Biography. Women are not born. Why Simone de Beauvoir became a feminist Beauvoir called Lanzmann "first true love" and herself - his "wife forever"

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir - French writer, philosopher, founder of feminism.

Simone de Beauvoir, a native Parisian, was born on January 9, 1908 in the family of Francoise and Georges de Beauvoir, was the eldest child. Simone was brought up in a respectable family with Catholic restrictions, which she considered a restriction on her freedom. From a very young age, she began to distinguish herself in her family by her opinion and character, which became more and more rebellious with age. One day, young Simone declared her main principle in life.

"I don't want my life to be subject to anyone else's will but my own"

Her father devoted all his time to work so that his girls were provided with everything necessary.

Simone de Beauvoir

Despite her rebellious nature, Simone studied diligently and diligently, which allowed her to enter the famous Sorbonne Institute. Studying was easy, she successfully became a master and began to teach philosophy in many educational institutions in Paris.

After another student party, Simone met the future famous writer Jean-Paul Sartre, who became not only her husband, but her best friend and lover. Their relationship violated traditional notions of the relationship between a man and a woman. They both agreed among themselves that their relationship is free and everyone has the right to have other sexual partners.

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone and Jean-Paul were united by a common worldview and a passion that attracted them to each other for more than 50 years. They were both friends and lovers until the death of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1980. During the years of their relationship, they organized marches of protests and demonstrations for women's rights together. They wrote many manifestos, lectures on the independence of women in society.

Their relationship has always included discussion of each other's creativity, they could spend hours discussing each other's ideas. Simone began to seriously engage in literature, her first novel, She Came to Stay, was published in 1943. This novel was copied from her life when a love triangle arose between her and Sartre during the first years of acquaintance with Jean-Paul.

It was the work of Simone de Beauvoir that became a symbol of feminism in the 1960s, when sexual principles and the life of a woman were revised.

Simone de Beauvoir

With her work, she made a strong development of the feminist movement. The intelligentsia of the Old and New Worlds were delighted with Simone's book - "The Second Sex", especially after its translation into English in 1953, which contains a controversial controversy on the position of women in society.

Works dedicated to the existential dilemma: "All men are mortal" and "The Blood of Others" in which the writer used facts from her own life experience. For example, the story "Tangerines" based on a short novel by Simone and Nelson Ahlgren, awarded in 1954 by the Prix Concourt. Often in the stories of Simone de Beauvoir, submission to the fate of a woman's life is indicated.

For 78 years of her life, Simona managed to write four of her autobiographies, as well as many serious philosophical works on existentiality, attitudes towards the elderly of a young society, and ideas about freedom of choice.

Simone de Beauvoir

The translation of the book "The Second Sex" into English also caused a lot of criticism, about this harsh and aggressive from people who adhere to rigid traditions. On the contrary, they believed that Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical view of the modern woman only degrades the woman in society. But among feminists, the work of Beauvoir caused a strong positive reaction, considering the writer a fighter for the equality of women.

Today in Russia, when a woman feels her own “I” more and more deeply, not at all being carried away by the problems of feminism, but simply touching on issues more significant and global than the spheres of life and sex that bothered her, she involuntarily faces what she felt and carried through her life Simone de Beauvoir. "Ideas come into the world together with people", many people would like to step into eternity, but most often people belong only to their time. Simone de Beauvoir will be dear to future generations for what she was looking for, although she did not find a stable relationship between the female class and the worldview of the intellectual.

Simone de Beauvoir's book "The Second Sex", written already half a century ago, although it dissolves in many new problems associated with the second millennium, however, in some respects does not cease to be relevant, as it gives a woman an accurate idea of ​​herself, both biological, historical and religious person. No matter what they say about de Beauvoir today, no matter how they “wash” her in the press and sermons, she looked reality in the eye and, by the example of her own life, proved the likelihood of a new nature of the relationship between men and women.

