The Stendhal Effect

Jun 20, 2023 · 5 min read

This is an essay of a very bad taste. I re-publish it for tracking the progress of my thinking over the year.

My life changed in 2020 when I grabbed Stendhal’s Le Rouge off the shelf in an abandoned house. I had not read anything serious for a long time, and forcing myself to go past beyond the initial pages of the book eventually brought a snowball effect (read: Stendhal effect). For the first time in my life, I paid attention to the following words:

I wouldn’t understand the most of the nouns and adjectives about human character even after googling them. But for the author they seemed to be so natural, so common. I was feeling like an alien while reading, yet the internal monologues of Julien Sorel, the main hero of the novel, was making me believe that I had found a treasure in the form of a book.

I finally understood, for example, what weakness of character meant in its full clarity. That was important, as two-three years prior to that, I remember reading something along the following lines in a Georges Simenon novel and feeling, well, flaggerbasted: “Maigret had already realized that in front of him was a man of a weak character”.

For a long time, I would accept the word stoic in terms of character as being equivalent to the word strong. But only after reading Stendhal, I started to slowly grasp the true meaning of the phrase, even though I was unable to formulate it.2

During that period, I visited my old chess coach. I described my admiration, my amazement of Stendhal, while happily declaring how I finally understood the phrase strength of a character through the thoughts and actions of the protagonist. To which Mr. Susel replied: “Dostoevsky writes about that as well.” It meant that there was a writer describing human character just like Stendhal. I knew Dostoevsky my whole life but had never read him – I felt as if I had wasted my past years.

But soon turned out that it wasn’t just Dostoevsky. It was everyone. Every great writer knew what all these nouns and adjectives meant, because they had latin/classical upbringing (of course, I understood the reason much later on). They knew their Homer, Virgil, Aristotle, Plutarch, Tacitus, Dante, Petrarch, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Boccaccio, Rebelais, Cervantes.

I had studied a portion of my master’s degree in the George Washington University. Why, I would ask myself, in Washington DC, all these cold, stone buildings are in neoclassical architecture? Why George Washington wears a Roman toga? Why Cincinnati gets its name from an ancient Roman dictator? Soon I learned that the founding fathers of the United States also had their latin upbringing. Just like European artistocracy, and just like Shakespeare, Napoleon, Stendhal (why would Shakespeare write about Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra?).

Stendhal was idealizing Napoleon, praising ancient Romans, etc. He was also a romantic (in general approach to life). That obviously shaped my interests. From April 2021 until March 2022, Napoleon was my idol. That was the only negative side of the Stendhal effect, which got cured eventually.

I became braver in life because of Stendhal. Julien Sorel or Fabrice del Dongo would help me to deal with fear and pressure more romantically. I lived with illusions, but I also started to notice the moments when I’d show cowardice or indecisiveness. To this day, I am not cured of most of the vices, but I became more mindful about them.

Because of Stendhal, I also remembered an online article I had read some years prior. It was Joseph Brodsky’s list of books. Who was Joseph Brodsky? I did not know, but I somehow remembered his surname perfectly. Brodsky was an ancient roman in soul, and his list of books was what I had been searching for. I set the goal of completing the whole list in three to five years, but I didn’t take much action.

Then, recently, I came across a writing of Andre Maurois – A Letter to a Young Man – which suggested a similar reading list, influxing it with lots of french writers, godifying (I am exaggerating) Balzac, talking about Saint-Simon, Chateaubriand, Tolstoy. When I was ill, I devoured Maurois’ novellas in less than a week. They were great. I read Balzac and Tolstoy, too. They were even greater events of my life than Stendhal.

I remember going through the shelf where I took Le Rouge from when the home was full of light and not abandoned. I was asking my grandfather the following questions one after another: “Is Daudet good?”, “Is Stendhal good?” 3, “Is Zola good?”, “Is Flaubert good?”, “Is Druon good?”, etc. He would answer positively. Then I asked: “Is Scott good?” and he, forgetting that Walter Scott is Scottish, replied with his warm smile: “Fransızlardan indiyə qədər pis yazıçı çıxmayıb.” 4 Contrast this with another anecdote, this time belittling frenchmen. My father, upon hearing from me that Napoleon was not French, but Corsican, exclaimed: “Deyirəm axı, fransızlardan bir dənə də kişi çıxmayıb!” 5

I wrote this whole essay in one go. All these paragraphs have already been here in my mind seperately. How did they click together, how did they come into such a natural coherency? I have no clue.

Stendhal, Brodsky, and Maurois formed my literary taste. I finally understood what good literature was, where to start my self-education. But now, I am afraid to lose myself in the ancient world, without seeing what is truly important at this moment. I am afraid of reading and not taking action, I am afraid of missing out the modern problems, contemporary society. I am afraid of mixing the French morality of XIX century with Azerbaijani morality of XXI. I fear that love has already detoriated to the degree of superficiality. I am afraid to live with illusions.

Now I recall that throughout my childhood and youth, I liked the TV shows and movies about Alexander the Great and ancient Romans. Why? As if our life path is determined from the very start, when we are just kids, and is dictated by our interests which we have no control over.


Footnotes

  1. I might be wrong about some translations to English. ↩

  2. Out of curiosity, I recently opened the pages of The Great Gatsby, which I had read much before Stendhal. It turns out, there were actually lots of nouns and adjectives describing human character, also including the phrase strength of character. I admired Fitzgerald’s book, but I don’t remember the words like virtue, vanity, indecisiveness, great, character, etc. having huge impact on me back then. I might have been simply not ready. I was eighteen. ↩

  3. The best of Stendhal is neither The Red and the Black nor The Charterhouse of Parma. It is The Life of Henry Brulard – the most mesmerizing event of my life. ↩

  4. There hasn’t been a bad writer of french origin. ↩

  5. There hasn’t been a man of french origin. ↩