Dictionary of Literary Influences

Gide, André

GIDE, ANDRÉ (1869–1951)

André Gide was born and educated in Paris, at Pension Keller (now Reid Hall), Ecole Alsacienne, and Lycée Henri IV. Gide experimented with the full spectrum of literary genres but is remembered less as fiction writer than as autobiographical chronicler equally revealing of himself and his times. Perhaps no other author until our day has so relentlessly (perhaps narcissistically) observed, dramatized, and analyzed his life and world. This greatest French moralist and immoralist of the last century, alternately Protestant puritan and pagan hedonist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1947 and placed on the Papal Index in 1952.

His early life wavered between opposite poles: the Bible, carried in his coat pocket, and the Arabian Nights, which his father had also read to him. His first conscious act was onanism, ages five to nine, followed from age 13 by obsession with older cousin Madeleine: their unconsummated marriage came in 1895, soon after his mother’s death. By 15 was established another precocious passion, reading. Young Gide devoured daily at least one book. His childhood readings were in religion (François Fénélon’s Traité de l’existence de Dieu, Bishop Bossuet’s De la connaissance de Dieu, Augustine’s Confessions) rather than in poetry, which would have suited him better. His late father’s “bookcase of poets” was locked until Gide was almost 16, when his mother opened its glass doors to him. Following the “most moving discovery” of Heinrich Heine’s lyrics he conceived a “passionate predilection” for verse. Gide memorized Victor Hugo from a “charming little edition” given to his mother and discovered in the Leconte de Lisle translations given to him those Greeks “who have had such a decisive influence on my mind,” such as the Iliad and the Oresteia. “Through them, I beheld Olympus, and the suffering of man, and the smiling severity of the gods.” Christian and Apollonian ideals were not then contradictory for Gide. Instead, “everything contributed to making me as I am today.” His virtually lifelong diary, kept “out of a need to give shape to a chaotic inner agitation,” began just months after conceiving a “most sincere” admiration for Amiel’s Journal (1883), lent him by his tutor. At 16, when reading Heine’s Book of Songs in translation, he underwent the headier influence of younger Alsacienne classmate Pierre Louÿs. At 18 through Louÿs he discovered Faust, a closer elective affinity: Gide preferred comparison to Johnann von Goethe over Voltaire. His “initiation into philosophy” was Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea in 1889. In 1903 he said his youth was much affected by German literature, but in the long term “what Goethe, Heine, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche perhaps taught me best was their admiration for France.” Gide entered Stephen Mallarmé’s influential symbolist circle in 1891. His encounter with Oscar Wilde that year and with North Africa in 1893 liberated him from Victorianism and facilitated the acceptance of his homosexuality. He had left his beloved Bible at home in France.

“Concerning Influence in Literature” (1900) is Gide’s apologia for all influences, unavoidable and necessary. Genuine affinity, not hack work, is reflected in his translations or presentations of Goethe (universal curiosity, said Thomas Mann), Wilde (vice authorized), Montaigne and Walt Whitman (self-celebratory confessional), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (“l’acte gratuit”), Rabindranath Tagore and Blake (mystic lyricism), Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. By his definition he authored only one novel, The Counterfeiters. His youthful desert-island lists included no extended prose fiction and comparatively few French authors. When he accepted to prepare a roster of the 10 leading French novels,

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Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma and Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons came first. From his long career and massive output Gide in 1946 said if only one work of his were to survive, he would choose the Journal.

Archives

Bibliothèque Doucet, Paris, has correspondence, manuscripts, and papers, some unpublished.

Printed Sources

Davenport, William Wyatt. An Old House in Paris: The Story of Reid Hall (Paris: Reid Hall, 1969).

Delay, Jean. The Youth of André Gide (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963). Gide, André. Dostoevsky (New York: New Directions, 1961).

———.If It Die (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

———.Imaginary Interviews (New York: Knopf, 1944).

———.The Journal, 4 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1947–51).

———.Montaigne (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

———.Oscar Wilde (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949).

———.Pretexts (New York: Delta, 1964).

Fayer, Mischa. Gide, Freedom and Dostoevsky (Burlington: Lane, 1946). Fryer, Jonathan. André and Oscar (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997).

Guggenheim, Michel. “Gide and Montaigne,” Yale French Studies 7 (1951), 107–14. Lang, B. Renée. André Gide et la pensée allemande (Paris: Egloff, 1949).

Sheridan, Alan. André Gide: A Life in the Present (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999).