Written in the late forties, the book "The Second Sex" has not ceased to be significant today, despite the women's riots of the thirties, the promotion of noble collective farmers, the glorification of certain personalities of the Soviet period (war veterans, astronauts and members of governments). Individual cases are not the rule. The appearance in the 60s of some fantastic works of fiction on the themes of the Amazons of our day, written mainly by men, only by the nature of their authors' noticeable fear before the onset of the female class confirm the correctness of these judgments.

Now let us recall the fate of the writer herself. The civil wife of the famous French existentialist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir was born into a prosperous and by no means poor family of a lawyer and a zealous Catholic. Her childhood, as she later admitted, was happy and cloudless. After graduating from the Faculty of Philosophy and writing a work "for the rank", Simone de Beauvoir has been teaching philosophy in Marseille for all the thirties. In the early forties, she begins an affair with the philosophy teacher Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her lifelong friend. As a writer, she takes part with him in the resistance movement. Their participation in these events is ambiguous, and is still disputed by some peers, because they did not endure the hardships that befell those who fought in the Resistance with weapons in their hands. But Simone de Beauvoir forever had a guilt complex due to the fact that she did not know the feeling of hunger, was not cold and did not feel thirsty. In moral terms, the lack of such an experience oppressed her much more than a conscious refusal to have children. In the end, the children were replaced by numerous books, where she tried to understand herself and, for example,

An example of what children are as a form of continuation of the human race. "I have always had a need to talk about myself ... The first question that I always had was this: what does it mean to be a woman?" I thought I would answer it right away. But as soon as I carefully looked at this problem, I realized, first of all, that this world was made for men; my childhood was filled with legends and myths composed by men, but I reacted to them in a completely different way than boys and youths. I was so excited by them that I forgot to listen to my own voice, my own confession ... ".

Simone de Beauvoir writes a lot, but, taking up a pen, she always strives to create only a significant, programmatic work, be it a novel, an essay or an autobiographical story. She reflects on the fact that, unlike many living beings, only a person realizes that his life is finite, that he is mortal. And during this short life, complete freedom is not available to people, they always face the problem of responsibility in communicating "with others." And the greatest difficulties arise in communication between the sexes. Simone de Beauvoir sees the possibility of agreement between them not in the sphere of sex and orientation to the privileged status of a man, but in a joint search for the meaning of life.

At the end of the 20th century, de Beauvoir's books devoted to the "third age" began to be remembered, where she managed to convey the magnificence of life, the anxiety and longing of mature years, the scandalous collision of her own consciousness with the process of dying, disappearing into oblivion.

They also remembered the books in which she talks about her "Roman holidays" with Sartre, about the topics of their conversations and conversations, about what worried them throughout their lives, about the fantastic success of Sartre, about his influence on the youth and minds of his contemporaries.

Simone de Beauvoir herself did not have the ambition of her husband, but she certainly basked in the rays of his glory, let's say with a French touch - "renome", until she earned her own fame with her distinctly expressed "feminism". The philosophical writings of Simone de Beauvoir note a balanced objectivity, insight, outlook, a good style, an enlightening beginning, but not everyone in society liked her, she was scolded by both Marxists and Catholics. They believed that her "purely feminine" rebellion was not a justification for the need for emancipation, but evidence of unbridled pride and humiliation.

shitty soul. The calm harmonious state of Simone de Beauvoir, as she admitted, was destroyed more than once throughout her life, and the writer subjected her fate to ruthless analysis both in works of art and in scientific research.

"My heroine is me," she quotes Maria Bashkirtseva. Indeed, most of her novels are autobiographical. So, for example, in her first novel, The Guest, about the life of a couple whose harmonious harmony is destroyed by a young creature intruding into their lives, she describes her relationship with Jean Paul Sartre. It is no secret that the great philosopher was constantly surrounded by young admirers.

For her, the writer's work is also a way of self-knowledge: "A man acts and thus knows himself. A woman, living locked up and doing work that does not have significant results, cannot determine either her place in the world or her strength. She ascribes to herself the highest meaning precisely because no important object of activity is available to it ...

The desire to live a woman's life, to have a husband, a home, children, to experience the spell of love is not always easy to reconcile with the desire to achieve the intended goal.

