The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (21 page)

After the suppression of the Decembrist uprising, the new tsar Nicholas I, aware of Pushkin's immense popularity and knowing that he had taken no part in the Decembrist “conspiracy,” allowed him to return to Moscow in the autumn of 1826. During a long conversation between them, the tsar met the poet's complaints about censorship with a promise that in the future he himself would be Pushkin's censor and told him of his plans to introduce several pressing reforms from above and, in particular, to prepare the way for liberation of the serfs.

Pushkin saw, however, that without the support of the people, the struggle against autocracy was doomed. He considered that the only possible way of achieving essential reforms was from above, “on the tsar's initiative.” This is the reason for his persistent interest in the age of reforms at the beginning of the 18th century and in the figure of Peter the Great, the “tsar-educator,” whose example he held up to the present tsar in, among other works, the poem
Medny vsadnik
(1837;
The Bronze Horseman
). The poem describes how the “little hero,” Yevgeny, driven mad by the drowning of his sweetheart, wanders through the streets. Seeing the bronze statue of Peter I seated on a rearing horse and realizing that the tsar, seen triumphing over the waves, is the cause of his grief, Yevgeny threatens him. In a climax of growing horror, he is pursued through the streets by the “Bronze Horseman.” The poem's descriptive and emotional powers give it an
unforgettable impact and make it one of the greatest in Russian literature.

It was during this period that Pushkin's genius came to its fullest flowering, despite his being surveilled by the police and struggling against the tsar's censorship. His art acquired new dimensions, and almost every one of the many works written between 1829 and 1836 opened a new chapter in the history of Russian literature.

In 1831, Pushkin married Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova and settled in St. Petersburg. Once more he took up government service. The social life at court, which he was now obliged to lead and which his wife enjoyed, was ill-suited to creative work, but he stubbornly continued to write. Alongside the theme of Peter the Great, the motif of a popular peasant rising acquired growing importance in his work, as is shown in particular by the most important of his prose works, the historical novel of the Pugachov Rebellion,
Kapitanskaya dochka
(1836;
The Captain's Daughter
). In court circles he was regarded with mounting suspicion and resentment, however, and his repeated petitions to be allowed to retire to the country and devote himself entirely to literature were all rejected. In 1837, Pushkin was mortally wounded defending his wife's honour in a duel forced on him by influential enemies.

(b. Feb. 26, 1802, Besançon, France—d. May 22, 1885, Paris)

V
ictor Hugo was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, and the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country's greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as
Notre-Dame de Paris
(1831) and
Les Misérables
(1862).

The son of a general, Hugo was an accomplished poet before age 20. With his verse drama
Cromwell
(1827), though immensely long and almost impossible to stage, he emerged as an important figure in Romanticism. The production of his verse tragedy
Hernani
, on Feb. 25, 1830, gained victory for the young Romantics over the Classicists in what came to be known as the battle of
Hernani
. In this play Hugo extolled the Romantic hero in the form of a noble outlaw at war with society, dedicated to a passionate love and driven on by inexorable fate.

Hugo gained wider fame in 1831 with his historical novel
Notre-Dame de Paris
(Eng. trans.
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
), an evocation of life in medieval Paris during the reign of Louis XI. The novel condemns a society that, in the persons of Frollo the archdeacon and Phoebus the soldier, heaps misery on the hunchback Quasimodo and the gypsy girl Esmeralda.

So intense was Hugo's creative activity in the 1830s and 1840s that he also continued to pour out plays. There were two motives for this: first, he needed a platform for his political and social ideas, and, second, he wished to write parts for a young and beautiful actress, Juliette Drouet, with whom he had begun a liaison in 1833. The first of these plays was another verse drama,
Le Roi s'amuse
(1832; Eng. trans.
The King's Fool
).

Hugo's literary achievement was recognized in 1841 by his election, after three unsuccessful attempts, to the French Academy and by his nomination in 1845 to the Chamber of Peers. From this time he almost ceased to publish, partly because of the demands of society and political life but also as a result of personal loss: his daughter Léopoldine, recently married, was accidentally drowned with her husband in September 1843. He found relief above all in working on a new novel, which became
Les Misérables
, published in 1862 after work on it had been set aside for a time and then resumed.

Hugo's republican views drove him into exile—at first enforced, then voluntary—between 1851 and 1870. During this exile he produced the most extensive part of all his writings and the most original, including
Les Châtiments
(1853; “The Punishments”), among the most powerful satirical poems in the French language, and
Les Contemplations
(1856), which contains the purest of his poetry.

Hugo then returned to prose and took up his abandoned novel,
Les Misérables
. Its extraordinary success with readers of every type when it was published in 1862 brought him instant popularity in his own country, and its speedy translation into many languages won him fame abroad. The novel's name means “the wretched,” or “the outcasts,” but English translations generally carry the French title. The story centres on the convict Jean Valjean, a victim of society who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread.
Les Misérables
is a vast panorama of Parisian society and its underworld, and it contains many famous episodes and passages, among them a chapter on the Battle of Waterloo and the description of Jean Valjean's rescue of his daughter's husband by means of a flight through the sewers of Paris.

