Inventory of those great European writers who served as officials
Dante: The consul
who died in a foreign land When he was very young, Dante pursued that kind of immortal glory, eager to do something earth-shattering. With this belief, he entered the Florence City Hall at the age of 28 and began to participate in politics. At the age of 35, he was elected consul and became one of the six highest administrators of the small republic. Due to the needs of work and his own personality, Dante was busy with various social activities and political planning every day. This experience accumulated a lot of material for his later writing “Feast”.
Dante, who is young and energetic, hopes to end all partisan struggles, eliminate sectarian opposition, strive for municipal freedom, create a harmonious and peaceful living environment for the people, and establish a unified, prosperous and strong Italian nation-state. However, fate always loves to play tricks on people. Just when Dante was full of enthusiasm and ready to fight, he encountered a regime change. The black party that supported the pope seized power. As a member of the white party who opposed the pope, Dante was permanently exiled and never returned. His hometown, Florence, once he returned to his hometown, any Florentine soldier could execute and burn him to death. At the end of 1301, Dante, who was only 36 years old, began the second half of his exile. Life in exile is difficult and lonely, but fortunately he has a whole body of talent, and many powerful families are happy to ask him to be a guest for the sake of being arty. At the invitation of the Earl of Gigi, he once served as secretary, diplomatic representative and copying official documents in the quiet and quiet Karsantim under the shade of the sun. The life of Ghasantine not only created a space for Dante to concentrate on his creation, but also provided him with many moving stories for writing “The Divine Comedy”.
In 1315, Florence was brought to power by the military. The new government announced that if Dandin would pay the fine, throw ashes on his head and hang a knife around his neck, he would be able to return home with impunity if he paraded through the streets for a week. Dante wrote back and said: “This method is not the way for me to return to my country! If my reputation as Dante is damaged, then I will never set foot on the land of Florence again! Can’t I enjoy the light of the sun, moon and stars elsewhere? Don’t I bow my knees to the citizens of Florence, can I not touch the precious truth? What is certain is that I will not worry about having no bread!”
One night in 1321, Dante, a generation of literary giants, died of malaria in Italy Ravenna in the northeast, and is buried there permanently.
Chaucer: The Lucky Royal Favourite
In order to allow Chaucer to find an official position in the court in the future, in 1357, the wine merchant’s father sent the 14-year-old Chaucer to the palace as a servant. While serving as a boy servant, Chaucer not only had to complete his daily work, but also received “court education”, studying law, theology, music, literature, Latin grammar and other courses. At that time, the British court was deeply influenced by French culture, and some literati from France directly brought the chivalry and court love in French literature. French literature, like the air to breathe, became a part of Chaucer’s life and transformed into his love fantasy poems.
Due to his good family background and adaptation to court education, Chaucer soon became an outstanding civil servant, and the royal family paid more and more attention to him. In 1359, he followed Edward III’s troops on an expedition to France, but was unfortunately captured by the French army. Fortunately, he was redeemed by the king soon. From 1361 to 1367, Chaucer was trained by the Law Association of the Inner Temple. In 1366, he married a female officer in the queen’s bedroom. Since then, he has traveled to the European continent on behalf of Edward III many times. He has been to Belgium, France, Italy and other countries. He had the opportunity to meet Bocca Qiu and Petrarch, bathed in the sunshine of the Renaissance, felt the breath of humanism.
In 1374, Chaucer was the administrator of the fur duty in London, and in 1382 he was also the administrator of the customs duty for wine and other commodities. In 1385, Chaucer served as magistrate of Kent, and was elected the county’s knight representative to the House of Commons the following year. After Richard came to power in 1389, Chaucer successively served as the chief of the royal building project and the deputy director of the Royal Forest of Somerset, responsible for the maintenance and repair of castles and manors. Because of the needs of his position, Chaucer often carried large sums of money with him, was robbed repeatedly, and his life was threatened, so he had to resign from this important position and became the Forestry Undersecretary of Bethelton Park in Somersetshire. At this time, Chaucer Already 48 years old. This is a slack job, and naturally the annual salary will not be too high. Chaucer, who was accustomed to living a superior life, had no savings, so he often borrowed money. When he was poor, he wrote “Empty Bag of Complaint” to tell about his poverty. Henry IV, who had already known about it, quickly gave it to him. Doubled the annual salary. It can be said that Chaucer is a lucky man. He was born in a wealthy family, and became a servant of the princes and nobles when he was young. Later, he was favored by the monarchs of the two dynasties, and was given an official position with generous remuneration. Most of his life he enjoyed the joy of life in harmony with his friends and lived a peaceful life.
