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Re: Lottman

From: Jan Rychlík <jan.rychlik~at~seznam.cz>
Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 22:10:15 +0100 (CET)
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To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>

Dear Art,

I very much agreed with your review of Lottman's book. Thanks for adding further thoughts or a kind of summary of your review. I would perhaps be less affable and would never call the book a psychological and sociological study. It is not very much psychological, because it does not - and even didn't attempt to - discover any reflexion Verne's psyche in his works. It is not sociological, because it doesn't tell the readers that some darker sides of Verne's character (e.g. anti-Semitism) were far from being to-one-person-limited phenomena (this doesn't mean that I excuse Verne). And it is not a study but rather a work worthy of publication in tabloid.

My personal hypothesis about Lottman's aiming at Verne's pesonal life is that he never fully read Verne's books (and if so, then didn't comprehend and enjoy them). Thus he was limited to the "exploration" Verne's personality only in his book. And it's absurd, when the book deals with a person known to the world as writer.

Certainly, it is important to know a writer's personal life (even character faults), but rather to comprehend how it shaped its writing. I was unable to discover anything like that in Lottman's book. Or, just one attempt at it: Lottman does not say much about DEUX ANS DES VACANSES, only that "readers know the book because of the character of Briant, a reminiscence of a victim of Verne's homosexual pedophilia". Well, the constant reissues of this book in our country (each 4th year of the 20th century statistically) thus must point to an immense proportion of sexologists in Czech population!

I am looking forward to Volker Dehs' forthcoming biography of Verne. Being a humble researcher, as I always perceived in his articles in BSJV, he is the right person to do Verne - the man and the writer - justice.

Sincerely

Jan Rychlik
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Received on Mon 31 Jan 2005 - 14:19:13 IST

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