A Passion for Far-off Places and Unusual Subjects prosper MERiMEE (1803-1870) was a distinguished French writer and novelist who was widely read throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
All over the world he featured on the curriculum for students of French, so virtually all of them at some time read his short novels, which - brief, direct, with exciting plots, exotic settings, and strong characters - readily appealed to young people.
His classical style but Romantic content made for easy but interesting reading.In politics, this innovative writer was an inveterate liberal. During the restoration of the monarchy that followed Napoleon's 1815 defeat, he was a critic of the absolutist Bourbons; after 1830, when a constitutional monarchy was proclaimed, and his fellow liberals came to power, especially the ministers Franςois Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, he held various government posts; after the Revolution of 1848, which eventually led to the re-establishment of the liberal “Empire,” he was close to the court of the Emperor Napoleon III, by whom he was appointed senator.
During most of his life, Merimee combined public service with literature, where he repeatedly revealed his devotion to the historical heritage of France and his interest in far-off places and unusual subjects. Merimee, it is said, was both “a liberal” and “a conservationist,” and, known for his dryness and froideur, he had what one particularly perceptive critic called “a cold passion” for the events of life. These very visible contradictions, together with his vacillating between Romantic and post-Romantic, defined much of his literary career.1
Nietzsche characterized him as a refined artist, much taken with the past, who actually despised “the spongy” liberalism (schwammingen Gefuhle) of his own time. That is, he was unimpressed by small beauties and little charms, which he was ready to sacrifice to a strong will, and so remained a pure rather than a great soul, while being “pessimist enough to be able to play along with the comedy [of life] without being sickened by it.”2
Nietzsche, of course, was an extremist and very jaded.
But such debates about Merimee were so frequent that one contemporary declared that he never belonged to any literary school at all - neither a Romantic nor a classicist, neither a naturalist nor an idealist, always measured, never exaggerating. He always sought only elegance and perfection of the word. And the English expression “Brevity is the soul of wit” suited him perfectly - although he did not write much, what he wrote was always interesting, significant, even jarring.3Attracted to exotic locales and foreign countries, this “hyper-Frenchman,” as Guy Dumur called him, “who embodied all of the qualities and faults of his race,” eventually learned some Russian, and introduced and interpreted Russian literature for the French.4 And late in life he wrote two important studies of the Ukrainian Cossacks, especially their great leader, or hetman, Bohdan Khmelnytsky (d. 1657), who had ended Polish rule in Ukraine and established a de facto independent Ukrainian state.5
When Merimee took up Khmelnytsky as a subject, the name “Ukraine” had been long gone from maps, and the Ukrainian Cossacks almost completely forgotten in western Europe. As a lad, Merimee had been shocked to see “Russian” Cossacks occupying Paris at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Shortly afterwards, Lord Byron and Victor Hugo wrote their famous poems on the Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa (1639-1709; hetman 1687-1708), but little accurate information about Ukraine was available to the general public. Older French writers like the seventeenth-century engineer/cartographer Guillaume le Vasseur Sieur de Beauplan, working in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the eighteenth-century historian of the Ukrainian Cossacks, the Alsatian Jean-Benoit Scherer, were by then little read, as indeed was even Napoleon's expert on the Cossacks, Charles-Louis Lesur. Thus Merimee helped spread the word about Ukraine wherever French was known.6
Modern Ukrainians and Russians are proud that such an eminent French author paid such serious attention to their homelands, and Soviet experts considered Merimee a bourgeois but relatively “progressive” writer, who, as they put it, took up literary arms against “feudalism” and religion. His novellas were assiduously collected, and a Russian-language edition of his collected works came out in six volumes in the 1930s, and again in the 1960s, and his two major works on the Ukrainian Cossacks appeared in Ukrainian in the 1990s. But who exactly was this French writer with a peculiar name, so honoured by the Soviets, and what did he actually write about Ukraine?7