Aristotle sayings about philosophy. Aristotle quotes

In May 1885, the people of Paris saw off the famous writer, playwright and poet on his last journey. Crowds of people lined up along the path of the funeral procession, starting from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon. They came to say goodbye to the legendary man who created Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, Cosette, Gouimplain, the author with a noble soul, oratorical pathos and old-fashioned manners, Victor Marie Hugo.

Novels of Victor Hugo

In 1831, the first full-fledged work of Victor Hugo was published, which turned out to be incredibly successful and very quickly scattered around the world. One of the techniques used by the author was to draw attention to the cathedral, forgotten at that time. After the publication of the book, the memo became very popular among tourists.

The best books of Victor Hugo online:

The writer brought many new details to French literature, he was able to combine romantic and realistic elements in his work. Soon this approach was adopted by many writers, which led to the creation of a new trend in literature. Critics noted his influence on literature as "limitless" and considered Hugo a teacher for future generations.

Brief biography of Victor Hugo

The writer was born in 1802 in the city of Bezason, France in a military family. In his early years, his family moved constantly from city to city. Educated at the Lyceum of Louis the Great. He wrote his first story at the age of 14, from that time he began to participate in literary competitions where he won prizes. In 1822 he married.

Hugo's first book, The Icelander, was published in 1823. At that time, he founded a literary circle and began publishing his own magazine. In 1824, a collection of poems, New Odes, was published. A year later, the writer was awarded the Order of the Stream Legion and became a member of the circle of romantics. In 1841 he became a member of the French Academy.

In 1845, for loyalty to the king, Hugo received the title of count and became a peer. In 1848 he joined the National Assembly, but after Napoleon's coup he moved to Brussels, where he began to publish anti-Napoleonic stories. After traveling, he lived on the island of Jersey (English Channel). In 1870 he returned to France. He devoted the last years of his life to creativity, gave his last strength to the novel "The Ninety-Third Year", where he described in detail great revolution and its implications for France. Victor Hugo passed away in 1885.

E. Evnina

On the work of Victor Hugo

http://www.tverlib.ru/gugo/evnina.htm

“For humanity to move forward, it is necessary to constantly have glorious examples of courage in front of it on the peaks. Exploits of bravery flood history with a dazzling brilliance... To try, to persevere, not to submit, to be true to oneself, to engage in single combat with fate, to disarm danger with fearlessness, to strike at unjust authority, to stigmatize a drunken victory, to stand strong, to hold fast - these are the lessons, needed by the peoples, here is the light that inspires them,” Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables, and his indomitable militant genius, calling for courage and courage, and his faith in the future to be won, and his constant appeal to the peoples of the world, are beautifully expressed in these fiery lines.

Victor Hugo lived a great, stormy, creative rich life, closely connected with that significant era (of French history, which began with the bourgeois revolution of 1789 and through the subsequent revolutions and popular uprisings of 1830-183 "i and 1848 came to the first proletarian revolution - the Paris Commune of 1871. Together with his century, Hugo did an equally remarkable political evolution from the royalist delusions of early youth to liberalism and republicanism, in which he finally established himself after the revolution of 1848. This marked a simultaneous rapprochement with utopian socialism and the resolute support of the disadvantaged masses, to whom the writer remained faithful until the end of his life.

Hugo was a true innovator in all areas of French literature: poetry, prose, drama. This innovation, going in line with the pan-European movement of romanticism, which captured not only literature, but also fine arts, music, and theater, was closely connected with the renewal of spiritual forces. European society- an update that came after the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.

Hugo was born in 1802. His father, Joseph-Leopold-Sigisber Hugo, was an officer in the Napoleonic army who rose from the ranks during the French Revolution, enlisting in the republican army at the age of fifteen, and under Napoleon rose to the rank of brigadier general; it was through him that the future writer most directly came into contact with the pathos of the revolution of 1789-1793 and the Napoleonic campaigns that followed it (for a long time he continued to consider Napoleon the direct heir of revolutionary ideas).

The first poetic works of the young Hugo, still imitative in many respects (Chateaubriand was then his idol), appeared in the early 1920s. The political upsurge on the outskirts of the July Revolution of 1830, and then the republican uprisings of 1832-1834, breathed into him a powerful surge of enthusiasm, entailed a whole rewrite in his aesthetics and artistic practice. (“The literary revolution and the political revolution found their union in me,” he would write later.) It was then, leading the young romantic movement, that Hugo proclaimed new artistic principles, violently subverting the old system of classicism, releasing one book of poetry after another, creating his first novel, with a fight introducing a new romantic drama onto the stage. At the same time, he introduces into fiction new themes and images, previously forbidden for it, the brightest colors, violent emotionality, the drama of sharp life contrasts, the liberation of vocabulary and syntax from the conventions of classicist aesthetics, which by this time had turned into a ossified dogma aimed at preserving old regime in both political and artistic life. Side by side with Hugo are young poets and writers of the romantic direction - Alfred to Musset, Charles Nodier, Prosper Mérimée, Theophile Gauthier, Alexandre Dumas père and others, united in 1826-1827 in a circle that entered the history of literature under the name " Senacle". The 1930s were a militant theoretical period of French romanticism, which worked out its new artistic criterion of truth in art through struggle and polemic.

Two opposing attitudes to the world clashed in this struggle between romanticism and classicism. The classicist vision, which in the era of the young Hugo was embodied in their works by the pathetic epigones of the once brilliant school of Corneille and Racine, kept a strict order, demanded clarity and stability, while the romantic one, which had passed through the revolution, through the change of dynasties, through social and ideological shifts in social practice and in the minds of people, strove for movement and a decisive renewal of all forms of poetry, all means of artistic reflection of a diverse, changing life before our eyes.

In 1827, Hugo created the historical drama Cromwell, and the preface to this drama became the manifesto of the French romantics. Acutely sensing the movement and development taking place in nature and in art, Hugo proclaimed that humanity is going through equal ages, each of which has its own form of art (lyrical, epic and dramatic). He put forward, in addition, a new understanding of man as a dual being, possessing a body and soul, that is, an animal and spiritual principle, low and sublime at the same time. From this followed the romantic theory of the grotesque, the ugly or buffoonish, which stands in sharp contrast to the sublime and beautiful in art. In contrast to the strict division of classic art into the “high” genre of tragedy and the “low” genre of comedy, the new romantic drama, according to Hugo, was supposed to combine both opposite poles, display “the minute-to-minute struggle of two warring principles that always oppose each other in life." In accordance with this provision, Shakespeare was declared the pinnacle of poetry, who “melts in one breath the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the clownish, tragedy and comedy.”

Objecting to the elimination of the ugly and ugly from the sphere of high art, Hugo protests against such a canon of classicism as the rule of "two unities" (the unity of place and the unity of time). He rightly believes that "an action artificially limited to twenty-four hours is as absurd as an action limited to a hallway." The main pathos of Hugo's Preface-Manifesto consists, therefore, in a protest against any forced regulation of art, in a furious overthrow of all obsolete dogmas: “So, let's say boldly: the time has come!.. Let's strike with a hammer at theories, ethics and systems. Let's knock down the old plaster that hides the facade of art! There are no rules, no patterns, or rather, there are no other rules than the general laws of nature...”

The subversive pathos of the Preface is complemented by the creative pathos of Hugo's poetry, in which he seeks to put into practice his romantic program.

Hugo is one of the greatest poets French of the 19th century, but, unfortunately, it is as a poet that he is the least known among us. Meanwhile, many plots, ideas and emotions familiar to us from his novels and dramas first passed through his poetry, received their first expression in his poetic word. artistic expression. In poetry, the evolution of Hugo's thought and artistic method was most clearly expressed: each of his poetic collections - Odes and Ballads, Oriental Motifs, four collections of the 30s, then Retribution, Contemplations, Terrible Year, the three-volume "Legend of the Ages" - represents a certain stage of his creative path.

Already in the preface to “Odes and Ballads” of 1826, Hugo outlines new principles of romantic poetry, opposing the “naturalness” of the primeval forest to the “leveled”, “trimmed”, “swept and sanded” royal park in Versailles, as he figuratively represents the outdated poetics of classicism . However, the first truly innovative word in Hugo's poetry was the collection of Oriental Motifs, created in 1828 on the same wave of enthusiasm on the eve of the 1830 revolution as the preface to Cromwell. Moreover, the very theme of the East, with its bizarre images and exotic colors, was a certain reaction to the Hellenistic harmony and clarity, which were sung by the poets of classicism. It is in this collection that the transition from intellectual and oratorical poetry, which was predominantly classicist poetry (for example, the poems of Boileau), to the poetry of emotions, to which romantics gravitate, begins to take place. From this originate the search for the most vivid poetic means that affect not so much thought as feelings. Hence the purely romantic drama, presented in unusually visible pictures: flaming Turkish ships burned by the Greek patriot Canaris; the sacked bodies thrown out of the women's seraglio on a dark night (“Moonlight”); four brothers stabbing their sister for lifting her veil in front of the giaur; the movement of an ominous black cloud sent down by God to destroy the vicious cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and spewing bright red flames on them (“Heavenly Fire”). This saturation of poetry with intense colors, dynamism, dramatic and emotional intensity goes hand in hand with the heroic theme of the liberation war of Greek patriots against the Turkish yoke (the poems “Enthusiasm”, “Child”, “Canaris”, “Heads in the seraglio” and others).

A masterpiece of pictorial and dynamic poetry, the collection Oriental Motifs was a kind of discovery of the sensual and colorful world; Hugo's subsequent poetic books, created over the course of the 1930s—Autumn Leaves (1831), Twilight Songs (1835), Inner Voices (1837), Rays and Shadows (1840)—are coming along the path of a deeper comprehension of life, give out the poet's constant desire to delve into the laws of the universe and human destiny. Philosophical, political and moral searches of the time were reflected here. Not without reason, in the very first poem of Autumn Leaves, Hugo says that his soul is placed “in the center” of the universe and responds to everything like a “sonorous echo”.

