The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (31 page)

In May 1872 Rimbaud was recalled to Paris by Verlaine, who said that he could not live without him. That July Verlaine abandoned his wife and child and fled with Rimbaud to London, where they spent the following winter. During this winter Rimbaud composed a series of 40 prose poems to which he gave the title
Illuminations
. These are his most ambitious attempt to develop new poetic forms from the content of his visions; they try to abolish the distinction between reality and hallucination.

The two poets' relationship was growing so tense and violent that Verlaine became physically ill and mentally disturbed. In April 1873 Rimbaud left him to return to his family, and it was at their farm at Roche, near Charleville, that he began to apply himself to another major work,
Une Saison en enfer
(1873;
A Season in Hell
). A month later Verlaine persuaded Rimbaud to accompany him to London. Rimbaud treated Verlaine with sadistic cruelty, and after more wanderings and quarrels, he rejoined Verlaine in Brussels only to make a last farewell. As he was leaving Verlaine shot him, wounding him in the wrist. Rimbaud was hospitalized, and Verlaine was arrested and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Rimbaud soon returned to Roche, where he finished
Une Saison en enfer
, which consists of nine fragments of prose and verse. It is a remarkable work of self-confession and psychological examination. In the book's final section, “Adieu” (“Goodbye”), Rimbaud
takes a nostalgic backward look at his past life and then moves on; it is a poem sometimes read as Rimbaud's farewell to creative writing.

The rest of Rimbaud's life, from the literary point of view, was silence. In 1875 he set out to see the world, and by 1879 he had crossed the Alps on foot, joined and deserted the Dutch colonial army in the East Indies, visited Egypt, and worked as a labourer in Cyprus, in every instance suffering illness or other hardships. In 1880 he found employment in the service of a coffee trader at Aden (now in Yemen), who sent him to H
ā
rer (now in Ethiopia). He became the first white man to journey into the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and his report of this expedition was published by France's National Society of Geography in 1884. He made his fortune in Ethiopia, but in early 1891 he returned to France plagued by a tumour on his right knee. The leg was amputated, and cancer was diagnosed; he died several months later.

(b. July 26, 1856, Dublin, Ire.—d. Nov. 2, 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, Eng.)

G
eorge Bernard Shaw was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

In 1876 Shaw resolved to become a writer, and he left Ireland to join his mother and elder sister in London. Shaw in his 20s suffered continuous frustration and poverty. He spent his afternoons in the British Museum reading room, writing novels and reading what he had missed at school, and his evenings in search of additional self-education in the lectures and debates that characterized contemporary middle-class London intellectual activities.

His fiction failed utterly. The semiautobiographical and aptly titled
Immaturity
(1879; published 1930) repelled every publisher in London. His next four novels were similarly refused, as were most of the articles he submitted to the press for a decade. Despite his failure as a novelist, Shaw found himself during the 1880s. He became a vegetarian, a socialist, a spellbinding orator, a polemicist, and tentatively a playwright. He became the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English society not through revolution but through permeation of the country's intellectual and political life. Shaw involved himself in every aspect of its activities, most visibly as editor of one of the classics of British socialism,
Fabian Essays in Socialism
(1889), to which he also contributed two sections.

Eventually, in 1885 the drama critic William Archer found Shaw steady journalistic work. But Shaw truly began to make his mark when he was recruited to the
Saturday Review
as theatre critic (1895–98); in that position he used all his wit and polemical powers in a campaign to displace the artificialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theatre of vital ideas. He also began writing his own plays.

In his first play,
Widowers' Houses
(performed 1892), he emphasized social and economic issues instead of romance, adopting the ironic comedic tone that would characterize all his work. He described his first plays as “unpleasant” because they forced the spectator to face unpleasant facts; these plays include
Mrs. Warren's Profession
, which concerns prostitution; it was written in 1893 but barred from performance until 1902. He followed these with several “pleasant” plays in an effort to find the producers and audiences that his mordant comedies had offended. The first of the second group,
Arms and the Man
(performed 1894),
has a Balkan setting and makes lighthearted, though sometimes mordant, fun of romantic falsifications of both love and warfare.
Candida
(performed 1897) and Y
ou Never Can Tell
(performed 1899) are other “pleasant” plays.

Shaw soon became established as a major playwright on the Continent by the performance of his plays there, but, curiously, his reputation lagged in England. It was only with the production of
John Bull's Other Island
(performed 1904) in London, with a special performance for Edward VII, that Shaw's stage reputation was belatedly made in England. Other plays of about the same time include
Man and Superman
(performed 1905),
Major Barbara
(performed 1905), and
The Doctor's Dilemma
(performed 1906), the latter two using high comedy for serious purposes. Possibly Shaw's comedic masterpiece, and certainly his funniest and most popular play, is
Pygmalion
(performed 1913). It was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, but the play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system.

World War I was a watershed for Shaw. At first he ceased writing plays. But by the 1920s he had returned to drama, most notably with
Saint Joan
(performed 1923), a chronicle play about Joan of Arc. Acclaim for it led to the awarding of the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature to Shaw (he refused the award).

