French novelist, essayist, and short story writer, who gained international fame with her metaphysical historical novels. In these works Yourcenar drew psychologically penetrating portraits of people from the distant past, but she also dealt with modern issues such as homosexuality and deviance.
“- Voyez, continua Zénon. Par-delà ce village, d’autres villages, par delà cette abbaye, d’autres abbayes, par-delà cette fortresse, d’autres fortresses. Et dans chacun des châteaux d’idées, des masures d’opinions superposés aux masures de bois et aux châteaux de pierre, la vie emmure les fous et ouvre un pertuis aux sages.” (from L’Œuvre au Noir, 1968)
Marguerite Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislane in Brussels, Belgia, into a Franco-Belgian family. Yourcenar’s Bergian mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, died of puerperal fever and peritonitis shortly after giving birth. Yourcenar spent her summer months from 1903 to 1912 at the château of Mont-Noir, “a small brick manor house, built with a great many superadded turrets, in that Louis XIII style so cherished during the Romantic era. The date 1824 was engraved on the façade…” She started to write as a teenager, when she lived traveling and aristocratic life with her father, Mechel de Crayencour.
The inheritance Yourcenar received after the death of his father, allowed her to devote herself to writing. In the story ‘How Wang-Fo Was Saved’ from Oriental Tales (1938), a collection of short stories from several countries, Yourcenar studied the artist’s role in the world. Algernon Blackwood also had used the same Chinese legend in ‘The Man Who Was Milligan’ and M.R. James in ‘The Mezzotint’. In a version told in the classic Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, a famous poet is thrown into prison by an angry king. To escape he calls his creations to help him - they break into the poet’s cell and set him free. The protagonist in Yourcenar’s tale is an old painter, who loves the image of things and not the things themselves. The painter is imprisoned by an Emperor, who sees his autocracy threatened by the power and beauty of art.
“The kingdom of Han is not the most beautiful of kingdoms, and I am not the Emperor. The only empire which is worth reigning over is which you alone can enter, old Wang, by the road of One Thousand Curves and Ten Thousand Colors. You alone reign peacefully over mountains covered in snow that cannot melt, and over fields of daffodils that cannot die. And that is why, Wang-Fo, I have imagined a punishment for you, for you whose enchantment has given me the disgust of everything I own, and the desire for everything I shall never possess.” (from ‘How Wang-Fo Was Saved’)
At the outbreak of World War II, Yourcenar moved to the United States. She then worked as professor of French literature at Sarah-Lawrence-College in New York. Yourcenar shared her time between France and the USA, where she lived with her partner, Grace Frick, who translated several of her works into English. After 1950 Yourcenar’s home was on Mount Desert Island, Maine. In 1980 she became the first woman to be elected to the Academie Française. Yourcenar died in Northeast Harbor, Maine on December 17, 1987.
Among Yourcenar’s best-known books is Memoirs of Hadrian. The emperor is portrayed on the eve of his death, absorbed in his reflections. Hadrian, who built the famous wall, was one of the last great Roman imperial leaders. He recounts his memories in his testament letter to his chosen successor, Marcus Aurelius. “There is but one thing in which I feel superior to most men: I am freer, and at the same time more compliant, than they dare to be. Nearly all of them fail to recognise their due liberty, and likewise their true servitude. They curse their fetters, but seem to find them matter for pride. Yet they pass their days in vain license, and do not know how to fashion for themselves the lightest yoke. For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom.” Part of the story deals with his relationship with a Greek youth called Antinous. Yourcenar worked on the novel for fifteen years and published it immediately after settling in the United States.
Coup de Grâce (1957) was a story of a Prussian officer, who murders the woman who loves him because he loves her brother. The Abyss (1976) was a fictitious life of Zeno, a Renaissance man, created from Yourcenar’s fascination with the occult. She worked on the story intermittently from 1921 to 1965. Zeno’s personality and life is a combination of Da Vinci, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno. He travels around Europe and the Mediterranean searching for truth. In the rivalry between Catholic and Protestant states, Zeno refuses to take sides, and like Hadrian, Yourcenar depicts him as essentially homosexual. “The strange magma which preachers define by the not ill-chose name of lust (since it would seem to be a matter of the luxuriance of the flesh expending its force) defies examination because of the variety of substance which compose it, and which in their turn break down into other components, themselves complex. Love is one part of the mixture, though less often, perhaps than is admitted, but the concept of love is itself far from simple.”
