Herman Melville

American writer (New York, August 1, 1819 – New York, IX 28, 1891). Due to the family's financial ruin, he had to stop regular schooling. As a deckhand he sailed (1839) across the Atlantic to Liverpool; he was (1841) a crew member of a whaling ship that sailed in the South Pacific. He escaped from a ship on one of the Marquesas Islands and stayed with a Polynesian tribe; then he found himself in Tahiti and Hawaii, from where he returned home in 1844 as a sailor on a war frigate. He described his maritime experiences in several books - Taipi (Typee, 1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849) and Sailor in a White-Jacket (White-Jacket, 1850), of which the first two in particular achieved great success.

In the next novel, Moby Dick or The Whale (Moby-Dick, or The Whale, 1851), which today is considered one of the pinnacles of American literature, Melville deepens his artistic process, but the work went almost unnoticed by his contemporaries. An epic novel about Captain Ahab's search for the great white whale that caused him to lose his leg, it culminates in a conflict between the whaler Pequod and the whale, in which Ahab and his entire crew perish except for the narrator, sailor Ishmael. The work is a symbolic vision of the eternal conflict between man and God, between hope and doubt, an image of the combination of good and evil, the insoluble secret of reality and illusion, and the sensory world and its metaphysical meaning.

Melville's inspired prose is in the spirit of Shakespeare, the Bible and the English Baroque poets. In the next work, Pierre (1852), departing from the adventure-metaphysical novel genre, combines his permanent preoccupation with the conventions of the family and sentimental novel. After the adventure historical novel Israel Potter (1855), he published a collection of short stories, The Piazza Tales (1856), among which Benito Cereno and Bartleby the Scrivener stand out, in which they touch on the hot topics of America at that time (slavery, violence , alienation, commercialization) and anticipates a modern society that denies the individual and his freedom. The novel Sljepar (The Confidence-Man, 1857), a satirical allegory about the position of modern man, is set in the framework of a river trip through the American West.

The demanding forms of his prose and an increasingly pessimistic vision alienated Melville from a wider readership; his career sank into oblivion, and unfavorable family circumstances and psychological crises characterized his later years. Year In 1876, he published the extensive philosophical-religious poem Clarel, partly based on a previous trip to Europe and the Holy Land. His poems, especially those inspired by the American Civil War (Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 1866), were subsequently re-evaluated and today form an important part of American poetry in the 19th century. para.

Unable to make a living from writing, Melville finally got a government job as a customs inspector, and continued his literary work away from the public eye. His last prose work is the short story Billy Budd (1888, published in 1924), about the conflict of ethical norms in tragic circumstances. It was only around the 1920s that criticism began to revalue Melville's work, and around the 1940s it canonized him as a writer who in the XIX. century critically penetrated into the moral and social implications of American life and expressed a spiritual issue with ramified symbolism which, with the possible exception of Dostoevsky, only experienced its peak with the writers of two or three generations after him.