The Expiation of Saveli

Gréville, Henry, 1842-1902Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.5
Word count
236K words
Chapters
24

Tags

Foreign Language Books Fate EntanglementFamily FeudEmotional RedemptionTragic ToneSoul InquiryRedemption ThemeMoral DilemmaPopular NarrativeRussian AtmosphereExotic Culture

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.L'expiation de Saveli by Henry GrévilleAuthor: Gréville, Henry, 1842-1902,Language: French, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Dec 31, 2007

Editor's review

L'expiation de Saveli is a novel by the French writer Henry Gréville, whose French original is freely distributed by Project Gutenberg. Gréville was a prolific novelist of the late nineteenth century, and his works often take Russian or Eastern European society as their setting, focusing on the choices characters make in moral dilemmas. The title itself announces the theme of expiation, and the plot revolves around the protagonist's transgression and inner atonement, bearing clear marks of a moral novel. For Chinese readers, the main value of this work lies not in the thrills of its plot but in the window it offers onto how nineteenth-century French popular literature imagined foreign societies: characterization, emotional description, and the narrative logic of reward for good and punishment for evil all carry the imprint of their era. As a public-domain ebook, it is suitable as French reading material or as a text for comparative literature study. When reading, it is worth noting how the narrator depicts foreign customs and how the expiation motif is carried by specific plot events; this will yield more than simply following the story.

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Reading tips

  1. Read through the opening chapters first to become familiar with the author's French vocabulary and narrative rhythm.
  2. Take brief plot notes tracing the protagonist's transgression and the thread of expiation.
  3. Pay attention to the book's descriptions of foreign customs and read them against historical sources.
  4. Compare with the author's other works to see similarities and differences in narrative technique.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24

FAQ

Is this book written in French, and what language level is needed? According to the information, the book is in French and is a free ebook released by Project Gutenberg. The syntax and vocabulary of nineteenth-century French novels are somewhat distant from modern French, so an intermediate or higher level of French reading ability is recommended before attempting to read it through; otherwise, a dictionary or a bilingual edition can help with comprehension.
What does the expiation in the title refer to? Judging from the title and the novel category indicated in the information, the work revolves around the protagonist Saveli's transgression and the moral repayment that follows. The specific plot needs to be confirmed by reading the original text. Readers may understand it as a narrative work centered on moral consequences rather than a work of religious doctrine.
What kind of writer is Gréville? According to the information, Henry Gréville was born in 1842 and died in 1902 and was a French novelist. The information provides only his birth and death years and the attribution of the work, with no further biographical details. Readers who wish to understand his full body of work may consult literary reference books and should not infer his overall standing from a single work.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Gréville, Henry, 1842-1902 Author

Henry Gréville (Gréville, Henry, 1842–1902) was a novelist writing in French in the late nineteenth century. Public information about his life is very limited: his nationality, education and personal history are not reliably documented. Judging from the six works held in the collection, his writing consists mainly of long narrative fiction concerned with family ethics, kinship ties and individual destiny. Suzanne Normis: Roman d'un père unfolds its story from a father's point of view, while La fille de Dosia and L'expiation de Saveli deal with emotional entanglement and atonement. The Russian-style names in the titles, together with figures such as "The Little Russian Servant" and "La Niania," suggest that he often introduced foreign settings and lower-class characters, in a realistic and sentimental tone. Gréville was thus a fairly productive popular novelist of his day; his works are not widely circulated now and are known mainly through bibliographic records.