The central figures in Yourcenar’s fiction are torn between society’s demands and their own passions. Noteworthy, the majority of the characters she presents are male. Yourcenar’s only novel with a contemporary setting was DENIER DU RÊVE (1934), about an assassination attempt on Mussolini. The book was written while she lived in Italy, and revised in 1958-59. Through her characters - a doctor, a flower-seller, a whore, and a Resistance fighter - Yourcenar examines life under a cruel regime and offerers different views into the female psyche. A woman loves unhappiness, another is “stingy like all who have just enough money for a single expense and enough fore for a single passion.”
In ALEXIS, which appeared in 1929 and again in 1965 with Yourcenar’s foreword, a young aristocratic man writers a long letter to his wife, Monique. Alexis confesses that he did not love his wife, and at school he already found women disgusting. He has decided to leave her and his son, and devote himself to his music and sensual pleasures, that are not against his own true self. The author is purposefully ambiguous about their nature and Alexis’s sexual orientation. In her foreword Yourcenar denies that Gide’s Traité du Vain Désir had influenced her book. Yourcenar’s Mishima: A Vision of the Void (1980) tried to separate the persona or shadow of great Japanese writer, and homosexual, and the human being of flesh and blood. “… let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer’s work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima’s carefully premeditated death is part of his work.”
The first version of ANNA, SOROR… (1981) Yourcenar composed already at the age of 22. The central characters are Miguel, a young aristocrat, and his sister Anna. They live and love earch other in seclusion from the surrounding world after the death of their mother. Yourcenar’s family memoirs, SOUVENIRS PIEUX (1974) and ARCHIVES DU NORD (1977), prove the author’s skill to depict contemporary life. Yourcenar’s other works include prose poems FEUX (1935), and FLEUVE PROFOUND, SOMBRE RIVIÉRE (1974), essays (’Without Liability to Debts,’ 1962; ‘Mishima or the Vision of Emptiness,’ 1981), and several plays. Yourcenar also translated Negro spirituals and various English and American novels into her native French.
For further reading: Marguerite Yourcenar by Pierre L. Horn (1985); Marguerite Yourcenar, A Readers Guide by Georgia Shurr (1985); From Violence to Vision: Sacrifice in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar by Joan E. Howard (1992); Marguerite Younrcenar: Inventing a Life by Josyane Savigneau (1993); Mythic Symbolism and Cultural Anthropology in Three Early Works of Marguerite Yourcenar by Patricia E. Frederick (1995); A Case of Betrayal? by Ingeborg Majer O’Sicley (1999); Marguerite Yourcenar: Reading the Visual by Nigel Saint (2000)
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Finnish playwright, satirical novelist, and short story writer, whose dramas gained a wide audience in Finland and abroad. Six of Yliruusi’s plays appeared in Modern International Drama, published by the Max Reinhardt Archives of the State University of New York at Binghamton. Among Yliruusi’s best known works are LEIKKIMURHA (1959, Murder for Fun), which has been translated into eight languages, RIKOSETSIVIEN VAPAAPÄIVÄ (1963), also a mystery story, and LUKIANOS (1975, Lucian), a comedy. Yliruusi’s novel KÄSI KÄDESSÄ (1979, Hand in Hand), about an aging couple facing separation and death, appeared in English.
“Anni, it’s our only possibility,” Thor whispered. “It’s a fine way to end everything, if we consider it calmly. Both of us will die soon anyway. Why not do it together, why let death separate us at the last moment. I couldn’t live without you anyway after you’re gone. Anni, let’s think it over calmly and rationally. Don’t cry, don’t. At first it seems strange and frightening, but when you think of it, it’s no different from going to sleep. It’s just that we’ve been taught to fear death. That’s why it seems the way it does. It’s only the instinct of self-preservation that makes it seem bad and awful. But it actually isn’t. We only imagine that…” (from Hand in Hand, 1979, trans. by Richard Impola)
Tauno Yliruusi was born in Tampere. Both his mother, Ali Maria Jokinen, and father, Eino Erik Yliruusi, were editors. After graduating from Helsingin suomalainen yksityislyseo in 1947, he studied political science at the University of Helsinki, receiving his M.A. in 1951. He then worked in several organizations, including the Finnish League of Private Entrepreneurs (1951-52), the Finnish Information Agency (1953), Taxpayers Association of Finland (1953-58), The Finnish United Nations Organization (1961), and Mekes Oy (1962-63). Yliruusi served also on boards of many literary groups. In 1963 he married the textile artist Ingeborg Anna Margareta Hackzell. Yliruusi’s first radio and television plays were produced in 1959.