The lyrical hero Hugo from the collections of the 1930s is constantly peering, listening, pondering everything around. Watching pictures of wonderful sunsets, he not only admires them, but tries to find the “key to the mystery” of being behind the sensual splendor of colors and shapes. He climbs the mountain, where he listens to the majestic and harmonious hymn that is created by nature, and the mournful, ear-cutting cry coming from humanity, listens in complete solitude to the sounds of the night, rushes with a daring thought into ancient times or into the depths of the sea. Reflections on the fate of people, their troubles and sorrows, their past and future, which is lost in darkness, constantly worry the poet: “pure” contemplation, “pure” nature does not exist for him. Inspired by the ideas of Saint-Simon and Fourier, already at that time he persistently raises the social theme of poverty and wealth (“For the poor”, “Ball in the town hall”, “Do not dare to condemn that woman who fell”). Sensitively capturing the tremors that herald a revolutionary breakdown, the poet, even before the July Revolution (in May 1830), wrote the poem “Thoughts of a passer-by about kings”, where he advises the kings to listen to the voice of the people, which is worried at the foot of their throne like a formidable ocean. The people-ocean, formidable for the crowned lords, is a through image that runs through all of Hugo's work.

Another theme of the 30s "foreshadows the late Hugo: this is a political and tyrannical theme, which leads the poet to an exit into the wide world, to sympathy for all oppressed peoples. In the poem "Friends, I will say two more words" (1831), he says that deeply hates oppression, in whatever corner of the earth it may arise, and that from now on he inserts a “brass string” into his lyre. In the same poem, Hugo’s characteristic understanding of the poet’s civic mission (“Yes, the muse must devote herself to the people!”) , which will find a more complete expression in the program poem "The Poet's Vocation" (1839) from the collection "Rays and Shadows".

The world created by Hugo in the poetry of the 1930s appears before us in sharp contrasts: a harmonic hymn expressing nature, and the sorrowful cry of mankind; insignificant and short-sighted kings - and agitated peoples; the splendid festivities of the rich and the misery of the poor; a drunken orgy of the minions of fate - and an ominous ghost of death, kidnapping its victims right from the banquet table; even at the bottom of the human soul, the poet distinguishes both clear azure and black mud, where vicious snakes swarm. As colorful and dynamic depiction of life as in the collection Oriental Motifs, the ability to capture even spiritual movements and thoughts in unusually concrete, visible images is complemented in the 30s by the introduction of dramatic effects of light and flow. From the multi-color extravaganza of "Oriental motifs", Hugo moves on to more concentrated and condensed combinations of white and black colors, which correspond to his contrasting vision of the world.

The poetics of Hugo's first novel, Notre Dame Cathedral, created on the crest of the July Revolution of 1830, also corresponds to this worldview. Hugo conceived the novel as "a picture of 15th-century Paris" and at the same time as a genuinely romantic work of "imagination, caprice and fantasy". The revolution, which captured Hugo with political passions, interrupted his work on the novel, but then, as his relatives say, he locked his clothes with a key so as not to leave the house, and five months later, at the beginning of 1831, he came to the publisher with a ready work. In The Cathedral, his theory of the grotesque found application, which makes both external ugliness and inner beauty hunchbacked Quasimodo, in contrast to the ostentatious piety and deep inner depravity of Archdeacon Claude Frollo. Here, even more clearly than in poetry, the search for new moral values ​​was outlined, which the writer finds, as a rule, not in the camp of the rich and those in power, but in the camp of the destitute and despised poor. All the best feelings - kindness, sincerity, selfless devotion - are given to the foundling Quasimodo and the gypsy Esmeralda, who are the true heroes of the novel, while the antipodes, standing at the helm of secular or spiritual power, like King Louis XI or the same archdeacon Frollo, differ cruelty, fanaticism, indifferent to the suffering of people.

It is significant that it was this moral idea of ​​Hugo's first novel that F. M. Dostoevsky highly appreciated. Offering Notre Dame Cathedral for translation into Russian, he wrote in a preface published in 1862 in the journal Vremya that the idea of ​​this work is “the restoration of a dead person crushed by the unjust oppression of circumstances ... This idea is the justification of the humiliated and all outcast pariahs of society.” “Who would not think,” Dostoevsky wrote further, “that Quasimodo is the personification of the oppressed and despised medieval people ... in which love and a thirst for justice finally wake up, and with them the consciousness of their truth and their still untouched infinite forces.”

Hugo's novel, due to its extraordinary picturesqueness and fascination, immediately received public recognition. But around the romantic theater created by the writer in those same years, fierce battles flared up. Hugo's plays followed for a decade one after another: "Marion Delorme" (1829), "Ernani" (1830), "The King Amuses" (1832), "Lucretia Borgia" (1833), "Mary Tudor" (1833), " Angelo the Tyrant of Padua” (1835), “Ruy Blas” (1838).

In this genre, more than in any other, it is clear that Hugo strives to continue in art the revolutionary traditions of 1789; attacking the famous citadel of classical tragedy - the theater "Comedy Francaise", he puts forward to replace his new - revolutionary and popular theater, "... literary freedom is the daughter of political freedom. This principle is the principle of the age, and it will triumph,” he says with his characteristic polemical enthusiasm in the preface to the drama “Ernani” (March 1830). “After so many exploits performed by our fathers ... we have freed ourselves from the old social form; how can we not free ourselves from the old poetic form? The new people need a new art... Let folk literature replace court literature.”

The conquest of the theater by the Romantics, therefore, was not only aesthetic, but also clearly political in nature. The defenders of pseudo-classical tragedy were at the same time staunch monarchists, adherents of the old political regime. The youth, who supported the romantic drama, gravitated, on the contrary, towards liberalism and the republic. This explains the extraordinary intensity of passion around almost every play by Hugo. The first drama, "Marion Delorme", created by him even before the July revolution, was successively banned by two ministers - Martignac and Polignac and was published only after the revolution, in August 1831. The drama "The King Amuses", which appeared after the June Republican uprising of 1832, was also banned - already by the government of the July Monarchy - after the first performance (it returned to the French stage only fifty years later, on November 22, 1882).

The first drama of Hugo, not only staged, but also withstood many performances, was "Ernani"; around her, the main battles of “romantics” and “classics” broke out, accompanied by a competition of whistles, threatening cries and applause, which did not subside for all nine months, until “Ernani” left the stage. In order to defend his play, the author had to not only be present at each of its performances, but also bring along friends and like-minded people who took it upon themselves to defend it militantly. Among the “gang” of Hugo, as their opponents then called them, the young Théophile Gauthier stood out, shocking the respectable audience with his pink vest. The reactionary newspapers said at that time that the romantic drama defied all the rules of Aristotelian aesthetics, but most importantly, that it “insults kings” and, if the police do not take serious measures, the theater hall in which Erpani performances take place can become an arena , battles, where peaceful people will be given to the mercy of "wild animals". The words of a chronicler of one ultra-monarchical newspaper are also known about the only (November 22, 1832) performance of the play “The King is amused”: “I will remember all my life the stalls of the theater, chock-full of people ... descending here from the suburbs of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Victor yelling at the top of its voice the hymns of 1993 and accompanying them with abuse and threats against those who disapprove of the play...”

The fear and hatred that the French reactionaries felt for the romantic drama was not accidentally associated with the specter of the revolution and its peak, 1993. organic connection theater Hugo with the ideas and dramatic reality of the French Revolution is undeniable. This is evidenced, first of all, by the typically “third estate” understanding public struggle as the struggle of the whole people as a whole against the nobility and aristocrats of all stripes, put forward by the revolution of 1789. It is from this contrasting opposition of two forces - the despotic nobility, which holds in its hands; wealth and power, and a disenfranchised people, “which has a future, but no present” (Hugo’s words from the preface to the drama “Ruy Blas”), both the plot conflict and the characters of the heroes of the romantic drama proceed. Of course, the great realist Balzac, who in the same 30s of the 19th century carefully traced social differentiation within the third estate, describing the rise of the bourgeois class, was more perspicacious, saw deeper. But Hugo's merit lies in the fact that, having artistically embodied the highest democratic ideas of the revolution, he gave them an unprecedented resonance.

At the heart of the plot conflict in all of Hugo's dramas is a fierce duel between a titled despot and a disenfranchised plebeian. Such is the clash of the obscure youth Didier and his girlfriend Marion with the all-powerful minister Richelieu in the drama Marion Delorme, or the exile Hernani with the Spanish king Don Carlos in Hernani. Sometimes such a clash is brought to a grotesque point, as in the drama "The King Amuses", where the conflict is played out between the minion of fate, invested with power, the handsome and heartless egoist King Francis, and the hunchbacked freak, the buffoon Triboulet, offended by God and people.

The very prominence of common people's heroes, such as the foundling Didier, the jester Triboulet, or the lackey Ruy Blas, who are given a genuine nobility of soul, the ability to truly love and actively defend their feelings, and sometimes their convictions, was a great innovation in romantic drama. And its greatest significance lies in the fact that it attracts the hearts of the audience to these oppressed, persecuted, but loving and noble heroes, making them moral winners in the conflict with all-powerful despots and crowned lords, even when these heroes are defeated and must perish. . In the drama Ruy Blas, the author endowed his hero of the people not only with a fiery heart and a noble soul - the usual qualities of a romantic hero - but also with a patriotic feeling and statesmanship, which allow him (in a famous speech at the council of ministers) to cruelly shame the high-born Spanish grandees , shamelessly plundering the agonizing kingdom. The angry eloquence of Ruy Blas, inexorable towards the internal enemies of the fatherland, accusing them from the standpoint of the masses of the people, sounds as if from the rostrum of the Convention: depravity. And still he is being robbed and oppressed!” The language of this accusation - violent, temperamental, equipped with hyperbole and metaphors - is also the flesh of the flesh of the oratorical pathos of the French Revolution.

