Baudelaire, Charles

(1821–1867) French poet whose dissipated lifestyle led to inner despair. [Fr. Lit.: NCE, 248]

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Baudelaire, Charles

Born Apr. 9, 1821, in Paris; died there Aug. 31, 1867. French poet. Born into the family of a participant in the Great French Revolution.

Baudelaire began publishing in 1840; he was the author of the pamphlets The Salon of 1845 (1845) and The Salon of 1846 (1846). He participated in the Revolution of 1848, published the newspaper Le Salut public, and fought on the barricades. He opposed the reactionary romantics and the theories of the Parnassians (“The Pagan School,” 1852). In his poetry he expressed sympathy for the working people and the dispossessed (“Evening Twilight,” “Morning Twilight,” “Ragpickers’ Banquet”). The coup of Louis Bonaparte deprived Baudelaire of faith in direct social progress. In the middle of the 1850’s, Baudelaire was influenced by T. Gautier, E. Poe, and the Parnassians (the sonnet “Beauty,” 1857). In the collection The Flowers of Evil (1857; enlarged editions, 1861 and 1869, posthumously; Russian translations, 1895 and 1907), the weakening of the moral evaluation of the phenomena of life made Baudelaire a predecessor of the decadents. However, Baudelaire also included in his collection rebellious, human verses (the section “Revolt”). He is also the author of the collection of articles Romantic Art (1846–68, posthumous edition), the treatise on the immorality of the use of drugs Artificial Paradise (1860; Russian translation, The Search for Paradise, 1908), and Little Prose Poems (edition of 1869; Russian translation, 1902).

In numerous poetic works and especially in the surveys of the salons (beginning in 1845; published in the collection Aesthetic Rarities, 1868) and in essays (“Several French

Caricaturists,” 1857–58; “The Work and Life of Eugene Delacroix,” 1863), Baudelaire showed himself to be a perceptive and profound critic of art who correctly assessed the historical importance of the work of E. Delacroix, C. Corot, H. Daumier, E. Manet, and other contemporaries, as well as of the past masters (Michelangelo, F. Goya, and J. L. David). Rejecting the stilted forms of salon art, Baudelaire attributed great importance to the organic and coherent expression of the spiritual life, disposition, and ideals of the artist.

Bourgeois historians of literature primarily cultivate the aesthetic side of Baudelaire’s work. Marxist criticism assesses Baudelaire as a representative of that part of the French intelligentsia which “could not reconcile itself to the paltriness of bourgeois prospects and fell into despair” (A. V. Lunacharskii, “Bodler,” Literaturnaia entsi-klopediia, vol. 1, 1929, p. 550). M. Gorky said of Baudelaire: “He lived in evil, loving the good” (Sobr. soch., vol. 23, 1953, p. 128).

WORKS

Oeuvres complètes. Vols. 1–18. Edited by J. Crépet and C. Pichois. Paris 1923–53.
In Russian translation: Tsvety zla. Moscow, 1908.
Tsvety zla. Translated by V. Briusov. In the collection Revoliutsionnaia poeziia Zapada 19 v. Moscow, 1930.
Lirika. Translated by P. Antokol’skii. Moscow, 1966.
Tsvety zla. Moscow, 1970.

REFERENCES

Istoriia frantsuzskoi literatury, vol. 2. Moscow, 1956.
Levik, V. “Sh. Bodler.” In Pisateli Frantsii. Moscow, 1964.
Baudelaire. Actes du colloque de Nice. Paris, 1968.
Mouquet, J., and W. T. Bandy. Baudelaire en 1848. Paris, 1946.
Borgal, C. C. Baudelaire. Paris, 1967. (With bibliography.)
Les Lettres françaises, 1967, no. 1197 (special issue).
Europe, 1967, no. 456–57 (special issue).
Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, C. “Etude bibliographique sur les oeuvres de C. Baudelaire.” In his book Les lundis d’un cher-cheur. Paris, 1894.

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References in periodicals archive

O trecho acima da desfecho a uma carta enderecada pelo poeta frances Charles Baudelaire a jovem Judith Gautier.

Judith Gautier and the amazement of Baudelaire: social roles and literary spaces in the nineteenth century/Judith Gautier e o espanto de Baudelaire: papeis sociais e espacos literarios no seculo XIX

Comme Charles Baudelaire, Noureddine Mhakkak celebre la femme dans ses multiples facettes et le voyage comme moment de formation et d'enrichissement.

Quelques reflexions sur le recueil [beaucoup moins que]Les fleurs de l'Orient[beaucoup plus grand que] de Noureddine Mhakkak

Tout en insistant sur le genie poetique de l'auteur de La Comedie humaine, Charles Baudelaire proclame Balzac un "visionnaire passionne" dans son celebre essai, Theophile Gautier (1859).

Lichtle, Michel, Max Andreoli, et al., eds. L'Annee balzacienne 2012: Balzac, fantastique fantaisiste? Situations de la fantaisie balzacienne, troisieme serie 13

Looking in turn at cognitive approaches to literary thought and at aspects of cognitive rhetoric, they consider such topics as simultaneous multiple frames in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, poetry and the invisible subject, blending in New Testament parables, whether Obama's and Sarkkozy's remarks at the United Nations Climate Change summit were a contest between figurative and literal language, and cognitive mechanisms at work and their perlocutionary effect in Catholic preaching.

Texts and minds; papers in cognitive poetics and rhetoric

His work in the middle period of his life was influenced by the work of the German composer Richard Wagner which is highlighted in his La damoiselle elue and the 1889 piece Cinq poemes de Charles Baudelaire. Debussy died on March 25, 1918 in Paris from cancer.

Google Doodle marks Claude Debussy's 151st birth anniversary

Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.

Philosophy and Melancholy

"The best and most natural appreciation of a work of art," reads their manifesto, "may be a response to it in another." Partly inspired by Charles Baudelaire's concept of "correspondences" in the arts, this belief in the natural interrelatedness of all art forms provides the key to understanding the rapport between image and text in Nocturnes.

Nocturnes, by Josephine Sacabo and Dalt Wonk (Luna Press, 2012)

The book deals with these two authors' novelty and modernity, defined as a reconfiguration of the generic boundaries between poetry and prose, by bringing formal, thematic, and historical considerations to bear on Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and Gustave Flaubert's Trois contes, as well as by setting those works in the context of the authors' other works of literature and literary criticism.

Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert

I have known since adolescence--though in Soviet Russia it was all a bit hard to believe, these United States of ours being, after all, the Manichaean pole of Light--that Edgar Allan Poe was completely unknown in America and would have perished in obscurity had he not found a literary agent in Charles Baudelaire and a vociferous claque in Baudelaires milieu in France.

Baudelaire in Russia

In what artistic field was Frenchman Charles Baudelaire renowned?

QUIZ OF THE DAY

In his influential essay "In Praise of Make-Up," section XI of The Painter of Modern Life (1863), Charles Baudelaire extolled the reformation of nature, the majesty of artificial forms, the need to approximate the ideal, and the duty to appear magical and supernatural:

T. S. Eliot's green face powder: a mystery solved