Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Nicolas Boileau Boileau - alias Despréaux or Despréaux ( born November 1, 1636 Paris, † March 13, 1711 ) was a French author who was expected long fully to the great French classics, but now survives only as an important figure in the history of literature.

Life and work

Boileau, as he is known here as a rule, was born the fifteenth child ( from the second marriage ) of his father, a bourgeois Parisian lawyers, however, proudly pointed to noble ancestors. With one and a half years, he lost his mother. He was a sickly boy, the one -handed removal of bladder stones also made ​​impotent. So he settled before the end of his schooling at the Collège de Beauvais ( which, like the previously visited by him Collège d' Harcourt, Jansenism was close to ) give minor orders. However, after short theology studies in 1652 he switched over to Jura and was admitted to the bar in 1656.

1657, his father died; Boileau inherited and never had to have a job. As he wrote verses for quite some time, he now devoted himself entirely to literature and was inspired by his older brother Gilles, who also wrote ( and in 1659, at 28, was admitted to the Académie française, but already with 38 died ), in introduce belletristic circle. Here he learned as well as all Parisian authors of the time know, that the years to which you will later date the beginning of French classical music. He interfered in quarrels and made ​​friends with some budding success authors, the older Jean de La Fontaine and Molière, and especially the little younger Jean Racine.

He debuted in 1661 under the him different from brother Gilles name Despréaux, with such witty as mocking verse satire, which he had eight more to follow over the next seven years. Subject of this text, which emulated at antique ( Horace and Juvenal ) and contemporary models (including brother Gilles), was mainly the world of Parisian salons and they haunting aesthetes and writers whose manias and vanities Boileau spearing relish, literary opponents quite also the name calling. Only Satire VI (Les embarras de Paris, 1664), which is dramatically and humorously the disagreements of everyday life in the noisy, dirty and overcrowded Paris time, has a more real subject. Given his success as a performance artist, who understood his texts to present updated effective and constantly on the social circuit Boileau refrained long time to have them printed. When in 1666 a pirated edition appeared with six satires, he turned downright indignant and declared it inauthentic.

1668, according Satire IX ( the first around 1700, three more followed ), he tried to shed his image as the enfant terrible of Parisian literary scene, and moved from the aggressive satire to moralizing and philosophizing Versepisteln ( épîtres ). The first glorified Louis XIV, who had just occupy the so-called War of Devolution against the Spanish crown, Franche Comté and leave parts of Flanders conquer. In 1669 he was the king recite the epistle, the pretty board received 2000 livres annually allocated and inserted itself into the circle of quasi state-supporting writers who gathered to minister Colbert.

His critical study of many authors of the time had always led him also to more fundamental considerations in which the poetics of Classical Latin poet Horace was an important reference point for him. Moreover, he had in the estate of his deceased brother Gilles 1669 a program begun by this transfer of an ancient poetics, the so-called Pseudo- Longinus, found completed and published as Traité sur le sublime ( 1674). For these literartheoretischen interests went 1669-1674 as a written Versepistel in four " songs " poetics out: L'Art poétique. Herein Boileau defines the role and responsibility of the author, requires compliance with general requirements such as " vraisemblance " (reality adequacy ) or " bienséance " (moral acceptability ) and codifies the various lyrical and dramatic genera as well as the epic. The novel it does not consider him in 1668 he had already disqualified in his Dialogue of héros de roman as untrustworthy. Boileau was lucky with his kind poétique: Thanks to the long-running success of the authors, according to their poetry practice he his theories formulated (including the friendly La Fontaine, Molière and especially Racine ), his work also even an authoritative, "classic" text was.

In 1674 he was under the title Oeuvres diverses du sieur D *** Print a collective output that poétique next to the recently completed type the nine finished ( later probably something milder ) satires and epistles contained four and one not " songs " I- IV or concluded " heroic- comic " epic, Le Lutrin ( = the music desk ), in which he caricatured him well-known world of Paris canons in the form of a burlesque Epenparodie.

Henceforth he managed, not much writing, sent its position as a recognized advocate of good literary taste and perverse, the alleged nobility of his family out sweeping, in the best Parisian circles as well as on the farm. 1676 he was appointed even for Historiographe du Roi along with Racine, ie the official chronicler of the now numerous campaigns of King Ludwig. His and Racine records but were later lost in a fire.

1683 brought an increased Boileau four epistles and the last two songs of the Lutrin second edition of his works out. In 1684 he was, with a little help from Ludwig ( because of course he was upset with his criticisms many literary colleagues), elected to the Académie Française. The acquisition of a country house at Auteuil consecrated his pleasing situation.

When in 1687 Charles Perrault in the Académie his verse treatise Le Siècle de Louis XIV was reading, in which he postulates the superiority of his own time on the then accepted in all, as exemplary classical antiquity, Boileau was one of the spokesmen of the traditionalists who attacked Perrault and thus the famous literary quarrel of the " Querelle des Anciens et Modernes" triggered. Already in 1694, however, he resigned himself publicly with Perrault, because the idea of ​​the superiority of modern times began to assert itself and become common property.

At a smaller slugfest among his supporters and opponents led in 1692 his misogynistic Satire X ( Contre les femmes, 1694 ), in which he had probably processed with impotence beaten and personal resentment.

After Boileau, similarly to Racine, had approached and then open in the late 80s and the 90s only secretly the rigorous - religious Jansenism his youth, he withdrew more and more into his small apartment on the pin of Notre Dame back, where he lived for many years. The publication of a last verse satire in which he indirectly the Jesuits, those intimate enemies of the Jansenists attacks, was forbidden to him in 1705 by the King.

For quite some time sick and embittered, he died a few years before his gleichaltrigem about ex- protector and King Louis XIV ( 1638-1715 ).