Roy Rosenstein

GINSBERG, ALLEN (1926–1997)

Irwin Allen Ginsberg, American poet and social activist, was born June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Paterson. He died April 5, 1997, in New York City of a heart attack, shortly after being diagnosed with liver cancer. His parents were Louis Ginsberg, a high school English teacher, poet, and socialist; and Naomi (Levy) Ginsberg, a Marxist, who suffered from chronic mental illness. Allen’s interest in poetry came early, probably influenced by his father reading poetry aloud at home. By age 11 he was writing his own poems. Naomi’s struggles with mental illness had a profound impact on her son. Kaddish, one of his two most critically acclaimed works, is drawn from her life and from the family’s Jewish heritage. According to biographer Barry Miles, “He became the poet advocate of the underdog” and “the most famous living poet on earth” (Miles 1989, 533).

Ginsberg entered Columbia University in September 1943 and received an A.B. degree in 1948, though he later said his formal education had been a waste of time. He began his studies in prelaw, but changed to literature and studied with traditionalists Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Their influence on him waned when he met and became friends with the personalities and writers who would form the core of the Beat Generation: Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Neal Cassady, and Gregory Corso. Burroughs introduced him to the works of Franz Kafka, W. B. Yeats, Céline, Arthur Rimbaud, and most importantly, to the poetry of William Blake, whose voice appeared to Ginsberg in an “auditory vision” in 1948. He heard Blake reciting Ah! Sunflower and The Sick Rose from Songs of Innocence and Experience and opened to levels of per-

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ception and consciousness beyond the ordinary. The experience was so profound he spent the next 15 years seeking to expand his consciousness through the use of psychedelics. Kerouac impressed upon him the idea of “spontaneous prose,” which emphasized writing what one felt at the moment and not revising. Kerouac thought revision destroyed the creation of the moment and lessened the work. Neither Burroughs nor Kerouac had been published at the time, but Ginsberg did read Burroughs’s notes for his first novel, Junky, published in 1950. Kerouac shared his journals and experimental writings, which were the basis for his 1957 breakthrough novel On the Road.

Ginsberg developed a long breath line poetry that was personal and based on speech rhythms and imagery drawn from everyday language. He first heard his high school English teacher read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This was a poetry that was personal and that spoke with an American voice. His own long breath style was derived from Whitman’s long lines. He was also reading William Carlos Williams in high school, and it was Williams who most influenced his early poems. In 1947 he wrote a favorable review of the first book of Williams’s five-book epic Paterson in his hometown newspaper. He met the poet in 1950 and Williams impressed upon him the importance of verse capturing the actual sounds and rhythms of American speech. He began to rework his own writings and submitted them to Williams for critique. Williams liked what he read and became a mentor, writing the introductions to Howl and Empty Mirror. Ginsberg was also influenced by the precise speech emphasis and “direct treatment of the thing” in the poetry of Ezra Pound, as in The Cantos and earlier works.

Ginsberg moved to California in 1954 and became part of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, a group of writers including Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Robert Duncan, and Philip Whalen. There he also met Peter Orlovsky, who would be his companion and lover for most of the rest of his life. His reading of Howl at the Six Gallery in October 1955 catapulted him and the Beat movement into public awareness. He lived in San Francisco for about three years, then in Tangier and Paris before traveling in India and the Far East during 1962–63. When he returned to the United States, he made New York his home.

Buddhism became a significant influence on Ginsberg’s work from the time he was introduced to it by Kerouac, Snyder, and Whalen in the mid-1950s. When he and Orlovsky traveled in India and on his own solo trip through parts of the Far East, he sought out holy men to deepen his spiritual awareness. His growing identification of himself as a “Buddhist–Jew” and the poverty he saw in India influenced him to abandon his obsession with drug-induced attempts to expand his consciousness and led him toward a life of social activisim and serious Buddhist practice. In 1970 he met Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche who told him he should make up poems on the spot, and who became a spiritual and literary mentor until his death in 1987. In 1989 Tibetan Lama Ngawang Gelek, Rinpoche became Ginsberg’s friend and spiritual mentor.

Archives

Allen Ginsberg Papers, M0733, Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/dynaweb/ead/stanford/mss/m0733. The collection contains Ginsberg’s personal papers through 1997, including literary manuscripts, journals, correspondence, photographs, and tape recordings as well as his library.

