In 1918, just after the smoke of the First World War had dissipated, a work titled "Biography of Victorian Celebrities" caused a sensation in the British literary world, which had been silent for a long time. With its "thought-provoking satire, vivid descriptions, unique material selection and detective psychoanalysis", the book forever changed the way people looked at the Victorian era, as well as the biographical genre. In the following 20 years, biographers from Europe and the United States followed suit, and the artistic writing of biographies became popular. This milestone in the history of British biography is the 38-year-old, little-known Lytton Strachey (1880-1932).
Strachey was born into an aristocratic family in Clapham, London. His father was an engineer and worked for many years in the British colony of India. My mother was proficient in French, loved literature, and wrote many lyric poems. Raised by his mother alone and primarily home-schooled as a young man, Strachey was deeply influenced by his mother's obsession with literature.
In 1899, Strachey entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and began to write poetry. In 1902, he published the poem "Erie", which praised Cambridge University and the poets who graduated from Cambridge, and won the Cambridge University President's Award. His other poems are included in Euphrosine (1905), a collection of poems with Cambridge classmates. Virginia Woolf, who was single at the time, did not think highly of the poetry collection, and even wrote a comment sarcastically: "It is undoubtedly an anticlimactic book, and its authors are not real poets."
In 1903, Sturt Luckey began to work as a professional writer, writing numerous book reviews and drama reviews for newspapers such as The Independent Review and the Observer, and was recognized as a Cambridge talent. These articles were later collected in Books and People (1922), Miniature Portraits (1931), People and Reviews (1933), and The Observer's Commentary (1964).
Strachey was one of the first British scholars to comment on Chinese classical poetry. In 1908, he read the Selected Treasures of Chinese Literature (1884), a collection of Chinese classical poetry compiled by British sinologist Herbert Giles. Giles' translation focuses on the verve of poetry. Through the ingenious combination of word meaning and rhythm, he translates Chinese classical poetry into English poetry with the beauty of rhythm and rhythm. Strachey spoke highly of Giles' translation, saying that the collection of poems is exquisite and beautiful, reproducing the gloomy and subtle beauty of classical Chinese poetry: "These voices are deep and wonderful, their reverberation is like the summer wind, and their details are like the chirping of birds. ; people are intoxicated when they hear these sounds, and they are intoxicated when they cannot hear them. These poems are perfect, concise, and read reminiscent of the classical beauty of Greek statues.” Strachey will Comparing Chinese and Western lyric poems, it is believed that European poets prefer to describe the passion and passion in love, while Chinese poets emphasize the memory of love rather than the yearning for the future of love. In his opinion, this collection of poems conveys the simplicity and simplicity of the ancient oriental civilization after going through chaos and twists and turns. The poems in it are like dried roses in a porcelain vase, still with the fragrance of the past summer, leading readers to Back to the old garden, the old palace, wandering in the barren forest.
After leaving Cambridge, Strachey became a core member of the cultural circle by regularly attending elite gatherings organized by the Virginia sisters in Bloomsbury. He is erudite, quiet, and always has insight into the inner world of others. At rallies, he often sends people into overwhelmed laughter, or makes a fooled popular one, with just one poignant, succinct remark. Gradually, he won Virginia's favor.
Britain in the early 20th century still followed the fashion of the Victorian era. At that time, sex was a taboo in people's daily life, and same-sex love was even less recognized by the secular and the law. In 1909, Strachey fell into the same-sex love and couldn't extricate himself, and fantasized about getting out of the predicament with the help of marriage. He proposed to Virginia, which was accepted by Virginia. But he couldn't really accept Virginia's love, and the two soon broke off their engagement. Later, he explored Victorian sexuality in the short story The Girl's Correspondence (1912). The story is about a letter exchange between two 17-year-old girls in high society on the topic of sex. They first made a lot of imagination about the physiology, love and how to have offspring between men and women, and then put it into practice in their own life. The novel is interspersed with a lot of jokes circulating in Bloomsbury cultural circles, and it is hilarious to read. But Strachey's purpose isn't just for entertainment, as some of the content is drawn from his own life experiences. There is a passage about the love between two boys. When they were found and reprimanded by their elders, the writer invoked the male love that prevailed in ancient Greece to justify it, emphasizing that it was harmless. It can be said that Strachey has gone far beyond his time in his quest for sexual enlightenment and sexual tolerance. However, after the novel was completed, it was only circulated among friends, and it was not officially published until 1969, and it did not receive attention for a long time.
