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But around 1830 Balzac began to form a new and revolutionary concept of fiction. A few writers had toyed with the idea of placing characters across more than one book, but no one had applied the idea to their life’s work. Balzac leapt at the concept, realizing that he could create a self-contained world that stretched across all his novels. When the idea came to him, he is said to have run all the way to his sister Laure’s house on the right bank of the Seine, shouting, “Hats off! I am about to become a genius!”

With a focus for his efforts, Balzac swiftly began to produce work of real significance. He was a phenomenally energetic writer, routinely working for eighteen hours at a stretch, fueled by up to fifty cups of coffee a day. He described himself as a “galley slave of pen and ink”; others called him a Napoleon of letters. One story, The Illustrious Gaudissart, was produced in a single sitting—14,000 words in a night. He was a furious amender of proofs from his publishers, revising and reworking his stories through six or seven drafts.

The tales that made up La Comédie humaine are characterized by Balzac’s superb gift for storytelling, his rich sense of humor, and his delicate description of characters, scenes and places. In Le Père Goriot (1835), the tale of a penniless young provincial and the old man who gives up everything for his daughters, Balzac brings Paris to life almost as a character in its own right:

Left alone, Rastignac walked a few steps to the highest part of the cemetery, and saw Paris spread out below on both banks of the winding Seine. Lights were beginning to twinkle here and there. His gaze fixed almost avidly upon the space that lay between the column of the Place Vendôme and the dome of the Invalides; there lay the splendid world that he wished to conquer.

His imaginative gift and powers of description set the tone for the development of the 19th-century realist novel. As Oscar Wilde said, Balzac “created life, he did not copy it.” The world of La Comédie humaine stretched from Paris to the French countryside, and its rich cast included sensitive portraits not only of young provincial men on the make in Paris, such as Rastignac, but also of young and old women, bureaucrats, politicians, courtesans, spinsters, nobles, peasants, actors and innkeepers—in his words, “scenes of private life, Parisian life, political life, military life.” He also created the most unforgettable villain, the bisexual criminal mastermind turned police chief Vautrin, who was based on the real criminal-turned-police-chief Vidocq. It was Balzac who reflected that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” The greatest works in this vast body of stories include Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père Goriot, Lost Illusions (1837), La Cousine Bette (1846) and A Harlot High and Low (1838–47).

From the age of twenty-three, when he fell for the forty-five-year-old mother of some children he was tutoring, Balzac was in search of the ideal woman. He eventually found her in a Polish countess, Evelina Hańska, whom he married after a romantic correspondence that lasted fifteen years. By the time he married her, in March 1850, Balzac had no more than five months to live. He died in August, killed by the strain of his punishingly indulgent working habits. At his funeral, the writer Victor Hugo remembered Balzac as “among the brightest stars of his native land.” It was a fitting tribute.

PUSHKIN

1799–1837

The poet is dead: a slave to honor

Felled, by slanderous rumor

With a bullet in his breast, and thirsting for revenge

His proud head now bowed down.

The poet’s spirit could not bear

The shame of petty calumnies …

Mikhail Lermontov, from his homage to Pushkin, circulated secretly a few days after the great poet’s death

Alexander Pushkin is the heroic ideal of the romantic poet. A genius of exuberance, versatility, wit, poignancy and originality, a passionate and promiscuous lover of women, a victim of tyranny who remained true to his art—he personifies the triumph of creativity over the dead hand of bureaucracy. He helped create modern Russia—its culture, its language, its very image of itself. He also wrote history and short stories.