Choderlos de Laclos

French novelist (Amiens, 18. X. 1741 – Taranto, 5. IX. 1803), member of the petty nobility, professional officer (he advanced to the rank of general in Napoleon's army). He began his literary career with courtly gallant verses and lascivious novellas, and became famous with the epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses, 1782), which was an immediate success (2,000 copies were sold in the first month). A masterpiece of psychological analysis and complex polyphonic structure, it consists of 175 letters from different characters - correspondents (12 in total). At the same time, Laclos skilfully and formally elaborately alternates correspondents as narrators of events on the subject of the social game of seduction in an aristocratic environment, often providing an insight into a single event from multiple points of view. The structural complexity of the work based on the thematization of the status of the letters themselves (they are stolen, forged, dictated, rejected, written in multiple versions, copied, destroyed) perfectly coincides with the depiction of the contradictions of the libertine society of the late Enlightenment. In the 20th century, the work was screened several times. He also published an essay On the Education of Women (De l'éducation des femmes, 1785), in which some proto-feminist positions are evident.