Balzac

2. He was born in 1799 –1850 a French novelist and
playwright. His masterpiece was a sequence of short
stories and novels collectively entitled, The Human
Comedy, which presents a panorama of French life
in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon.
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
multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally
ambiguous and fully human.

3. His writing influenced many subsequent
novelists such as Émile Zola,
Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert,
and Henry James and philosophers such as
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of
Balzac's works have been made into or
have inspired films, and they are a
continuing source of inspiration for writers,
filmmakers and critics.

4. An enthusiastic reader
and independent thinker
as a child, Balzac had
trouble adapting to the
teaching style of his
grammar school. His
willful nature caused
trouble throughout his life
and frustrated his
ambitions to succeed in
the world of business.

5. Before and during his career as a writer, he
attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman,
critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts.
The human comedy reflects his real-life difficulties,
and includes scenes from his own experience.

6. It is the general attempt to depict subjects
as they are considered to exist in third person
objective reality, without embellishment or
interpretation and "in accordance with
secular, empirical rules. In its most specific
sense, Realism was an artistic movement that
began in France in the 1850s, after the
1848 Revolution.

7. These Realists positioned themselves
against Romanticism, a genre dominating
French literature and artwork in the late
18th and early 19th centuries. Seeking to be
undistorted by personal bias.
Realism believed in the ideology of
objective reality and revolted against the
exaggerated emotionalism of the Romantic
movement.

8. Truth and accuracy became the goals of
many Realists. Many paintings depicted
people at work, underscoring the changes
wrought by the Industrial and
Commercial Revolutions. The popularity of
such 'realistic' works grew with the
introduction of photography — a new visual
source that created a desire for people to
produce representations which look
“objectively real.”

9. The faithful representation of
reality, was based on the dogma of "
objective reality", and was focused
on showing everyday, quotidian
activities and life, primarily among
the middle or lower class society,
without romantic idealization or
dramatization.

11. Balzac's extensive use of detail,
especially the detail of objects, to
illustrate the lives of his characters
made him an early pioneer of literary
realism.

12. Balzac sought to present his characters as real
people, neither fully good nor fully evil, but fully
human to arrive at the truth the characters
represent a particular range of social types: the
noble soldier, the scoundrel, the proud workman, the
fearless spy, the alluring mistress. he was able to
balance the strength of the individual against the
representation of the type which is an evidence of his
skill.

13. The characters in his
novels are struggling
against the currents of
human nature and
society, they may lose
more often than they
win—but only rarely do
they give up.

14. Representations of the city, countryside, and building
interiors are essential to Balzac's realism, often serving to
paint a naturalistic backdrop before which the characters'
lives follow a particular course; this gave him a reputation
as an early naturalist.
Complex details about locations sometimes stretch for
fifteen or twenty pages. As he did with the people around
him, Balzac studied these places in depth, traveling to
remote locations and surveying notes that he had made on
previous visits.

15. Five months after his wedding,
Balzac died. Balzac was buried in
Paris. "Today", said Hugo at the
ceremony, "we have a people in
black because of the death of the
man of talent; a nation in
mourning for a man of genius” .
Later, Balzac became the
subject of a monumental statue
by the French sculptor Auguste
Rodin, which stands near the
intersection of Boulevard
Montparnasse.