Cher ami … Votre Marcel Proust – Marcel Proust im Spiegel seiner Korrespondenz/ Marcel Proust et sa correspondance

Key to the world – letters and autographs from the Bibliotheca Proustiana Reiner Speck! The evocation of a world of memory through the enjoyment of a pastry dipped into a cup of tea – that famous madeleine episode in Marcel Proust’s “À la recherché du temps perdu” – is a key experience that no one can escape once they have read the great novel. Marcel Proust was an exceedingly assiduous letter writer; after his withdrawal from society into the cork-lined room, correspondence appears to have been the sole link between the outer and the inner world. At the same time it was the ferment for the genesis of his opus magnum, which extended over more than a decade and a half. Many of the themes treated there as expansively as they are sensitively reappear in the “recherche” in embryonic form, in quotations that are in part taken over verbatim. An international team of authors has illuminated the most diverse contexts of the correspondence in a series of essays: the reader learns new things about the addressees and their part in the history of publication and reception, about literary life in Paris, about Proust as a draughtsman, about his relationship with his mother, about the stylistics of his letters … The volume offers a chronicle of the life, a contextual commentary on more than 80 original letters reproduced here and a bibliographical record of the editions of the correspondence, with numerous illustrations of the material, all of which comes from the Bibliotheca Proustiana Reiner Speck. This gives the reader an opportunity to penetrate the mystery of Proust’s écriture, which moves between the poles of a lucid marshalling of thought and an illegibility lamented by more than one recipient. Forms of address, omissions, allusions and redactions pose or unlock riddles about Marcel Proust’s mysterious private life.

Exhibitions:
Literaturhaus München, 26/3 – 7/6/2009
Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, 28/6 – 6/9/2009