Boucquey Thierry (General Editor). Encyclopedia Of World Writers. 3 volumes
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whose entire collection of works appeared on the
Index Liborum Prohibitorum, a listing of books
forbidden to be read by Roman Catholics.
André Gide’s life was complicated by many
facets, and his writing, which reflects the circum-
stances of his life, is based on an intense scrutiny of
himself and the world around him.
Other Works by André Gide
Amyntas. Translated by Richard Howard. New York:
Ecco Press, 1988.
The Counterfeiters. New York: Random House, 1973.
Works about André Gide
Fryer, Jonathan. André and Oscar: Gide, Wilde and
the Gay Art of Living. London: Constable, 1997.
Sheridan, Alan. André Gide: A Life in the Present. Lon-
don: Hamish Hamilton, 1998.
Ginzburg, Natalia (Alessandra
Tornimparti)
(1916–1991) novelist, essayist,
nonfiction writer
Natalia Ginzburg, well known for her autobio-
graphical novels detailing her unconventional
family and its fight against fascism, was born Na-
talia Levi in Palermo to a middle-class family. Her
religious background was mixed, being Jewish on
her father’s side and Catholic on her mother’s side,
and she was raised as an atheist. Because of this,
she spent her childhood removed from other chil-
dren, isolated for her differences. In 1919, she
moved to Turin, where her father had accepted a
position as a professor at the University of Turin.
There, she was immersed in the culture of the time,
particularly the activities centered around antifas-
cism. Intellectuals, all opponents of Benito Mus-
solini, would gather regularly at her family’s home
to discuss opposition.
Ginzburg graduated from the University of
Turin in 1935. Three years later, she married editor
and political activist Leone Ginzburg. The couple
had two children and spent much of their life to-
gether in seclusion in the region of Abruzzi, where
they were involved in numerous antifascist activi-
ties. Eventually, they were forced into hiding, al-
ternately in Rome and in Florence, until Leone
Ginzburg was arrested in 1944. Imprisoned at the
Regina Coeli prison, he died after being subjected
to extreme torture.
Ginzburg had begun her career as a writer of
short stories. Many of these were published in the
Florintine magazine Solaria. Her first major work
to appear in the magazine was “Un’assenza”
(1933), a tale about an unhappy marriage. It was
printed when she was only 17 years old. Her first
short novel, however, was not written until almost
a decade later. She published The Road to the City
(1942) under the pseudonym of Alessandra Torn-
imparti while she and her husband were still in
hiding.
In 1944, after the death of her husband and the
Allied liberation, Ginzburg returned to Rome
where she gained employment with the publish-
ing house of Guilio Einaudi. While working as an
editorial consultant, she continued to produce
novels of her own, including The Dry Heart
(1947), another tale of unhappy marriage, and A
Light for Fools (1952), the story of a family’s strug-
gles to survive in an era of fascism.
Ginzburg remarried in 1950, this time to
Gabriele Baldini, an English literature professor
from the University of Rome. While married to
him, she produced her humorous and well-known
autobiographical work, Family Sayings (1963).
After his death in 1969, she continued to write,
producing essays, biographies, and translations, as
well as fiction. She was elected to the Italian Par-
liament in 1983 and later published more works
including The City and the House (1984) and True
Justice (1990). Ginzburg died of cancer on October
7, leaving behind works that show in vivid detail
the social implications of fascism and the history
and culture of her world.
A Work about Natalia Ginzburg
Jeannet, Angela M., and Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz,
eds. Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth
Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2000.
168 Ginzburg, Natalia
Giraudoux, Jean (1882–1944) playwright
Hippolyte-Jean Giraudoux was born in France in
the village of Bellac. He was educated at the École
Normale Supérieure. As a child and young man, he
traveled extensively to Germany, Italy, the Balkans,
Canada, and finally to the United States, where he
spent a year as an instructor at Harvard. He re-
turned to France to serve in World War I; he was
wounded twice and became the only writer ever to
be awarded the Wartime Legion of Honor.
Giraudoux began his literary career as a novel-
ist, with Suzanne et le Pacifique (1921), and he
wrote several other works of fiction. He also wrote
literary studies such as Racine (1930) and political
works, including Full Powers (1939). But he gained
recognition for his stage plays, 15 in all, most of
which were initially staged in France by actor-di-
rector Louis Jouvet.