Hugo's romantic drama is an acutely political and tyrannical drama, far from a chamber performance, closed within the framework of private and family life. Its action is carried out on a wide arena. leaves the home environment to the palaces of nobles and kings, sometimes to the street and the square. She makes history itself a springboard for bringing to the stage major political and moral conflicts used by the author for the most topical purposes (it is not for nothing that in the preface to the drama “Mary Tudor” Hugo speaks of “the past, resurrected for the benefit of the present”). Characteristic is the famous monologue of Don Carlos at the hour of his election as emperor, when from a frivolous rake he becomes a wise sovereign (in "Ernani"); creating this monologue on the eve of the July Revolution, when the advanced forces of the nation pinned their hopes on the change of the rotten Bourbon dynasty, Hugo, as it were, teaches and warns the kings, reminding them of the people, which is the “support of the nation” and

enduring resentment,

Carries the entire weight of the pyramid on his shoulders,—

a people like an ocean, which has already swallowed and can swallow from its waves not one kingdom, but one dynasty.

Hugo, thus, is constantly trying to actively influence the thought of his contemporaries with his artistic word: he dares to teach monarchs how they should rule the state; he fiercely condemns the despotism of kings, ministers, grandees, Spanish grandees or Italian tyrants; he seeks to open the eyes of the people to their violated rights and to the possibility of a revolutionary action against tyranny. Echoes of popular uprisings and revolutions are felt not only in Don Carlos's thoughts about the people - the ocean from "Ernani", but even more directly in "Mary Tudor", where the popular anger against the queen's favorite, as it were, splashes onto the stage, playing a significant role in the course of the action: the masses besiege the palace and finally achieve the execution of the hated Fabiani.

The romantic drama of Hugo pursues, however, not only political, but also moral tasks. In this respect it goes even further than Notre Dame. “Care for the human soul is also the work of a poet. It is impossible for the crowd to disperse from the theater and not take home with them some harsh and deep moral truth, ”the author declares in the preface to Lucrezia Bordja, and in the preface to Mary Tudor he adds that the drama is considered by him as a lesson and teaching that the theater is designed to enlighten, clarify, "lead the hearts", that is, through strong emotions, to implicate the people with certain moral principles. That is why Hugo's drama is characterized by intensity, emphasis, hypertrophy of feelings. His characters - Didier, Hernann, Ruy Blas or Triboulet - have remarkable integrity, uncompromisingness, great passions that completely capture a person; they do not know half-heartedness, duality, hesitation; if love, then to the grave; if insult, then a duel and death; if revenge, then revenge to the last limit, even if it costs one's own life. The girlfriends of romantic heroes - Marchon or Doña Sol - but yield to them in their devotion and fearlessness, readiness to fight for their love and, if necessary, go to death for it, as the unfortunate Platy did in the drama "The King Amuses". And this power of female or male or paternal love, and this selflessness and generous self-giving - all these truly high and noble emotions, embodied in a romantic drama with an unusual pathetic layer, resonate with the widest democratic audience, to which Hugo addressed himself in his new theater. . This is facilitated by a cleverly tied intrigue, and the fascination of the plot, rapid and unexpected turns in the development of the action and in the fate of the characters. The romantic drama thus achieves the moral effect it hopes for, and makes a great contribution to the art of its time.

However, the most violent and exaggerated pathos in the depiction of demonic passions, quite far from the prosaic everyday life of the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, the exclusivity and sometimes low probability of situations (for example, a lackey in love with the queen is the situation of Ruy Blas, which Victor Hugo Balzac could not forgive in any way, on the whole highly appreciating his art), and besides, the heap of melodramatic effects or horrors of all kinds (procession to the scaffold, poisons, daggers, murders from around the corner, which are present in a number of plays) - led in the end to a certain degeneration and the crisis of the romantic drama, which was especially sharply indicated in the failure of the drama The Burgraves (1843).

In the 1940s, the crisis seized not only drama, but all of Hugo's work. However, in the second half of the century, it was destined to turn around again with unexpected force.

The revolutionary events of 1848, and then the counter-revolutionary coup d'état on December 2, 1851, opened a new stage in Hugo's worldview and work.

After February Revolution On the 48th year, which overthrew the July Monarchy, Hugo put forward his candidacy for parliament and, having received 86,965 votes, became a deputy of the Constituent and then the Legislative Assembly. When the June uprising of the Parisian proletariat broke out, for the first time realizing its own class interests, opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie, Hugo at first did not understand the true meaning of the events and was among those deputies who went to the barricades to persuade the workers to stop the hopeless struggle. He proceeded from the old third-class understanding of the people, as if united in their aspirations (“In vain they wanted to make the bourgeoisie a class. The bourgeoisie is simply a satisfied part of the people,” he says in the novel “Les Misérables”), so the June uprising seemed senseless to him “ revolt of the people against itself. However, the bloody suppression of the insurgent workers by the government of the bourgeois republic outraged the writer and marked the beginning of a decisive evolution of his views. The contemporary French poet, novelist and literary critic Jean Rousselot, who published a biography of Victor Hugo in 1961, asserts with full justification that in relation to the working class - "Hugo felt more and more in solidarity with his fate."

At parliamentary meetings, Hugo begins to make sharp speeches in defense of the poor: “I am one of those who think and argue that poverty can be eliminated ... You created laws against anarchy, now create laws against poverty,” he said on June 9, 1849 of the year. This speech, like many of Hugo's other speeches, evoked applause from the deputies on the left, but also the fury of the right. Hugo was booed and threatened. But he continued to stubbornly defend his convictions on the parliamentary platform until the coup d'état of Louis Bonaparte.

It is here that the most remarkable, truly heroic period in the life of Victor Hugo opens.

As early as July 17, 1851, a few months before the December events in one of his public speaking he aptly called the adventurer Bonaparte, striving for power, "Little Napoleon" in reference to his uncle, Napoleon the Great. When on December 2 this little Napoleon, supported by the big and petty bourgeoisie, nevertheless seized power with the help of blackmail, bribery and bloody terror, Hugo stood at the head of the republican resistance and for several days, in contact with the workers' organizations, waged the most fierce struggle for the republic. Hiding in different quarters of Paris, he knew that Bonaparte's agents were looking for him and that his head was valued at 25,000 francs. He was later told that an angry usurper had given orders for him to be shot if he was captured. Only when it became clear that the cause of the republic was lost, Hugo left France and moved to the capital of Belgium - Brussels, and then to the Anglo-Norman island of Jersey, then Guernsey, from where he continued to strike the newly-minted emperor and his minions with furious pamphlets ("Little Napoleon ”, “The Story of a Crime”) and thunderous poems that made up the collection “Retribution”.

The years of exile and loneliness face to face with the ocean were not an easy test for the poet. “Exile is a harsh country,” he once said. But he was consistent in his refusal. Even when his family - wife, sons, daughter, tired of life in a foreign land, left the islands one by one, Hugo remained unshakable. When an amnesty was proclaimed by the emperor in 1859 and many exiles returned to their homeland, he said the famous words: “I will return to France only when freedom returns there.” And he really only returned after the fall of the empire in 1870.

The nineteen-year period of exile proved to be extraordinarily fruitful for Hugo. By the intensity of passions, by the enormous creative power of Hugo of these years, not without reason, they are compared with Beethoven or Wagner. During this time, he created genuine masterpieces both in poetry and in the genre of the novel. During the same time it political activity acquired a truly international character (speeches in defense of the American John Brown, the Italian Garibaldi, Mexican Republicans, Cretan patriots, Spanish revolutionaries, chairmanship of the International Peace Congress, etc.), thanks to which he became a banner for all those who fought for their trampled national and social rights.

When on September 5, 1870, at the height of the Franco-Prussian war, the day after the fall of the empire, Hugo arrived at home, in Paris he was greeted with applause from the crowd of people with shouts of “Long live the republic!”, “Long live Victor Hugo!”. The old poet survived with his compatriots the siege of Paris by the Prussian troops, the birth and fall of the Commune, the rampant ferocious reaction and the horrors of the "bloody week"; with astonishing energy he responded to these historical events with fiery appeals, poems from The Terrible Year, a long-term and purposeful struggle against French and world reaction for an amnesty for the Communards, for the brotherhood of peoples, for peace throughout the world - a struggle that continued until the death of the poet in 1885.

It is from this spiritually and politically intense life that the new character or rearmament of Hugo's romanticism in the second half of the 19th century, after the well-known crisis through which he passed in the 1940s, flows. The originality of the second period of Hugo, who survived the heyday of the critical realism of Balzac and Stendhal and was a contemporary of Zola, lies in the fact that the poet absorbed many features and techniques of realistic art into his work (image social environment, taste for the document, realism of detail, interest in the reproduction of the national language, and others), but at the same time remained a real romantic in the very best value this word. Moreover, the romanticism of the second period is no longer associated with the anarchist lone rebels of the 30s, but with "mass popular movements, with the problem of uprisings and revolutions, which enriched the experience of a political exile, an international fighter and a tribune. Hence, not only the satirical, but also the epic scope, which henceforth acquires the romantic work of Hugo.

The new character of romanticism in the second half of the river is reflected in Hugo primarily in poetry, when the wonderful poetic books “Retribution” (1853), “Contemplations” (1856), “The Terrible Year” (1872), three volumes of “Legends of the Ages” (1859) were created. , 1877, 1883) and others.

Starting with the collection "Retribution", this poetry takes on a pronounced militant and emphatically democratic character. A master of poetic form, Hugo had never before been inspired by the theory of "art for art's sake"; now his understanding of the civil mission of the poet, prepared over the course of the 30s, reaches its true climax: the poet’s word should “carats, “wake up”, raise peoples, call humanity to high moral standards. That is why, in the poem "Nox", placed as an introduction to the collection "Retribution", he appeals to the muse of hatred, who inspired the once great epic poets Juvenal and Dante, to now help him "drive a pillory" into the empire of Napoleon III. That is why he warns his publisher Etzel in advance that he will be “violent” in his poetry, just as Dante, Tacitus and even Christ were furious, who with a whip in his hand drove the merchants out of the temple. And the strength of his violent indignation and furious denunciation, in which he sees his duty as a poet and citizen, is really such that it allows him to smash his political opponent - the emperor and his gang - with unusually energetic, indignant words, not embarrassed in expressions, introducing into high poetry deliberate vulgarisms, the sharpest contemptuous nicknames and abusive epithets.

