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Description
Thus Spake Zarathustra was Friedrich Nietzsche’s favorite of the books he wrote, and has been his most popular amongst general readers. Yet some scholars dislike it because of its unphilosophical nature: it eschews jargon and the scaffolding of arguments, which engage only the intellect, in favor of an artistic approach that engages the whole mind.
After ten years of solitude in a cave high in the mountains, Zarathustra wishes to share with humanity the wisdom he has accumulated during this time. He reaches the nearest town and addresses the crowd on the marketplace. He tells them of the Overman: the next step in human evolution, a being who creates their own values, freed from the weight of tradition and morality, and who takes responsibility for their own successes and failures. But the crowd doesn’t understand him; his discourse is met only with rude ignorance. Zarathustra then decides to gather a small group of disciples and share his wisdom with them.
The bulk of the book is Zarathustra’s speeches on topics such as morality, society, individualism, religion, and how suffering and its overcoming are what give meaning to our existence. While already wiser than most, Zarathustra still learns from those he talks to, re-evaluating his thoughts as he deals with disappointment (such as when his disciples prove to be mere followers), and confronting his own doubts. His greatest challenge, though, comes when he faces the existential test of the eternal recurrence of the same: the thought that our lives could repeat indefinitely without the minutest of change.
The inspiration for Zarathustra came to Nietzsche during one of the long hikes he often indulged in despite his failing health. It was a decade of solitude: his physical condition had worsened to the point of forcing him to retire from his position at the University of Basel, and each change of season prompted him to relocate to kinder climes in Switzerland, France, or Italy. The book took two years to write. Each of its four parts was written in a ten-day period of creative effervescence followed by months of gloom, plagued by terrible, debilitating migraines.
Zarathustra was initially received with indifference at best and frustration at worst. It’s a work of philosophy as much as aesthetics: the language is modeled after the Luther Bible and contains numerous references to Homer, Heraclitus, Plato, Goethe, Emerson, and Wagner, to name a few. Later Nietzsche attempted to address the book’s lack of popularity by framing the same concepts in a more traditional, approachable manner in his following book, Beyond Good and Evil, but that book also struggled to find an audience.
With his health steadily deteriorating, Nietzsche’s mind broke down in 1889 and never recovered. His body would live on for 11 more years, and he ended up in the care of his sister, Elisabeth. A stalwart nationalist and anti-Semite, she saw in her brother’s illness the opportunity to turn him into a German hero. Despite her brother’s firm opposition to nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, she perverted his work by promoting it for her own ends. Scores of commentators partook in her lie and enthusiastically used Nietzsche’s work to buttress their own contrary views. Doing so requires one to selectively ignore half the content of the book: Zarathustra’s discourses regularly touch on a priori dark and violent themes, but they also clearly state that these are to be directed towards oneself. Reaching the Overman requires us to know ourselves, and such introspection, given the darker side of human nature, leads to contempt. This contempt for ourselves, says Nietzsche, should be embraced as the first step towards awareness of what we could be. Cruelty, likewise, stems from that knowledge as a necessity to hammer ourselves into the proper shape. Such commentators also conveniently ignored Zarathustra’s many remarks about love: love for ourselves, he says, is what can prevent us from spreading resentment around us during this difficult process of change.
The first English translation of Zarathustra was by Alexander Tille, a German scholar who had emigrated to Scotland. English wasn’t his first language and his work suffered from it. Thomas Common, a Scottish scholar, used Tille’s work as the base for his own translation. Bringing Zarathustra to the English-speaking world was no easy task given Nietzsche’s stylistic idiosyncrasies. Just like Nietzsche, Common took risks: because the book is written in the style of the Luther Bible, Common decided to emulate the style of the King James Bible; he also tried to reproduce the musicality of the language and the new words coined by Nietzsche, some of which have been updated over time—e.g. Common’s “Superman” is nowadays known as “Overman.” While his choices have been controversial, he produced a landmark translation that faithfully tried to convert the unique flavor of Zarathustra into English. Published in 1909, it would take four decades until the next translation by Walter Kaufman in 1954.