Like the great 17th-century French dramatist
Racine, whom he deeply admired, Giraudoux
often chose classical themes. He titled one of
his plays Amphitryon 38 (1929; translated 1938) in
acknowledgement of the 37 versions of the
story (about a man whose wife gives birth to
twins, of whom one has been fathered not by
Amphitryon but by the sky god Zeus) that pre-
ceded his own. Judith (1931) revisits the biblical
story of Judith’s outwitting of Holofernes. But
unlike Racine, who grandly presents his characters
as consumed by fatal passions, Giraudoux treats
his characters informally and ironically. He be-
lieved that he was living in an age when grandness
could not be appreciated, and he adjusted his art
accordingly.
Giraudoux’s last play, The Madwoman of Chail-
lot (1946; translated 1949), was completed in 1943
but produced and published posthumously. Writ-
ten during the German occupation of France, it
tells an inspirational story of a group of greedy
prospectors whose search for oil threatens to de-
stroy a small town and of the “madwoman” who
thwarts their plans.
Giraudoux’s work is rich in allegory and fantasy
and has strong political and psychological under-
tones. His playful anachronisms and his wit helped
release the inhibitions that
REALISM had placed on
French theater.
Other Works by Jean Giraudoux
Choice of the Elect. Translated by Henry Bosworth
Russell. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 2002.
The Five Temptations of La Fontaine. Translated by
Richard Howard. New York: Turtle Point Press,
2002.
Lying Woman: A Novel. Translated by Richard
Howard. New York: Winter House, 1972.
Plays. Translated by Roger Gellert. London: Methuen,
1967.
Three Plays. Translated by Phyllis La Farge with Peter
H. Judd. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
Tiger at the Gates [La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu].
Translated by Christopher Fry. London: Methuen,
1983.
Works about Jean Giraudoux
Body, Jacques. Jean Giraudoux: The Legend and the
Secret. Translated by James Norwood. Madison,
N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991.
Korzeniowska, Victoria B. The Heroine as Social Re-
deemer in the Plays of Jean Giraudoux. New York:
Peter Long, 1991.
Nagel, Susan. The Influence of the Novels of Jean
Giraudoux on the Hispanic Vanguard Novels of the
1920s–1930s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University
Press, 1991.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
(1749–1842) poet, novelist, playwright,
essayist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frank-
furt, Germany, to Johann Caspar Goethe, an attor-
ney, and Katherine Elizabeth Goethe, a daughter of
Frankfurt’s mayor. Goethe’s early interest in litera-
ture was wholeheartedly encouraged by his
mother, an extremely well-educated woman. His
childhood was marked by academic brilliance, as
well as constant conflict with authority figures in
school. Emotionally, Goethe’s adolescence was
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 169
shaped by several unsuccessful love affairs, which
greatly contributed to his development as a writer.
At age 16, Goethe enrolled in Leipzig University
to study law. During an interruption of his educa-
tion due to illness, he studied drawing. He trans-
ferred to the University of Strasbourg where,
in 1771, he obtained a degree in law. Between
1771 and 1774, he practiced law in Frankfurt and
Wetzlar, until he was hired by Duke Karl August of
Weimar. During his career as an administrator at
the Weimar court, Goethe acted as the duke’s
councilman, a member of the war commission,
and director of roads and services, and he directed
the financial affairs of the court. A true member of
the Enlightenment—the 18th-century movement
of confidence in the capacities of human reason—
Goethe dedicated his spare time to scientific re-
search, mostly in anatomy. Between 1791 and
1817, Goethe acted as the director of court the-
aters. He also became an expert on mining, and
under his influence and directorship, Jena Univer-
sity enjoyed the status as one of the most promi-
nent and prestigious academic institutions in
Europe, particularly in history and philosophy.
Critical Analysis
Goethe’s first major work, The Sorrows of Young
Werther, appeared in 1774. The novel delineates
Werther’s hopeless love for Lotte Buff, the wife of
his close friend. Driven to self-alienation and psy-
chological breakdown, no longer able to live with-
out his beloved, Werther commits suicide. Werther
expresses his misery in terms that resonated
widely, especially with young readers:“My creative
powers have been reduced to a senseless indolence.
I cannot be idle, yet I cannot seem to do anything
either. When we are robbed of ourselves, we are
robbed of everything.” Goethe explained his moti-
vation for writing the novel in terms of his height-
ened spiritual and emotional awareness:“I tried to
release myself from all alien emotions, to look
kindly upon what was going on around me and let
all living things, beginning with man himself, af-
fect me as deeply as possible, each in its own way.”
