Buxoro davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz adabiyotshunosligi kafedrasi

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Theme 6: 
Critical Realism in World Literature 
 

The second half of the 1800's brought reaction against romanticism. A new 

group of writers called realists turned against the exaggerated feelings stressed by 
the romantics. Truth and accuracy became the goals of the realists. The novel and 
the drama were their best means of expression. 
The great novelists of realism include Stendhal, Honore de Balzac and Grestave 
Flaubert of France, and Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy of 
Russia. Realism was mixed with Romanticism in the writings of the English author 
Charles Dickens. Emile Zola of France led the naturalist movement in literature. His 
writings emphasized the most sordid aspects of society. The naturalists and realists 
treated their characters as though they were specimen in a laboratory. Such wrights 
as Henric Ibsen in Norway, August Strinberg in Sweden and George B. Shaw in 
England used much the same approach.In the United States Walt Whiteman 
combined realism and romanticism in his poetry. The novels of Mark Twain, Hanry 
James and Stephan Grame also reflected the realistic movement. 

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Honore de Balzac (20 May 1799 - 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and 
playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays 
collectively entitled La Comedie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life 
in the years after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. 
Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac 
is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned 
for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally 
ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; 
the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. 
His writing influenced many famous authors, including the novelists Marcel Proust, 
Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Gustav Flaubert, Marie Corelli, Henry James, Jack 
Kerouac, and Ital Calvino as well as important philosophers such as Friedrich 
Engels. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films, and they continue to 
inspire other writers. 
Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense 
writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial 
and personal drama, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, 
he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime love; he died five months later.In 1832 
(after writing several novels), Balzac conceived the idea for an enormous series of 
books that would paint a panoramic portrait of "all aspects of society." When the 
idea struck, he raced to his sister's apartment and proclaimed: "I am about to become 
a genius." Although he originally called it Etudes des Moeurs, it eventually became 
known as La Comedie Humaine, and he included in it all of the fiction he published 
in his lifetime under his own name. This was to be Balzac's life work and his greatest 
achievement. 
After the collapse of his businesses, Balzac traveled to Brittany and stayed with the 
de Pommereul family outside Fougeres. It was here that he drew inspiration for Les 
Chouans (1829), a tale of love gone wrong amid the Chouan royalist forces. A 
supporter of the crown himself, Balzac paints the counter-revolutionaries in a 
sympathetic light - even though they are the center of the book's most brutal scenes. 
This was the first book Balzac released under his own name, and it gave him what 
one critic called "passage into the Promised Land" It established him as an author of 
note (even if the surface owes a debt to Walter Scott) and provided him with a name 
outside the pseudonyms of his past.Soon afterwards, around the time of his father's 
death, Balzac wrote El Verdugo - about a 30-year-old man who kills his father 
(Balzac was 30 years old at the time). This was the first work signed "Ноnore de 
Balzac". Like his father, he added the aristocratic-sounding particle to help him fit 
into respected society, but it was a choice based on skill, not birthright. "The 
aristocracy and authority of talent are more substantial than the aristocracy of names 
and material power", he wrote 1830. The timing of the decision was also significant. 
Robb frames it this way: "The disappearance of the father coincides with the 
adoption of the nobiliary particle. A svmbolic inheritance." Just as his father had 
worked his way up from poverty into respectable society.
When the July Revolution Overthrew Chanes X in 1830, Balzac declared himself a 
Legitimist, supporting Charles' House of Bourbon - but with qualifications H that 

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the new July Monarchy (which claimed widespread popular support) was 
disorganized and unprincipled, in need of , mediator to keep the political pea 
between the King and insurgent forces. He called for "a young and vigorous man 
who belongs neither to the Directoire nor to the Empire, but who is incarnate...." He 
planned to be such a candidate, appealing especially to the higher classes in Chinon. 
But after a near-fatal accident in 1832 (he slipped and cracked his head on the street), 
Balzac decided not to stand for election 
1831 saw the success of La Peau de Chagrin {The Wild Ass's Skin), a fable-like tale 
about a despondent young man named Raphael de Valentine who finds an animal 
skin promising great power and wealth. He obtains these things, but loses the ability 
to manage them. In the end, his health fails and he is consumed by his own confusion. 
Balzac meant the story to bear witness to the treacherous turns of life, its "serpentine 
motion." 
In 1833, Balzac released Eugenie Grander, his first best-selling novel. A story about 
a young lady who inherits her father's miserliness, it also became the most critically 
acclaimed book of his career. The writing is simple, yet the individuals (especially 
the bourgeois title character) are dynamic and complex.
He revised obsessively, covering printer's proofs with changes and additions to be 
reset. Balzac sometimes repeated this process during the publication of a book, 
causing significant expense for both himself and the publisher. As a result, the 
finished product was frequently quite different from the original book. While some 
of his books never reached a finished state, some of those - such as Les Employees 
{The Government Clerks, 1841) - are nonetheless noted by critics.