Background

Although Ramuz was born on September 24, 1878 in Lausanne, Switzerland, the capital city of the canton of Vaud, his parents were natives of a nearby rural region, and throughout his lifetime Ramuz regarded the grassy highlands of Vaud, where he spent his childhood summers, as his true home.

Education

After studying at primary and secondary schools in Lausanne, he enrolled at the university there, initially complying with his father’s request that he study law but transferring after one term to the college of arts. He received a degree from the University of Lausanne in 1900.

Career

Upon receiving his degree, Ramuz accepted a teaching position in rural Vaud. However, he was shortly thereafter stricken with appendicitis and peritonitis, and after recovering, he moved to Paris to pursue a literary career.

Inspired by the French Parnassian poets, who advocated the use of classical verse forms, Ramuz had been writing formally regular, rhyming poetry since adolescence; when he arrived in Paris, he brought with him a collection his poems, tentatively titled Le petit village. Soon afterward, however, he rewrote Le Petit village using free verse forms and colloquial diction and substituting assonance for rhyme. When Le petit village was published in 1903, critical response was markedly positive.

During his ten-year sojourn in Paris, Ramuz published one additional volume of poetry, La grande guerre du Sondrebund, which was released in 1906, but concentrated primarily on the production of novels, experimenting with various literary styles in his attempt to find an appropriate form for his subject matter.

His marriage was followed by a period of enormous productivity for Ramuz, during which he completed thirteen novels, several volumes of humanistic philosophical reflections, and innumerable journal articles. He also participated in the founding of Cahiers vaudois, a journal devoted to the promotion and dissemination of the work of Vaudois authors, and frequently lectured at the University of Lausanne.

Achievements

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  Ramuz remains a widely revered figure throughout much of Europe: his works continue to enjoy wide popularity, while his unprecedented and skillful use of native Swiss subjects and settings has secured his position as the chief progenitor of modern Swiss literature. Although his reputation in English-speaking countries has been limited by a scarcity of translations of h,s work, critical response to existing translations has been predominantly positive. Both English-speaking and European commentators have praised the powerful simplicity of Ramuz’s prose and the accuracy of his portraits of rural Swiss peasants, and some consider him one of the most important European novelists of the early twentieth century. His image appears on the 200 Swiss Franc note and his foundation awards the quintannual Grand Prix C.F. Ramuz.

Works

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  • What if the sun...

    (What might the end of the world look like, to people who ...)

    1939
  • The Reign of the Evil One

    (On a quiet summer evening in a Swiss mountain village, a ...)

    1917
  • Derborence: Where the Devils Came Down

    (A mountain falls down and an alpine village is frozen in ...)

    1934
  • Beauty on Earth

    (Through the door of a Swiss inn the reader steps into a p...)

    1927
  • Aline 1905
  • Jean-Luc persécuté 1909
  • Aimé Pache peintre vaudois 1911
  • Vie de Samuel Belet 1913
  • Raison d'Etre 1914
  • Les signes parmi nous 1919
  • Salutation paysanne 1919
  • Terre du ciel 1921
  • Riversong of the Rhône 1920

Views

Critics generally divide Ramuz’s career as a novelist into two phases, using his return to Vaud as the point of demarcation. Reflecting various influences, the novels of the first period reveal his search for an appropriate narrative style. Ramuz’s 1905 novel, Aline, for example, has been compared to the novels of Realist author Gustave Flaubert because of its straightforward, objective narrative, while Les circonstances de la vie, published in 1907, and La vie de Samuel Belet, published in 1913 and translated in 1951 as The Life of Samuel Belet, are regarded as Naturalistic character studies. During this initial phase of his career, Ramuz sought above all to free his prose from stylistic artifice, nothing in his diary that style is the "part of man in the interpretation of things." He, therefore, attempted to base his prose style on the example of representational painters, who evoked ideas by simply portraying reality as they saw it, and this aim is manifested in the increasingly static and descriptive style of Ramuz’s early novels.

Ramuz most successfully expressed his personal vision in the novels written after his 1913 return to Vaud. From the beginning, he had chosen to write about rural Swiss life not only because it was the existence to which he felt most akin, but also because he saw the constant struggle and rewards of Alpine dwellers as representative of the First World War - 1917’s La guerison des maladies, 1919’s Les signes parmi nous, 1921’s Terre du del, and Presence de la mort, published in 1922 and translated in 1944 as The End of All Me. Ramuz repeatedly utilized the microcosm of the Alpine village to explore the multifaceted response of humanity to the presence of evil, exhibiting a markedly Christian perspective. In later novels, he drew from the personal struggles of Swiss peasants myriad conclusions about the nature of courage, about humanity’s ability to endure and transcend adversity, and about the inherent spirituality of human nature.

In his mature works, Ramuz’s pictorial realism is further heightened by his accurate re-production of peasant speech and his frequent reference to esoteric features of mountain life.

Connections

In 1913 Ramuz married a young Swiss artist named Cecile Cellier, and soon afterward the couple settled in Vaud, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

Spouse:

Cecile Cellier

Friend:

Edouard Rod

(March 31, 1857 - January 29, 1910)

Edouard Rod was a French-Swiss novelist.

Friend:

Rene Auberjonois

(August 18, 1872 - October 11, 1957)

Rene Auberjonois was a Swiss post-impressionist painter and one of the leading Swiss artists of the 20th century.

References

• Art and Poetry of Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
  1979