Writers of the «Lost Generation» will help us go back a century and hear the echoes of the events of World War I, not only to understand the specifics of what happened but also to prepare for the new challenges of post-war life
Rivarol is a goldsmith of words, perfecting his skill at crafting fragments, turning each aphorism into a diamond and a collection of reflections into precious mines
Nicolas de Chamfort (1741–1794) was an 18th-century French dramatist and moralist writer whose fame was made possible by the posthumous publication of his book «Maxims and Thoughts. Characters and Anecdotes» (1795)
The history of French essayism and aphorism would be incomplete if we overlooked the work of Vauvenargues (1715–1747). Vauvenargues was able to express a lot in one line as if he had the skills of a talented juggler in whose hands the words find the right direction and proper force
La Bruyère wrote only one book, but it earned him worldwide fame. The book «Characters» continues its triumphal procession even today: it is translated and published, read and quoted, and La Bruyère himself rightfully belongs among the great French moralists
This summer is precisely 400 years since the birth of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), one of the universal geniuses of mankind
La Rochefoucauld requires no special training to understand him, he seeks in the reader an openness of soul and receptivity of heart, and though his philosophy is uncomplicated and the demands of morality are as old as the world; he is interesting for his brevity and precision, his humor and paradoxes, and in his book a sublime style is appropriate
Montaigne is the creator of a new literature where subjectivity is elevated to the rank of absolute truth that needs no proof. «Experiments» is a book of unsubstantiated assertions and dizzying and often erroneous inferences, a fantasy of fantasies with the only purpose — to write about everything without putting views into any system, to write not only from boredom, but also by pure chance, to make the entropy of writing the energy of inspiration and the driving force of literary creativity
The name of the Japanese writer Kōbō Abe (1924–1993) became familiar to me thirty years ago when I read three of his novels one after another: «The Woman in the Dunes», «The Box Man» and «The Face of Another». The impression of the first reading remained in my memory as a feeling of incredible loneliness and hopelessness that roamed the pages of the books, leaving almost no reason for optimism