The emotions and local color are placed in the
foreground of his work. The Sorrows of Young
Werther is considered to among the most influen-
tial texts of German ROMANTICISM.
In Goethe’s second major novel, Wilhelm Meis-
ter’s Apprenticeship (1795–96), Goethe continues to
explore themes of love and alienation. However, the
novel presents a more optimistic outlook on life.
Like Werther, Wilhelm suffers a tragic blow after an
unsuccessful courtship. Unlike Werther, however,
Wilhelm begins to seek out actively other values in
life. He dedicates himself to work and becomes a
playwright and an actor. In the end,Wilhelm is spir-
itually satisfied with his newfound outlet for pas-
sion. The novel remains thematically consistent
with the Romantic school; however, critics have
noted the emergence of the conservative side of
Goethe’s thinking. Unlike many of his contempo-
raries, Goethe was not impressed by the uprising
and violence of the French Revolution. He sup-
ported liberty and progress but also maintained that
the aristocracy had an important role in society.
Many younger readers began to criticize Goethe for
what they saw as subservience to the upper classes.
The first part of Goethe’s dramatic masterpiece,
Faust, appeared in 1808. This drama became his
passion and he worked on it for more than 30 years.
Based on the play by the English Renaissance
dramatist Christopher Marlowe, it tells a chilling
story of a man who sells his soul for knowledge.
Faust makes a contract with Mephistopheles to die
as soon as his thirst for knowledge is satisfied. Faust
is driven to despair when Margaret, an innocent
woman, is condemned to death for giving birth to
Faust’s illegitimate child. He finally realizes that his
lust for knowledge has led to tragic mistakes.
The second part of Faust appeared in 1838.
Faust marries the beautiful Helen of Troy and cre-
ates a happy community of scholars. The bliss of
his good deeds brings satisfaction in old age, and
Mephistopheles is about to demand satisfaction.
But Faust’s changed attitudes and good heart are
rewarded, as angels descend from the sky in the
final scene of the play and take Faust to heaven.
The play brought Goethe international success and
had a profound influence on modern drama.
170 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
During his illustrious career, Goethe produced,
in addition, a number of important poetical
works. He also provided literary guidance to his
close friend Friedrich SCHILLER and produced sev-
eral of his plays.After his death, he was buried next
to Schiller in Weimar.
Although it is difficult to measure the influ-
ence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he is cer-
tainly among the giants of world literature. His
novels, poems, and plays are still widely read and
studied. He is a dominant figure of German
Romanticism.
Other Works by Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe
Italian Journey. Translated by Elizabeth Mayer. New
York: Penguin, 1992.
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings.
Translated by Catherine Hutter. New York: New
American Library, 1987.
Theory of Colors. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970.
Vaget, Hans R., ed. Erotic Poems. Translated by David
Luke. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Works about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Eckermann, Johann. Conversations of Goethe. Trans-
lated by John Oxenford. New York: Da Capo Press,
1998.
Wag ner, Irmgard. Goethe. Boston: Twayne, 1999.
Williams, John. The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biogra-
phy. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Gogol, Nikolay (1808–1852) novelist,
short-story writer, dramatist
Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol was born in Sorochinez,
Ukraine, into a family of minor aristocrats. He was
a mediocre student in school and avoided other
people. After graduation, he moved to St. Peters-
burg in search of a position in the civil service.
More interested in writing than in a government
career, Gogol worked as a minor official for only a
brief period of time, quitting his job for a higher-
paying position as a history professor at the St. Pe-
tersburg University.
In 1831, Gogol published his first collection of
short stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.
Based on Ukrainian folk tales, the stories combine
elements of the supernatural, humor, and ro-
mance. Gogol’s first collection was greeted with ac-
claim from both critics and readers. Fired from his
university position for incompetence, Gogol con-
tinued his literary work. In Mirgorod (1835), he
produced more short stories that were based on
Ukrainian folklore and history. It was with this
collection that Gogol established himself as the
father of Russian
REALISM. In his famous story “The
Overcoat,” he explores the psychology of a clerk
who must make enormous sacrifices to buy a new
overcoat. It was the first work of Russian literature
to bring sympathetic attention to the plight of a
social misfit, who would previously have been seen
only as a comic character.
In 1836, Gogol presented his first comic play,
The Inspector General, to an enormous audience
that included the czar of Russia. In the play, the
officials of a small town expect an important visit
from a governor. They mistake Hlestakov, a petty
government official en route to his father’s estate,
for the inspector general. The play, with its hilari-
ous satire on provincial officials, was a huge suc-
cess in St. Petersburg, but certain censors in the
government viewed it as politically dangerous.