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Printed Sources

“Allen Ginsberg,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 169: American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Joseph Conte (ed.), (State University of New York at Buffalo: The Gale Group, 1996), 116–36.

Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

Morgan, Bill. The Response to Allen Ginsberg, 1926–1994: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources

(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).

———. The Works of Allen Ginsberg, 1941–1994 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995). Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martin’s

Press, 1992).

Jerry Shuttle

GODARD, JEAN-LUC (1930– )

Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris. In 1940, he became a Swiss citizen but returned to Paris in 1949 to study ethnology at the Sorbonne. In the 1950s, he regularly attended the Cinéclub and the Cinémathèque, where he met other future nouvelle vague filmmakers such as François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. During this time, Godard began writing for the Cahiers du cinéma, founded by André Bazin, whose ideas on film greatly influenced these young men. In 1960, his first feature-length film, À bout de souffle, was released in Paris, marking the turning point not only for Godard’s own career, but for the nouvelle vague as a whole. In the 1960s, Godard produced some of his most cinematically innovative films. As he aligned himself with far-leftist and militant movements, his films became more overtly political. At the same time, he founded the Dziga Vertov Group with Jean-Pierre Gorin, which embodied the ideal of collective filmmaking. It was during this period that he met and married Anne Wiazemsky. In the 1970s, Godard divorced Wiazemsky and founded his own film and video production studio with Anne-Marie Miéville, with whom he continues to make and produce provocative and innovative films.

Godard’s influences are literary and political as well as cinematic. The numerous quotations in his films are testimony to his vast knowledge of literature and philosophy (see the interview Les livres et moi in Bergala 1985, 1988, II, 432–39). His films, critical writings, and interviews also reveal his numerous cinematic influences. He particularly admired the films of Howard Hawks, as is evident in his

Défense et Illustration du découpage classique (1952). In the same article, he praises the techniques and aims of Sergei Eisenstein, the influence of whom can also be seen in Godard’s other theoretical writings, Pour un cinéma politique (1950) and Montage, Mon Beau Souci (1956). The films of such diverse directors as D. W. Griffith, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Jean Rouch, and Roberto Rossellini, among many others, are referred to constantly by Godard and informed his ideas on filmmaking.

Godard’s education exposed him to ideas which formed the basis of his theories on cinema. His thoughts on the semiology of film are rooted in Brice Parain’s

Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage (1942) (Parain later appeared in

Vivre sa vie), and the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. It is likely that Maurice Mer- leau-Ponty’s thoughts on cinema informed some of Godard’s own reflections on film as perception. The ideas of Bertolt Brecht on the role of the spectator also play a large part in his theory. In his Défense, Godard proposes a dialectic cinema,

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Goebbels, Joseph Paul

showing his debt to Friedrich Hegel. His politics are greatly influenced by Karl Marx and Louis Althusser, while his more militant views are rooted in the ideas of Mao Zedong. The writings of all three thinkers are quoted extensively in Godard’s films.

Archives

No single collection, although major film archives housing prints of films, stills, clippings, and screenplays are listed in Lesage 1979, 419–21.

Printed Sources

Bergala, Alain (ed.). Godard par Godard, 2 vols. (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/Étoile, 1985, 1998). Collected writings, interviews, and photographs.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). Lesage, Julia. Jean-Luc Godard. A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979). Monaco, James. The New Wave (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Roud, Richard. Jean-Luc Godard, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson in association with the British Film Institute, 1970).

Linda Ness

GOEBBELS, JOSEPH PAUL (1897–1945)

Joseph Goebbels was born in Rheydt, Germany. He was raised a Roman Catholic and was known as a reserved yet scholarly boy in school. He was teased relentlessly by his peers due to his crippled foot, the result of a bout with polio. This disability, along with his small stature and his dark features (children taunted him for looking “Jewish,” which he loathed) haunted him for the rest of his life. After completing his education in the gymnasium in Rheydt, Goebbels was accepted at the University of Heidelberg, where he studied for his doctorate in German literature and history. As a member of the Catholic student fraternity “Unitas,” Goebbels received an Albertus Magnus Society loan for poor Catholics, a loan whose repayment he would shirk his entire life. His professor, Dr. Friedrich Gundolf, a Jewish literary historian, Goethe scholar, and disciple of the poet Stefan Georg, ironically became one of Goebbels’s favorite instructors. His doctoral thesis was entitled Wilhelm von Schaetz as Dramatist: A Contribution to the History of the Drama of the Romantic School. Goebbels even wrote a novel, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblaettern (1926), which was not well received. However, Goebbels’s childhood had affected him strongly, even as an adult. In a effort to compensate for his stature, the “Little Doctor,” as he later came to be called, turned to strong anti-Semitic rhetoric and right-wing extremism as the Nazis surged into power in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He had switched to Adolf Hitler’s party in 1926 and became a master propagandist as well as a cultural dictator. He created all sorts of myths and dredged up old historical legends against Jews to advance Hitler’s cause and the Nazi propaganda against the Jews. He built up Hitler into the powerful force he became, a fact for which Hitler was truly grateful.