The energy and fury of the language is paired in the poems of "Retribution" with satirical decline, with the art of caricature, which Hugo masters in this period to perfection. The December coup of 1851 is depicted in the same "Nox" in the form of a bandit raid, Loupe Bonaparte - in the form of a thief, with a knife in his bosom climbing at midnight on< трон Франции. Вторая империя появляется перед читателем то в образе балагана с большим барабаном, в который заставляют бить державную тень Наполеона I, то в виде “луврской харчевни”, где идет шумный пир и распоясавшиеся победители, хохоча, предлагают тосты: один кричит “всех резать”, другой—“грабить” и т. д. Постоянное использование реалистической детали в этих нарочито сниженных, окарикатуренных образах Второй империи позволяет увидеть источники сатиры Гюго не только в литературных традициях (Ювенала, Данте, Агриппы Д"0бинье), но и в политической карикатуре изобразительного искусства, которая была чрезвычайно распространена во Франции Июльской монархии и особенно республики I848—1851 годов.

However, even in the collection "Retribution" Hugo is not limited to direct satire. By analogy with painting, one could say that Delacroix's canvases full of revolutionary romantic pathos are combined here with Daumier's caricature. The peculiarity of Hugo's satirical poetry is that the political caricature is most closely connected with prophecy, with the optimistic concept of the historical process.

Hugo's political views come at this time into unity with his philosophical and religious concept of the world. He does not adhere to the official religion and resolutely renounces Catholic dogmas, incurring the indignation of the clerics. But he understands God as a good principle, which, through trials, catastrophes and revolutions, leads humanity along the path of progress. The institutions hated by the poet - monarchies and despotisms of all kinds - appear to him as inertia, immobility, absolute evil, which hinders this movement, delays humanity in its ascent to the light. Hugo, thus, deeply feels the drama of the development of human history, but never loses optimistic confidence in overcoming evil and the ultimate triumph of a bright beginning. This, undoubtedly, idealistic, but dynamic and revolutionary outlook pervades all his work of the second period. No matter how terrible or base the picture of reality, recreated by the satirical genius of Hugo, he always strives to rise above the given, the actual, the present, in order to see the movement towards the ideal, towards the future, which will replace today's shame. No wonder the furious satire of the poem “Rent for the night” ends significant words about the fact that while the imperial gang is walking with incredible noise, somewhere along the night path "God's messenger - the future" is hurrying. At the end of the poem “Map of Europe”, which speaks of the enslavement and oppression of many European peoples, of their tears and torments, the poet again turns to the future: “The future awaits us! And now, spinning and howling, sweeping away the kings, the rumble of the surf rushes ... ”

It is significant that the coming of the desired future does not seem idyllic to the poet. This future must be won in a terrible battle (recall the dynamic images of the surf, thundering full, storms, constant in Hugo's poetry), and in this battle the main role is assigned to the peoples addressed by the poet; it is them who are called by a trumpet voice “from the four ends of the sky”, it is eternity that tells them to “get up”.

The constant faith in the people, the appeal to the people, the thought of the people and the revolution is the most characteristic feature of Hugo's poetry of the second period. Thoughts and images connected with the people pass through "Retribution", "The Terrible Year" and through the "Legend of Ages". Several special poems are dedicated to the people in "Retribution". In one of them, built on characteristic romantic contrasts, the poet deploys his old favorite image of the people-ocean, both meek and formidable, concealing unknown depths, being both terrible and gentle, able to split a rock and spare a blade of grass (“The People”) . In the poem “Caravan”, the people appear in the form of a mighty lion, appearing among predatory animals, peaceful and majestic, always following the same path “which he came yesterday and will come tomorrow-), so the poet emphasizes the inevitability of this coming, which will instantly silence the frantic growl, howl and squeal of predators from the thicket.

The period of historical events associated with the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, when the poems of the “Terrible Year” were created, enriched Hugo with even more relevant examples of national courage and heroism. He sings of the people's Paris as a valiant "martyr city" and "warrior city", staunchly resisting the enemy; he is full of gratitude for the “immense tenderness” of the majestic people, when on March 18, the day of the proclamation of the Paris Commune, its fighters dismantled the barricades in order to skip the funeral procession in which Victor Hugo himself, dejected and depressed, followed the coffin of his son who had suddenly died; he is struck by the heroism of the Communards, when, during the brutal massacre that the executioners of Versailles inflicted on them, they went to their death with their heads held high. In the poems “The Trial of the Revolution” and “In the Darkness” Hugo creates a genuine apology for the revolution, speaking of it as a “dawn” and a pre-dawn “beam” that fights with darkness, drawing a dramatic picture of the struggle of the old world, unsuccessfully trying to stop the “flood ” revolution.

The revolutionary-romantic pathos of Hugo, with his favorite images of a roaring wave and a boiling whirlpool, in which the gloomy ghosts of the old world disappear, reaches a particularly great intensity here. The poem “In the Darkness”, placed in the collection “The Terrible Year” as an epilogue, was created back in 1853, that is, at the time of “Retribution”, - another confirmation of the fact that the thought of revolution is one of the cross-cutting themes that are passing through the poetry of Hugo's second period for decades. Hugo's romantic poetry is characterized by a deep personal feeling; it fills almost all of his poetry collections. The lyrical image of the exiled poet, who retired to the ocean, defeated, but not broken, refusing to accept the dishonor of his homeland and calling in the darkness to "sleepy souls", is constantly present in the poems of "Retribution":

Exile, I will stand by the sea,
Like a black ghost on a rock
And, with the rumble of coastal waves arguing,
My voice will sound in the darkness...—

says the poet in the first verse of this book.

The emotional palette of the collection “Contemplation”, which the poet compiled from poems he created over a twenty-five-year period, is unusually rich. Noteworthy is the sincerity of the intonation with which Hugo speaks of his joys and sorrows, with the extraordinary visibility and materiality of the artistic image, with the help of which he reveals deeply personal feelings.

The lyrical is inseparable from the epic in Hugo's poetry; the poet's personal feelings and experiences are always intertwined with a tense thought about the universe, with the desire to capture the vast human and even cosmic world with an inner eye. The long-term loneliness of exile, the constant contemplation of the raging elements on the ocean coast especially disposed Hugo to such thoughts about the cataclysms that occur both in nature and in human society. “I see the real outlines of all that people call deeds, history, events, successes, catastrophes, the vast mechanics of Providence,” he once wrote in his Jersey period diary, summing up the experience of a three-year exile.

Already in the satirical “Retribution”, Hugo devotes a lot of space to the historical fresco, the campaigns of Napoleon and the “soldiers of 1802”, depicted in the majestic Homeric traditions, in order to emphasize by the very grandeur of these campaigns the meagerness and ridiculousness of his contemporary empire, headed by the unworthy nephew of Napoleon I. Pictures of the battle at Waterloo, the retreats from Moscow, St. Helena, where the former ruler of the world dies (“Redemption”), are created in a truly epic manner. It is no coincidence that the well-known French literary scholar Brunetière called this poem by Hugo an example of “epic satire”.

However, Hugo's poetry rises to the heights of a genuine epic in the huge cycle “Legend of the Ages”, where the poet conceived “to capture humanity in a kind of cyclic epic, depict it consistently and simultaneously in all aspects of history, legend, philosophy, religion, science, merging in one grandiose movement to the light,” as he writes in the preface to the first part. The interpretation of human history as a constant ascent to goodness and light moves the author on. a special selection of events, images and plots, which are taken not so much from real history as from legendary. There is no need to look for historical accuracy here: Hugo pursues other - moral and edifying tasks. To do this, he involves ancient gods, biblical sages, legendary and historical kings and heroes in the depiction of the human drama. The epic narrative in his "Legend" is linked to the symbol behind almost every one of its episodes.

Hugo's moral edification is given in unusually vivid and powerful images. Here is Cain, running after the murder of his brother to the ends of the earth, hiding from God's wrath behind the high walls of towers or in an underground necklace. And everywhere he sees the same keen eye in the harsh skies (“Conscience”). Here is the shadow of the famous in ancient times King Canute, who came to the throne, having killed his aged father, and now wanders in a shroud covered in blood, not daring to appear before the highest court (“Paricide”). Here is the bloodthirsty feudal lord Tifain, who killed a child despite the entreaties of an old man and a woman-mother and was cruelly tormented for this by an eagle that flew off his iron helmet (“Eagle from a helmet”). It is characteristic that the poet not only reveals the crime, but immediately severely; punishes the criminal, creating, as in "Retribution", a right judgment with his punishing word. Not without reason, before killing his ferocious master, the eagle turns to the whole universe for a witness: “Starry sky, mountains dressed with the white innocence of snows, oh flowers, oh forests, cedars, firs, maples. I take you as a witness that this man is angry!” It is not for nothing that the whole section of medieval history from the second book of “Legends”, which includes the poem “The Eagle from the Helmet”, is eloquently called “Warnings and Retributions”.

The general tyrannical spirit of “Legends of the Ages” is connected with the theme of evil and retribution. The images of kings, monarchs, legendary or historical despots, passing through the entire “Legend” from ancient times to the poet’s modern times, from the Spanish Philip II or the Italian Cosimo de Medici to the French Napoleon III, are revealed as a gallery of monsters that trample and trample on the lives of peoples, abandoning them into the war, threatening them with a scaffold. They are opposed by carriers of a heroic, noble beginning: wandering knights of the Middle Ages, who are ready at any moment for a feat for the sake of good or punishing a villain, defenders of their people, the legendary heroes Sid or Roland, or, finally, poor people embodying true humanity, modesty and kindness. Thus, not a passive and systematic ascent to the light, but a cruel conflict between the power of evil and the heroic defense of good, is put by the poet at the basis of the “Legend”, which is a single epic, but composed of many different episodes, moral conflicts, heroic acts and the most picturesque paintings.

A characteristic feature of romantic poetry, which is so clearly reflected in the "Legend of the Ages", is that it is not given a direct image, but rather the transformation of everyday reality, the presentation of human history and political struggle in sometimes space and mythological frameworks extended. The poem “Satyr” is indicative, which tells how Hercules, grabbing a little satyr by the ear, brought him with him to Olympus, where the ancient gods live. At first they make fun of the ugly guest, but then they give him a lyre, and he begins to sing to them about the Earth, about the birth of the soul, about man and his long-suffering history. Gradually, before the eyes of the astonished gods, it grows to an extraordinary size: here it is a post about a shining future, about love and harmony, about freedom and life triumphing over destroyed dogma. He is immensely great, he personifies the mighty nature - Pan and makes the pagan god - Jupiter fall on the columns.