Afraid of losing his freedom, Gogol left Russia for
Europe to continue his work away from govern-
ment oversight.
Gogol traveled throughout Europe, staying for
extended periods in Germany, Switzerland, France,
and Italy. While in Paris, he lost one of his closest
friends to a cholera epidemic. This tragic event
prompted Gogol’s return to Russia in 1839. Con-
trary to his expectations, Russia celebrated his re-
turn, and a version of The Inspector General was
produced in Moscow to mark the occasion. Facing
serious health problems, Gogol returned to Eu-
rope, became a complete recluse, and turned to
studying the sacred texts of the Russian Orthodox
Church. His newly found religious sentiments,
which some contemporaries described as zeal,
eventually surfaced in his work.
Gogol, Nikolay 171
Critical Analysis
In 1842, Gogol published the first volume of his
masterpiece, Dead Souls. Even before publication, it
attracted negative attention from the censors, and it
came into print only after the personal intervention
of the czar. The novel centers on a small-time
provincial bureaucrat named Chichikov and sati-
rizes both middle-class greed and the institution of
serfdom in Russia. Gogol’s critique of serfdom,
which essentially consigned peasants to a form of
slavery, skillfully portrays the moral decay of Russ-
ian society. In hope of advancing his social position
and his opportunities for a profitable marriage,
Chichikov falsifies his economic status by purchas-
ing “dead souls”—the names of dead serfs. In the
second volume, Gogol apparently attempted to in-
corporate strong elements of spirituality and reli-
gion; however, spiritually and psychologically
troubled, he destroyed the manuscript. In 1848, he
departed on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but the jour-
ney proved quite unsuccessful in terms of providing
the religious consolation Gogol was seeking.
In many respects, Gogol’s life translated into his
works of fiction. Characters are often mentally dis-
traught, almost to the point of grotesquerie, cen-
tering their lives on seemingly insignificant,
worldly goals. By the same token, Gogol’s critique
of Russian society extends far beyond social issues
and often illuminates the individual’s struggle for
spiritual fulfillment.
The last years of Gogol’s life were marked by
deep physical and psychological suffering. As many
experts concur today, Gogol suffered from acute
forms of depression and anxiety. Gogol spent the
last three days of his life praying. He died in 1852,
reportedly from a stroke.
In Russia, Gogol is viewed as one of the major
figures of the literary canon. His prose shows a
deep understanding and sensitivity, not only to the
social order but also to individual psychological di-
mensions.
Other Works by Nikolay Gogol
Arabesques. Translated by Alexander Tulloch. Ann
Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982.
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Translated by
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New
York: Pantheon, 1998.
Gogol: Three Plays. Translated by Stephen Mulrine.
London: Methuen, 2000.
Works about Nikolay Gogol
Fanger, Donald. Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Nikolai Gogol. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1961.
Stilman, Leon. Gogol. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990.
Gombrowicz, Witold (1904–1969)
novelist, playwright
Witold Gombrowicz was born on his family’s es-
tate in Maolsczyce and then moved to Warsaw,
Poland. As a boy, he was introverted and sickly. He
felt alienated by the nationalist sentiment of the
time and ultimately rejected orthodox culture in
favor of the company of peasants, such as maids
and stablehands.
Attempting to follow a career that would be ac-
cepted by his family, Gombrowicz studied law at
the University of Warsaw but began, in secret, to
write short stories, which were later published in
the collection Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity
(1933). Although his writing was attacked by crit-
ics for its rejection of contemporary viewpoints, it
was moderately successful with readers who shared
his discontent. Gombrowicz eventually gave up law
and began writing full time. In 1938, he published
his first play, Yvonne, the Princess of Burgundy, and
followed it with his first novel, Ferdydurke (1938),
which is a satirical comment on the absurdities of
Polish society in the 1930s with elements of mys-
tery and eroticism.
Gombrowicz was commissioned in 1939 to
write a series of articles about Argentina. Two days
after he arrived in Buenos Aires, World War II
began and Poland was invaded. He stayed in
Buenos Aires, working for several small newspa-
pers. There, he published his second play The
172 Gombrowicz, Witold
Marriage (1947) and the novel Trans-Atlantic
(1953).