Did she succeed in this reconciliation herself? Probably not. But she consciously chose her path. And all her life she tried to prove that a strong relationship is possible between a man and a woman, not due to their biological essence. That is why she refused to have children. That is why she was always close to Sartre even when their mutual passion faded and each of them had their own personal life. Their amazing civil union was legendary. It was believed that none of them wanted more. Every public appearance of a famous philosopher was expected by journalists, who always know more than others, like a sensation: with whom will he appear today? But Sartre persistently demonstrated his loyalty to Simone de Beauvoir.

Was she beautiful? I think no. If you can say that about a Frenchwoman. And she was a real Frenchwoman. She loved beautiful and fashionable clothes and had excellent taste. In the photographs of the period of a romantic relationship with Sartre, a self-confident, charming woman looks at us. But later she had to listen to so many nasty things and accusations against her that, they say, she had a complex of an ugly woman. The independence of her thinking and bright public

cations in defense of women's emancipation contributed to the creation of the image of a feminist alien to earthly joys. Simone did not deny these accusations.

But ten years after her death in 1997, the book "Transatlantic Love" was published - a collection of letters from Simone de Beauvoir to the American writer Nelson Algren, in which we see another, unofficial, non-fighting side of the writer's life. She wrote hundreds of messages to her beloved man - evidence of her passionate and jealous human love. For the sake of meeting her beloved, this, by no means a celestial, flew across the ocean on rather frail “steel birds” in the fifties, discovered at first cities like Chicago and Los Angeles that did not attract her, read literature that she did not like from afar, started unnecessary acquaintance. Often she could not fall asleep without writing another letter to Nelson, without at least saying a word of love to him in writing. Unlike all her books published earlier, "Transatlantic Love" reveals to us the writer as a completely earthly woman who dreams of a family, of a loved one who meets her on the threshold of the house, giving her the most ordinary warmth and comfort. "... I even sleep, waiting for you," she writes. Letters like this were written daily by Simone de Beauvoir from 1947 to 1964. In letters, they often addressed each other: "my husband", "my wife". However, she was not destined to marry Nelson, as they dreamed about it. The reason must be sought in the very enduring legend of Sartre and de Beauvoir, in the writer's deep connection with France, and in Nelson's personal life. The Atlantic Ocean firmly connected, but also seriously separated the two artists, creators of their own life, their own biography. We don't know everything yet. After all, the truth often does not match the legends. It should take more than a decade...

Sartre and de Beauvoir are buried in a joint grave in the Montparnasse cemetery. The graves of writers are now less visited than the graves of chansonniers and pop musicians. However, the French put signs of love and gratitude on them - flowers and stones. On the grave of Sartre and de Beauvoir are red carnations and pebbles, similar to pebbles picked up on the seashore.

After reading the biography of Simone de Beauvoir, you will learn more about the life and work of the famous writer. The French writer was born into a fairly wealthy family with loving parents, and was well brought up. Childhood left her with the most pleasant memories - warm and joyful. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a deeply religious person. Simone was born in 1908 in Paris.

Simone received an excellent philosophical education and already in the 1930s she actively taught philosophical sciences in the city of Marseille.

Soon after teaching practice, de Beauvoir met and became very close to one of his colleagues, a teacher of philosophy, who would soon play an important role in the biography of Simone de Beauvoir. His name is Jean-Paul Sartre. They feel a romantic attachment to each other and become soul mates for the rest of their lives. During the resistance movement, they also act together, although with all their sincere desire to be on a par with other participants, Jean-Paul and de Beauvoir cannot endure all the difficulties and hardships of their associates. This fact tormented Simon for many years. She consciously decides not to have children and looks at this issue philosophically, having written numerous works with research and reflections on children and procreation. In this she finds solace.

The writer works hard in the creative field, making a big bias towards philosophical reasoning. For example, she talks about the destiny of a person, that the life path is limited and only a person understands this fact, and this understanding must be guided. Simone writes a lot about the relationship between the sexes.

What is worth mentioning about the appearance of the French writer? She did not have a particularly attractive appearance, but she liked to dress neatly and beautifully, even wearing the latest fashion. She had a good sense of taste. However, at one time a stream of mockery and various dirty tricks fell upon her, aimed at undermining the reputation of a beautiful, charming woman. De Beauvoir was aware of all this, but she preferred to endure these insults in silence, without saying anything in her defense.