But Zarathustra didn’t find its scholarly fame limited to Europe: soon after its publication, it reached Asia, where it was received with enthusiasm, particularly in China and Japan where it influenced the famous Kyoto School. Zarathustra has also received special attention from the music world. Nietzsche loved music and poetry, and it was his wish that this book be taken as music. No fewer than 87 pieces have been inspired by the book, in part or as a whole. The best known are Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the fourth movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, and Frederick Delius’ A Mass of Life.
Description
The essential facts regarding Joan of Arc are well known. A young teenage girl hears voices that tell her she will deliver France from England’s oppression during the Hundred Years War. She manages to take her message to the dauphin, who after some persuasion places her at the head of his army. That army promptly lifts the siege of Orléans, throws the English out of the Loire valley, hands them another significant defeat at Patay, and marches all the way to Reims, where the dauphin is crowned King Charles VII. After an ill-advised and short-lived truce, Joan is captured by the Burgundians—French nobility who have aligned themselves with the English—and they try her for heresy and burn her at the stake.
Twain first became fascinated with Joan as a teenager. When he finally decided to write a book about her, he researched it for a dozen years and spent two more years writing it. It was, in his words, “the best of all my books,” and became his last finished novel. Although a work of fiction, Twain’s research was time well spent: the known facts of Joan’s life, and especially the trial, are very accurate in their depiction. To tell Joan’s story, Twain invented a memoirist, Louis de Conte, a fictionalized version of her real-life page, Louis de Contes. Twain has the fictional de Conte grow up with Joan, and so he is able to tell her story from her early childhood all the way through the trial and execution. The result is the story of one of the great women in history told by one of history’s great storytellers.
Description
P. G. Wodehouse was an incredibly prolific writer who sold short stories to publications around the world throughout his career. The settings of his stories range from the casinos of Monte Carlo to the dance halls of New York, often taking detours into rural English life, where we follow his wide variety of distinctive characters and their trials, tribulations and follies.
The stories in this volume consist of most of what is available in U.S. public domain, with the exception of some stories which were never anthologized, and stories that are collected in themed volumes (Jeeves Stories, Ukridge Stories, and School Stories). They are ordered by the date they first appeared in magazine form.
Description
After the bloody battle at Tewksbury and the second dethroning of Henry VI, England and its citizens are finally able to enjoy peace under the reign of Edward IV. The remaining Lancastrian leaders are either killed or scattered to the four winds. Within the kingdom, not everyone is happy with their new king—and when Edward falls ill, his power-hungry brother Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, sees his chance and prepares to kill anyone who stands between him and the throne.
Richard puts into play numerous schemes to eradicate the line of succession and control the court. The first victim is King Edward’s other brother, Clarence. Rumors lead to Clarence’s imprisonment in the Tower of London, and Richard sends two murderers to stab him to death. This causes Edward’s health to worsen, and the title of Protector falls to the remaining brother. Next on Richard’s hit list is Lord Hastings, the loudest voice to object to Richard’s accession, and who is promptly arrested and executed for treason. As Richard orchestrates murder after murder, the deaths start coming back to haunt him.
This Standard Ebooks production is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.
Description
The first three acts of Molière’s Tartuffe were first performed for Louis XIV in 1664, but the play was almost immediately suppressed—not because the King disliked it, but because the church resented the insinuation that the pious were frauds. After several different versions were written and performed privately, Tartuffe was eventually published in its final five-act form in 1669.
A comic tale of man taken in by a sanctimonious scoundrel, the characters of Tartuffe, Elmire, and Orgon are considered among some of the great classical theater roles. As the family strives to convince the patriarch that Tartuffe is a religious fraud, the play ultimately focuses on skewering not the hypocrite, but his victims, and the hypocrisy of fervent religious belief unchecked by facts or reason—a defense Molière himself used to overcome the church’s proscriptions. In the end, the play was so impactful that both French and English now use the word “Tartuffe” to refer to a religious hypocrite who feigns virtue.
In its original French, the play is written in twelve-syllable lines of rhyming couplets. Curtis Hidden Page’s translation invokes a popular compromise and renders it into the familiar blank verse without rhymed endings that was popularized by Shakespeare. The translation is considered a seminal by modern translators.
