Импрессионизм в романе «Мадам Хризантема» Пьера Лоти

Abstract

Pierre Loti was a novelist and a marine officer who visited lots of countries. He gained popularity writing about his travels and travel impressions. This article analyses his travel to Nagasaki back in 1885 where he lived for half a year and had a ‘temporary wife’. His novel written during that travel is called “Madame Chrysanthème”. It’s one of his most extravagant and interesting pieces which made the author world-famous. It reflected common interest in the oriental life typical for that time and it predetermined the image of Japan in the European consciousness of the second half of the 19th century. Pierre Loti wrote about his ambition to make the novel as impressionist as possible determining impressionism not as an intellectual but as a decorative phenomenon related mostly to arts and translation of sensory perception. His interpretation of impressionism was expressed in “Madame Chrysanthème”, which is an attempt to describe the world around us, represented not only by the material world but by the author’s sensory perceptions and feelings. To be exact, this is impressionism in fiction. The world is a product of our sensory experience, and the author’s goal is to fix this experience, which is the sum of his observation and impressions. Pierre Loti creates his work where color plays the main role together with sounds and words. They are a sum total of the elements determining the reality in equal amounts. Stylistically “Madame Chrysanthème” is created according to impressionist canons, with lots of epithets, comparisons, metaphors, the author’s neologisms. The novel is written as a diary where separate episodes in chapters are separated from one another by large white empty gaps. The article discusses similarity of impressionism and the Japanese culture. However, a closer look demonstrates considerable differences between the European and the Oriental minds.