Georges Simenon. Not a detective, but a focus on the person
Young Simenon wrote his first novel at 17. Contrary to the wishes of his persistent mother, he did not become a priest or "at worst, a pastry chef", which she never forgave him. And all because of the Russian students who rented rooms in their parents' house. It was they who introduced little Georges to Russian classics, leaving him forever with Chekhov's brevity as a model for the best presentation and moral reflections of Dostoevsky, which later gave impetus to the creation of "difficult" novels …
Detective is a genre respected and loved all over the world. Not only because it is fascinating and interesting to read it, but also because a person is always attracted to topics prohibited in society, taboo. Such, for example, as sex and murder. Murder is especially interesting for a person who is fueled by an inner feeling of fear of his own death. Like any literature, the detective genre is presented by authors with a sound vector, one way or another trying to reveal the nature of man and his propensity for crimes against their own kind.
The three most popular detective authors in the post-Soviet space are closed by the French writer Georges Simenon, ahead of the popular Agatha Christie. His works are especially interesting from the point of view of psychology, since, unlike other authors, he does not devote a single page to either criminology or logic. The narrative of any of his novels is dedicated to a person and therefore stands out as a separate "socio-psychological" direction of the detective genre.
Georges Simenon. Chekhov's fate and crimes according to Dostoevsky
Young Simenon wrote his first novel at 17. Contrary to the wishes of his persistent mother, he did not become a priest or "at worst, a pastry chef", which she never forgave him. And all because of the Russian students who rented rooms in their parents' house. It was they who introduced little Georges to Russian classics, leaving him forever with Chekhov's brevity as a model for the best presentation and Dostoevsky's moral reflections, which later gave impetus to the creation of "difficult" novels.
This Chekhovian brevity will affect Simenon not only in a capacious presentation of the essence, but also, according to the conventional skin understanding of elite Russian culture, will be expressed mainly in form - in the extremely meager vocabulary of his novels (up to 2 thousand words). According to Dostoevsky, the French author will only be able to reach the tragedies of human souls at the age of 26 - after 220 tabloid novels under 16 pseudonyms. It was then that the first novel about the clever and merciful commissar Maigret, signed by the author's real name, will be released.
Read books by Georges Simenon and see people through his eyes
Georges began his writing career with short notes on police chronicles in a local newspaper while still in college. At the same time, he had a favorite literary hero - a police investigator with a short pipe in his mouth - the future prototype of the famous commissar. Since then Simenon himself did not part with pipe smoking, which he also rewarded the hero of his own novels.
Consumed by a skin desire to become popular and earn as much as possible, Simenon marries and moves to Paris. He writes 80 pages a day, providing reports for 6 editorial offices. Seeing his exceptional efficiency and ability to quickly describe the events of Parisian life and compose opuses, he was offered a publicity stunt: sitting in a glass cage near the Moulin Rouge, write a novel in 5 days, continuously typing. But this was not destined to happen.
Simenon's first novel about the famous criminal police commissioner was in stark contrast to all the previous ones. Its editor mistakenly believed that he would not captivate the public, since it does not give the reader all the initial data of the crime, and the plot develops in an illogical and unusual way. The novel lacks the usual tabloid "ideal" detectives and wedding finals. However, he published this first sound "turn on" of Simenon. And I was not mistaken.
Soon, critics will call this an "intuitive" approach, but for now, getting up in the morning and slowly sharpening his pencils, the writer turns away from everything that happens around him and completely focuses on the plot. He thinks about the next chapter, which will take only one day. Usually he works in a curtained room only by the light of an electric lamp, overlaid with maps of the area and crime atlases.
His novels about Maigret are always "one-session" - he writes without prior preparation. Before lunch - in small pencil handwriting, in the afternoon - he types on a typewriter, making the first and last edits. And so the concentration lasts from morning to night, until the novel is over. The second wife of the writer in her memoirs will say that her husband worked like a robot. And then a doctor was called for him.
Simenon explained that he works "in a trance" and "the book writes itself until it finally lets him go." It could last 8 days, or it could last 2 months. What was it? System-vector psychology reveals this feature of the mental as a property of a developed anal-sound bundle of vectors - the ability to ponder, trying to get to the very essence of what is happening, painstakingly and clearly bringing the work to an ideal result, to the final point. This property was in Lomonosov ("the head is boiling") and in Einstein, in Tolstoy and in many genius sound artists of his time. What was Simenon's concentration about?
Georges Simenon. Man through the prism of crime
I read the criminal code and the Bible. The Bible is a cruel book.
Perhaps the most brutal that has ever been written.
As a journalist, Simenon was constantly aware of the events of the criminal life of Paris. Even in his youth, being the less successful "husband of a famous artist", he knew the French capital and its inhabitants almost intimately: from the richest to the poorest. He will need all this skin-tightly grasped information for further sound reflection on 76 novels and 26 stories: why, who and why.
His unconscious will stop thinking about it only at the age of 72: “Finally it let me go, and I can live like an ordinary person!”, And he will switch to autobiographical research.
As you know, writing does not solve eternal human questions, but only describes. In other words, his task is to correctly pose the question to the reader. And such a question should have half the answer.
“Why do people commit crimes? That is, why do they do evil towards others? Simenon poses this question, immersing the reader in all aspects of the life of his characters.
In the process of creativity, the writer even externally expresses all the properties of an anal sound specialist - he becomes gloomy, taciturn, endlessly smokes a pipe, completely surrendering to inner concentration that is incomprehensible to an outsider's eye. Confusing cause and effect, he explains this by the fact that in this way he enters the role of Maigret, becoming outwardly similar to him. But in fact, this is he, and Maigret is only the image he described.
