Imoralist

Andre Gide, French writer and Nobel Prize winner. He is known for numerous novels (Vatican Cellars, Counterfeit Coins, The Immoralist), but also for his travelogues (from the Soviet Union, Congo), essays, plays, poems and autobiographical works. He is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

During 1893 and 1894, he traveled around North Africa, where he became acquainted with different moral and sexual standards. In Tunisia, he fell ill and barely escaped death. He discovered different sensual pleasures in Sus... These experiences gave him the basis for the novel Immoralist, about the destructive power of hedonism and hunger for new experiences...

And this selection of Gide's prose by Nolita: The Immoralist, Narrow Gate, Isabella, Pastoral Symphony, School for Women, Theseus is difficult to determine the gender. These are mostly short novels or novellas written in diary-confessional and analytical form, in which we follow the development of the ever-vigilant, restless and curious mind of the great French writer through its ever-new and ever-contradictory stages, in a wide range from the exaltation of individual freedom (Imoralist) , to a rigorously moral attitude (Straight Gate).

If the so-called classic type of novelist, which mostly fixed the past century, is disappearing more and more in front of the new novelist; if the novelist is no longer some extraordinary being, some god or demigod, omniscient and above other mortals, who sees everything and knows everything that happens to people and what happens in them, without even an iota of doubt arising in him , or at least he doesn't let it be suspected, but such a novelist is already ripe for the museum of historical wax figures, if the novelist seems to us like someone who is there among us, someone equal to the others, with the same difficulties to penetrate the secrets of life, with the same torments , with the same traps, someone who can be deceived, and who knows that there are parts of the soul that are not easily penetrated even at the risk of the whole self, that what is dark should be said so darkly, what is half clear so and to say, what is clear, to say clearly, even if our creation was not geometrically beautiful and harmonious - let the harmony be more hidden; even if there is no harmony visible, it is somewhere in the depths, maybe - then it is somewhat the merit - or fault - of Gide, Gide who was perhaps not a "typical" novelist.