Pierre Loti

He was trained at the Naval Academy and served as captain in 1881. He served in the waters of China from 1885 to 1891. Later, he was promoted continuously and became captain in 1906. After his first novel, Aziyade (1879), was published, he began to create literature. He published novel after novel, winning the respect of critics and the love of the public. Masterpieces such as "The Fisherman of Iceland"(1886) and "Madame Kiuko"(1887), coupled with the approval of strict critics, paved the way for him to enter the Academy of France in 1891.

Pierre Loti, Louis-Marie-Julien? The pen name of Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud (1850-1923) was born into a clerk's family in Rochefort, on the mouth of the Charente River in western France. He was fascinated by the sea since childhood and dreamed of traveling around the world as a sailor. Later, he really became a naval officer and engaged in the maritime profession for forty-two years. He traveled all over the coastal areas of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean, and visited the Americas, Oceania, Turkey, Senegal, Egypt, Persia, India, Pakistan, Indochina, Japan, China... His rich experience provided him with a steady stream of writing materials. He did not even need much imagination. He just used line drawing to record what he saw along the way, which was enough to compose a fantasy picture that fascinated readers. In 1879, Loti published his debut novel "Agiadai", which described the scenery of Turkey and its love affair. The following year, he serialized "Loti's Marriage" in newspapers and periodicals. These two novels established his reputation as a writer, and the unknown naval officer became a celebrity in the literary world. He has published twelve novels, nine documentary essays (including "The End of Beijing", which describes the burning of Yuanmingyuan by the Anglo-French coalition forces), and several autobiographical works at the rate of almost one book per year.

These twelve novels include: Agiyaday (1879), Lottie's Marriage (1880), The Story of an African Cavalry (1881), The Flower of Tiredness (1882), My Brother Yves (1883), The Three North African Ladies (1884), The Icelandic Fisherman (1886), Madame Kikuko (1887), The Sailor (1892), Ramooka (1897), Madame Plum's Third Youth (1905), and Awakening (1906). The nine essays include: "Japan in Autumn" (1889), "In Morocco" (1890), "The Strange Shadow in the East" (1892), "Wandering the World" (1893), "The Desert of Jerusalem" (1895), "The End of Beijing" (1902), "India under the British" (1903), "Towards Isbahan" (1904), "The Incense Insider at Angkor" (1912).

In these novels. He objectively described the love story. Every time the fleet anchored and docked, he tried to satisfy his dreams and dispel his depression with love. Sometimes he even wrote himself in books, such as the story of a child and a teenager. Love and death occupy an important place in his book, revealing his deep disappointment at the disappearance of his emotional life.

evaluation

Due to the convenience provided by his career, Lotti was able to see and describe colorful scenery that could not be described by other contemporary writers, reflecting the diverse cultural concepts of different nations, and giving readers a fresh and strong impression; but also due to the limitations of his career, he had little chance to go deep into the social life of France or any other country, and he rarely had the opportunity to actually observe and study the characters of various classes and their mutual relationships. From this perspective, his vision is quite narrow, so we cannot expect his works to reflect the complexity of social life and the subtle contradictions and conflicts between people and between people and society. However, his accounts of foreign scenery and foreign national cultures were so vivid and vivid that they were enough to greatly attract the French public, who was curious about the overseas world, and just adapted to the needs of the French authorities in pursuing overseas expansion policies. As a result, he almost easily won the unanimous praise of the officials and the public, and in 1891 he was elected one of the forty immortal figures of the French Academy.

However, Lottie does have his own unique points in art, mainly in the description of landscapes. He has a real artistic talent, especially his depiction of the sea, which can be said to have been matched by no other French writer. Just as Saint-Exupéry in the twentieth century, because he was a pilot himself, observed and felt space to a level impossible for other writers to achieve, Pierre Lottie has gained an absolute and indisputable advantage in depicting the sea with his forty-plus years of maritime career. It is precisely because of this outstanding achievement that he is different from those short-lived fashionable writers and occupies a position that cannot be ignored in the history of literature.

Lanzon, the famous French literary historian, attributed Pierre Lottie to a romantic writer of Châteaubriand, praising him as "one of the great painters in the field of literature" and believing that he "depicts moving scenery and strange phenomena in nature. The precision and accuracy" can completely be "comparable to Châteaubriand."

In fact, Lottie's style is much simpler than that of Chateaubriand. Even when Châteaubriand wrote scenes, he often exaggerated and fictionalized, so that the nature he described in his books was far from the real nature; Lottie faithfully recorded everything he saw, and never used words or exaggerated adjectives. His writing is simple, almost all ordinary words, and his vocabulary is so simple that it is almost poor. However, what is amazing is that he can use some extremely ordinary words to describe the ever-changing changes of nature and give people a strong impression. His descriptions are so precise and detailed, and give people such a cordial sense of reality, so some critics believe that Lotti's main art comes from direct observation and realistic descriptions, and is still essentially a realistic creative method.

However, Lotti's scenery descriptions are more impressionist than the realistic detail descriptions in the general sense. He emphasizes the traveler's subjective feelings of the outside scenery and endows the nature with a human soul, and always grasps the new artistic conception in different moments. From this perspective, Lotti's art is very romantic. Like more Brion, the tone of his work is often one of indelible pain and melancholy. The profession he engaged in had a decisive influence on the formation of his temperament. Because he is accompanied by the unpredictable sea day and night, and because he is often exposed to the atmosphere of war, his thoughts are often entangled by the idea of life and death: human life is so fragile, and destiny is so ruthless, and everyone It is difficult to predict what will be waiting for him tomorrow. He has visited countless countries, seen various types of lifestyles, and came into contact with people of different skin colors, different looks, and different beliefs. Under all these changing forms, he feels that everything is relative and short-lived. Only death is absolute, and everything will be swallowed up by eternal death. The same feeling is repeated in almost all of his works: the passage of time, the brevity of the world, and the impermanence of emotions. Is it because of this that he often enjoys the moment with a cynical attitude? Is it because of this that he works diligently to keep this ever-passing life as much as possible and preserve a part of himself as much as possible?