During a brief respite from censorship in 1956,
several of his works were reprinted in Poland, but
Gombrowicz did not return to his homeland. His
third novel, Pornografia (1960), an account of a
relationship between two teenagers in rural Poland
as viewed by fascinated old men, was followed in
1963 by his receipt of a Ford Foundation Fellow-
ship, which allowed him to leave Argentina. He set-
tled in Berlin, where he wrote his fourth novel,
Cosmos (1964), an absurdist mystery that has been
compared to Franz KAFKA’s The Castle, as well as his
final play, Operetta (1966), before dying of heart
failure in Vence, France.
Gombrowicz’s popularity was largely posthu-
mous. His books had been banned, once again, in
Poland in the 1960s. After his death, the ban was
partially lifted, but Gombrowicz specified in his
will that his works were not to be published in
Poland unless they were reprinted in their entirety.
As a result, an underground movement was
formed to smuggle foreign editions of his work
into Poland. His plays were performed in Polish
theaters, but their texts could not be bought in of-
ficial stores. This contributed to a rise in Gom-
browicz’s popularity. It was not until 1988, after
the collapse of Communist Party rule, that the first
full edition of his books was published in Poland.
Other Works by Witold Gombrowicz
Cosmos and Pornografia: Two Novels. Translated by
Eric Mosbacher and Alastair Hamilton. New York:
Grove Press, 1994.
Diary. Translated by Lillian Vallee. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1988.
Ferdydurke. Translated by Danuta Borchardt, with a
foreword by Susan Sontag. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2000.
Works about Witold Gombrowicz
Milosz, Czeslaw. Who Is Gombrowicz? New York: Pen-
guin, 1986.
Thompson, Ewa M. Witold Gombrowicz. Boston:
Twayne, 1979.
Gomringer, Eugen (1925– ) poet
Born in Cachuela Esperanza, Bolivia, Eugen Gom-
ringer was raised in Switzerland by his grandpar-
ents. He studied art history and economics at
colleges in Bern and Rome and later worked as a
graphic designer. In 1952, Gomringer cofounded
the magazine Spirale. From 1954 to 1958, he
worked as a secretary for Max Bill, the director of
the Academy of Art in Ulm, Germany. Since the
1960s, Gomringer has worked as a business man-
ager for the Schweizer Werkbund in Zurich, an
artistic adviser for the Rosenthal concern, and as a
professor of aesthetic theory at the Art Academy in
Düsseldorf.
Gomringer published his first poems in Spirale
in 1953. His verse helped initiate the concrete
movement in poetry. These poems create a con-
crete reality by using words as building blocks to
form three-dimensional semantic, phonetic, and
visual explorations. Conventional syntax, descrip-
tion, and metaphor are ignored. The poet Jerome
Rothenberg explained that concrete poetry is “a
question of making the words cohere in a given
space, the poem’s force or strength related to the
weight & value of the words within it, the way they
pull & act on each other.” Gomringer’s “schweigen”
(“Silence”) is his most famous concrete poem. The
word schweigen is printed 14 times to form a rec-
tangle, with the empty space in the middle repre-
senting silence.
In addition to poetry collections, Gomringer
wrote theoretical tracts explaining his style and
calling for a simple, universal language devoid of
irrationality. His influence was strong in the 1950s
and 1960s, inspiring a range of linguistic experi-
ments. The concrete poetry movement waned in
1972, however, as critics found it too simplistic.
Gomringer then gave up poetry to write about art
and artists.
Another Work by Eugen Gomringer
The Book of Hours and Constellations. Translated by
Jerome Rothenberg. New York: Something Else
Press, 1968.
Gomringer, Eugen 173
Gonçalves Dias, Antônio (1823–1864)
poet, dramatist
Born in 1823, Antônio Gonçalves Dias was the most
important romantic poet to write in the Brazilian
literary tradition. He was educated in Portugal at the
University of Coimbra but felt strong ties to Brazil.
He celebrates Brazil in his poetry collections, such as
Primeiros cantos (1846) and Ultimos cantos (1851),
focusing on themes of nature. Specifically, Dias
wrote extensively about nativist issues. His glorifica-
tion of indigenous peoples places him among the
many writers of the Indianist movement (see INDI
-
ANISM
) of the 19th century in Brazil, along with the
novelist José de ALENCAR. Gonçalves Dias’s work
Song of Exile (1843), with its nostalgic first line,“My
land has palm trees, where the nightingale sings,” is
Brazil’s best known poem. He is often thought of
as Brazil’s national poet, although he published
only three collections of poetry. He was killed in a
shipwreck while returning to Brazil from Portugal.
