Benjamin Constant și «tulburarea» romantică a ființei

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present the artistic work of a lesser known French pre-romantic writer, but no less important for the romanticism’s history in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the discreet Benjamin Constant. Alongside his famous contemporaries, Madame de Staël (the French romanticism starter and theoretician) and the great Chateaubriand, Constant embrace the new breath, the lyricism, the wave of passions, the melancholy and the enthusiasm with Germanic origins, and put them into the stylistic mold of French literature, in his essentially autobiographical novel Adolphe, becoming, that way, one of the initiators of the French psychological novel. Being himself a master of the autobiographical exhibition of the poetical Me, undecided, introverts and irreparably touched by the famous mal de siècle, Benjamin Constant illustrates and analyzes with lucidity in his novel the no less famous romantic "disorder", unfortunately remaining however for the literature of the beginning of the 19th century, in the shadow of the other initiators of the great French romanticism.