”(2)Chamisso……poetry ” The Frenchman in Germany and the German in France;
Catholic among Protestants and protesting in the Catholics;
Philosopher among religious people and canting hypocrite people without prejudices;
society man in the scientists and pedant in the world;
Jacobin in the aristocrats and democrats noble”
Adelbert (Adalbert) Von Chamisso, (Jan.30,1781---Aug,21,1838), with the full name Louis Charles Adelaide de Chamisso de Boncourt, was one of the best-known literary figures of his time. He was born in an aristocratic family with the castle of Boncourt from the Champagne district, and forced to flee France during the Revolution and settled in Berlin.
(*This is the reason commonly accepted about his moving to Germany. However, according to mezzo-soprano and musicologist Dr. Suzanne Summerville, Chamisso’s family was not driven out of France by the Revolution, but in fact settled in Berlin after an older brother got a job there and then found a job for Adelbert at the KPM, Royal Berlin Porcelain Factory, as an apprentice painter.)
As a boy he was a page at the Prussian court. When he entered the Prussian army, he found himself in a terrible disadvantage. Napoleon was at his height, and the French-born Chamisso felt that his contemporaries despised him as the enemy. His language skills in his adopted tongue developed quicker than a sense of belonging to his adopted country. He was initially an accustomed emigrant to the Berliner shows, then one of the most adulated German lyric poets at the center of German literary life in Berlin after a profound study in German literature. His early work, published in almanacs, which he also edited, shows the influence of Novalis and Tieck.
When he was drawn back to France in 1810, he was introduced to Madame de Stael in Paris. He followed her to Coppet on Lake Geneva and as the result of time spent in Switzerland he discovered, at age of 32, the passion of his life--botany. He returned to Berlin to study this subject (such as medicine and natural sciences and Botany) in earnest at University of Berlin, but the military jingoism in the wake of Napoleon’s first wave of defeat engendered a mood there that made him want to leave Prussia.
He wrote his most famous novella, ”Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte” (Peter Schlemihl’s Remarkable Story), in self-imposed Polish exile. It is the tale of a man who sells his shadow to the devil for a bottomless purse. This trade brings wealth to Peter Schlemihl, but also exclusion from the society that he ends in despair. To end his ordeal, the demon offers him a second deal: his shadow against his soul. But Peter declines, although it means that he will loose the woman he loves. With the aid of a pair of magic boots he wanders around the world searching for the peace of mind, which he finds as a naturalist, and not in endless wealth. But his magic boots can’t bring him everywhere, and he regrets not being able to visit the Pacific islands, notably the coral islands (in his language ”zoophyte islands”). So even his magic tools do not enable him to get the ultimate knowledge.
The admirable story of Peter Schlemihl certainly reflects the life and struggles of the naturalist Adelbert Chamisso himself.
As the Napoleonic wars dragged on, Chamisso found his position, caught between two opposing sides, increasingly untenable. Partly to escape, he departed on a three-year voyage around the world--a Russian expedition under Captain Otto von Kotzebue. This was the great adventure of his life, and the making of him: the specimens and information gathered on this journey (botanical, zoological and ethnological) furnished him enough research to last for the rest of his life. The diary that Chamisso kept of his trip, ”Reise um die Welt in den Jahren” (Trip around the World in the Years, 1815–1818), has stood the test of time as one of the great German travel books.
Afterwards, he was elected to the Berlin Academy, became the custodian of the Schoeneberg Herbarium and he obtained an employment at the Berlin botanical gardens, where he continued his scientific and literary work. He married a beloved 18-year-old girl, Antoine Piaste, and had seven kids. With his re-entry into the Prussian literary life, he re-established the interests of poetry and his work quickly got popular again.
Despite the loss and exile from the land of his birth and the voyage he had been through, Chamisso was always on the side of the common people, using their lyric gifts to create poems advocating social reform. He was one of the first literary figures of the time to notice and understand what we think of as ”modern problem”: the displacement and alienation of peoples in the wake of war. His passionate nature allied to his scientific background that inclined him to what we might now call left-wing social realism, and Chamisso offered a strong flavor of that radical approach to the Biedermeier romanticism of his time. The extraordinary breath of his travels, his ruthlessly and analytical eye, as well as his ambiguous nationality, equipped him to subvert the cozy self-assurance of German life and its narrow-minded assumptions.
Musician knows Chamisso only as the poet of a Schumann song-cycle, which is an underestimation of him. In the context of the poet’s life and political sympathies, the lyrics of Frauenliebe und Leben have a subtext, which is as near to feminist egalitarianism as one will find in a male writer of his time. This poet’s technical skills and refined intelligence have won him many modern fans, and he is one of the minor classical writers whose standing is now much higher in his adopted country than it was fifty years ago.
Adelbert Chamisso died in 1838 of lung-suffer, only one year after his much beloved wife Antoine Piaste, and was buried in Cemetery Jerusalems and new church municipality, Berlin.
11/26/2003
文章定位：