Researchers of Hugo's work have repeatedly emphasized the complete consistency of the poet's philosophical thought with its embodiment in visible poetic images, his ability to paint even the most abstract concepts, because concrete landscapes or symbolic pictures are always freely born around his thoughts or feelings. In the "Legend of the Ages" the author has achieved an unprecedented luxury of picturesque images, shining enchanting paintings and flaming colors. “An artist, sculptor and musician, he created a visible and audible philosophy,” his contemporary Baudelaire rightly said about Hugo.

The same epic breath that is felt in "Retribution" and "Legend of the Ages" - the breadth of historical and artistic vision, the scale of ideas, the constant preoccupation with the fate of individuals and entire nations - inspired Hugo to create novels of the second period. These are Les Misérables (1862), Toilers of the Sea (1866). "The Man Who Laughs" (1869) and "The Ninety-Third Year" (1874). They are genuine epics, multifaceted buildings in which a broad historical plan, the social life of an entire era, stands behind the romantic intrigue. In particular, the huge novel Les Misérables, a true encyclopedia of the nineteenth century, is a polyphonic work with many planes, storylines, motifs, and problems. It includes both the social problem of poverty and lack of rights of the lower classes, and an extensive historical and political plan covering a whole range of issues of the French Revolution, the empire of Napoleon I, the Battle of Waterloo, the Restoration, the June Monarchy, the republican uprising of 1832; it raises pressing issues of public administration and legislation, issues of child homelessness and the criminal world; here the problem of moral perfection is posed (the image of Bishop Miriel and then Jean Valjean) and the spiritual evolution of the generation of Hugo (the story of Marius) is revealed. The purest lyricism sounds here (the love of Marius and Cosette), and the sharp political characterization of the working-class faubourg Saint-Lituan as a “powder flask of suffering and thought”, located at the gates of Paris, and the pathos of the barricade war, the dream of a bright future that the revolution brings to mankind (“ the horizon that opens from the height of the barricade”, in the speech of the republican Enjolras).

The romantic heroes of Hugo are always people of significant destiny. Or these are the poor, rejected by society, like Jean Valjean, who stole a bun for his sister's hungry children and was sent to hard labor for this, which imposed a terrible stigma on his entire future life (“Les Misérables”). Or is it the victim of the king's crime - Gwynplaine, sold and mutilated in early childhood, with his (monstrous mask of laughter, personifying suffering humanity, disfigured by the criminal social system (“The Man Who Laughs”). Romantic scale, hyperbole, maximum expressiveness, the grotesque of human suffering is clearly felt in the construction of these characters (Gwynplaine's mask not without reason surpasses all possible deformities, being a real "parody of the human image").

In contrast to the naturalistic description, commensurate with the actual scale of events and not detached from everyday facts and phenomena, Hugo in his description highlights the significant, impressive and grandiose, denoting not only the visible, but also the spiritual essence of things hidden behind it. Far-reaching conclusions always follow from the description of Hugo, sometimes entire philosophical concepts. Characteristic, for example, is the description of the raging sea in The Man Who Laughs, when the sea, as if on purpose, pursues (and finally absorbs in its depths the criminal comprachoses who disfigured and abandoned little Gwynplaine, and then for many years the lot carefully carries a flask on its waves containing the secret of his fate. According to Hugo, behind this raging element lies divine retribution for a crime and the protection of an unjustly offended child. Such a providential interpretation of the universe also applies to human history, in which Hugo also rejects crucial fate, fate, the will of Providence. But in another paragraph he judges historical events about wars, for example, is more sober than bourgeois historians. According to him, the winners of historical battles and battles are not great generals, but unknown people, ordinary soldiers, the people themselves, whose valor he does not tire of glorifying in all his novels.

Hugo's novels are openly tendentious. The author himself says in Les Misérables that his book is not a simple sketch of events, that it includes a certain trend. Seeing the world in sharp contrasts, in constant movement from evil to good, he tries not only to capture, but also to preach this movement, to actively promote it with his word. Therefore, he directly and sharply reveals his author's attitude to events and characters. He has absolute righteous people, such as Bishop Miriel from Les Misérables, or absolute villains, such as Barkilfodro from The Man Who Laughs. Like Legend of the Ages, his novels are fierce battle good and evil forces, and not only in the outside world, but also in the souls of the heroes. The novelistic plot of Les Misérables is largely built on just such a grandiose struggle in the soul of Jean Valjean, a struggle that is compared to a hurricane, an earthquake, a duel of giants. Jean Valjean not only wins this battle with his conscience, but becomes a kind of grotesque greatness (“Everything that is courageous, virtuous, heroic, holy in the world is all in it,” declares Marius, who only at the end of the novel knows greatness the soul of this man from the people, a former convict who became a “saint”).

Hugo's novels are always novels of great and noble feelings and generous deeds, like the actions of the same Jean Valjean, or the feat of little Gavroche on the revolutionary barricade, or the courageous behavior of Gwynplaine, abandoned in the icy desert and saving the life of an even more helpless baby - Dei.

Thus, the humanist Hugo preaches kindness, generosity, truth, as he understands it, in the very plot fabric of his novels. He, moreover, freely breaks into this plot fabric with the author's digressions, additions, assessments, judgments, questions and answers “aloud”. In this sense, his authorial style is frankly lyrical and publicistic. As he goes along, he gives his assessment of the French Revolution, which he considers to be a mighty and noble movement, "full of kindness." He passionately defends, using the example of Jean Valjean, his moral views, which consist in the fact that in the human soul there is a divine basis, a spark that goodness can ignite and turn into a radiant radiance. Such pathetic, philosophical, historical and political digressions are one of the attractions of Hugo's novels, their undeniable richness.

In the last novel, "The Ninety-Third Year", the problem of revolution, which constantly stands in the work of Hugo, receives its most complete embodiment.

The ninety-third year, no matter what official historiography says about it, branding this pinnacle of the French Revolution as the year of the guillotine, terror and horror, for Hugo is “a memorable year of heroic battles.” Covering in his plot the most dramatic knot of events (the Vendée in revolt against the republic, the formidable coalition of European monarchs, the British ready to enter French soil, the internal and external counter-revolution waiting for the moment to plunge a knife into the heart of the revolutionary Convention), the great humanist Hugo, without closing an eye on the necessity of revolutionary violence, on the forced cruelty of civil war, wants to show the greatness and humanity of the revolution. And this grandiose task is solved by him with the help of equally grandiose means: enlarged characters and situations, contrasting and hyperbolic constructions, pathetic and dramatic scenes, each of which reveals a new facet or a new aspect of the revolutionary consciousness that is formed in the midst of battles.

Significant is the depiction of the Convention as the “highest peak” of the revolution, which Hugo likens to the Himalayas. The revolution and its brainchild, the Convention, appear in the novel as a great mass movement, closely connected with the street, with the widest sections of the people. It is very important that the artist saw and emphasized the creative role of the Convention, which, in the terrible situation of the war, surrounded by enemies, at the same time pondered the project of public education, created primary schools, dealt with the issue of improving hospitals.

But the most remarkable feature of the novel is that when sketching these historically large-scale events - wars, revolution, its solution of the enormous importance of political and ideological tasks - the artist does not lose sight of the individual human drama that unfolds against the background of these events. The combination of high epic and intimate lyrics, which is characteristic of Hugo's poetry, is no less pronounced in his novel. This is evidenced by the very first episodes of “The Ninety-Third Year” - the meeting of the Parisian “Red Cap” battalion with an unfortunate peasant woman, a widow, a mother hiding with her children in the thicket of the Vendée forests, a dialogue between her and Sergeant Radub (“Who are you? .. Which party Do you sympathize?.. Are you blue? White? Who are you with?" - "With children..."), and the tear of a stern warrior of the revolution, and his proposal to adopt orphans, making them the children of the battalion. How to link motherhood, childhood, love, mercy with the formidable pace of the revolution, which cleanses the earth in the name of a radiant future? This is the most important problem that Hugo poses in his novel.

The main characters of Hugo personify the forces of revolution and counter-revolution, collided in a fierce duel. The inhumanity of the old world, which uses in the struggle against the revolution illiteracy, superstition, the slavish habit of obedience of the common people, especially the dark peasant masses, is embodied by the artist in the image of the Marquis de Lantenac, the mercilessly cruel, resolute, active leader of the rebellious Vendée, who announces himself bloody executions, total executions and arson of peaceful villages that adopted the republic (it is noteworthy that Hugo's enemies of the revolution are no less large-scale than she herself, otherwise her struggle with the old world would have been so difficult, so dramatic).

Another contrasting pair of Hugo's heroes belongs to the camp of the revolution. A former priest-turned-revolutionary, Cimourdain, and his pupil, the young general of the republic, Gauvin, serve the same great cause of defending the republic, nor, according to Hugo, they embody two opposite tendencies of the revolution. Stern and inflexible Cimourdain relies on violence, with which the republic must overcome its enemies. Beloved by the mountain, Hugo Gauvain combines military courage with mercy.

The opposing positions of Spmourdain and Gauvain clash sharply around the act of the Marquis Lantenac, who rescues little hostages from a burning tower - adopted children of the Red Cap battalion and voluntarily surrenders himself to the Republicans. Then, at the climax, Hugo's constant romantic tendency is sharply manifested, striving to prove that the actions of people should be controlled by the highest humanity, that good can win even in the soul of the most evil person. (“Humanity defeated inhumanity. With what help was this victory won? .. How was it possible to defeat this colossus of malice and hatred? What weapons were used against him? Cannon, guns? No, a cradle.”)

But the generous act of the Marquis de Lantenac. elicits a backlash in Gauvain's soul - a passionate argument that he has with his own conscience: should he return nobility for nobility and free Lantenac? But what about France?

Gauvain's action, which frees Lantenac, can in no way be justified from the point of view of the real tasks of the revolution and the fatherland. Gauvain's speech before the revolutionary tribunal proves that he himself understood this very well and condemned himself to death (“I forgot the burned villages, the trampled fields, the brutally murdered prisoners ... I forgot about France, which was betrayed by England; I gave freedom to the executioner of the motherland. I'm guilty").

