普鲁斯特(1871～1922年)
Proust, Marcel
法国小说家。出身富裕，曾学习法律和文学。其社交关系使他成为一名对贵族最隐秘的生活的观察家，他为巴黎多家杂志撰写了很多社会性的文章。曾出版随笔和故事书籍，包括故事集《悠游卒岁录》（1896）。童年起就深受哮喘困扰，1897年左右开始退出社交圈，健康开始不佳。他有一半血统是犹太人，并成为了德雷福斯的支持者，使法国的反犹太情绪成为了一个高度争议性的全国问题。他的母亲在1905年去世，对他造成很大影响，使他更加远离社交圈。1909年一块甜饼在无意中勾起了他对童年的不情愿的回忆，他完全退进了一个封闭的世界，在自己封闭的卧室中埋头创作《追忆逝水年华》（1913～1927）。这部由七个部分组成的小说是他的自传，同时也是法国社会在第一次世界大战前後的一个全景图，也是对爱情、嫉妒和艺术，以及同现实关系的思考。这是历史上最杰出的着作之一，为普鲁斯特带来了国际声誉，并影响了20世纪小说的整个环境。
English version：
1871～1922年
Proust, Marcel
French novelist. Born to a wealthy family, he studied law and literature. His social connections allowed him to become an observant habitué of the most exclusive drawing rooms of the nobility, and he wrote social pieces for Parisian journals. He published essays and stories, including the story collection Pleasures and Days (1896). He had suffered from asthma since childhood, and c. 1897 he began to disengage from social life as his health declined. Half-Jewish himself, he became a major supporter of Alfred Dreyfus in the affair that made French anti-Semitism into a hugely controversial national issue. Deeply affected by his mother's death in 1905, he withdrew further from society. An incident of involuntary revival of childhood memory through the taste of a rusk biscuit in 1909 led him to retire almost totally into an eccentric seclusion in his cork-lined bedroom to write à la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27; In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past). The vast seven-part novel is at once a kind of autobiography, a vast social panorama of France in the years just before and during World War I, and an immense meditation on love and jealousy and on art and its relation to reality. One of the supreme achievements in fiction of all time, it brought him worldwide fame and affected the entire climate of the 20th-century novel.