Simone was very different from her contemporaries in her thirst for freedom, will, adventurism. François Mitterrand called de Beauvoir "an exceptional personality", others even called her "an entire era", which is clearly imprinted in the biography of Simone de Beauvoir. Simone earned herself such a reputation for her waywardness, adventurism, desire to challenge public opinion. All this became her life and took possession of her, surprisingly, from childhood. Otherwise, it would be unlikely that a decent girl from a strict Catholic family would suddenly deprive herself of the joys of a family and raising children, and decide to write and proclaim free ideas, female independence, a spirit of rebellion and revolutionary sentiments.

In 1970 Sartre fell ill and Simone took care of him. On April 15, 1980, Sartre died. Simone took it hard and outlived her friend by only six years. These six years have passed for her in solitude.

Simone de Beauvoir died on April 14, 1986 in a hospital in Paris. No one visited her, no one offered help, no one wanted to be around.

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The French writer Simone de Beauvoir is considered the founder of the modern feminist movement. Beauvoir's freedom-loving and existential views formed the basis of the struggle for equality, and also resulted in magnificent philosophical works about life, love and women in this world. We decided to talk about the fate of Simone de Beauvoir, her work and the very ambiguous relationship that connected the writer with the equally famous existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.

Women are not born, they are made. Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir could become a nun

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In a bourgeois family, the girl was raised under the strict influence of Catholicism. In her youth, Simone went to a Catholic school and was so deeply religious that she even considered becoming a nun. But at the age of 14, Simone, being very curious and intellectually developed, faced a crisis of faith, as a result of which she called herself an atheist. Instead of the Bible, de Beauvoir devoted herself to the study of existentialism, mathematics and philosophy. In 1926, Simone left home to enter the prestigious Sorbonne and study philosophy. Beauvoir quickly became the most successful student in her group. In 1929 she defended her work on Leibniz. And it was during this period that Simone de Beauvoir met another student, the budding existentialist and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she developed a strong connection that soon influenced her life and career.

Beauvoir and Sartre were 21 years old when they met, and a serious relationship began between them, combining a productive partnership and. Sartre was impressed by the intellect of Beauvoir, so he found a quick acquaintance with her. Very quickly, their relationship became romantic, but at the same time it was completely unconventional. Simone rejected Sartre's proposal of marriage, never lived with him under the same roof, and each of them was free to have other romantic relationships. But despite this, Beauvoir and Sartre loved each other throughout their lives and their relationship lasted until the death of Sartre himself.

Genuine love would have to be based on the mutual recognition of two freedoms. Each of the lovers in this case would feel himself and himself, and others - not one of them would have to renounce his transcendence or mutilate himself. Together they would find value and purpose in the world. Each of them, giving himself to his beloved, would know himself and enrich his world.

In addition to their love affairs, Sartre and Beauvoir were engaged in science, writing and teaching, working in different parts of France, which caused them to be often away from each other. Before the war, Simone de Beauvoir taught literature and philosophy, but after the outbreak of the war she was removed from her post, while Sartre went to the front. Only after the end of the war, due to the inability to teach, Beauvoir had to take up his literary activities.

The first great works of Simone de Beauvoir

In 1943, the first large-scale work by Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, was published, which described the love triangle between Beauvoir, Sartre and Olga Kozhakevich and considered existential ideals, the complexity of relationships and issues related to the perception of another person in a couple . After the release of this work, books such as The Blood of Others (1945) and All Men Are Mortal (1946) were also published, which also focused on the study of existentialism.

During this time, Beauvoir and Sartre founded a newspaper called Les Temps Modernes, where many writers, including Sartre and Beauvoir themselves, wrote philosophical essays and articles promoting their ideology. And after that, Simone de Beauvoir's most famous work, The Second Sex, was born.

