André Gide
Encyclopedia
André Paul Guillaume Gide (ɑ̃dʁe pɔl ɡijom ʒid) (22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 and winner of the Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

 in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

 movement, to the advent of anticolonialism
Anti-imperialism
Anti-imperialism, strictly speaking, is a term that may be applied to a movement opposed to any form of colonialism or imperialism. Anti-imperialism includes opposition to wars of conquest, particularly of non-contiguous territory or people with a different language or culture; it also includes...

 between the two World Wars.

Known for his fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...

 as well as his autobiographical
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

 works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straight-laced education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

 after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.

Early life

Gide was born in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 on 22 November 1869, into a middle-class Protestant family. His father was a Paris University
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

 professor of law and died in 1880. His uncle was the political economist Charles Gide
Charles Gide
Charles Gide was a leading French economist and historian of economic thought. He was a professor at the University of Bordeaux, at Montpellier, at Université de Paris and finally at Collège de France.- Academic work :...

.

Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy
Normandy
Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...

 and became a prolific writer at an early age, publishing his first novel, The Notebooks of Andre Walter (French: Les Cahiers d'André Walter), in 1891.

In 1893 and 1894, Gide traveled in Northern Africa, and it was there that he came to accept his attraction to boys. He befriended Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 in Paris, and in 1895 Gide and Wilde met in Algiers
Algiers
' is the capital and largest city of Algeria. According to the 1998 census, the population of the city proper was 1,519,570 and that of the urban agglomeration was 2,135,630. In 2009, the population was about 3,500,000...

. There, Wilde had the impression that he had introduced Gide to homosexuality, but, in fact, Gide had already discovered this on his own.

The middle years

In 1895, after his mother's death, he married his cousin
Cousin
In kinship terminology, a cousin is a relative with whom one shares one or more common ancestors. The term is rarely used when referring to a relative in one's immediate family where there is a more specific term . The term "blood relative" can be used synonymously and establishes the existence of...

 Madeleine Rondeaux, but the marriage remained unconsummated. In 1896, he became mayor of La Roque-Baignard
La Roque-Baignard
La Roque-Baignard is a commune in the Calvados department in the Basse-Normandie region in northwestern France.-Population:-References:*...

, a commune
Communes of France
The commune is the lowest level of administrative division in the French Republic. French communes are roughly equivalent to incorporated municipalities or villages in the United States or Gemeinden in Germany...

 in Normandy.

In 1901, Gide rented the property Maderia in St. Brelade's Bay and lived there while residing in Jersey
Jersey
Jersey, officially the Bailiwick of Jersey is a British Crown Dependency off the coast of Normandy, France. As well as the island of Jersey itself, the bailiwick includes two groups of small islands that are no longer permanently inhabited, the Minquiers and Écréhous, and the Pierres de Lecq and...

. This period, 1901–1907, is commonly seen as a period of apathy and unsettlement in his life.

In 1908, Gide helped found the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française
Nouvelle Revue Française
La Nouvelle Revue Française is a literary magazine founded in 1909 by a group of intellectuals, including André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Jean Schlumberger...

(The New French Review). In 1916, Marc Allégret
Marc Allégret
Marc Allégret was a French screenwriter and film director.Born in Basel, Basel-Stadt, Switzerland, he was the elder brother of Yves Allégret. Marc was educated to be a lawyer. Allégret became André Gide's lover when he was fifteen and Gide was forty-seven...

, only 15 years old, became his lover. Marc was the son of Elie Allégret, best man at Gide's wedding. Of Allégret's five children, André Gide adopted Marc. The two fled to London, in retribution for which his wife burned all his correspondence, "the best part of myself," as he was later to comment. In 1918, he met Dorothy Bussy
Dorothy Bussy
Dorothy Bussy was an English novelist and translator.-Family background and childhood:Dorothy Bussy was a member of the Strachey family, one of ten children of Jane Strachey and the great British Empire soldier and administrator Lt-Gen Sir Richard Strachey...

, who was his friend for over thirty years and who would translate many of his works into English.

In the 1920s
1920s
File:1920s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Third Tipperary Brigade Flying Column No. 2 under Sean Hogan during the Irish Civil War; Prohibition agents destroying barrels of alcohol in accordance to the 18th amendment, which made alcoholic beverages illegal throughout the entire decade; In...

, Gide became an inspiration for writers such as Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...

 and Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...

. In 1923, he published a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky; however, when he defended pederasty in the public edition of Corydon
Corydon (book)
Corydon is a book by André Gide consisting of four dialogues on homosexuality. The name of the book comes from Virgil's pederastic character Corydon. Parts of the text were separately published from 1911 to 1920, and the whole book appeared in its French original in France in 1924 and in the United...

(1924) he received widespread condemnation. He later considered this his most important work.

In 1923, he sired a daughter, Catherine, by Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, a woman who was much younger than him. He had known Elisabeth for a long time, as she was the daughter of his closest female friend, Maria Monnom, the wife of his friend, the Belgian neo-impressionist painter Théo van Rysselberghe
Théo van Rysselberghe
Théo van Rysselberghe was a Belgian neo-impressionist painter, who played a pivotal role in the European art scene at the turn of the century.-Early years:...

