Gustave Flaubert

French novelist (Rouen, December 21, 1821 – Croisset, May 8, 1880), classic French realist novel. Sickly, lived on the Croisset estate in Normandy, did not engage in politics, nor did he participate in public life; god. In 1848, he planned a cruise around the Mediterranean. In 1849, he traveled with his friend Maximo du Camp to Egypt, and then to Asia Minor. The novel Madame Bovary (Madame Bovary, 1857) disturbed spirits and was accused of violating public morals. A painter of provincial desolation, bourgeois hypocrisy and limitation, Flaubert is a pessimist, a skeptic, a sober observer, who does not believe in the better nature of his contemporaries. In the petty-bourgeois atmosphere, unadaptable individuals perish (Ema Bovary), life is anxious and cramped (Jednostavno srce – Un C oeur simple, 1877), instead of science, ambitious dilettantism flourishes (Bouvard and Pécuchet, 1881). An impartial observer ("the author must remain invisible in his work") and a cold collector of facts, Flaubert seeks salvation in art, considering that it is "higher than life" - because "a man is nothing, and the work is everything." Striving for the perfection of expression, never satisfied with what he had achieved, he reworked, refined, and chiseled individual passages several times. Other works: Sentimental education (L'Éducation sentimentale, 1843–45), Temptation of St. Antuna (La Tentation de saint Antoine, 1849–74), Salammbô (1862), Three stories (Trois contes, 1877). He also wrote a book of travel impressions, Par les champs et par les grèves (Par les champs et par les grèves, 1886) and a theatrical play The Candidate (Le Candidat, 1874), which was performed without success. Flaubert's particularly interesting correspondence was published (in 10 volumes) in 1926–30. From a philosophical point of view, he tried to shed light on Flaubert's work by J.P. Sartre in the work L'Idiot de la famille.