Novelist and playwright, born in Trévières, NW France. He became known with his stories, Lettres de ma chaumière (1886) and La Calvaire (1887). His novels, Le Jardin des supplices (1899), Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1900), and Dingo (1913), were bitter social satires, and Les Affaires sont les affaires (1903) was his most successful play. He was one of the 10 original members of the Acadéemie Goncourt, founded in 1903.
Octave Mirbeau (February 16, 1848 in Trévières - February 16, 1917) was a French journalist, art critic, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde.
Biography
Aesthetical and political struggles
After his debut in journalism in the service of the Bonapartists, and his debut in literature when he worked as a ghostwriter, Mirbeau began to publish under his own name. A supporter of the anarchist cause and fervent supporter of Alfred Dreyfus, Mirbeau embodied the intellectual who involved himself in civic issues.
Independent of all parties, Mirbeau believed that one’s primary duty was to remain lucid. As an art critic, Mirbeau campaigned on behalf of the “great gods nearest to his heart”: he sang the praises of Rodin, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Félix Vallotton, and Pierre Bonnard, and was an early advocate of Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Claudel, Aristide Maillol, and Maurice Utrillo.
Mirbeau's novels
After authoring ten ghostwritten novels, he made his own literary debut with Le Calvaire (Calvary, 1886), in which writing allowed him to overcome the traumatic effects of his devastating liaison with the ill-reputed Judith, renamed Juliette in the novel. In 1888, Mirbeau published L'Abbé Jules, the first pre-Freudian novel written under the influence of Dostoyevsky to appear in French literature; In Sébastien Roch (1890), Mirbeau purged the traumatic effects of his experience as a student during his sojourn among the Jesuits of Vannes.
Mirbeau then underwent a grave existential and literary crisis, yet during this time, he still published in serial form a pre-existentialist novel about the artist’s fate, Dans le ciel (In the Sky), introducing the figure of a painter directly modeled on Van Gogh. In the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair - which exacerbated Mirbeau’s pessimism - he published two novels judged to be scandalous by self-styled paragons of virtue : Le Jardin des supplices (Torture Garden (1899) and Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid) (1900).
In these works, Mirbeau unsettled traditional novelistic conventions, practising the technique of collage, transgressing the code of verisimilitude and fictional credibility, and defying the hypocritical rules of propriety.
Mirbeau's theatre
In the theatre, Mirbeau experienced world-wide acclaim with Les affaires sont les affaires (Business is business 1903) - his classical comedy of manners and characters in the tradition of Molière. Here Mirbeau featured the character of Isidore Lechat, predecessor of the modern master of business intrigue, a product of the new world, a figure who makes money from everything and spreads his tentacles out over the world.
In 1908 - at the end of a long legal and media battle - Mirbeau saw his play Le Foyer (Home) performed by the Comédie-Française.
Published under the title of Farces et moralités (1904) were six small one act plays that were themselves considered extremely innovative. Here Mirbeau can be seen as anticipating the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Aymé, Harold Pinter, and Eugène Ionesco.
Posthumous fame
Mirbeau has never been forgotten, and there has been no interruption in the publication of his works. More recently, Mirbeau has been rediscovered and presented in a new light.
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