Description
When Robert Peary’s team was the first to reach the North Pole, he was the only white man in the picture. Accompanying him were four Eskimos and Matthew Henson, a black man who had been with Peary on all his expeditions for the previous twenty years. Henson tells the story of that last expedition with candor and warmth, making neither too much nor too little of the conditions the team endured, including travelling on foot and sled in temperatures reaching 50° and more below zero. Henson’s story is a testament to fortitude in the face of debilitating conditions.
Description
Robbery Under Arms, subtitled A Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and in the Goldfields of Australia, was published in serial form in the Sydney Mail newspaper between July 1882 and August 1883. It was published under the name of Rolf Boldrewood, a pseudonym for Thomas Alexander Browne, a police magistrate and gold commissioner.
Robbery Under Arms is an entertaining adventure story told from the first person point of view of Richard “Dick” Marston. The story is in the form of a journal written from jail where he’s waiting to be hanged for his crimes. Marston and his brother Jim are led astray as young men by their father, who made money by cattle “duffing,” or stealing. They are introduced to their father’s associate, known only as Captain Starlight, a clever and charming fraudster. After a spell in jail, from which he escapes, Marston, his brother, and father are persuaded by Starlight to operate as bank robbers and bushrangers. They embark on a life continually on the run from the police. Despite this, Dick and Jim also manage to spend a considerable time prospecting for gold, and the gold rush and the fictitious gold town of Turon are described in detail.
The character of Captain Starlight is based largely on the real-life exploits of bushrangers Harry Redford and Thomas Smith, the latter known as “Captain Midnight.”
Regarded as a classic of Australian literature, Robbery Under Arms has never been out of print, and has been the basis of several adaptations in the form of films and television serials.
This Standard Ebooks edition is unabridged, and restores some 30,000 words from the original serialization which were cut out of the 1889 one-volume edition of the novel.
Description
The Chessmen of Mars, the fifth installment in the Martian series, was originally serialized in six parts in Argosy All-Story Weekly before being published as a novel in 1922. It introduces Tara, Princess of Helium, the headstrong daughter of John Carter, the Warlord of Mars. Just like the rest of the novels in the series, this one is packed with imaginative characters and locations. In true Barsoomian fashion, Burroughs regales us with an action-packed adventure: planet-shaking storms, daring swordfights, horrific dungeons, complex alien cultures, and wild escapes. While the story may be considered a standard pulp adventure, it also introduces a bit of philosophy by exploring the connection between the mind and the body.
Of special note is Jetan, or Martian chess, which holds a central place in the storyline. Burroughs includes an appendix so that interested readers may play the game themselves.
Description
Sir and Lady Chiltern are the picture of responsibility: he a member of the House of Commons, she a member of the Women’s Liberal Association. When Mrs. Cheveley arrives in London, she brings with her a letter that threatens to ruin Sir Chiltern forever—his whole life threatens to come crumbling down. The following twenty-four hours are filled with theft, blackmail, farce, and biting social commentary.
An Ideal Husband was first performed in 1893 at the Haymarket Theatre, and it was immediately successful. On April 6th, the same day it transferred to the Criterion Theatre, Oscar Wilde was arrested for gross indecency, and his name was removed from the play. Wilde revised the play for publication in 1899, taking steps to add written stage directions and character descriptions in order to make the work more accessible to the public. Today it’s Wilde’s second most popular play, after The Importance of Being Earnest.
Description
Although many readers might associate the term “fairy tales” with the Germanic or Celtic folk tale tradition—like in the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm—countries like India have their own rich history of fairy tales. Many of these tales, infused with a local flavor, bear a striking structural and thematic similarity to those with which Western readers are accustomed: moral allegories, talking animals, gambling incidents, and the like. Joseph Jacobs has carefully selected 29 fairy tales from the Jatakas, the Fables of Bidpai, the Tales of the Sun, the Baluchi Folktales, the Folktales of Kashmir, and other Sanskrit sources. These stories are a humorous and imaginative showcase of India’s rich fairy tale tradition.
Joseph Jacobs was an Australian folklorist who devoted most of his career to collecting fairy tales from around the world. His collections on English fairy tales have immortalized stories such as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “The Three Little Pigs,” “Jack the Giant Killer” and “The History of Tom Thumb.”