Thus, the tragic contradiction between the humane goal and the forced cruel means of the revolution is embodied. The contradiction between the noble generosity of its fighters and the severe need to protect the revolution from its enemies. It is not for nothing that it is in the mouth of Govzna (during his last conversation with Cimourdain on the night before his execution) that Hugo puts his utopian program, his understanding of the revolution in its formidable present and the wonderful future that it brings to people. Gauvin justifies without hesitation this moment revolution as a cleansing storm that should heal society (“Knowing how terrible the miasma, I understand the fury of the hurricane”). But at the same time, without deviating from his humanistic aspirations, Gauvin (Hugo) expects from the revolution not only universal equality and equal rights, for which the stern Cimourdain advocates, but also the flowering of the highest human feelings - mercy, devotion, mutual generosity and love; he dreams of a "republic of the spirit" that will enable man to "rise above nature"; he believes in eternal daring and boundless development of human genius.

Such was the answer of the old humanist, philanthropist Hugo to the numerous enemies and slanderers who attacked the revolution with particular fury after the daring attempt of the Paris Commune.

In 1952, when the whole world was celebrating Victor Hugo's 150th birthday, we talked a lot about Hugo's rapprochement with realism, the highest artistic method of the 19th century. Sometimes, with an apologetic intonation, they wrote that, “contrary to” romanticism, Hugo reflected the true reality of his time, especially in such masterpieces as “Retribution” or “Les Misérables”. However, in the twenty years that have passed since then, Soviet literary criticism has done a lot for the study of romanticism, showing that this method of nineteenth-century fiction had its enormous achievements, and today there is no need to “justify” Hugo in his romanticism.

In fact, all of Hugo's aesthetics (as well as ethics and philosophy) remain deeply romantic in spirit, which does not mean at all that the writer "leaves" reality or distorts it in his work. On the contrary, Hugo's romantic method in a number of cases allows him to pose some political and moral problems on a larger scale (the problems of the people and the revolution, for example), sometimes allows him to rise above the immediate visible events today to see invisible majestic processes behind them, to see the future, which Gauvin speaks about in his dying epiphany.

All of Hugo's ethics and aesthetics are based on overcoming the present, on rising above everyday life and on the impulse towards a moral ideal. In contrast to the naturalistic method, which consciously but broke away from everyday life, Hugo is characterized by the power and scope of the imagination, the creation of images on the verge of the real and the fantastic (like the monstrous Gwynplaine mask, symbolizing the general mutilation of man in an inhuman world). This is the aesthetics of excess and contrast, deliberate enlargement - up to the grotesque - of both heroes and events, both virtue and vice, the aesthetics of constant antitheses: black and white, evil and good, not only coexisting, but also constantly fighting among themselves in throughout the universe and in the soul of man. This, finally, is purely romantic tendentiousness: the conscious predominance of a moralistic goal over the tasks of creating a typical character (this is why Hugo cannot be reproached from the point of view of realistic aesthetics for the “unjustified” unexpectedly magnanimous act of the Marquis Lantenac).

These are the features of the artistic and romantic reconstruction of the world in the work of Hugo, with the help of which he vividly expresses his humanistic assessment of events and attracts the hearts of people to the destitute against the rich and aristocrats, to the masses and the revolution against tyranny, to mercy and spiritual greatness against cruelty, meanness and baseness of every kind.

Hugo's books, thanks to their humanity and nobility, thanks to their brilliant imagination, fascination, dream, continue to excite adult and young readers from all over the world.

Notes.

F. M. Dostoevsky. Sobr. soch., vol. 13. M. - L., 1930, p. 526.

Translation by V. Bryusov.

Brief biography of Victor Hugo

Victor Marie Hugo - legendary French writer prose writer, leader of French romanticism. The most famous works: Notre Dame Cathedral, Les Misérables, The Man Who Laughs, Cromwell. He was born on February 26, 1802 in the east of France in Besançon. The father of the future writer served in the Napoleonic army, and his mother was a royalist. He was the youngest of three brothers. When Victor was little, the family traveled often, so his childhood was spent in different places: in Paris, Marseille, Madrid, Corsica. The main home for the Hugo family was Paris. Travel left an indelible mark on the soul of a romantic child and later appeared in his work.

Soon his parents separated, and little Victor stayed with his mother. He received his education at the Lyceum of Louis the Great, and at the age of 14 he was already seriously engaged in literary activities. At such a young age, he wrote one tragedy dedicated to his mother, translations of Virgil's works, and many poems. For his poems, he was repeatedly awarded the Academy. Readers paid attention to his work after the release of the satire Telegraph. At 20, Hugo married Adele Fouche, with whom he later had five children. A year later, the novel "Gan the Icelander" was published. However, he was not particularly popular.

Soon the writer became friends with the critic Charles Nodier, who influenced his work. However, their friendship did not last long. In the 1830s, Nodier became critical of Hugo's work. Resuming relations with his father, the writer dedicated an ode to him - "Ode to my father" (1823). In 1828, Victor's father, who by that time had become a general in Napoleon's army, died. The play "Cromwell" (1827) with elements of a romantic drama caused a stormy reaction from the public. Such outstanding personalities as Merimee, Lamartine, Delacroix began to visit his house more often. In 1841, the writer became a member of the French Academy, and a few years later - a peer.

The famous novelist Chateaubriand had a great influence on his work. Notre Dame Cathedral (1831) is considered the first full-fledged and, undoubtedly, successful novel of the writer. This work was immediately translated into many European languages ​​and began to attract thousands of tourists from all over the world to France. After the publication of this book, the country began to treat old buildings more carefully. One of the most famous novels writer is "The Man Who Laughs" (1869). The action of the novel takes place in England at the end of the 17th - beginning of the 18th century. Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885 due to pneumonia. More than a million people attended his funeral.

Hugo Victor Marie- French writer, poet, a prominent representative of the romantic literary trend - was born in Besançon on February 26, 1802. His father was a high-ranking soldier, therefore, as a child, Hugo managed to visit Corsica, Elba, Marseille, Madrid, which later played a role in his formation as a romantic writer. A noticeable imprint on the formation of his personality was played by the monarchist and Voltaire views of his mother. After the divorce, she took Victor away, and in 1813 they settled in Paris. His education continued in the capital: in 1814, Hugo became a pupil of the private boarding school Cordier, from 1814 to 1818 he was a student of the Lyceum of Louis the Great.

Hugo began writing at the age of 14. His first publications - debut poems and the novel "Byug Zhargal" - date back to 1821. Victor was 19 when his mother's death forced him to look for a source of livelihood, and he chose the craft of a writer. The poetic collection "Odes and Miscellaneous Poems" (1822) attracted Louis XVIII and brought the author an annual annuity. In the same year, Hugo married Adele Fouche, with whom he became the father of five children.

The preface to the drama "Cromwell", written in 1827, attracted general attention to Hugo, as it became a real manifesto of a new - romantic - direction in French dramaturgy. Thanks to him, as well as the story "The Last Day of the Condemned" (1829) and the collection of poems "Oriental Motives" (1829), the author gained great fame. 1829 marked the beginning of an extremely fruitful period in his creative biography, which lasted until 1843.

In 1829, Hugo wrote another work that became resonant - the drama "Ernani", which put an end to literary disputes, marking the final victory of democratic romanticism. Dramaturgical experiments made Hugo not only famous, but also a wealthy author. In addition, active cooperation with theaters gave another acquisition: the actress Juliette Drouet appeared in his life, who was his muse and mistress for more than three decades. In 1831, one of Hugo's most popular novels, Notre Dame de Paris, was published.

In 1841, the writer became a member of the French Academy, which meant official recognition of his merits in the field of literature. The tragic death of his daughter and son-in-law in 1843 forced him to abandon his active social life in favor of creative work: it was at that time that the idea of ​​a large-scale social novel arose, which Hugo conventionally called "Troubles." However, the revolution of 1848 returned the writer to the bosom of social and political activity; in the same year he was elected to the National Assembly.

In December 1851, after a coup d'état, Victor Hugo, who opposed the self-proclaimed Emperor Louis Napoleon III Bonaparte, was forced to flee the country. He spent almost two decades in a foreign land, living in the British Isles, where he wrote works that gained immense popularity, in particular, the lyric collection Contemplations (1856), the novels Les Misérables (1862, revised The Adversity), The Workers sea" (1866), "The Man Who Laughs" (1869).

In 1870, after the overthrow of Napoleon III, Hugo, who for many years served as the personification of the opposition, returned triumphantly to Paris. In 1871 he was elected to the National Assembly, but the conservative policy of the majority led the writer to refuse the deputy post. During this period, Hugo continued his literary activity, but he did not create anything that would increase his fame. He experienced the death in 1883 of Juliette Drouet as a severe loss, and two years later, on May 22, 1885, the 83-year-old Victor Hugo himself died. His funeral became a national event; the ashes of the great writer rest in the Pantheon - in the same place where the remains of Rousseau and Voltaire are buried.

Biography from Wikipedia

Victor Marie Hugo(fr. Victor Marie Hugo; February 26, 1802, Besancon - May 22, 1885, Paris) - French writer (poet, prose writer and playwright), one of the main figures of French romanticism. Member of the French Academy (1841).

life and creation

Childhood

Victor Hugo was the youngest of three brothers (the elders were Abel, (1798-1865) and Eugene, (1800-1837)). The writer's father, Joseph Leopold Sigisber Hugo (1773-1828), became a general in the Napoleonic army, his mother Sophie Trebuchet (1772-1821), the daughter of a Nantes shipowner, was a royalist Voltairian.

Hugo's early childhood takes place in Marseille, Corsica, Elba (1803-1805), Italy (1807), Madrid (1811), where his father's career takes place, and from where the family returns to Paris every time. Travel left a deep impression in the soul of the future poet and prepared his romantic outlook.

In 1813, Hugo's mother, Sophie Trebuchet, who had a love affair with General Lagory, separated from her husband and settled with her son in Paris.