In 1933, Goebbels became the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment. He also staged the famous book-burning in Berlin on May 10, 1933. Marxist, Jewish, and other “undesirable” authors had their works destroyed in massive bonfires.

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Under Goebbels’s instructions, Jews were banned from law, medicine, public offices, and entertainment. This hatred was fed to the public in large doses and became a way to mobilize the masses into supporting the Nazis’ values. He was especially interested in the use of film as a propaganda tool and enticed many German actors into performing in his films. One director, Fritz Lang (1890–1976), managed to elude Goebbels’s requests for films by quickly emigrating.

After Hitler committed suicide in 1945, Goebbels had an SS doctor inject his children with poison, while he and his wife, Magda, had themselves shot by an SS orderly on May 1, 1945.

As a student of literature, Goebbels was introduced to a world of great German literature. He was especially influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s works, such as Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96) and Faust (1808), both of which reflect the richness of the literature of the romantic era in Germany. Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s poem Lied der Deutschen (1841), in which the greatness of Germany is expressed, had a particularly strong influence upon Goebbels. Falsely interpreted by the Nazis, this poem of the romantic era supplied the words to the German national hymn. Karl Marx’s writings, among them The Communist Manifesto (1848), aided in deepening his hatred of the Jews and their “invention” of Communism. However, Goebbels also appears to have been greatly influenced by his own doctoral thesis in drama, having studied Friedrich Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (1792) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779). Drama had been used in the Enlightenment and the romantic period as an educational tool for the audience. Indeed it is from his own study of drama that Goebbels turned to film in order to advance his propaganda cause. He had also read Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), which became especially influential in his lending his wholehearted support to Hitler’s manifest against the Jews.

Archives

National Archives, Modern Military Branch, Washington, D.C. Films, correspondence, historical records on World War II.

Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, Germany. Propaganda films, correspondence, war records, historical records on World War II.

Munich Film Archives (Reichsfilmarchiv), Munich, Germany. Propaganda films. Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C. War records, Holocaust records, photography

archive and other audio-visual recordings.

Printed Sources

Boelke, Willi A. The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels: The Nazi Propaganda War, 1939–1943,

Willi A. Boelke (ed.), Ewald Osers (trans.), (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970).

Goebbels, Joseph. Die Tagebuecher von Josef Goebbels: Saemtliche Fragmente. Hsg. Elke Froehlich im Auftrag des Instituts fuer Zeitgeschichte und in Verbindung mit dem Bundesarchiv (Muenchen: K.B. Sauer, 1987).

———. The Goebbels Diaries, 1939–1941, Fred Taylor (ed. and trans.), (New York: Putnam, 1983).

Moeller, Felix. The Film Minister: Goebbels and the Cinema in the Third Reich (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2000).

Riess, Curt. Josef Goebbels: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948).

Cynthia A. Klima

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Gompers, Samuel

GOMPERS, SAMUEL (1850–1924)

Samuel Gompers was born in London, attending the Jewish Free School in London from 1856 to 1860. However, owing to his family’s poverty, he left school at the age of 10. Emigrating with his family to the United States in 1863, Gompers followed his father into the cigar-making trade and became a naturalized citizen in 1872. In 1873 he went to work for David Hirsch, who ran the only union cigar shop in New York City. Attending a conference of unions in 1881 where a loose affiliation called the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Councils was formed, Gompers was named its first leader. Owing to its poor organization, Gompers reorganized the Federation into American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886. By 1892 the AFL had over one million members. Gompers served as president of the AFL from 1886 to 1924. During an era when the public was largely hostile to unions, Gompers developed the philosophy of “voluntarism,” which stressed the union’s use of strikes, boycotts, and other efforts deleterious to business. Gompers emphasized the development of a powerful union of skilled workers rather than widening the AFL’s membership to include unskilled labor. After remaining politically neutral for many years, the AFL endorsed William Jennings Bryan for president in 1908 after courts declared many union tactics illegal. Gompers attended the Versailles Treaty negotiations, where he helped create the International Labor Organization, an arm of the League of Nations. Gompers died while attending the Congress of the Pan-American Federation of Labor, which sought to establish trade unions in Mexico.

