Jules Gabriel Janin (redirected from Jules Janin)

Janin, Jules Gabriel 

Born Feb. 16, 1804, in St. Etienne, Loire Department; died June 19, 1874, in Paris. French writer, critic, and journalist.

Janin became a member of the French Academy in 1870. His early novels The Dead Ass and the Guillotined Woman (1829) and Confession (1830) reflected the love of romanticists for dramatic conflicts and social contrasts. The first Russian translation of The Dead Ass (1831) brought Janin the attention of the Russian press as well. After the Revolution of 1830 he renounced his progressive passions and became the permanent theater critic on the government newspaper Le Journal des Débats. His unscrupulous and at times reactionary but observant and witty essays and newspaper satires were popular in bourgeois circles. Janin’s The End of a World and of Rameau’s Nephew (1861), a reinterpreted sequel to a novel by D. Diderot, was harshly condemned by Karl Marx (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 32, p. 242). Janin successfully translated the English classics (S. Richardson, L. Sterne, and others).

WORKS

Oeuvres diverses, vols. 1–17. Paris, 1876–83.
In Russian translation:
Fantazii. St. Petersburg, 1834.

REFERENCES

Istoriia frantsuzskoi literatury, vol. 2. Moscow, 1956.
Tomashevskii, B. V. Pushkin i Frantsiia. Leningrad, 1960.
Mergier-Bourdeix. Les Amours de J. Janin et “Le Manage du critique,” une correspondance inédite. Paris, 1968.

M. A. GOL’DMAN