Youth and the beginning of literary activity

From 1814 to 1818 Hugo studied at the Lyceum Louis the Great. At the age of 14, he began his creative activity: he writes his unpublished tragedies - “ Yrtatine”, which he dedicates to his mother; and " Athelie ou les scandinaves", drama" Louis de Castro”, translates Virgil. At the age of 15, he already receives an honorary review at the Academy's competition for the poem " Les avantages des études”, in 1819 - two prizes at the Jeux Floraux competition for the poems “Verdun Maidens” ( Vierges de Verdun) and the ode "On the restoration of the statue of Henry IV" ( Retablissement de la statue de Henri IV), which marked the beginning of his "Legend of the Ages". Then he prints the ultra-royalist satire " Telegraph”, which first drew the attention of readers to it. In 1819-1821 he publishes Le Conservateur litteraire, a literary supplement to a royalist Catholic magazine Le Conservator. Filling out his own edition under various pseudonyms, Hugo published there " Ode on the Death of the Duke of Berry”, which for a long time secured his reputation as a monarchist.

In October 1822, Hugo married Adele Fouche (1803-1868), five children were born in this marriage:

• Leopold (1823-1823)
• Leopoldina, (1824-1843)
• Charles, (1826-1871)
• François-Victor, (1828-1873)
• Adele (1830-1915).

In 1823 Victor Hugo's novel The Icelander was published. Han d'Islande), which received a lukewarm reception. Well-reasoned criticism of Charles Nodier led to a meeting and further friendship between him and Victor Hugo. Shortly thereafter, a meeting was held in the library of the Arsenal, the cradle of romanticism, which had a great influence on the development of Victor Hugo's work.

The friendship between Hugo and Nodier would last from 1827 to 1830, when the latter would become increasingly critical of the writer's works. Somewhat earlier, Hugo resumes relations with his father and writes the poem "Ode to my father" ( Odes a mon père, 1823), " two islands" (1825) and "After the battle" ( Apres la bataille). His father died in 1828.

Hugo's "Cromwell" Cromwell), written specifically for the great actor of the French Revolution, François-Joseph Talma and published in 1827, caused heated debate. In the preface to the drama, the author rejects the conventions of classicism, especially the unity of place and time, and lays the foundations of romantic drama.

The Hugo family often arranges receptions in their house and establishes friendly relations with Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, Merimee, Musset, Delacroix.

From 1826 to 1837, the writer's family often lived in the Château de Roche, in Bièvre, the estate of Louis-François Bertin, editor Journal des debates. There Hugo meets Berlioz, Liszt, Chateaubriand, Giacomo Meyerbeer; composes collections of poems "Oriental motives" ( Les Orientales, 1829) and "Autumn Leaves" ( Les Feuilles d'automne, 1831). The theme of "Oriental Motifs" is the Greek War of Independence, where Hugo speaks in support of Homer's homeland.

In 1829, The Last Day of the Condemned to Death was published ( Dernier Jour d'un condamne), in 1834 - "Claude Ge" ( Claude Gueux). In these two short novels Hugo expresses his negative attitude towards the death penalty.

Novel " Cathedral of Notre Dame” was published in the interval between these two works, in 1831.

Theater years

From 1830 to 1843 Victor Hugo worked almost exclusively for the theatre. However, he publishes several collections of poetry during this time:

• "Autumn leaves" ( Les Feuilles d'automne, 1831),
• "Songs of Twilight" ( Les Chants du Crepuscule, 1835),
• "Inner Voices" ( Les Voix interiors, 1837),
• "Rays and shadows" ( Les Rayons and les Ombres, 1840).

In Songs of the Twilight, Victor Hugo glorifies the July Revolution of 1830 with great admiration.

Scandal during the first production " Ernani» (1830). Lithograph J.-I. Granville ( 1846)

Already in 1828 he staged his early play " Amy Robsart". 1829 - the year of the creation of the play "Ernani" (first staged in 1830), which became the occasion for literary battles between representatives of the old and new art. Theophile Gauthier, who enthusiastically accepted this romantic work, acted as an ardent defender of everything new in dramaturgy. These disputes remained in the history of literature under the name " battle for Hernani". The play "Marion Delorme", banned in 1829, was staged at the theater "Porte Saint-Martin"; and "The King is amused" - in the "Comedy Française" in 1832 (removed from the repertoire and banned immediately after the premiere, the show was resumed only after 50 years).

The prohibition of the latter prompted Victor Hugo to write the following preface to the original 1832 edition, which began: " The appearance of this drama on the stage of the theater gave rise to unheard-of actions on the part of the government. The day after the first performance, the author received a note from Monsieur Jousselin de la Salle, director of the stage at the Théâtre-France. Here is its exact content: “It is now ten thirty minutes, and I have received an order to stop the performance of the play The King Amuses himself. Monsieur Talor conveyed this order to me on behalf of the Minister».

It was November 23rd. Three days later, on November 26, Victor Hugo sent a letter to the editor-in-chief of Le National, which said: Monsieur, I have been warned that some of the noble students and artists are going to the theater this evening or tomorrow and demand the showing of the drama The King Amuses himself, and also protest against the unheard-of act of arbitrariness due to which the play was closed. I hope, monsieur, that there are other means to punish these illegal acts, and I will use them. Let me use your newspaper to support the friends of freedom, art and thought, and prevent violent speeches that may lead to the rebellion so desired by the government for a long time. With deep respect, Victor Hugo. November 26, 1832».

At the heart of the plot conflict in all of Hugo's dramas is a fierce duel between a titled despot and a disenfranchised plebeian. Such is the clash of the obscure youth Didier and his girlfriend Marion with the all-powerful minister Richelieu in the drama Marion Delorme, or the exile Hernani with the Spanish king Don Carlos in Hernani. Sometimes such a clash is brought to a grotesque point, as in the drama "The King Amuses", where the conflict is played out between the minion of fate, invested with power, the handsome and heartless egoist King Francis, and the hunchbacked freak, the jester Triboulet, offended by God and people.

In 1841 Hugo was elected to the French Academy, in 1845 he received a peerage, in 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly. Hugo was an opponent of the coup d'état of 1851 and after the proclamation of Napoleon III as emperor was in exile. In 1870 he returned to France, and in 1876 he was elected senator.

Death and funeral

Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885, at the age of 84, from pneumonia. The funeral ceremony of the famous writer lasted ten days; about a million people took part in it.

On June 1, the coffin with the body of Hugo was exhibited for two days under triumphal arch, which was covered with black crepe.

After a magnificent national funeral, the ashes of the writer were placed in the Pantheon.

Artworks

Quasimodo(hero of the novel " Cathedral of Notre Dame”) - Luc-Olivier Merson. Engraving from Alfred Barbu's book " Victor Hugo and his time» (1881)

Like many young writers of his era, Hugo was greatly influenced by François Chateaubriand, a well-known figure in the literary movement of Romanticism and a prominent figure in France. early XIX century. As a young man, Hugo decided to be " Chateaubriand or none", and also that his life should correspond to the life of his predecessor. Like Chateaubriand, Hugo would promote the development of romanticism, would occupy a significant place in politics as the leader of republicanism, and be exiled because of his political views.

The early-born passion and eloquence of the first works brought Hugo success and fame in the early years of his life. His first collection of poetry, "Odes and Miscellaneous Poems" ( Odes et poesies diverses) was published in 1822, when Hugo was only 20 years old. King Louis XVIII granted an annual allowance for the writer. Hugo's poetry was admired for its spontaneous fervor and fluency. This collection of works was followed by the collection "Odes and Ballads" ( Odes and Ballades), written in 1826, four years after the first triumph. It presented Hugo as a great poet, a true master of lyrics and song.

Cosette- the heroine of the novel Outcasts". Illustration by Emil Bayard

Victor Hugo's first mature work in the genre fiction, "The last day of the condemned to death" ( Le Dernier jour d'un condamne), was written in 1829 and reflected the sharp social consciousness of the writer, which continued in his subsequent works. The story had a great influence on writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens and F. M. Dostoevsky. Claude Gueux, a short documentary story about a real-life murderer executed in France, was published in 1834 and was subsequently regarded by Hugo himself as a harbinger of his magnificent work on social injustice - an epic novel " Outcasts» (Les Miserables). But Hugo's first full-fledged novel will be the incredibly successful Notre-Dame de Paris (« Cathedral of Notre Dame”), published in 1831 and quickly translated into many languages ​​throughout Europe. One of the effects of the novel's appearance was the subsequent attraction of attention to the desolate Notre Dame Cathedral, which began to attract thousands of tourists who read the popular novel. The book also contributed to a renewed respect for the old buildings, which immediately thereafter began to be actively preserved.

"The Man Who Laughs"

"The Man Who Laughs"(French L "Homme qui rit) - one of the most famous novels of Victor Hugo, written in the 60s of the XIX century. The starting point in the plot of the novel is January 29, 1690, when a child is abandoned in Portland under mysterious circumstances.

Hugo began work on the novel in July 1866 in Brussels. In a letter to Lacroix's Parisian publisher, Victor Hugo suggests the title of the work " By order of the king", but later, on the advice of friends, stops at the final title" The man who laughs».

• The French Post issued postage stamps dedicated to Victor Hugo in 1933, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1985.
• House Museum of Victor Hugo in Paris.
• Monument at the Sorbonne by Laurent Marqueste.
• House Museum of Victor Hugo in Luxembourg.
• Bust of Hugo by Auguste Rodin.
• Monument to Hugo in the Hermitage Garden. The author is Laurent Marquest, the bronze bust was created in 1920. Gift of the City Hall of Paris to Moscow, established on May 15, 2000.
• V. Hugo street in Kaliningrad.
• Victor Hugo Street in Tver, approved by the decision of the Tver City Duma on September 20, 2011.
• A crater on Mercury is named after Victor Hugo.
• Hugo is canonized in the Vietnamese Cao Dai religion.
• Metro station Victor Hugo in Paris on the 2nd line.

Hugo's works in other art forms

Victor Hugo started painting at the age of 8. Now private collectors and museums have about 4,000 works by the writer, they are still successful and are sold at auctions). Most of the works were written in ink and pencil between 1848 and 1851. He made sketches with pen and black ink on plain paper. Delacroix said to Hugo: "If you became an artist, you would outshine all the painters of our time" (Delacroix made costume designs for Hugo's first play "Amy Robsart").