Impudent, irreverent, and always a showman, Shaw used his buoyant wit to keep himself in the public eye to the end of his 94 years. He was not merely the best comic dramatist of his time but also one of the most significant playwrights in the English language since the 17th century. He was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Swift; the most readable music critic in English; the best theatre critic of his generation; a prodigious lecturer and essayist on politics, economics, and sociological subjects; and one of the most prolific letter writers in literature.

(b. Jan. 29 [Jan. 17, Old Style], 1860, Taganrog, Russia—d. July 14/15 [July 1/2], 1904, Badenweiler, Ger.)

A
nton Pavlovich Chekhov was a major Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. He is regarded as the outstanding representative of the late 19th-century Russian realist school.

Chekhov, the son of a former serf, became a doctor in 1884. He began his writing career as the author of anecdotes for humorous journals, signing his early work pseudonymously. By 1888 he had become widely popular with a “lowbrow” public and had already produced a body of work more voluminous than all his later writings put together. He had also experimented in serious writing, providing studies of human misery and despair at variance with the frenzied facetiousness of his comic work. Gradually this serious vein absorbed him and soon predominated over the comic.

In 1888, Chekhov published his first work in a leading literary review,
Severny vestnik
(“Northern Herald”). With the work in question—a long story entitled “Steppe”—he at last turned his back on comic fiction. “Steppe,” an autobiographical work describing a journey in the Ukraine as seen through the eyes of a child, is the first among more than 50 stories published in a variety of journals and selections between 1888 and his death in 1904.

Chekhov also wrote several profoundly tragic studies at this time. The play
Ivanov
(1887–89) culminates in the suicide of a young man nearer to the author's own age. Together with other works of this period, this play belongs to a group among Chekhov's works that have been called clinical studies. They explore the experiences of the mentally or physically ill in a spirit that reminds one that the
author was himself a qualified—and remained a sporadically practicing—doctor.

By the late 1880s many critics had begun to reprimand Chekhov for holding no firm political and social views and for failing to endow his works with a sense of direction. Such expectations irked Chekhov, who was unpolitical and philosophically uncommitted. In early 1890 he suddenly sought relief from the irritations of urban intellectual life by undertaking a one-man sociological expedition to a remote island, Sakhalin.

During the years just before and after his Sakhalin expedition, Chekhov had continued his experiments as a dramatist. His
Wood Demon
(1888–89) is a long-winded and ineptly facetious four-act play, which somehow, by a miracle of art, became converted—largely by cutting—into
Dyadya Vanya
(
Uncle Vany
a), one of his greatest stage masterpieces. The conversion—to a superb study of aimlessness in a rural manor house—took place some time between 1890 and 1896; the play was published in 1897. Other dramatic efforts of the period include several of the uproarious one-act farces known as vaudevilles:
Medved
(
The Bear
),
Predlozheniye
(
The Proposal
), and others.

Chayka
(
The Seagull
) was first performed in St. Petersburg in 1896. This four-act drama, misnamed a comedy, was badly received; indeed, it was almost hissed off the stage. Chekhov was greatly distressed and left the auditorium during the second act, having suffered one of the most traumatic experiences of his life and vowing never to write for the stage again. Two years later, however, the play was revived by the newly created Moscow Art Theatre, enjoying considerable success and helping to reestablish Chekhov as a dramatist.
The Seagull
is a study of the clash between the older and younger generations as it affects two actresses and two writers, some of
the details having been suggested by episodes in the lives of Chekhov's friends.

In March 1897 Chekhov had suffered a lung hemorrhage caused by tuberculosis, symptoms of which had become apparent considerably earlier. Never a successful financial manager, Chekhov attempted to regularize his literary affairs in 1899 by selling the copyright of all his existing works, excluding plays, to a publisher for 75,000 rubles, an unduly low sum.

Chekhov's two last plays—
Tri sestry
(1901;
Three Sisters
) and
Vishnyovy sad
(1904;
The Cherry Orchard
)—were both written for the Moscow Art Theatre. But much as Chekhov owed to the theatre's two founders, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstanin Stanislavsky, he remained dissatisfied with such rehearsals and performances of his plays as he was able to witness. In
Three Sisters
Chekhov sensitively portrays the longings of a trio of provincial young women, while in
The Cherry Orchard
he offered a poignant picture of the Russian landowning class in decline, portraying characters who remain comic despite their very poignancy. Less than six months after its first performance Chekhov died of tuberculosis.

(b. May 7, 1861, Calcutta, India—d. Aug. 7, 1941, Calcutta)

R
abindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is
generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern India.

The son of the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, he early began to write verses. After incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned to India. There he published several books of poetry in the 1880s and completed
M
ā
nas
Ä«
(1890), a collection that marks the maturing of his genius. It contains some of his best-known poems, including many in verse forms new to Bengali, as well as some social and political satire that was critical of his fellow Bengalis.