"Melmoth the Wanderer" is the most famous work of Charles R. Maturin (1782-1824), an English writer of Irish descent. A typical example of the late Gothic genre of the Byronist era. Maturin himself designated the genre of the work as a fiction: English. “A tale” appears in the subtitle on the cover of the book.
"There is no error more absurd, and yet more rooted in the heart of man, than the belief that his sufferings will promote his spiritual safety." ― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
Written at the end of the first quarter of the 19th century in Ireland, this novel became popular far beyond the borders of England, and for a long time influenced the literature of many European countries, including Russia and France.
Melmoth the Wanderer is not a short novel. Maturin divided it into 39 chapters, numbered in Roman numerals. In the first edition of the novel (1820), its volume was divided into 4 volumes, while due to the negligence of the printing house, a failure was made in the numbering of chapters, and the last one was designated XXXVI. Each chapter is preceded by an epigraph, often in Latin or Greek.
Compositionally, the novel belongs to the category of narratives called in German literary criticism "frame" (German Rahmenerzählung), and in French - "going to infinity" (French mise en abîme, or, more precisely, the abyss: French abîme ← abisme ← others. -Greek. ἄβυσσος bottomless). When reading such a novel, one by one, the narratives nested within each other are revealed. The reason for their deployment can be either the story of one of the heroes, or the book he is reading, etc. the story of the character whose story the novel began.
The technique of changing the narrator has been known in world literature since ancient times - it is enough to mention the Mahabharata, Ramayana, or the Thousand and One Nights. However, in comparison with them, the composition of "Melmot the Wanderer" is so complicated that "it is difficult for it to find an analogy among the many 'frame narratives' of world literature." To tell its plot is just as difficult, writes the French literary critic, as it is to state what and in what sequence Jacques Callot depicted on the engraving of The Temptations of Saint Anthony: “hundreds of images flowing one onto another, created with unrestrained and inexhaustible imagination, displacement of plans, the impression of an endless, endlessly stretching nightmare. " Among the closest compositional analogues, Alekseev calls "The Manuscript Found in Zaragoza", however, unlike Maturin, this novel was never completed by Yan Pototsky.
Multilayer, multi-tiered novels have also been compared with "Chinese lacquer boxes" inserted into each other - unlike matryoshka dolls, here it is much more difficult to understand their forms and relationships. Referring to this analogy, Alekseev states that it is not the author's task to suggest a solution. “Maturin always deliberately confuses the spatial and temporal plans, shifts the perspective; this leads to the fact that the reader loses the common thread that connects separate stories. " This complexity turned out to be so great that the first reprint of it at home in 1892, English publishers accompanied in the preface with a special scheme.
Influence on world literature
Oscar Wilde
In May 1897, Oscar Wilde moved to France and changed his name to Sebastian Melmoth. The writer knew about this novel from childhood - after all, Charles Maturin was his great-uncle. Actually, the fundamental motives of his novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray - a deal with the devil and a magical portrait associated with the fate of the hero - go directly to Melmoth the Wanderer.
Honore de Balzac
For the first time Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) read Melmoth the Wanderer, apparently shortly after the publication in 1821 of the French translation of this novel. The fact that Matyuren's "fairy tale" excited him is already felt in one of his first youthful novels, The Eternal, or Two Beringelds (1822). Like Melmot, the main character here is endowed with fabulous longevity, the ability to instantly move in space, see through walls - which gives him power over people. There are also similarities in the details: the date confirming Beringeld's age (1500) is in the portrait of Beringeld (1640 by Melmot); one of the first scenes is a gathering of villagers, where the figure of a whooping grandmother stands out. Directly borrowed from chapter XXI a sentence in which Melmot explains to Immali what love is; in general, Balzac remembered this phrase by heart - literary critics found it later in his personal letter to Mrs. Bernie.
A.S. Pushkin
"In the fall of 1816, John Melmot, a student at Trinity College Dublin, went to his dying uncle, the focus of all his hopes for an independent position in the world ..." The origin of "Melmoth the Wanderer", the very premise of introducing the main character is the same as in the first stanza of "Eugene Onegin". However, in 1823, when Pushkin brought out the famous lines about Onegin's uncle, ten years remained until the Russian translation of The Wanderer was published. Pushkin read the novel he liked in a French translation.
M. A. Bulgakov
By the first third of the 20th century, so many works have accumulated in world literature where Satan, who has come to earth, tempts people that it would be difficult to draw an unambiguous line from Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita directly to Maturin. However, the figure of Ivan Homeless and the collisions in which he falls directly indicate the Meturin prototype - this is Stanton.
This article was sponsored by Zeya Bakhtyar.
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