Most of Gompers’s biographers describe him as a man who rarely read and whose labor philosophies came as much from hard-won experience as from any literary influence. Louis Reed described him as practical and anti-intellectual. However, it is important to note that, as a worker in David Hirsch’s cigar shop, Gompers was exposed to a wide variety of literature through the shop readers, whose job it was to keep workers’ minds occupied. Readers also provided information from many of the labor papers of the day, including The Workingmen’s Advocate, published by A. C. Cameron in Chicago, and the National Labor Tribune, published by John M. Davis in Pittsburgh. Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, first published, as Gompers recalled, in pamphlet form in the Irish World, was also read to the workers and provided grist for many discussions. Hirsch, as well as many of his employees, were German exiles whose revolutionary activities had led to their expulsion from Hamburg. Swede Karl Malcolm Ferdinand Laurrell, the shop’s intellectual leader, gave Gompers a copy of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Determined to appreciate its full meaning, Gompers learned German, reading not only the Manifesto, but also works by Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, and others. Gompers was especially fond of German socialist Carl Hillman’s pamphlet, entitled Emancipationswinke (Emancipation Hints), which awakened Gompers to the potential power of trade unions.

Archives

M. P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.: notebooks, scrapbooks, correspondence.

Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, New York City, N.Y.: scrapbooks, testimonials, and memorials, photographs, certificates, printed matter, and ephemera.

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State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisc.: correspondence, speeches, writings, reports, clippings, miscellaneous material.

Printed Sources

Gompers, Samuel. Seventy Years of Life and Labour (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1925).

Kaufman, Stuart Bruce. Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor, 1848–1896 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973).

Mandel, Bernard. Samuel Gompers: A Biography (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1963). Reed, Louis. The Labor Philosophy of Samuel Gompers (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat

Press, Inc., 1930).

Paul Allan Hillmer

GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH (1931– )

Mikhail Gorbachev was born in Privolnoye in the Stavropol territory of Southern Russia. Gorbachev started his career as a farm machinery operator, but at the age of 19 was accepted into the prestigious Moscow State University, where he studied history, literature, and physics before turning his attention to law. He graduated with a law degree in 1952 and became a full member of the Communist Party. Publicly loyal to the policies of Josef Stalin but privately critical of the leader’s severe actions throughout the Second World War, Gorbachev agreed with Nikita Khrushchev that the Soviet government was in need of reform and modernization. In 1960, Gorbachev became the leader of Stavropol’s communist newsgroup and by 1963 was in charge of the territory’s collective farms. He studied and completed a degree in agronomy and began to restructure the local agricultural system to increase productivity. Scaling the political ladder, Gorbachev became secretary of the Stavropol Communist Organization in 1970, where he met Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. He was appointed by Andropov to the Secretariat of the Communist Central Committee in 1971, and later became the Party secretary in charge of agriculture (1978) and the youngest full member of the Politburo (1980). After the death of Chernenko in 1985, Gorbachev was elected as Soviet general secretary and party head. Under Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness), the entire structure of the Soviet Union was changed. The consumption of alcohol was limited, a free market economy was implemented and public elections were instituted for party officials. As well, relationships with the West were strengthened and the production of nuclear arms significantly limited. His Communist Party failed to hold the fragmenting Soviet Union together, and after a major coup in 1991, Gorbachev resigned as party head as waves of former Soviet republics declared their independence. For his contributions to world peace, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. Upon his retirement he became head of a political research group in Moscow and is still active in politics.

Gorbachev frequently modernized the writings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the Soviet State, and applied them to the political and social situation within the Soviet Union at the time of his leadership. Gorbachev’s glasnost was directly derived from the Leninist concept of free and frequent criticism of the state. Under Gorbachev’s rule, this would include the expansion of media freedoms (and consequently an increase in government scrutiny), as well as a critical reexam-

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ination of Soviet history. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) was also influential to Gorbachev’s decentralizing reform efforts through its criticism of the dictatorial and complex nature of Western bureaucracy. His concept of democratic centralism allowed for a freedom of discussion, criticism, and debate that was firmly rooted in Lenin’s original treatises. Along with studying Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Gorbachev also read Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Thomas Hobbes’s The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government, whose common emphasis on natural law and the innate rights of the individual helped to structure his humanitarian reform efforts. Finally, Gorbachev’s decentralization of the Soviet State was supported in the writings of economist Abel Aganbegyan and the social critic Tatyana Zaslavskaya, both of whom published their work in the era immediately previous to his leadership.

Archives

Russian State Historical Archives (RGIA), St. Petersburg, Russia.

The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Control # 2001052443. Includes 71-page notebook (1994) and interviews conducted by Zdnek Mlynar.

Printed Sources

Brown, Archie. The Gorbachev Factor (London: Oxford University Press, 1996). Gorbachev, Mikhail. Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995).

Sakwa, Richard. Gorbachev and His Reforms, 1985–1990 (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1991).

Gregory L. Schnurr

GORDIMER, NADINE (1923– )

Nadine Gordimer, South African novelist, essayist, and short-story writer, was born in Springs, a mining town near Johannesburg. Born to Jewish parents, Gordimer spent her early years in a convent school, but when she was 11, her mother removed her from formal schooling, claiming that the child had a heart condition. From age 11 through 16, Gordimer was tutored at home. This period was one of extensive self-direction, in which Gordimer read widely from British and European novels. In 1943, Gordimer began studying at the University of Witwatersrand but left after one year. Thereafter, she began publishing regularly. Her first book of short stories, Face to Face, was published in 1949. The Lying Days, her first novel, appeared in 1953. To date, she has published 13 novels, over 150 short stories, and over 200 nonfictional essays. She has been the recipient of many literary prizes, including the Booker Prize (1974) and the Nobel Prize for literature (1991).

Gordimer was first influenced by the British tradition, in particular E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Many critics note the influence that British fictional forms have had on Gordimer’s fiction, citing in particular her association with the liberal humanist tradition and its emphasis on the individual, social realism, and familial themes. We see this influence primarily in her early stories and novels, which show an intense focus on character development and psychological enlightenment. Also in her early years, Gordimer was influenced by the social upheaval expressed by nineteenth-century Russian writers, most significantly Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev, as well as by the style of Guy de Maupassant,

Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, whom she calls her “great

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mentor.” One of Gordimer’s noted achievements is her ability to combine British/European literary techniques with an African consciousness. The literary theorist most often connected to Gordimer’s work is György Lukács, especially his concept of critical realism, which has been useful in identifying her increasing concern with bringing together style and theme. Especially in her later novels, she incorporates radical continental ideas, experimenting with new forms of the novel (fragmented points-of-view, gaps), irony, and ambiguity. Gordimer admires contemporary developments in the novel from Latin American writers, especially

Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. Moreover, she is an important contributor to the discussion of African writing and has noted her personal connection with Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Kofi Awoonor. In addition, she has published comments on Naguib Mahfouz and identified Edward Said as a major influence on her thoughts about non-European perspectives and traditions. Gordimer’s writing career spans the duration of official apartheid in South Africa. Her writing chronicles the effects of the system on individual lives. She insists, however, that hers are not political novels. Instead, understanding the situation in South Africa was part of becoming a writer in her particular place and at her particular time in history.

Archives

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Manuscripts of early work, including 13 short stories from Friday’s Footprint and the novel A World of Strangers.

National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa. Manuscripts, interviews, letters from 1960 to 1975.

Printed Works

Bazin, Nancy Topping, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (eds.). Conversations with Nadine Gordimer. Literary Conversations Series ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990).

Clingman, Stephen R. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).

JanMohamed, Ahdul, R. Manichiean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983). Places Gordimer in the context of an African writing tradition.

Newman, Judie. Nadine Gordimer. Contemporary Writers Series (London: Routledge, 1988). Consideration of postmodern techniques and influences.

Shwartz, Ronald B. For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most

(New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1999).

Holly Messitt

GÓRECKI, HENRYK MIKO AJ (1933– )

Composer Henryk Górecki was born on December 6, 1933, in a village of Czernica in Upper Silesia, Poland, and is best known for the poignant Symphony No. 3, The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976), based on Polish religious and folk material. After graduating from high school in 1951, Górecki taught in a primary school while pursuing his musical training. He studied composition with Bolesl⁄ aw Szabelski at the State Higher School of Music (PWSM) in Katowice (1955–60), graduating with highest honors. His engagement with literature began with a teachertraining course in Rybnik and continued through his life. Performances of his com-

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