Marie-Henry Beyle Stendhal

Stendhal (real name Marie-Henri Beyle), French writer (Grenoble, January 23, 1783 – Paris, March 23, 1842). From a wealthy royalist family. Delighted by the French Revolution, and then by Napoleon, he entered the Polytechnic School in Paris in 1799, but left it the following year and entered the military service (as a second lieutenant), where he served until 1802 and again (in the quartermaster's office) in 1806–14. Participated in several Napoleonic wars (in Italy, Germany, Russia). After the fall of Napoleon, he lived in Milan in 1814–21, then, when the Austrian authorities suspected him of sympathizing with the Carbonari, he returned to Paris. After the July Revolution, he was the French consul in Trieste (1830–31) and Civitavecchia (1831–42). Devoting himself to literature, he became famous for his biographies The Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, Rossini's Life, travelogues Rome, Naples and Florence (his first work in which he signed the pseudonym Stendhal), Walks in Rome, Memories of Tourists, essays History of Painting in Italy, About love and a biographical study of Racine and Shakespeare, in which he highlights romanticism as a vital aspect of literary creation. In the mid-1820s, he began writing novels (the first being Armance, 1827), the most significant of which are Red and Black and Parma Carthusian Monastery. As a novelist, Stendhal was only valued at the end of the 19th century. century (among his contemporaries, only H. de Balzac appreciated him). More of a moralist than a chronicler, Stendhal created his novels at the constant tension and intersection of classicism, romanticism and realism, a mixture of romantic fables (in which fatal loves and the hero's awareness of his own exceptionality play an important role) and a paradoxical general tone, in the space between satire, irony and poetic spirit. At the same time, the events are most often seen through the hero's consciousness, while the narrator withdraws; thus Stendhal elaborates subjective realism in which the consciousness of the character determines the point of view of the narration. He also wrote novellas set in medieval and Renaissance Italy, with motifs taken from chronicles and archival writings, created in the spirit of G. Boccaccio and F. Rabelais and collected in the collection of Italian Chronicles. He also left several unfinished works published posthumously – the novelized autobiography The Life of Henri Brulard, a masterpiece of ironic self-examination, and Memories from Egotism, novels Lamiel (1889), Lucien Leuwen (1894), set during the reign of Louis Philippe, Red and Green, biography Napoleon's life.