"Second Sex" by feminist Simone de Beauvoir

Published in 1949, The Second Sex was a 1,000-page critique of patriarchal culture and the secondary status of women in society. The book, which today is considered to be the basis, was once subjected to terrible criticism, and the Vatican added it to the list of prohibited literature. But despite this, a few years later The Second Sex was released in English in America. It was this book that made Simone de Beauvoir one of the most prominent thinkers of our time and gave the feminist movement an ideology and a solid historical foundation.

A woman perceives herself as insignificant, which will never turn into an essential, because she herself does not carry out this transformation. The proletarians say "we". Negroes too. By positing themselves as a subject, they make "others" the bourgeoisie, the whites. Women - except for a few of their congresses, which were abstract demonstrations - do not say "we"; men call them "women," and women use the same word to call themselves, but they do not truly consider themselves to be the Subject. The proletarians have made a revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indochinese are fighting in their peninsula - the actions of women have always been only symbolic excitement; they achieved only that the men deigned to yield to them; they took nothing: they received.

Despite the fact that the book The Second Sex made Beauvoir a popular and respected icon, she did not stop there, she traveled widely and continued to write, and was also actively involved in politics. Among the works of that time, the book "Tangerines", which won the Goncourt Prize, as well as the autobiographical work "The Power of Maturity" and many other books, is considered special.

During the 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir could not enjoy only a literary career, therefore, with the support of Sartre, she participated in solving socially important issues, and, in particular, the struggle for equality. Simone de Beauvoir influenced the student movement in the 1960s, spoke out about the Vietnam War in the 70s, and also participated in feminist demonstrations, promoting her ideas among women.

The fate of women and the future of socialism are closely linked, which follows from the extensive work that Bebel devoted to women. "A woman and a proletarian," he says, "are the two oppressed." And both of them will be liberated as a result of the same development of the economy after the revolution brought about by machine production.

Time for philosophical reflection Beauvoir

Towards the end of her life, Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical searches turned to the issues of aging and death. In 1964, she wrote A Very Easy Death Details, in which she described the death of her mother. She also explored what aging and age mean in society and for each person individually. After Sartre's death, Simone de Beauvoir wrote a farewell work in which she described the last years of the writer's life and their relationship.

Psychoanalysts argue that a woman is masochistic, because in the loss of virginity and childbirth, pleasure is supposedly associated with painful sensations, and also because she puts up with her passive role in love. First of all, it should be noted that painful sensations play a certain role in erotic relationships, which has nothing to do with passive submission. Often pain raises the tone of the individual experiencing it, awakens sensitivity, dulled by strong love confusion and pleasure; it resembles a bright beam that flashes in the darkness of carnal sensations, sobering lovers, who are thrilled in anticipation of pleasure, in order to allow them to plunge back into the state of this expectation. In a fit of tender passion, lovers often hurt each other. Completely immersed in mutual carnal pleasure, they strive to use all forms of contact, unity and confrontation. In the heat of a love game, a person forgets himself, goes into a frenzy, into ecstasy. Suffering also destroys the boundaries of the personality, brings a person's feelings to a paroxysm, makes him surpass himself. Pain has always played a significant role in orgies; it is known that the highest pleasure can border on pain: caress sometimes turns into torture, and torment can give pleasure. Embracing, lovers often bite, scratch, pinch each other; such behavior does not indicate their sadistic inclinations, it expresses the desire for merger, and not for destruction, the subject to whom it is directed does not at all strive for self-denial or self-humiliation, he longs for unity.

Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986 at the age of 78. She was buried in a common grave with Sartre at the Montparnasse cemetery.

To liberate a woman means to refuse to limit her to a relationship with a man, but this does not mean to deny the relationship itself. Existing for herself, she will thereby exist for a man. Each of them, seeing the other as an independent subject, will remain the Other for him. Complementarity in their relationship will not destroy the miracle that is generated by the division of human beings into two sexes, will not destroy desire, possession, love, dreams, love adventures. The concepts that excite us will retain their full meaning: to give, to win, to unite. On the contrary, only when the slavish state of half of humanity is finished, when the system of hypocrisy based on it is destroyed, the division of humanity into two sexes will acquire its true meaning, and the human couple will acquire its true appearance.