Stello: A Session With Doctor Noir (Noumena Classics)

Stello (1832) marks the watershed in Alfred de Vigny's development as a writer, from the Romantic lyricist to the philosophical poet, from the fabricator of historical romances to the novelist of ideas. In the characters of Stello and Doctor Noir, he externalizes the conflict in his own nature between the youthful idealist and the mature realist. Stello is the patient, sick with romantic sentiment, who must be cured by the acrid psychiatrist, Doctor Noir. In order to effect this cure, Doctor Noir undertakes to disillusion the young man by describing the deaths of three unfortunate poets, each of whom came to grief under a different political and social system. Each, like Stello, tended to ignore the nature of the real world, hoping to substitute for it an impossible ideal. Each was disappointed: Nicholas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert and Thomas Chatterton both took their own lives; Andre Chenier was the victim of the Reign of Terror. From their stories, Stello may perhaps learn to free himself from the hope for assurances; then, in the pathos of his ignorance, he may begin to aspire to the peculiar dignity of the human being."

• | Author: Alfred de Vigny
• | Publisher: Noumena Press
• | Publication Date: Nov 24, 2015
• | Number of Pages: 266 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0976706253
• | ISBN-13: 9780976706250