On January 23, 1783, in a wealthy bourgeois family in Grenoble, France, a boy named Henri Bell was born, and he was the 19th-century French critical realist writer Stendhal. His novels "The Red and the Black", "Parma Abbey", and "Armands" have become the favorite books of thousands of young people.
Stendhal lost his mother at an early age, his father was a rich lawyer, rich and conservative, Stendhal and the Soviet writer Gorky's fate, but also by voltaire's maternal grandfather.
As a child, Stendhal had a wide range of interests and a passion for mathematics, and the math teacher Groy was a Jacobin who often told him about the history of the French Revolution, which laid the foundation for the formation of his worldview.
Stendhal had excellent grades, was a famous school bully, and was preparing to apply for the famous comprehensive technical school, but the situation in the French Revolution was in full swing, and Stendhal joined the army led by Napoleon and participated in the famous Battle of Marengo. In the midst of the fire and gunfire, the young Stendhal honed himself. A year later, he was appointed second lieutenant of the Sixth Dragoon. He then left the army and practiced writing in Milan.
But Napoleon's heroic career always called on Stendhal to make a contribution, and from 1806 to 1814, Stendhal returned to the army for the European continent. After the Restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty, the bourgeois revolutionaries were suppressed, and Stendhal was disheartened, feeling that "nothing could be gained except humiliation", so he left France and settled in Milan.
After the July Revolution, he served as consul in a small coastal town in Italy under papal rule, and on the evening of March 23, 1842, Stendhal suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while walking the streets of Paris and left this world forever.
In Stendhal's work, 16th-century Italian society jumps out of the paper: it is economically rich, the republican system is advanced, and the people are full of resistance. Italians show a passion for freedom and a passion for love. The story in the Parma Abbey is based on the History of the Entrepreneurship of the Farnais, and the prototype of the Duchess is Madame Vanasha, who was in the Roman social world at that time.
Open-ended and multi-layered in Stendhal's novels, The Red and the Black deals with the four spaces of Verrier, Chambéson, Paris, and the prison, in which mental and physical time are dealt with as needed.
He was particularly adept at psychological description, but not a Balzacian "clerk of French history", for he believed that "it is easier to describe the clothes and copper collar of a serf in the Middle Ages than to describe the mental activity of man." In his novels, psychological monologues, whispers, dreams and other means reveal the complexity, variability, contingency, contradiction and uncertainty of the characters' minds. Before the end of "The Red and the Black", Yu Lian's psychology before his death had the characteristics of a stream of consciousness. The psychological novel The Red and the Black pioneered one of the greatest literary genres in the history of European literature, critical realism.
Most of the characters he depicts are typical "marginal people" of the times. Octav in Armands, Julien in The Red and the Black, and Fabric in Bama Abbey are all handsome teenagers, intelligent, and uniquely attractive to women, but indulging in themselves and being sensitive to the outside world.
Gorky said, "His work is simpler written for the future. The literary critic Brandeis said, "He was a psychologist, and only a psychologist." ”
When we re-read Stendhal's works today, we can still see the shadow of Stendhal himself in "The Red and the Black", peep into the shadow of Stendhal himself who hopes to fight for his ideals all his life, still see the revolutionary years when blood is boiling, and can still see the pain of civilian youth who are talented but do not have the opportunity to develop.
But in the era in which Stendhal lived, he was not accepted and was the author who had ever recorded the worst sales of his work—On Love sold only seven copies in eleven years.
This is Stendhal, lonely and hot-blooded, running into walls everywhere but never giving up, until the last moment of his life.
In Stendhal's epitaph there is this passage:
Lived, loved, written.