Works about Antônio Gonçalves Dias
Haberly, David. Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and
National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Treece, David. Exiles, Allies and Rebels: Brazil’s Indi-
anist Movement, Indigenist Politics, and the Imper-
ial Nation-State. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 2000.
Goncharov, Ivan (1812–1891) novelist
Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov was born in Sim-
birsk, Russia. His father, a wealthy grain merchant,
died when Goncharov was only seven. Young Ivan
was raised by his godfather, Nikolay Tregubov. An
average student, Goncharov studied business at the
University of Moscow. After he graduated in 1834,
he worked in the civil service for nearly 30 years.
In 1847, Goncharov published his first novel,
An Ordinary Story, which focuses on the conflict
between Russian nobility and the newly emergent
merchant class. The novel examines the moral im-
plications of income and how it affected social po-
sition of the two classes.
Between 1852 and 1855, Goncharov traveled
around the world as a personal secretary for Admi-
ral Putyatin. He published his account of the jour-
ney as Frigate Pallada (1858). His observations
about the nations he visited, which included
England, parts of Africa, and Japan, are often
unflattering, and he expresses his sense of Russian
superiority and his distrust of social reform.
In 1859 Goncharov published his most famous
novel, Oblomov, a masterpiece of Russian
REALISM.
In the novel, Goncharov satirizes the character of
Oblomov, a young aristocrat who is indecisive and
apathetic. Goncharov presents the aristocracy as an
obsolete class that no longer contributes to the wel-
fare of the state. The novel was so successful that it
introduced a new word into the Russian language:
oblomovshina, meaning “indecision and inertia.”
Goncharov’s talent was readily acknowledged in
Russia by such personages as Fyodor
DOSTOYEVSKY.
Goncharov, however, was a quarrelsome figure. He
accused Ivan
TURGENEV and Gustave FLAUBERT of
plagiarizing his ideas for their own novels. Gon-
charov never married. He published his last novel,
The Precipice, in 1869. The work tells of a senti-
mental love affair between three men and a myste-
rious woman. Critical response to the novel was
devastating, and Goncharov never published an-
other. He spent the rest of his life virtually alone,
writing short stories and essays.
Goncharov died in St. Petersburg in 1891.
Through his works, Goncharov depicted the emer-
gent class conflict between aristocracy and the ris-
ing middle class. He is mostly remembered for his
contribution to realism and his mastery of social
satire.
Another Work by Ivan Goncharov
An Ordinary Story: Including the Stage Adaptation of
the Novel. Translated by Marjorie L. Hoover. New
York: Ardis Publishers, 1994.
Works about Ivan Goncharov
Diment, Galya. The Autobiographical Novel of Co-
Consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf, and Joyce.
Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994.
174 Gonçalves Dias, Antônio
Diment, Galya, ed. Goncharov’s Oblomov: A Critical
Companion. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1998.
Ehre, Milton. Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and
Art of Ivan Goncharov. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1974.
Goncourt, Edmond (1822–1896) and
Jules (1830–1870) novelists
The Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, are
most notable for their long history of collabora-
tion as a team of novelists writing in the tradition
of naturalism. Edmond was born in Nancy, France,
and Jules in Paris eight years later. Close as chil-
dren, they retained their special bond throughout
their lives.
In 1849, “les deux Goncourts,” as they would
come to be known, began to travel throughout
France as artists, painting watercolor sketches
and ultimately keeping detailed notes of their
travels in a journal. This journal, published as
Journal des Goncourts (nine volumes, 1887–96;
translation of selections by Lewis Galantière,
1937), which they began together in 1851, con-
tains 40 years of detailed accounts of French so-
cial and literary life.
The brothers also became successful as art crit-
ics and art historians. After a failed attempt at writ-
ing for the theater, they began to collaborate on a
series of novels, including Sœur Philomène (1861),
Renée Mauperin (1864; translated 1887), Germinie
Lacerteux (1864), and Mme. Gervaisais (1869), all
of which became well known as representations of
the naturalist school. Their elaborate and often
convoluted style as well as their selection of sub-
jects based on their sensational value anticipated
naturalist ideas.
After Jules died, Edmond continued to write,
publishing three more novels, among them La Fille
Élisa (1877; translated 1959), a tragic story of a girl
who becomes a prostitute. As a condition of his
will, Edmond provided funding for the establish-
ment of the Goncourt Academy to award and en-
courage excellence in fiction. The Goncourt Prize
for literature is awarded annually to an outstand-
ing French author.
