| George Sand | |
|---|---|
| Amantine Lucile Dupin | |
| Birthday | |
| Birthplace | Paris |
| Died | |
(pen name of Aurore Dupin; married name Dudevant). Born July 1, 1804, in Paris; died June 8, 1876, in Nohant, Indre Department. French writer.
Sand studied at an English Catholic convent in Paris. In 1831, after separating from her husband, she published the novel Rose and Blanche in collaboration with the writer Jules Sandeau. Sand’s formation as a writer took place in the atmosphere of social upheaval brought about by the July Revolution (1830). Her first independent work, the novel Indiana, appeared in 1832 under the pen name George Sand; in this work the question of women’s rights is expanded into the broader question of human freedom. The novels Valentine (1832), Lélia (1833), and Jacques (1834), permeated with rebellious individualism, placed Sand firmly in the ranks of the democratic romantics.
In the mid-1830’s, Sand was drawn to the ideas of the Saint-Simonists, the Christian socialism of P. Leroux, and the views of the left-wing republicans. The protagonists of her works from this period are confronted with the ideals of the Utopian socialists. Her novel Mauprat (1837) condemns romantic rebellion, and Horace (1841–42) debunks individualism. Sand found positive heroes among the common people, for example among such workers as the joiner Pierre Huguenin (The Journeyman Joiner, 1840), the miller Louis (The Miller of Angibault, 1845), and the carpenter Jean Jappeloup (The Sin of Monsieur Antoine, 1845). Sand’s best novel, Consuelo (1842–43), which sensitively depicts the Hussite revolutionary movement, is permeated with faith in the creative potential of the common man, the fervor of the national liberation struggle, and the desire for an art that serves the people.
The 1840’s were the period of Sand’s greatest literary and civic activity. She took part in the publication of a number of utopian-socialist, anticlerical, and left-wing republican journals and newspapers. She also actively supported various worker poets and publicized their writing in Intimate Dialogues on Proletarian Poetry (1842). In her novels of the 1840’s, Sand drew a series of sharply negative portraits of bourgeois accumulators, including Bricolin in The Miller of Angibault and Cardonnet in The Sin of Monsieur Antoine. On the other hand, Sand idealized patriarchal, rural mores in such idyllic novels as The Devil’s Pool (1846), François the Waif (1847–48), and Little Fadette (1848–49).
Sand actively supported the February Revolution of 1848; she was close to the circles of radical left-wing republicans, such as A. Barbès, and edited the Bulletins de la république. The events of June 1848 shattered her Utopian illusions. She abandoned social activism and returned to writing novels in the spirit of her earlier romantic works. Typical of this new direction were The Snowman (1858) and Jean de la Roche (1859). This period also saw the publication of Sand’s multivolume Story of My Life (1854–55).
Sand first became popular in Russia in the 1840’s. She was greatly admired by I. S. Turgenev, N. A. Nekrasov, F. M. Dos-toevsky, V. G. Belinskii, N. G. Chernyshevskii, and A. I. Her-zen, all of whom viewed her as an ally in the struggle for the liberation of mankind.
I. A. LILEEVA