Hugo's enormous output is unique in French literature; it is said that he wrote each morning 100 lines of verse or 20 pages of prose. “The most powerful mind of the Romantic movement,” as he was described in 1830, laureate and peer of France in 1845, he went on to assume the role of an outlawed sage who, with the easy consciousness of authority, put down his insights and prophetic visions in prose and verse, becoming at last the genial grandfather of popular literary portraiture and the national poet who gave his name to a street in every town in France.

(b. July 4, 1804, Salem, Mass., U.S.—d. May 19, 1864, Plymouth, N.H.)

T
he American novelist and short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in American literature, he is best known for
The Scarlet Letter
(1850) and
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851).

Hawthorne did not distinguish himself as a young man. Instead, he spent nearly a dozen years reading and trying to master the art of writing fiction. His first novel,
Fanshawe
, which he published at his own expense in 1825, upon graduation from Bowdoin College, he considered a failure. Hawthorne, however, soon found his own voice, style, and subjects, and by 1830 he had published such impressive and distinctive stories as “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman's Tale.” By 1832, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Roger Malvin's Burial,” two of his greatest tales—and among the finest in the language—had appeared. “Young Goodman Brown,” perhaps the greatest tale of witchcraft ever written, appeared in 1835.

His first signed book,
Twice-Told Tales
, was published in 1837. By 1842, Hawthorne's writing had brought him a sufficient income to allow him to marry Sophia Peabody; the couple rented the Old Manse in Concord and began a happy period that Hawthorne would later record in his essay “The Old Manse.”

The presence of some of the leading social thinkers and philosophers of his day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, in Concord made the village the centre of the philosophy of Transcendentalism. Hawthorne welcomed the companionship of his Transcendentalist neighbours, but he had little to say to
them. His new short-story collection,
Mosses from an Old Manse
, appeared in 1846, a year after he had moved to Salem, where he had been appointed to the position of surveyor of the Custom House.

In a few months of concentrated effort in 1848, he produced his masterpiece,
The Scarlet Letter
. (The bitterness he felt over his dismissal from the Salem Custom House in 1848, which had been a political appointment, is apparent in “The Custom House” essay prefixed to the novel.)
The Scarlet Letter
tells the story of two lovers kept apart by the ironies of fate, their own mingled strengths and weaknesses, and the Puritan community's interpretation of moral law, until at last death unites them under a single headstone. The book made Hawthorne famous and was eventually recognized as one of the greatest of American novels.

Determined to leave Salem forever, Hawthorne moved to Lenox, located in the mountain scenery of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. There he began work on
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851), the story of the Pyncheon family, who for generations had lived under a curse until it was removed at last by love. At Lenox he enjoyed the stimulating friendship of Herman Melville, who lived in nearby Pittsfield. This friendship, although important for the younger writer and his work, was much less so for Hawthorne.

In 1853, when his friend Franklin Pierce assumed the presidency of the United States, Hawthorne was appointed to a consulship in Liverpool, Lancashire. The position was terminated in 1857, and then he spent a year and a half sightseeing in Italy. Determined to produce yet another romance, he finally retreated to a seaside town in England and quickly produced
The Marble Faun
. In writing it, he drew heavily upon the experiences and impressions he had
recorded in a notebook kept during his Italian tour to give substance to an allegory of the Fall of Man, a theme that had usually been assumed in his earlier works but that now received direct and philosophic treatment.

Back in Concord in 1860, Hawthorne devoted himself entirely to his writing but was unable to make any progress with his plans for a new novel. The drafts of unfinished works he left are mostly incoherent. Some two years before his death he began to age very suddenly. His hair turned white, his handwriting changed, he suffered frequent nosebleeds, and he took to writing the figure “64” compulsively on scraps of paper. He died in his sleep on a trip with Pierce in search of health.

Hawthorne's high rank among American fiction writers is the result of at least three considerations. First, Hawthorne was a skillful craftsman with an impressive sense of form; second, he had profound moral insight; third, he was a master of allegory and symbolism. Hawthorne was also the master of a literary style that is remarkable for its directness, its clarity, its firmness, and its sureness of idiom. Hawthorne's work initiated the most durable tradition in American fiction, that of the symbolic romance that assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man's choices. His greatest short stories and
The Scarlet Letter
are marked by a depth of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled by any American writer.

(b. Jan. 19, 1809, Boston, Mass., U.S.—d. Oct. 7, 1849, Baltimore, Md.)

E
dgar Allan Poe was an American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His tale
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
(1841) initiated the modern detective story,
and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His
The Raven
(1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature.