Atala / René

Chateaubriand was the giant of French literature in the early nineteenth century. Drawing on eighteenth-century English romanticists, on explorers in America, and on Goethe's "Werther", he had a profound effect on French writers from Victor Hugo and Lamartine to George Sand and Flaubert. A quixotic and paradoxical personality, he combined impressive careers as a brilliant prose-poet, a spiritual guide, a high-ranking diplomat, and an enterprising lover. "Atala" and "Rene" are his two best-known works, reflecting not only his own joys, aspirations, and despair, but the emerging tastes of a new literary era. "Atala" is the passionate and tragic love story of a young Indian couple wandering in the wilderness, enthralled by the beauties of nature, drawn to a revivified Christianity by its esthetic charm and consoling beneficence, and finally succumbing to the cruelty of fate. Perhaps even more than "Werther" or "Childe Harold", "Rene" embodies the romantic hero, and is not wholly foreign to the disorientation of youth today. Solitary, mysterious, ardent, and poetic, he is in open revolt against a society whose values he rejects. Without question, this archetype played a large part in determining the course of French literature up to the 1850's.

夏多布里昂（Francois-René de Chateaubriand, 1768-1848），法国作家，浪漫派先锋和优秀的散文家。出身布列塔尼一个衰而复振的贵族家庭，年轻时投身军旅，随其兄进入巴黎社交界，后至美洲游历。法国爆发大革命后，夏多布里昂参加路易十六的勤王部队，失败后旅居英国，以教授法语为生，并开始写作。拿破仑上台后，夏多布里昂一度被任命为驻罗马使馆秘书，后与斯塔尔夫人一道成为反拿破仑集团的中坚人物。

夏多布里昂依据早年社交及游历美洲的素材写成小说《阿达拉》和《勒内》，前者写美洲一未开化部族酋长之女阿达拉已皈依基督教，与另一部族俘虏青年夏克达相恋，因不能与非基督徒结合而服毒自尽；后者写亚美丽对胞弟勒内发生恋情，因恪守宗教戒律而被迫进入修道院，勒内自此孑然一身，飘然遁迹于蛮荒之地。二者均以浓郁的抒情及景物描写见长，而成为法国浪漫派的开篇之作...

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