. This would cause the only crisis in the long-standing relationship between Allégret and Gide and damaged the relation with Van Rysselberghe. This was possibly his only sexual liaison with a woman and it was brief in the extreme, but his daughter Catherine became his only descendant by blood. He liked to call Elisabeth "La Dame Blanche" ("The White Lady"). Elisabeth eventually left her husband to move to Paris and manage the practical aspects of Gide's life (they had adjoining apartments built for each of them on the rue Vavin). She worshipped him, but evidently they no longer had a sexual relationship. Gide's legal wife, Madeleine, died in 1938. Later he used the background of his unconsummated marriage in his novel Et Nunc Manet in Te.

In 1924, he published an autobiography, Unless the seed dies (French: Si le grain ne meurt
Si le grain ne meurt
Si le grain ne meurt is the autobiography of the French writer André Gide. Published in 1924, it recounts the life of Gide from his childhood in Paris until his engagement with his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux in 1895.The book has two parts...

).

After 1925, he began to demand more humane conditions for criminals.

Africa

From July 1926 to May 1927, he travelled through the French Equatorial Africa
French Equatorial Africa
French Equatorial Africa or the AEF was the federation of French colonial possessions in Middle Africa, extending northwards from the Congo River to the Sahara Desert.-History:...

 colony
Colony
In politics and history, a colony is a territory under the immediate political control of a state. For colonies in antiquity, city-states would often found their own colonies. Some colonies were historically countries, while others were territories without definite statehood from their inception....

 with his lover Marc Allégret
Marc Allégret
Marc Allégret was a French screenwriter and film director.Born in Basel, Basel-Stadt, Switzerland, he was the elder brother of Yves Allégret. Marc was educated to be a lawyer. Allégret became André Gide's lover when he was fifteen and Gide was forty-seven...

. He went successively to Middle Congo (now the Republic of the Congo
Republic of the Congo
The Republic of the Congo , sometimes known locally as Congo-Brazzaville, is a state in Central Africa. It is bordered by Gabon, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo , the Angolan exclave province of Cabinda, and the Gulf of Guinea.The region was dominated by...

), Oubangui-Chari
Oubangui-Chari
Oubangui-Chari, or Ubangi-Shari, was a French territory in central Africa which later became the independent Central African Republic . French activity in the area began in 1889 with the establishment of an outpost at Bangui, now the capital of CAR. The territory was named in 1894.In 1903, French...

 (now the Central African Republic
Central African Republic
The Central African Republic , is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It borders Chad in the north, Sudan in the north east, South Sudan in the east, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo in the south, and Cameroon in the west. The CAR covers a land area of about ,...

), briefly to Chad
Chad
Chad , officially known as the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west...

 and then to Cameroun
Cameroun
Cameroun was a French and British mandate territory in central Africa, now constituting the majority of the territory of the Republic of Cameroon....

 before returning to France. He related his peregrinations in a journal called Travels in the Congo (French: Voyage au Congo) and Return from Chad (French: Retour du Tchad). In this published journal, he criticized the behavior of French business interests in the Congo and inspired reform. In particular, he strongly criticized the Large Concessions regime (French: régime des Grandes Concessions), i.e. a regime according to which part of the colony was conceded to French companies and where these companies could exploit all of the area's natural resource
Natural resource
Natural resources occur naturally within environments that exist relatively undisturbed by mankind, in a natural form. A natural resource is often characterized by amounts of biodiversity and geodiversity existent in various ecosystems....

s, in particular rubber
Rubber
Natural rubber, also called India rubber or caoutchouc, is an elastomer that was originally derived from latex, a milky colloid produced by some plants. The plants would be ‘tapped’, that is, an incision made into the bark of the tree and the sticky, milk colored latex sap collected and refined...

. He related for instance how natives were forced to leave their village during several weeks to collect rubber in the forest, and went as far as comparing their exploitation to slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...

. The book had important influence on anti-colonialism movements in France and helped re-evaluate the impact of colonialism
Impact and evaluation of colonialism and colonization
Colonialism is the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. Historically, this has often involved killing or subjugating the indigenous population...

.

Russia

During the 1930s, he briefly became a communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

, or more precisely, a fellow traveler (he never formally joined the Communist Party). As a distinguished writer sympathizing with the cause of communism, he was invited to tour the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 as a guest of the Soviet Union of Writers. The tour disillusioned him and he subsequently became quite critical of Soviet Communism. This criticism of Communism caused him to lose socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

 friends, especially when he made a clean break with it in Retour de L'U.R.S.S. in 1936. He was also a contributor to The God That Failed
The God that Failed
The God That Failed is a 1949 book which collects together six essays with the testimonies of a number of famous ex-communists, who were writers and journalists. The common theme of the essays is the authors' disillusionment with and abandonment of communism...

.
...and after his visit to the Soviet Union:

The 1940s

Gide left France for Africa in 1942 and lived in Tunis
Tunis
Tunis is the capital of both the Tunisian Republic and the Tunis Governorate. It is Tunisia's largest city, with a population of 728,453 as of 2004; the greater metropolitan area holds some 2,412,500 inhabitants....

 until the end of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

. In 1947, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...

