Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
Birthday	Monday, July 10, 1871
Birthplace	Auteuil, France
Died	Saturday, November 18, 1922
Occupation	Novelist, essayist, critic

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 It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Proust, Marcel

Born July 10, 1871, in Paris; died there Nov. 18, 1922. French writer.

The son of a physician, Proust studied at the law faculty of the Sorbonne. In 1896 he published the collection of short stories Pleasures and Regrets. From 1900 to 1913 he was in charge of the society section of the newspaper Le Figaro.

Proust’s chief work is the cycle Remembrance of Things Past (vols. 1–16, 1913–27; last six volumes published posthumously), consisting of seven novels. The narrator of the cycle is the sickly and idle scion of a rich bourgeois family who from youth had been received in aristocratic circles. The worst ordeal he undergoes is his tormented love for Albertine, who arouses in him a jealous passion. The narrator is genuinely interested in literature and art, but his own prolonged creative efforts are fruitless. Only in the last novel of the cycle—Time Recaptured— does he begin writing a novel about his own life, for he is convinced that only creative work based on intuition can give meaning to human existence and to “lost time.” Many episodes in Proust’s novels concentrate on subjective perception of space and time and especially on involuntary memory; the narrator’s inner life is conveyed as a stream of consciousness.

Proust attempted to depict the unreliability and relativeness of a person’s concepts of himself, the world, and society and to reveal the instability of society itself. His creative method is that of impressionism, within whose boundaries he engages in social criticism and creates realistic and authentic human figures. Among such figures are remarkable aristocratic and bourgeois types: the Baron de Charlus, the Guermantes, Swann, and the Verdurins. Proust’s works have influenced many 20th-century Western European writers.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Sobr. soch.: V poiskakh za utrachennym vremenem. Foreword by A. V. Lunacharskii [vol. 1]. Introductory article by N. Rykova [vol. 3], vols. 1–4. Leningrad, 1934–38.
Po napravleniiu k Svanu. [Translated by N. Liubimov; foreword by B. Suchkov.] Moscow, 1973.

REFERENCES

Reikh, B. “Marsel’ Prust.” Pechat’i revoliutsiia, 1927, no. 8.
Voronskii, A. “Marsel’ Prust.” In Pereval. Moscow-Leningrad, 1928, collection 6.
Tolmachev, M. V. “Marsel’ Prust: V poiskakh utrachennogo vremeni.” VIMK, 1961 [no.] 6 (30).
Andreev, L. G. M. Prust. Moscow, 1968.
Dneprov, V. “Iskusstvo M. Prusta.” Inostrannaia literatura, 1973, no. 4.
Bonnet, H. Le Progrès spirituel dans l’oeuvre de M. Proust [vols. 1–2]. Paris, 1946–49. (Contains bibliography.)
Picon, G. Lecture de Proust. [Paris, 1968.]
Kopp, R. L. Marcel Proust as a Social Critic. Rutherford, N. J. [1971].
Marcel Proust: 1871–1922. A Centennial Volume. Edited by P. Quennell. New York[1971].
Tadié, J.-Y. Proust et le roman. [Paris, 1971.]
Vial, A. Proust. Paris, 1971.
Borel, J. M. Proust. [Paris, 1972.] (Contains bibliography.)
Marcel Proust: A Critical Panorama. Urbana, III. [1973].

M. V. TOLMACHEV