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Honoré de Balzac was a French writer whose works have been made into films, such as, Cousin Bette (1998) starring Jessica Lange, and television serials, such as Cousin Bette (1971), starring Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren.
He was born on March 20, 1799, in Tours, France. His father, Bernard Francois Balzac, was a government regional administrator who married a daughter of his boss. The family moved to Paris in 1815. There Balzac went to the Sorbonne, matriculated in jurisprudence and became a clerk for an attorney.
Balzac's efforts at publishing his early novels under a pseudonym and in his own publishing company failed, and he went into debt. His activity as a journalist brought recognition among intellectuals for his political and cultural reviews, which resonated with the mixed social expectations during the Restoration. However, with the 1830 fall of the Bourbon monarchy came the new, "bourgeous" (or capitalist) monarchy, a chimera doomed to fall in the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe. Such was the political background for Balzac's literary works.
Balzac created the idea of a serialized cross-genre web of stories and novels, linked together as a broad historic panorama of lives and events. This idea was implemented in his "La Comedie humane" ("The Human Comedy"). It included about 100 stories, novels and essays, some of them unfinished. Such a vast body of handwriting could not be possible without an obsession. His plans and plots grew constantly and often changed, just to include a new idea based on a fresh gossip. Altogether his works reflected on a mosaic of life in Paris, and France in general, from the 1820s to 1850.
"Les Chouans" (1829) was a prologue to the collection of Balsac's interconnected works, known as the Human Comedy; it really opened with "Scenes de la Vie Privee", six Scenes From a Private Life (1830-1832) and "La Peau de chagrin" (The Goat-skin 1831). Balzac was writing 14 to 18 hours a day and often through the night, constantly doping himself with countless cups of coffee. He draw upon ideas from the works of Walter Scott and William Shakespeare, as in 1835's "Le pere Goriot" ("Father Goriot"), a "King Lear" type of story set in 1820s Paris. He also created many of his own purely original plots and introduced over 2,000 characters through the books of the Human Comedy. The largest "stones" in his pyramid of fiction are "Eugene Grande" (1833), a thousand-page saga; "Les Illusions Perdues" ("Lost Illusions"); "Le cousin Pons" (1847), "La Cousine Bette" (1848). His novel "Eugenia Grande" was translated into Russian in 1844 by the young writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.
One year before his death, being in declining health, Balzac traveled to Poland to see his pen-friend of 15 years, Countess Evelina Hanska. She was a wealthy lady of the Polish nobility. They married in Berdichev, Russian Empire, in 1850, when Balzac had only three months left to live. He died on August 18, 1850, in Paris, and was laid to rest in the cemetery of Père Lachaise.- Zachary Taylor was an American military leader who served as the 12th president of the United States from 1849 until his death in 1850. Taylor previously was a career officer in the United States Army, rising to the rank of major general and becoming a national hero as a result of his victories in the Mexican-American War. As a result, he won election to the White House despite his vague political beliefs. His top priority as president was preserving the Union. He died sixteen months into his term, having made no progress on the most divisive issue in Congress, slavery.
- José de San Martín was born on 25 February 1778 in Yapeyú, Argentina. He was married to María de los Remedios de Escalada. He died on 17 August 1850 in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France.
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Born in 1779 in Copenhagen, Adam Oehlenschläger was one of Denmark's most prominent poets of the early 1800s and was a leader of the Romantic movement in that country. He was heavily influenced by Norse myths and released his first volume of poetry in 1802 - entitled Digte (Poems). His works include St. John's Eve Play (1803); the historical works Earl Hakon (1807), Baldur the Good (1808) and Axel and Valborg (1809). Other important works include the tragedy Correggio (1811) and the fantasy Aladdin of the Wonderful Lamp (1820).- Writer
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Nikolaus Lenau's real name was Nikolaus Niembsch, Edler von Strehlenau (from 1822). Lenau grew up in the confines of an impoverished officer's family. He spent his childhood and youth in Pest, Trokaj, Vienna and Stockerau near Vienna. From 1812 to 1815 he went to the Piarist High School in Pest. In 1816 the family moved to Tokaj, where he received private lessons as well as violin and guitar lessons. In 1817 he passed his examination at the Piarist high school in Sátoraljaújhely and in 1818 at the high school in Pest. He then moved to Stockerau near Vienna to live with his wealthy paternal grandparents. In 1820 his grandfather, Colonel Josef Niembsch, received the title of nobility, which was inherited by Nikolaus Lenau after his death in 1822. From this he derived his stage name.
After his school education, with the financial support of his grandparents, he studied law, philosophy, agriculture and medicine in Pressburg, Vienna, Hungarian-Altenburg and Heidelberg from 1822 to 1832, but without completing his studies. In 1828 he was able to read one of his works for the first time, the poem "The Dreams of Youth" in J.G. Publish Seidl's paperback "Aurora". From 1830 he used his pseudonym Lenau. In Württemberg he had his first contact with the members of the "Swabian Poets' Circle" in 1831; there he met Gustav Schwab, Ludwig Uhland, Justinus Kerner, Count Alexander v. Württemberg and Carl Mayer. He owes his first publications to the Cotta publishing house to the professor, editor and poet Gustav Schwab. In Stuttgart he frequented various salons where he recited his own poems.
From 1832 to 1833 he traveled to America to try for a new start, but it failed. There he encountered a situation similar to that at home, which did not give him any new motifs for his poetic work. His experiences were processed in Ferdinand Kürnberger's novel "Der Amerika-Müde" (1855). With this trip, Lenau tried to escape from the political and intellectual narrowness of contemporary Germany. Departures have accompanied him since his childhood and also in later years. This homelessness was transferred to his poetic work, in which he moved between melancholy and commitment. In 1833 Lenau fell in love with the married Viennese woman Sophie von Löwenthal, in whose house he lived intermittently from 1837 to 1841. He began a restless life traveling between Württemberg and Vienna.
Lenau entered into several engagements, which he saw as a way out of his unhappy love - but none of them led to a happy ending. In 1836 he met the Danish theologian Hans Lassen Martensen. He and his reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel influenced his thinking and work. Between 1833 and 1842, Nikolaus wrote his three major hybrids "Faust" (1836), "Savonarola" (1837) and "The Albigensians" (1842). These dramatic works with an epic tone are characterized by distinctly lyrical elements that can also be found in other dramatic pieces and in his verse epics. Lenau's poetic productivity focused primarily on nature poetry. His images of nature are associated with death, isolation, transience and loss. Lenau strikes a tone of sadness and melancholy.
This contrasts with his political, often aggressive and accusatory poems, which propagate European freedom, emancipation, liberalism and democracy. These two sides make up the ambivalence in Nikolaus Lenau's poetic work. His lyrical works are characterized not only by rich images and metaphors, but also by an onomatopoeic language that appeals to all the senses. In 1844, the physical and mental collapse followed, from which Nikolaus Lenau never recovered. The sensitive poet went mad, suffered a stroke and attempted suicide several times. He was sent to closed sanatoriums in Stuttgart and Vienna, where he spent a total of six years. His work on "Don-Juan" was never completed.
Nikolaus Lenau died on August 22, 1850 in Oberdöbling/Vienna.