The emerging middle-class family environment and years of court life gave Chaucer the dual identity of “bottom” and “court”. He not only knew the lives of princes and nobles, but also witnessed and experienced the lives of ordinary people in the city. Life experience enabled Chaucer to go beyond the limitations of his own class, to break through the shackles of medieval religious ideology, and to absorb the essence of humanism from works such as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, making him the greatest English medieval figure. Poet, the founder of British national literature.
Goethe: Hard-working privy adviser
Like the protagonist in “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, the young Goethe has ideals, ambitions, and talents, but suffers from no opportunities. In 1775, when Grand Duke August of Weimar invited him to Weimar, the 26-year-old was so excited that he almost abandoned everything before, “decided to participate in all court and political affairs in the most direct way”.
In 1776 Goethe was appointed advisor to the Privy Council. From then on, Goethe actually presided over the government affairs of Weimar Principality. He is eager for work, enthusiastic about his career, and has a sense of responsibility. He personally drafts large and small documents ranging from the city’s fire prevention regulations to diplomatic exchanges with major European countries. He led the recovery of mines in Ilmenau, developed forests, consolidated finances, streamlined the army, studied textile technology, established textile schools, implemented measures to reduce farmers’ taxes, built roads, opened theaters, assisted universities, and even took charge of an army. The training of the unit of nearly 500 soldiers. It can be said that in the first few years of working in Weimar, out of a strong sense of responsibility and pursuit of life, Goethe worked hard, almost overworked, and even washed his face with snow in January to keep awake. In short, he hopes to improve the financial situation of this small country and improve the living standards of the people through his unremitting efforts, so as to realize his political ambitions.
Goethe pinned his hopes on a sage monarch and imagined social reforms through the imperial court, but in the end he found that “the ideal is very full, but the reality is very skinny.” There were many irreconcilable contradictions between his reform ideas and the conservative court order. He could no longer bear the lingering from the upper class, became taciturn, and fell into indescribable depression. In 1786, Goethe, who was tired of the ups and downs of the officialdom, quietly embarked on a trip to Italy like a fugitive. In the hometown of ancient Rome and the Renaissance, he traveled from Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, all the way to Sicily. As a wanderer, pay homage to the distant historical relics and find the goddess of art in your heart. Two years later, Goethe returned to Weimar. At this time, he was reborn as a new Goethe. He declined all political positions and began to devote himself to writing.
Pushkin: A rebellious diplomat
According to his parents’ arrangement, 12-year-old Pushkin entered the best school in Russia at that time, Huangcun School. However, Pushkin was born a poet, and he didn’t like this school with too many rules in his bones. To escape the pain of school, he immersed himself in poetry. Six years in Huangcun made Pushkin very disgusted with the stereotypes of the officialdom and the hypocritical tyranny of the tsar. Nevertheless, after graduating from the school in 1817, he accepted the assignment of the school and became a tenth-class civil servant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Pushkin, who had just stepped into society, happened to catch up with the “dark age” of the tsarist dictatorship. As a member of the government, but because the thoughts of anti-serfdom and the pursuit of freedom had already taken root in his heart, Pushkin did not hesitate to stand in the camp of fighting for freedom and became a people’s poet. In short, Pushkin, who had no interest in official career, was very active in the literary world. He even secretly contacted the Decembrists, opened the “Literary Newspaper”, and wrote many political satires criticizing the ugly acts of the tsarist dictatorship.
Although Pushkin hated the officialdom, but because he could obtain more literary materials through his position, he had been dealing with the officialdom with an ambivalence. He wanted to create poems that angrily denounced the tsarist rule and tried his best to avoid the tsar’s threats and surveillance. Fight on the basis of self-preservation. In 1820, the Tsar finally couldn’t bear it anymore, and planned to exile him to Siberia on the grounds that he wrote “Ode to Freedom” and other poems that offended the authorities. Later, because many people interceded and said good things for him, the tsar sent him to the south under the pretext of job transfer. In the south, Pushkin lived for more than four years. These four years or so have been a period in which he has become more mature in thought and achieved fruitful results in creation.
On August 9, 1824, Pushkin ended his “exile in the south” and was sent back to the village of Mikhailovsk, his parents’ territory by the tsarist authorities, where he spent another two years. It was not until 1826 that the newly enthroned Tsar Nicholas I recalled him to Moscow in order to win over the hearts of the people.
In 1831, Pushkin moved to Petersburg after his marriage, still serving in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But the beautiful wife Gangcharova was favored by the Tsar. In order to be able to see her often, the Tsar appointed Pushkin as a court attendant in December 1833. Pushkin was 35 years old and was forced to be among a group of young attendants. He felt humiliated and said angrily: “I can be a subject, or even a slave, but I will never be a servant and jester, even if it is In God’s place.” In June 1834, Pushkin angrily petitioned for his resignation.
