A Summer with Proust (Leto s Prustom)

Marcel Proust's (1871–1922) novel In Search of Lost Time has remained an unrelenting challenge to readers worldwide since its publication in the 1910s and 1920s. What is it: a vast, cathedral-like volume in the tradition of great 19th-century novels; a panorama of the refined culture of Europe at the end of the Belle Époque, swept away by world wars; an attempt at philosophical understanding of memory through literary means; the author's attempt to understand himself; his reflections on what it means to write a book and how to decide to do so; or, finally, an invitation to the reader to understand what it means to truly read a book? All of this, and much more, is explored from various perspectives by nine readers of Proust: literary scholars, philosophers, and art historians. And, of course, In Search of Lost Time is a challenge to the translator, a challenge that Elena Baevskaya accepts in this book, offering a fragmented yet unified view of the corpus of texts by the outstanding French writer.