In 1966-1967 Yliruusi worked as the director of the theatre department of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (channel two). In 1968 he became a freeance-writer. One of his most popular radio dramas became Murder for Fun (1959), originally a television play, which has been broadcasted in Britain, Canada, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia, and by the Comédie Française in France. Yliruusi also translated into Finnish works from such authors as Jean-Pierre Conty (Mustaa valoa, 1960), Mario Fratti (Allende ja Olivares, 1973), and Václav Ctvrtek (Rosvo Rudolf, 1980). Ylituusi died in Espoo on June 17, 1994.
Yliruusi’s first novel, satirical SITÄ EI SATU KAIKILLE, appeared in 1960. The protagonist is Antti Valpola, a carefree student. He becomes involved in a series of farcical events, in which the author laughs at the self-importance of politicians, and makes a gentle fun of the vagaries of youth. Yliruusi’s career as a mystery novelist started with YLLÄTYSMURHA (1960). The idea for Rikosetsivien vapaapäivä (1963) has similarities with Agatha Christie’s novel Ten Little Niggers, but the solution of the crime is perhaps more skillful. The story depicts a group of detectives on an island near Helsinki. A storm has isolated their villa, doors are closed, windows are covered, and they are facing a serious problem: somebody among them is a murderer, killing members of the group. Yliruusi’s mystery stories HERMOSAVUT 1-2 were sponsored by the tobacco company Rettig. A number of the characters smoke Time cigarettes with double filter, which gives “a gentle, sweet taste”. Yliruusi’s mystery novel JOULU TOIJALAN TAKANA (1963) was published in the highly esteemed ‘Salama series’. It also included translation into Finnish from such famous writers as James Hadley Chase, Erle Stanley Gardner, Maria Lang, and Ellery Queen. ” - Se on kumma juttu, hän sanoi. - Kun ihminen äkkiä alkaakin epäillä itseään siitä mistä hän ennen on epäillyt muita niin… niin asiat alkavat näkyä aivan toisessa valossa…” (from Joulu Toijalan takana, 1963)
In the 1960s and 1970s Yliruusi’s works received lukewarm critics. The National Board of Education was especially negative in its literary magazine Arvosteleva kirjaluettelo, which was published for librarians to help them with their book selection. Some of Yliruusi’s polemical books were printed by the publishing house Alea-kirja. It was the major forum for writers, who did not accept President Kekkonen’s political line, his special brand of neutrality, and the influence of the Soviet Union in Finland, the “Finlandization” in political jargon. In this atmosphere appeared Yliruusi’s political pamphlet UMPIKUJA (1969), which dealt with the the suppression of Aleksandr Dubcek’s ’socialism with a human face’ in Czechoslovakia, and criticized the ideology of Marxism.
As a theatre critic Yliruusi represented conservative views in his ironic JUOPUNUT RAMPPI (1970). His attack on the more or less leftist or experimental movements in the theatre arouse much debate. However, many of Yliruusi’s poignant strokes hit at the tender spots. In the 1980s Yliruusi published only a few works, but in the early 1990s he come back with partly autobiographical essays and collections of short stories. In 1990 Yliruusi’s play, MAKUUHUONEET (1968), dealing with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, was performed in Estonia at the Vanemuine theatre. It was the first political play, that was performed in the country without a permission from Moscow. The cultural climate in Finland had also changed: Mauno Koivisto became in 1982 the successor to the aging Kekkonen - President Koivisto was a friend of James Bond movies, nearly all leftist theatre groups had disappeared, and writers were less occupied with sociological pathos.
“Ei muuta uutta alla auringon
kuin että julmemmaksi julmuus käynyt on.
Ja joka kerta uudet syylliset
me löydämme, nuo miehet kyyniset.”
(from Toinen Luther, 1967-68)
Series character in mystery novels: inspector Viktor Suominen, who appears in Hermosavut (1963), Savuverho (1964) and Joulu Toijalan takana (1963) - For further reading: ‘Traagista mutta ihanaa: katkelmia tulevista muistelmista’ by Tauno Yliruusi, in Parnasso 2 (1992); ‘About the Author’ by Richard Impola, in Hand in Hand by Tauno Yliruusi (1992); Taide-Espoo, ed. by Marjatta Jaatinen et. al (1987); Suomen kirjailijat 1945-1980, ed. by Maija Hirvonen et al. (1985); Hornanlinnan perilliset by Timo Kukkola (1980); ‘Pirinen, Luther, antisemitismi’ by Tauno Yliruusi, in Kanava 2 (1976); ‘Luther ja antisemitismi’ by Kauko Pirinen, in Kanava 1 (1976); ‘Näytelmäkirjoitus käy kesämökin vintilläkin’ by Tuula Niskanen, in Savon Sanomat (15.8.1971)
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