Reading Order
Stello Reading Order
Stello (1832) by Alfred de Vigny is the companion prose work to Chatterton and Servitude et grandeur militaires — the first of a planned trilogy of works about 'les souffrances des âmes extraordinaires' (the sufferings of extraordinary souls) that would examine the fate of the poet, the soldier, and the philosopher in modern society. Stello is structured as a dialogue between the narrator (called 'le docteur Noir,' the Black Doctor) and Stello, a young poet who asks whether poets should align themselves with any of the political powers of their time (the monarchy, the republic, or Bonapartism). The Black Doctor's answer — told through three historical tales of poets destroyed by each of the three political systems — is a radical aesthetic pessimism: the poet's condition is incompatible with every political system because all political systems need useful citizens and the poet is defined by his uselessness. The three historical tales are about Thomas Chatterton (the same subject as Vigny's later play), Nicholas Gilbert (a minor French poet who died in a charitable hospital during the Revolution), and André Chénier (the greatest French poet of the Revolutionary period, guillotined in 1794). Stello is the book in which Vigny states his political aesthetic most directly: the poet must be completely independent of all political power, because alignment with power always destroys authentic creation.
Where to start
Stello (1832) — the book is moderate length (about 250 pages) and the most philosophically direct of Vigny's prose works. Read after Cinq-Mars (1826) to understand the development of Vigny's thought from historical fiction to philosophical dialogue, and before Chatterton (1835) to understand the ideas that the play dramatizes. The Garnier-Flammarion French edition is the best text; there is an old English translation and some modern reprints.
Complete Stello Book List
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Stello
Alfred de Vigny·1832·Published 1832. The first of a planned trilogy that Vigny called 'Les Consultations du docteur Noir' (The Black Doctor's Consultations); Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835) is the second; the third (examining the philosopher's fate) was never written. The subtitle of Stello is 'Les Diables bleus' (The Blue Devils) — a reference to English romantic melancholy or 'blue devils' as depression was called.
Stello — Frequently Asked Questions
Who was André Chénier?
André Chénier (1762–1794) was the greatest French poet of the Revolutionary period and one of the most gifted lyric poets of the eighteenth century — and one of the only French poets of his generation who fully absorbed the lessons of Greek lyric poetry into French verse. Chénier was the son of a French diplomat and a Greek mother, spent several years in London as secretary at the French embassy, and returned to Paris in 1790 to become a journalist and pamphleteer during the Revolution. He was initially sympathetic to the Revolution's principles but became increasingly alarmed by the Terror; his articles criticizing Robespierre led to his arrest in 1794. He was guillotined on the 25th of July 1794, two days before the Thermidorian reaction that ended the Terror — the death most often cited as a symbol of the Revolution's self-destruction. His poetry was largely unknown during his lifetime; the collection (Les Bucoliques, Élégies, Iambes) was published posthumously in 1819 and immediately recognized as the work of a major poet. Vigny uses Chénier in Stello as the clearest example of the poet destroyed by political power: Chénier's journalism brought him to the guillotine, and Vigny's argument is that if Chénier had maintained the poet's complete independence from political engagement, he would have survived to give French literature its greatest lyric poetry.
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