Madame Potifar. Borel P.

The novel “Madame Potifar” (1839) is the central work of the French writer-romantic and the Bontary poet Petryus Barev (1809-1859), known to the domestic reader for the collection “Champagne. Immoral stories ”(1833), which was published in the series“ Literary Monuments ”in 1971.

putting the tragic fate of the unknown prisoner of the Bastille, which had been languishing in anticipation of liberation, but so on the plot of Madame Potifar, but so. And he has not managed to use it, the author unfolds a truly monumental historical canvas in front of the reader - the brilliant era of Louis XV in all its diversity. Here are the royal favorites, and gallant festivities, and secret orders for imprisonment without trial and investigation.

The events associated with the beginning of the French Revolution, in the picturesque and often shocking details, presented the capture of the Bastille, the liberation of its The few prisoners, the euphoria of the crowd of “winners”, before which the strong walls of the royal citadel did not resist and which take possession of the guns of the prison inrture hall. Among the characters appearing or even only mentioned in the narrative, there are many genuine historical persons. The prototype of Madame Potifar was the official favorite of King Marquis de Pompadur.

in his “Prison Roman”, contrary to the tradition of the genre, Boel represents a very extensive geography: following the author, the reader will pass along the dusky alleys of the castle parks, green paths of the Irish provinces, wide streets and squares of Paris, “this huge crowd of people and stones” will visit the flowering island of St. Margarita, will penetrate into the darkness of the Vincennes Castle, and the dungeon of the dungeon of the Bastille. , contrasting, as he puts it, three eternal forces fighting in the human chest: the world with his entertainment and feasts, a monastery with thoughts and austerity, oblivion with his incomparable peace. The reader has a choice of how to perceive the novel “Madame Potifar” through which a single thought passes through the red thread - about the unused paths, the wisdom of providence and the inevitability of retaliation for the deed. “Prince of Critics” by Jules Zhanen on the novel “Madame Potifar” and the essay Charles Baudler, dedicated to the work of Barel as a whole. For Baudelaire, this outstanding representative of “frantic literature”, this passionate apologist Marquis de Sad was “one of the luminaries on the gloomy heavens of romanticism”, the author, endowed with “truly epic talent”, which sounded in full power in the novel “Madame Potifar”.

Some modern literary scholars attribute Petrus Barev to the harbingers of surrealism.