Other Works by Edmond and Jules
Goncourt
Pages from the Goncourt Journal. Translated by Robert
Baldick. New York: Penguin USA, 1984.
Paris and the Arts, 1851–1896; from the Goncourt Jour-
nal. Translated by George J. Becker and Edith
Philips. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1971.
Paris Under Siege, 1870–1871; from the Goncourt Jour-
nal. Translated by George J. Becker. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1969.
Works about Edmond and Jules Goncourt
Brookner, Anita. The Genius of the Future: Diderot,
Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, the Brothers Goncourt,
Huysmans: Essays in French Art Criticism. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Heil, Elissa. The Conflicting Discourses of the Drawing-
Room: Anthony Trollope and Edmond and Jules de
Goncourt. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.
Goodison, Lorna (1947– ) poet, short-
story writer, professor, painter, illustrator
Lorna Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica,
to Vivian Goodison, a Jamaica Telephone Com-
pany technician, and Dorice Goodison, a dress-
maker. She was educated at St. Hugh’s High School
for girls and read the major English writers at an
early age. V. S.
NAIPAUL’S Miguel Street, which she
read as a teenager, sparked Goodison’s appetite for
Caribbean literature. In an interview with Kwame
Dawes, Goodison said she started writing to read
her own writing because so many of the charac-
ters she had been reading about differed from
those of her experiences.
Goodison wrote while attending the Jamaica
School of Art and the Art Students League of New
York during her early 20s, but she did not begin to
write seriously until the 1970s. Many of her poems
juxtapose standard English and Jamaican dialect,
and a variety of musical traditions, including
Goodison, Lorna 175
rhythm and blues and reggae, influence her writ-
ing style. “For Don Drummond,” a notable poem
in Goodison’s first collection, Tamarind Season:
Poems (1980), reproduces the sound of Drum-
mond’s voice and trombone to mourn the influen-
tial Jamaican musician’s death.
The poetry collections I Am Becoming My
Mother (1986) and Heartease (1988) explore
women’s experiences, and To Us, All Flowers Are
Roses: Poems (1995) focuses on common Jamaican
experiences. The poet Andrew Salkey commented
in the journal World Literature Today, “The evoca-
tive power of Lorna Goodison’s poetry derives its
urgency and appeal from the heart-and-mind con-
cerns she has for language, history, racial identity,
and gender.”
Other Works by Lorna Goodison
Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems. Manchester,
U.K.: Carcanet, 2000.
Travelling Mercies. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,
2001.
Works about Lorna Goodison
Dawes, Kwame, ed. Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with An-
glophone Caribbean Poets. Charlottesville: Univer-
sity Press of Virginia, 2001.
Kuwabong, D. “The Mother as Archetype of Self: A
Poetics of Matrilineage in the Poetry of Claire
Harris and Lorna Goodison.” Ariel 30, no. 1
(1999): 105–29.
Gordimer, Nadine (1923– ) novelist,
short-story writer, essayist
Nadine Gordimer published her first short story
when she was 13. Since that first publication in
1937, she has published eight collections of short
stories and more than a dozen novels. She has also
written extensively on political, literary, and cul-
tural issues. She is one of Africa’s, and the world’s,
premier literary talents.
Gordimer was born in a small mining town in
South Africa outside of Johannesburg. Her father,
Isidore, a Jew, was a jeweler from Lithuania, and
her mother, Nan Myers, helped him to become a
shopkeeper in the conservative suburban town
where Nadine was raised. Her first novel, The Lying
Days (1953), evaluates the growth and develop-
ment of a young woman as she confronts the con-
formity of a comfortable, middle-class existence.
While still a young girl, Gordimer had an expe-
rience that was to forever change her life. As she re-
lated the incident to Bill Moyers in a 1992
videotaped interview entitled “On Being a Liberal
White South African,” Gordimer’s mother had re-
moved the 11-year-old Gordimer from school “on
the pretext of a heart ailment.” She was to have lit-
tle contact with other children until she was 16.
Her enforced isolation led to a life filled with read-
ing, writing, and observing. One of the novels she
read during this period was Upton Sinclair’s The
Jungle, which recounts the horrible living condi-
tions of workers in Chicago’s meat-packing plants
in the early 20th century. In the Bill Moyers inter-
view, Gordimer said that the reading of this book
changed her life because she saw, clearly, that liter-
ature could change the world, that it could open
people’s eyes to inequity and foster change.