. He devoted much of his last years to publishing his Journal. Gide died in Paris on 19 February 1951. The Roman Catholic Church
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

 placed his works on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1952.

Quotations

  • "Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling"
  • "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time"
  • "It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not"
  • "Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."
  • “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

Partial list of works

  • Les cahiers d'André Walter – 1891
  • Le traité du Narcisse – 1891
  • Les poésies d'André Walter – 1892
  • Le voyage d'Urien – 1893
  • La tentative amoureuse – 1893
  • Paludes – 1895
  • Réflexions sur quelques points de littérature – 1897
  • Les nourritures terrestres
    Les nourritures terrestres
    The Fruits of the Earth is a prose-poem by André Gide, published in France in 1897.The book was written in 1895 and appeared in a review in 1896 before publication the next year...

    – 1897 (translated as The Fruits of the Earth)
  • Feuilles de route 1895–1896 – 1897
  • El Hadj
  • Le Prométhée mal enchaîné – 1899
  • Philoctète – 1899
  • Lettres à Angèle – 1900
  • De l'influence en littérature – 1900
  • Le roi Candaule – 1901
  • Les limites de l'art – 1901
  • L'immoraliste
    The Immoralist
    The Immoralist is a novel by André Gide, published in France in 1902. When it was first published, it was considered shocking. What some see as a story of dereliction, others see as a tale of introspection and self-discovery.-Plot:...

    – 1902 (translated by Richard Howard
    Richard Howard
    Richard Howard is an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and is a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and where he now teaches...

     as The Immoralist)
  • Saül – 1903
  • De l'importance du public – 1903
  • Prétextes – 1903
  • Amyntas – 1906
  • Le retour de l'enfant prodigue
    Le retour de l'enfant prodigue
    Le Retour de l'Enfant Prodigue is a short story by André Gide. Gide wrote the story in early 1907, in less than two weeks....

    – 1907
  • Dostoïevsky d'après sa correspondance – 1908
  • La porte étroite
    La porte étroite
    Strait Is the Gate is a French novel written by André Gide published in 1909. It is a very sad and moving story which probes some of the complexities and terrors of adolescence and growing up. Based on a very Freudian interpretation, the story uses the influences of childhood experience and the...

    – 1909 (translated as Strait Is the Gate)
  • Oscar Wilde – 1910
  • Nouveaux prétextes – 1911
  • Charles-Louis-Philippe – 1911
  • C. R. D. N. – 1911
  • Isabelle – 1911
  • Bethsabé – 1912
  • Souvenirs de la Cour d'Assises – 1914
  • Les caves du Vatican – 1914 (translated as Lafcadio's Adventures and The Vatican Cellars)
  • La marche Turque – 1914
  • La symphonie pastorale
    La Symphonie Pastorale
    La Symphonie Pastorale is a French novel written by André Gide published in 1919. The work was made into a film in 1946 by Jean Delannoy, with Michèle Morgan in the principal role as Gertrude.-Plot:...

    – 1919
  • Corydon
    Corydon (book)
    Corydon is a book by André Gide consisting of four dialogues on homosexuality. The name of the book comes from Virgil's pederastic character Corydon. Parts of the text were separately published from 1911 to 1920, and the whole book appeared in its French original in France in 1924 and in the United...

    – 1920
  • Numquid et tu . . .? – 1922
  • Dostoïevsky – 1923
  • Incidences – 1924
  • Caractères – 1925
  • Les faux-monnayeurs
    The Counterfeiters (novel)
    The Counterfeiters is a 1925 novel by French author André Gide, first published in Nouvelle Revue Française...

    – 1925 (translated as The Counterfeiters – 1927)
  • Si le grain ne meurt
    Si le grain ne meurt
    Si le grain ne meurt is the autobiography of the French writer André Gide. Published in 1924, it recounts the life of Gide from his childhood in Paris until his engagement with his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux in 1895.The book has two parts...

    – 1926 (translated as If It Die)
  • Le journal des faux-monnayeurs – 1926
  • Dindiki – 1927
  • Voyage au Congo – 1927
  • Le retour de Tchad – 1928
  • L'école des femmes – 1929
  • Essai sur Montaigne – 1929
  • Un esprit non prévenu – 1929
  • Robert – 1930
  • La séquestrée de Poitiers – 1930
  • L'affaire Redureau – 1930
  • Œdipe – 1931
  • Perséphone – 1934
  • Les nouvelles nourritures – 1935
  • Geneviève – 1936
  • Retour de l'U. R. S. S. – 1936
  • Retouches â mon retour de l'U. R. S. S. – 1937
  • Notes sur Chopin – 1938
  • Journal 1889–1939 – 1939
  • Découvrons Henri Michaux
    Henri Michaux
    Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism...

    – 1941
  • Thésée – 1946
  • Le retour – 1946
  • Paul Valéry
    Paul Valéry
    Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...

    – 1947
  • Le procès – 1947
  • L'arbitraire – 1947
  • Eloges – 1948
  • Littérature engagée – 1950

External links

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