Classics

2 total works

Remembrance of Things Past

by Marcel Proust

Published 4 September 1980

Here are the first two volumes of Proust’s monumental achievement, Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove. The famous overture to Swann's Way sets down the grand themes that govern In Search of Lost Time: as the narrator recalls his childhood in Paris and Combray, exquisite memories, long since passed—his mother’s good-night kiss, the water lilies on the Vivonne, his love for Swann’s daughter Gilberte—spring vividly into being. In Within a Budding Grove—which won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, bringing the author instant fame—the narrator turns from his childhood recollections and begins to explore the memories of his adolescence. As his affections for Gilberte grow dim, the narrator discovers a new object of attention in the bright-eyed Albertine. Their encounters unfold by the shores of Balbec. One of the great works of Western literature, now in the new definitive French Pleiade edition translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.

Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays

by Marcel Proust

Published 26 May 1988

These essays represent a vital episode in the intellectual development of Proust - without them, a full understanding of "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" would be incomplete. The best essays are the ones that date from 1908 - when Proust, aged 37, already felt that his life was drawing to a close, and the urgency of writing his masterpiece was fully upon him. Although these essays mostly accuse the then famous critic Sainte-Beuve of being, among other things, an incompetent judge of Baudelaire, Stendhal, Flaubert and Balzac, collectively they make a robust statement of Proust's overriding aesthetic beliefs and concerns. Through them he defines the task of the artist as releasing the creative energies of past experiences from the hidden store of the unconscious - the aesthetic that was to lie at the heart of his great novel.