MARCEL PROUST «AGAINST SAINT-BEAUVAIS»: CONTRADICTIONS OF THE BIOGRAPHICAL METHOD

Abstract

The object of the theoretical analysis is Marcel Proust's unfinished book «Against St. Beauvais», some details of the writer's preparation for writing the seven-volume novel «In Search of Lost Time» are traced. Attention is focused on
the figure of Honore de Balzac, whose creative and life path was one of the cornerstone factors in the process of arguing the principles of the biographical method.
It is emphasized that Marcel Proust was working on the book during the years when avant-garde art began to emerge in France. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the period of summarizing the pros and cons of the postmodern art practice, the influence of certain avant-garde trends on the aesthetic and artistic pursuits of not only the «post» but also the «meta» modernists became apparent.
The purpose of the article is to focus on the contradictions of the biographical method revealed by the author of the novel «In Search of Lost Time», a concept that is actively used in the field of Ukrainian humanities, based on the theoretical potential of Marcel Proust's book «Against Saint-Beauvais».
Research methodology. Based on the interdisciplinary principle, the issues raised in the article are examined using the problem-conceptual, comparative, and biographical approaches.
The actual importance of the problem lies in the possibility of applying the potential of the cultural approach to the creative search situation that developed in France at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and moving on to a consistent detailing (even nuancing) of this period.
Conclusions. The material presented in this article gives grounds to assert that M. Proust's study «Against St. Beauvais» has not only literary but also cultural significance, significantly expanding the idea of the research space of French humanities at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on the attitude of S.-O. de Saint-Beauvais, the author of the biographical method, to the life and creative path of O. de Balzac, the author reconstructs both different
approaches and possible interpretive modeling of the work of a particular writer using the principle of «biographism».
In this regard, both M. Proust's assessment of the «biographical method» of S.-A. de Saint-Beauvais and the purposeful personalization of writers become clear. O. de Balzac, J. de Nerval, S. Baudelaire, G. Flaubert are analyzed as authors whose works should be compared with those of the early twentieth century writers.
Prospects for further research. In the future, we plan to continue researching the French avant-garde of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.