Hugo was familiar with many artists and illustrators, the brothers Deveria, Eugene Delacroix, so his close friend was Louis Boulanger. Admiration for the writer and poet resulted in a deep mutual friendship, visiting Hugo's house every day, Boulanger left a lot of portraits of people grouped around the writer.

He was attracted by fantastic plots, inspired by all the same poems by Hugo: "Ghost", "Lenora", "Devil's Hunt". The lithograph "Night Sabbath" was masterfully executed, where devils, naked witches, snakes and other "evil spirits" appearing in Hugo's ballad rush in a terrible and swift round dance. A whole series of lithographs was inspired by Boulanger's novel Notre Dame Cathedral. Of course, one cannot exhaust the work of Boulanger with the all-encompassing influence of Hugo. The artist was inspired by the stories of the past and present, the Bible, Italian literature... But the works inspired by the art of Hugo remain the best. The talent of the writer was akin to the artist, in his work he found the most faithful support for his quest. Their devoted friendship, which lasted a lifetime, was the subject of admiration for contemporaries. "Monsieur Hugo lost Boulanger," said Baudelaire upon learning of the artist's death. And in a review of the “Salon of 1845” (a brochure published in the same year with a volume of about 50 pages, signed by “Baudelaire-Dufay”). Baudelaire gives the following characterization of Louis Boulanger: “we have before us the last fragments of the old romanticism - this is what it means to live in an era when it is believed that the artist has enough inspiration to replace everything else; this is the abyss where Mazepa's wild leap takes him. M. Victor Hugo, who killed so many, also killed M. Boulanger - the poet pushed the painter into the pit. And meanwhile, M. Boulanger writes quite decently - just look at his portraits; but where the hell did he get a degree as a historical painter and inspired artist? Is it not in the prefaces and odes of his famous friend?

In March 1866, the novel "Toilers of the Sea" was published with illustrations by Gustave Dore. “Young, gifted master! Thank you,” Hugo writes to him on December 18, 1866. - Today, in spite of the storm, an illustration to "Toilers of the Sea" that is in no way inferior to it in strength has reached me. You have depicted in this drawing a shipwreck, a ship, a reef, a hydra, and a man. Your octopus is scary. Your Gillette is great."

Hugo Rodin received an order for a monument in 1886. The monument was planned to be installed in the Pantheon, where the writer was buried a year before. Rodin's candidacy was chosen, among other things, because he had previously created a bust of the writer, which was received positively. However, Rodin's work, when it was completed, did not meet the expectations of customers. The sculptor depicted Hugo as a mighty naked titan leaning on a rock and surrounded by three muses. The nude figure seemed out of place in the tomb, and as a result, the project was rejected. In 1890, Rodin revised the original design by removing the figures of the Muses. A monument to Hugo in 1909 was installed in the garden at the Palais Royal.

The most famous illustrator of Hugo's books is perhaps the artist Emile Bayard ("Les Misérables"). The emblem of the musical "Les Misérables" is a picture in which the abandoned Cosette sweeps the floors in the tavern at Thenardier's. In the musical, this scene corresponds to the song "Castle on a Cloud" ( Castle on the cloud). A cropped version of the picture is usually used, where only the head and shoulders of the girl are visible, often a fluttering background is woven into the emblem. French flag. This image is based on an engraving by Gustave Brion, who in turn was based on a drawing by Emile Bayard.

In the USSR, Pinkisevich P. N. designed his books, last book illustrated by A. I. Kravchenko, a well-known master of engraving, was “Notre Dame Cathedral” (1940). Also famous are the illustrations of the contemporary French artist Benjamin Lacombe ( Benjamin Lacombe) (born in 1982). (Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, Part 1 - 2011, Partie 2- 2012. Editions Soleil).

Screen adaptations

• L'Homme qui rit ("The Man Who Laughs"; 2012)
• Les miserables (" Outcasts»; USA-UK, 2012)
• Quasimodo d'El Paris (1999) (novel "Notre Dame de Paris")
• Les miserables (" Outcasts»; 1998)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) (novel "Notre Dame de Paris")
• Les miserables (" Outcasts»; 1995)
• Mest shuta (1993) (novel "Le Roi s'Amuse")
• Les miserables (" Outcasts»; 1988)
• Días difíciles (1987) (novel)
• La conscience (1987) (short story)
• Le dernier jour d'un condamné (1985) (novel)
• Les miserables (" Outcasts»; 1982)
• Rigoletto (1982) (play "Le roi s'amuse")
• Kozete (based on the novel " Outcasts»; 1977)
• Le scomunicate di San Valentino (1974) (loosely inspired by a drama by)
• Sefiller (based on the novel " Outcasts»; 1967)
• L'uomo che ride (based on The Man Who Laughs; 1966) (uncredited in italian version)
• Jean Valjean (1961) (based on the novel " Outcasts»; 1961)
• Les miserables (" Outcasts»; 1958)
• La déroute (1957) (story)
• Nanbanji no semushi-otoko (1957) (novel "Notre Dame de Paris")
• Notre Dame de Paris (1956) (novel)
• Sea Devils (1953) (novel "Les Travailleurs de la mer")
• La Gioconda (1953) (novel "Angelo, tyran de Padoue")
• Les miserables (1952) (novel)
• Re mizeraburu: kami to jiyu no hata (1950) (novel)
• Re mizeraburu: kami to akuma (1950) (novel)
• Ruy Blas (1948)
• I miserabili (1948) (novel "Les Misérables")
• Il tiranno di Padova (1946) (story)
• Rigoletto (1946) (novel)
• El rey se divierte (1944/I) (play)
• El boassa (1944) (novel "Les Miserables")
• Los miserables (1943) (novel)
• Il re si diverte (1941) (play)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) (novel)
• Les pauvres gens (1938) (writer)
• Gavrosh (1937) (novel "Les Miserables")
• Toilers of the Sea(1936) (novel "Les Travailleurs de la mer")
• Les misérables (1935) (novel)
• Les misérables (1934) (novel)
• Jean Valjean (1931) (novel "Les Misérables")
• Aa mujo: Kohen (1929) (novel)
• Aa mujo: Zempen (1929) (novel)
• The Bishop's Candlesticks (1929) (novel "Les Misérables")
• The Man Who Laughs (1928) (novel "L'Homme Qui Rit")
• Rigoletto (1927) (play "Le Roi s'Amuse")
• Les misérables (1925) (novel)
• The Spanish Dancer (1923) (novella)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923/I) (novel "Notre-Dame de Paris")
• Toilers of the Sea (1923) (novel "Les Travailleurs de la mer")
• Aa mujô - Dai nihen: Shichô no maki (1923) (story)
• Aa mujô - Dai ippen: Hôrô no maki (1923) (story)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923/II) (novel)
• Tense Moments with Great Authors (1922) (novel "Les Misérables") (segment "Miserables, Les")
• Tense Moments from Great Plays (1922) (novel "Notre Dame de Paris") (segment "Esmeralda")
• Esmeralda (1922) (novel Notre Dame de Paris)
• Das grinsende Gesicht (1921) (novel "L'homme e qui rit")
• Der rote Henker (1920) (novel)
• Quatre-vingt-treize (1920) (novel)
• The Toilers (1919) (novel "Les Travailleurs de la mer")
• Marion de Lorme (1918) (play)
• Les travailleurs de la mer (1918) (novel)
• Der König amüsiert sich (1918) (novel "Le Roi s'Amuse")
• Les misérables (1917) (novel)
• Marie Tudor (1917)
• The Darling of Paris (1917) (novel Notre Dame de Paris)
• Don Caesar de Bazan (1915) (novel "Ruy Blas")
• The Bishop's Candlesticks (1913) (novel "Les Misérables")
• Les misérables - Époque 4: Cosette et Marius (1913) (novel)
• Les misérables - Époque 3: Cosette (1913) (novel)
• Les misérables - Époque 2: Fantine (1913) (novel)
• Les misérables - Époque 1: Jean Valjean (1913) (novel)
• La Tragedia di Pulcinella (1913) (play)
• Marion de Lorme (1912) (writer)
• Ruy Blas (1912) (play)
• Notre Dame de Paris (1911) (novel "Notre Dame de Paris")
• Ernani (1911) (writer)
• Hugo the Hunchback (1910) (novel)
• Hernani (1910) (writer)
• Les misérables (1909) (novel)
• Rigoletto (1909/I) (writer)
• Les Misérables (Part III) (1909) (novel "Les Misérables")
• Le roi s'amuse (1909) (play)
• Les miserables (Part II) (1909) (novel)
• Les Miserables (Part I) (1909) (novel "Les Miserables")
• The Duke's Jester or A Fool's Revenge (1909) (novel "Le Roi s'Amuse")
• A Fool's Revenge (1909) (novel "Le Roi s'Amuse")
• Ruy Blas (1909) (play)
• Rigoletto (1909/II) (play)
• Esmeralda (1905) (novel Notre Dame de Paris)

Musical Theatre

• 1830 - "Ernani" (opera), composer V. Bellini
• 1836 - "Esmeralda" (opera), composer L. Bertin
• 1839 - "Esmeralda" (ballet), composer C. Pugni
• 1839 - "Esmeralda" (opera), composer A. Dargomyzhsky
• 1844 - "Ernani" (opera), composer G. Verdi
• 1851 - "Rigoletto" (opera), composer G. Verdi
• 1862 - "Marion Delorme" (opera), composer G. Bottesini
• 1869 - Ruy Blas (opera), composer F. Marchetti
• 1876 ​​- "Angelo" (opera), composer C. Cui
• 1885 - "Marion Delorme" (opera), composer A. Ponchielli
• 80s - "Marion Delorme" (opera), composer P. Makarov
• 1880 - La Gioconda (opera), composer A. Ponchielli
• 1914 - "Notre Dame" (ballet), composer F. Schmidt
• 1980 - Les Misérables (musical), composer K.-M. Schoenberg
• 1998 - "Notre Dame de Paris" (musical), composer P. Kochchante