primarily intended to offer the reader an artistic history of life and death of a young man of low birth who is forced to fight for his existence in the conditions of the musty atmosphere of the Restoration era. But this name narrowed the scope of the narrative, reducing the content of the novel to the history of only a single person, which clearly contradicted the scale, social and psychological all-embracing nature of the work created by the writer. Therefore, the novel came out with the symbolic name “Red and Black”.
The title of the novel was followed by a subtitle – “The Chronicle of the XIX century.” It is known that the subtitle, as a rule, clarifies the title of the work and to some extent reflects the author’s attitude to what is on its pages. This primarily relates
“Black” is a symbol of the era of Restoration, an era that revived the “surviving monarchy”, class privileges and the worship of the golden calf. The crimson-red reflections of the past, as it were, emphasize in the novel of Stendhal the black shadows of the present. And the personal destiny of the main character of the novel Julien Sorel is formed as if under the sign of the struggle of these two principles – “red” and “black.” Where “red” is faith, hope, love, and “black” is hypocrisy and hypocrisy.
However, the title of the novel is still controversial today, since the
The beauty of fiction is that a truly great work is inexhaustible in the variety of its reading. Therefore, each new generation of readers of the novel Stendhal “Red and Black” will find in it more and more new meanings, consonant with the actual time of its reading.
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