In 1912, Strachey published "Milestones of French Literature", which was praised by critics. The book has a novel conception, taking the seven major events that occurred in French history after the 11th century AD as an outline, showing the development of French literature for 900 years. The whole book adheres to the principle of combining history and commentary from beginning to end, and has high academic value. When analyzing specific writers, Strachey is good at making detailed investigations and comments on writers from both horizontal and vertical levels in combination with the historical environment in which they live. Among French writers, he highly admired the classical playwright Racine, and believed that Racine's works reflected the social style of the Louis XIV era: "The traditional aristocratic fashion has disappeared, people are no longer keen on adventure, war and chivalry, Begin to yearn for a peaceful and civilized life. The society is permeated with modern atmosphere, women begin to dominate fashion, and the living room becomes the center of life.” He also compared Racine with Shakespeare, and believed that Racine was superior in theatrical techniques. The creative style has a great influence on modern playwrights such as Ibsen and Galsworthy.
After the outbreak of World War I, Britain joined the war in Europe, and the army suffered heavy casualties. In 1916, Parliament passed a bill to recruit a large number of new recruits. Strachey opposed war chauvinism and refused to enlist in the army, so he was tried by a special court. His physique was weak since he was a child, and the conscription was finally settled. During this period, he was far away from the chaotic situation, secluded in a village in Wiltshire, and devoted himself to writing. It took him four years to write the famous "Victorian Celebrities" (1918).
After the war, Britain was devastated. Unable to face the harsh reality, the younger generation became cynical and violently critical of Victorian values. "Victorian Celebrities" just catered to the wave of skepticism and rebellion that pervaded the society at the time. It was a bestseller and was reprinted nine times in just two years. This book breaks the narrative mode of traditional biographies that praise the hero's merits and deeds, and outlines the complex characters and their rich inner worlds of the four celebrities in the Victorian era with concise, light, and harmonious writing, creating a new style of biographical literature. French biographer Moroya once commented: "Strachi is a destroyer of heroic images, a man who brought down idols, who always blows away the halo from the heads of great men with understated cynicism, but at the same time seems to Let the readers shake hands with them."
In the preface of "Victorian Celebrities", Strachey examines and criticizes the reality of British biographical literature creation, and expounds his unique biographical view. He opposed the traditional long-form narrative mode of running accounts and the practice of paying homage to the biographer, emphasizing that biographers should shoulder two responsibilities: one is to avoid complexity and maintain appropriate simplicity; the other is to maintain spiritual freedom and disclose facts objectively and impartially. The following passage shows his unique approach to material selection:
The first condition for the governance of history is to have a choice and to give up. Only by giving up can we simplify and classify, remove the rubbish and save the essence, so as to obtain the orderly perfection that no superb skill can achieve. As far as the era just passed, our fathers and grandparents have written and accumulated so much material that even the industrious as Ranke will be overwhelmed by it, and the astute as Gibbon will probably retreat. For historical explorers to describe such an era, it is not a good idea to have a positive narrative that is well-established. A wise man will not hit hard, he will choose a clever roundabout strategy, attack his target from unexpected places, flank it, or cover it from behind; he will project the light of exploration unexpectedly on those unsuspecting The subtleties that have been investigated. Rafting in the vast sea of materials, he sometimes put down a small bucket, took out representative samples from the deep sea, and placed them in the sky for detailed investigation.
Strachey advocates that biographers should extensively read the detailed information of the biographer, select the material that best reflects the character of the biographer, and then extract the character characteristics that make the characters vivid, and then use this as a standard to find out from his life. The anecdotes that best embody this feature use artistic techniques to create a true and credible image of the main character.
In 1921, Strachey's other masterpiece "Queen Victoria" was published. This book is against the cynicism of the biography in "Victorian Celebrities", and the writing attitude tends to be rigorous. The book consists of ten chapters, the first chapter describes the Queen's family background, the second to ninth chapters describe the main events of the Queen's life, and the tenth chapter summarizes and summarizes her life. Strachey is good at fiction, and often plays on the basis of existing materials, using imagination to make up for the lack of empirical evidence. He uses novels and melodrama and other artistic techniques to truly reproduce Queen Victoria's brilliant political career and rich emotional life. The image is full and full of tension, which greatly changes the public's view of Queen Victoria. The book is recognized as a classic in the history of British biography and literature, and established Strachey's position in the history of British literature.
In 1928, Strachey published his last biography, Elizabeth and Essex. The book tells about the tragic love between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex. Due to the lack of materials, there are obvious traces of fiction. In 1931, Strachey suffered from stomach cancer and died the following year.
Regarding Strachey's life, British scholar Quentin Bell commented: "He never fully discovered himself, never fully justified the hopes of his fellow Cambridge alumni, never wrote that they thought he had A 'supreme' work of ability." This comment may be due to Strachey's failure to lead the way in poetry, fiction, etc. However, as an epoch-making writer in the history of British biographical literature, the new biography he initiated had a profound impact on later generations. Today, the art of biography has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and later biographers are still following his footsteps, further thinking about how to grasp the relationship between biography, art and history. The inspiration given by Strachey's creative path may be that biographers can neither completely return to the pile of old papers of history, nor allow the identity of biographers to be replaced by novelists. to be successful.
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