"I'm not looking at a person from the outside. I'm trying to get inside."
Chesterton
Life is not a black and white picture. There are many components in it, where everything is interconnected. Investigating a murder, usually violent and sudden, Commissioner Maigret never entrusts the investigation of the crime scene to inspectors - he himself must immerse himself in the atmosphere of the victim's life. To understand how he lived, what feelings he experienced, what interested him.
No evidence and questions of benefit-benefit ("who benefits from it?") Does not interest the gloomy commissioner as much as the testimony of witnesses and relatives. The semitones of their conversations, the views with which they look at life, value systems. And what appears to the reader? A life. Human life, not measured in money, success or career. And unbearable suffering in her.
This may be the suffering of an elderly woman who fell in love for the first time from infidelity, or it may be the unbearable severity of resentment for the warped life of a close relative. There are no positive or negative characters in Maigret's novels. Maigret understands everyone: a man forced to a crime, ready to kill for a woman, and a girl who has lost her head from love, covering her lover. Together with him, the reader seems to understand and empathize.
Revealing the entire course of the crime, focusing soundly and not noticing anything around, Maigret reproduces the intensity of suffering (crisis) that prompts people to transcend their inner taboo and commit murder of their neighbor. For inner relief from my own misery. On these psychological nuances, without any evidence, even before interrogating the accused, he uncovers the crimes, which is what he becomes famous for.
Often he helps people: “he fixes human destinies like others mend a chair,” restoring justice so close to a Russian, where, among other things, intention is assessed, and not just action. Simenon distinguishes between morality and morality and gives a hint at the true concept of justice.
"There is only one morality - that by which the strong enslave the weak."
Judges and prosecutors cannot judge people for their true fault, because they do not see the whole picture. Simenon's contemporary Karel Czapek also revealed the same problem, describing that, for example, God cannot judge, because he understands the whole situation and can only forgive. Only man can judge a person. That is why Maigret helps lost people even before the transfer of cases to court.
Maigret does not judge - he does his job. In order to reveal the truth, he does not feel sorry for his own position. He notes that the skin law in France and America is written in such a way as to cover the richer, blaming the poorer, and sometimes just protecting the former from the latter, regardless of justice.
This is contrary to his sound perception of the world, and therefore he will forever remain a police commissioner. But on the other hand, even today, while driving a tour of the Seine, everyone will be shown his "office" on the third floor of the criminal police building on the Orfevre embankment. And in the city of Delfzijl, where the first novel was written, the commissioner Maigret was issued a birth certificate and a monument was erected.
Georges Simenon and his "difficult" novels
During World War II, Simenon helped the French and Belgians escape from the Nazis, for which he later received awards. The dramas he saw prompted him to write new psychological "difficult" * novels. There is no longer the "adjuster of destinies" Maigret. Here, as in life, people suffer from their own unfulfillment and unsuccessfully try to find the reasons for their dramatic actions. And not finding, they suffer even more.
“All around there are fools! A whole city of fools, insignificant people who do not even know why they live in this world, and who stupidly walk forward, like bulls in a yoke, jingling some with a bell, some with a bell hanging from their neck"
110 "difficult" novels - 110 questions sent to society. About why people become maniacs and why, when dying, do they regret not at all about what others would judge them for? Why do people commit meanness, and is there a gradation of them? Where do such desires come from in a person? These questions 20 years after the death of the writer will be answered by the system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan. In the meantime, they only describe the tragedies of the personal character of "little" people and the abyss of human pain, occasionally illuminated by the sparks of mercy of those from whom you do not expect it at all.
Biography of Georges Simenon or the reverse side of talent
All my life I tried to understand people …
Now I decided to observe myself. This is the most difficult thing.
Everyone comes into the world with their own task. Five percent of people are tasked with focusing and leading humanity forward with their thoughts and ideas in both science and psychology. A person's unconscious, in spite of consciousness, asks him such desires that he is forced to fulfill, whether he wants it or not.
Simenon made his feasible sound contribution to the piggy bank of focusing on questions that are higher than mathematics, engineering or space - questions about the human psyche. It was not easy. In days free from "literary attacks", the unconscious desires of his other vectors demanded realization.
So, the skin vector found itself in the constant change of women. 20 years before his death, Georges will boastfully declare in his "Intimate Diaries" that he had 10 thousand women. The second wife will correct this figure by 12 thousand. Possessing the same skin needs of "novelty", she never limited him in his night adventures, for which both paid with mutual disgust after 5 years of marriage.
The ideal image of a wife for him will remain the first wife who did not forgive him for betrayal, whose “golden” anal-visual qualities will form the basis of the image of Madame Maigret. In the same "Intimate Diaries" Simenon explores the tragedy of his own life. His beloved and only daughter, suffering from depression, at 25, committed suicide with a shot in the heart.
Not seeing her place in life, the owner of the sound vector could not cope with the burden of internal questions about meaning and chose to cut off her suffering. In a letter to her father before her death, she asked to plant a cypress on her grave, and Simenon himself bequeathed to scatter his ashes over this tree. But this is only a conditional material projection of a possible sound unity between the father who was then busy with literature and the bewildered daughter.
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Georges Simenon, a museum named after him was opened in his hometown of Liege. He is remembered and loved to this day. After all, humanity is left with something more important than just a detective story, and even more than a new direction in this genre. Under the guise of reading a simple text about fascinating events, everyone is given the opportunity to get in touch with the results of sound concentration over the essence of human nature.
