André Suarès
(Isaac Félix Suarès; Marseille, 1868-Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, 1948) French writer.He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and was a friend of Valéry, Claudel and Rolland.He is the author of a remarkable work of essays: The journey of the condottiero (1910-1932), Tolstoy alive (1911), Three men: Pascal, Ibsen, Dostoevsky (1913), Debussy (1922), Goethe (1932), Portraits without models (1935), Big Three alive (1937) and Points of view on Europe (1939).
André Suarès
After the first and passionate Historical and humanistic studies, André Suarès was content with a modest pension, coming from the family income that his brothers passed him, and devoted himself exclusively to letters, in an austere isolation similar to that of Elémir Bourges.According to official French criticism, he was a "philosophical, political and individualist" essayist, and distinguished himself from the authors of traditionalist essays and from the "écrivains avancés".
Possessing an arrogant independence, the pessimistic skepticism of André Suarès is combined with certain nuances of courageous stoicism and a true idolatry of beauty (in the vein of Gustave Flaubert and Ernest Renan), and also with the Stendhal's cult of energy, renewed by Maurice Barrès, and with a verbal aestheticism that, influenced in his Mediterranean temperament by the classicist myth of Maurras and the disdainful Barresian sensual pomp, gave rise to a certain rhetoric in the style of D'Annunzio.
After the first books, Images de la grandeur (1901), Sur la mort de mon frère , Voici l'homme , Le bouclier du Zodiaque and Sur la vie (three volumes, 1909-12), André Suarès attempted a greater breadth in The journey of the condottiero (1910-1932), a moderated text to whose evocations and impressions a narrative element is attached that, however, remains in a secondary place.The work, which could be considered topical when the first volume was published, had already aged before reaching its end; however, remarkable anthology pages can be drawn from the same.
During those years the author felt more and more oppressed by economic difficulties, which he endured with an elegant arrogance manifested in part by the noble features of his countenance and the elaborate attitudes of his person, and hurt by the lack of success, compensated only by the high appreciation of numerous illustrious literary colleagues.
After painfully enduring the period of occupation, André Suarès witnessed a new flowering of vigor and fame in the immediate aftermath of World War II.In the famous "pamphlet" La France byzantine ou le triomphe de la littérature pure (1945), Julien Benda had respectfully condemned him, but since 1939, with Points of view on Europe , a work that was accompanied by multiple pages of circumstances and of literary criticism (such as Tres Grandes vivos , 1937), artistic, musical and moral, Suarès had found more moderate accents and shades of greater purity.
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