- Person
- Elias Canetti
- Lived
- 1905–1994
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Bulgarian-born British
The story
In 1942, in wartime London, Elias Canetti was buried in research for his great study Crowds and Power, a project to which he had subordinated almost everything else. To relieve the pressure he allowed himself an outlet: short notes, aphorisms and reflections written freely in notebooks. He kept the habit for the rest of his life, and the notes eventually ran to many thousands.
Their subjects ranged widely. Some respond to particular books he was reading, but most return to the questions that occupied him: the Jews and their fate, the myths of many cultures, crowds and power, wars and revolutions, language, animals and, above all, death, which he refused to accept as natural and treated as humanity's real enemy. In one wartime note he declared that German would remain the language of his mind because he was a Jew, and that he would guard within himself what remained of the devastated country.
A first selection, covering 1942 to 1948, appeared in 1965. The larger collection Die Provinz des Menschen: Aufzeichnungen 1942 bis 1972 was published in 1973, and an English translation followed in 1978 as The Human Province. Later volumes included The Secret Heart of the Clock, covering 1973 to 1985, The Agony of Flies, and Notes from Hampstead, and his long-planned Book Against Death appeared after his death, in 2014.
The Swedish Academy called him one of the foremost aphorists of the age, comparing his wit and economy with La Bruyère and the German physicist and aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. It noted the satirical bite of his observations, his loathing of war and destruction and his bitterness at the brevity of life.
Many critics now regard the notes as the most lasting part of his work. Written partly during the darkest years of the war, as the murder of European Jewry became known, they record a mind trying to think honestly about catastrophe without giving up on hope.
Why it matters
The Human Province offers readers a rich store of compact, searching reflections on power, death and what it means to remain humane.
About Elias Canetti
Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who wrote in German, author of Auto-da-Fé, Crowds and Power and a celebrated memoir trilogy; Nobel Prize in Literature, 1981.
More about Elias Canetti
- Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé became a modernist classicElias Canetti's only novel, Die Blendung (1935), known in English as Auto-da-Fé, came to be recognised as a major work of European modernism.
- Elias Canetti sketched 50 characters in EarwitnessIn Earwitness: Fifty Characters (1974), Elias Canetti revived the ancient art of the character sketch with fifty brief, comic portraits of human types.
- Elias Canetti wrote Kafka's Other TrialIn Kafka's Other Trial (1969), Elias Canetti used Franz Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer to illuminate the inner life behind The Trial.
- Canetti's memoirs portrayed Vienna between the warsElias Canetti's later memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985), portray the intellectual life of Vienna and Frankfurt before the Second World War.
- Elias Canetti wrote The Voices of MarrakeshElias Canetti's The Voices of Marrakesh, a short book of impressions from a 1954 journey to Morocco, became a classic of travel writing.
- Elias Canetti spent 30 years writing Crowds and PowerElias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960), the fruit of decades of thought, is a much-cited study of how crowds form and how rulers wield power.
- Canetti's memoir preserved a lost Sephardic worldElias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free (1977) preserved the vanished world of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in his Bulgarian birthplace, Ruse.
Sources
- Elias Canetti Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti Jewish Virtual Library
- Elias Canetti EBSCO Research Starters
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.