Critical Analysis
Many of Gordimer’s stories and novels examine
the status and responsibilities of white, liberal in-
tellectuals in both South Africa and abroad. Novels
such as The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of
Honor (1970), and Burger’s Daughter (1979) exam-
ine the difference between engaging with the world
and withdrawing from it. For example, the plot of
Burger’s Daughter concerns the reflections of a
young woman whose father had led a life of active
political resistance to the inequities of South
African culture. His daughter struggles with his
legacy and her own wavering commitment to con-
frontation. The novel raises an issue that is very
important in Gordimer’s work: Can white South
Africans be a part of the world that will come
when majority rule becomes a reality? Will “liber-
alism” alone create a space for whites in the new
South Africa? Rosa Burger, the daughter of the
title, seems to find her only real fulfillment out-
176 Gordimer, Nadine
side of South Africa and outside of politics. The
story that unfolds on her return to South Africa,
however, shows that an embrace of the political is
necessary, even if the end result is tragic.
Gordimer has been quoted by critic Stephen
Clingman, in The Novels of Nadine Gordimer
(1986), as saying, “If you want to read the facts of
the retreat from Moscow in 1812, you may read a
history book; if you want to know what war is like
and how people of a certain time and background
dealt with it as their personal situation, you must
read War and Peace.” In this and other statements,
Gordimer has insisted that the novelist’s job is to
convey human truth as regards historical events.
As Clingman explains, she makes a case for the
value of literature in a world of facts and incidents:
“This . . . is the primary material that a novel offers:
not so much an historical world, but a certain con-
sciousness of that world.” Gordimer’s novels at-
tempt to present complete worlds in which
characters are faced with conflicts of class, race,
and gender, all of which exist within the dynamics
of personal relationships. In other words, she
presents the consciousness of a culture by dealing
with both the larger political and “smaller” inter-
personal relationships that make up her characters’
lives. She has, throughout her career, incorporated
the historical reality of the South African situation
into her work. She has also written many essays
that examine the relationship between writers and
their worlds, such as those collected in The Essen-
tial Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places (1988).
Her essays examine many of the ideological impli-
cations of what it means to be a writer living in a
politically charged environment.
Her first published novel, The Lying Days
(1953), focuses on the small Jewish world of the
Aaron family and its relationship to the various
Afrikaners around it. The young woman at the
center of the tale, Helen Shaw, views the different
cultures (Afrikaner, or Dutch settler, Jewish, and
others) with which she interacts as exotic and dis-
tinct. The story of this early work also deals with
those Jews who sold goods to the black minework-
ers in the area outside of Johannesburg.
Her next novel, A World of Strangers (1958), was
more pointedly political. It deals with the devel-
oping anti-apartheid forces of the African National
Congress (ANC) in their resistance to the
apartheid policies of the increasingly severe Na-
tionalist government. Johannesburg in the mid-
1950s was a hotbed of political activity, and
writers, such as Lewis NKOSI and others, were agi-
tating in magazines, such as Drum, about active re-
sistance to apartheid. Gordimer’s novel details the
connection between writing and political engage-
ment, and this early work’s insistence on that con-
nection—between the personal and the
political—is at the heart of most of her work.
But Gordimer’s works are not only political
treatises. Her writing is lyrical, and she uses detail
to great effect. For example, in A Sport of Nature
(1987), which tells the story of a white woman who
becomes completely immersed in black revolu-
tionary politics, she describes a woman walking
through an embassy: “through ceremonial pur-
plish corridors she walked, past buried bars out-
lined like burning eyelids with neon, reception
rooms named for African political heroes holding
a silent assembly of stacked gilt chairs....”The im-
ages this description evoke are of a “silent,” or inef-
fective, government built on the foundations of
“gilt,” or pomp.
Her ability to combine rich description, sharply
observed dialogue, knowledge of human nature,
and political situations has made Gordimer one of
the most respected novelists in the English-speak-
ing world. In her own country, she has been con-
sistently controversial in her ongoing literary
analysis of the failure of the politics of liberalism,
as South Africa has attempted to deal with its mul-
tiracial reality. Her international reputation has led
to many awards, including Britain’s prestigious
Booker Prize (for her novel The Conservationist) in
1974, and the Nobel Prize in 1991.
Other Works by Nadine Gordimer
July’s People. New York: Viking, 1981.
Jump and Other Stories. New York: Penguin USA,
1992.
Gordimer, Nadine 177