영어로 읽는 고전 _ 가브리엘레 단눈치오의 바위의 처녀들
가브리엘레 단눈치오의 “바위의 처녀들”은 1895년에 출간된 소설입니다. 단눈치오가 니체의 철학을 접한 이후 쓰인 이 작품은 초인(Übermensch) 개념을 모델로 한 주인공을 중심으로 전개됩니다. 원래 미완성 삼부작의 첫 번째 작품으로 기획되었으며, 묘하게 규정되지 않은 채로 남아 있는 1인칭 화자를 통해 부성과 우월성이라는 주제를 탐구합니다. 이 작품은 니체적 이상과 단눈치오 특유의 문학적 문체를 융합한 그의 철학적 선언문으로, 그의 소설 중 가장 정치적으로 강렬한 색채를 띤 작품으로 평가받습니다.
Classics Read in English _ The Virgins of the Rocks by Gabriele D'Annunzio
The Virgins of the Rocks, published in 1895, marks a decisive turning point in D'Annunzio's literary evolution — the moment when his aestheticism fused with philosophy to produce something altogether more ambitious and more dangerous. Written in the wake of his encounter with Nietzsche, the novel is D'Annunzio's most explicit attempt to translate ideas into fiction, constructing a protagonist cast in the mold of the Übermensch — a man of exceptional will, refinement, and self-belief who stands apart from and above the mediocrity of the world around him.
The novel was originally conceived as the first installment of an unfinished trilogy, and that sense of grand, incomplete ambition runs through every page. Its first-person narrator is a curiously elusive figure — defined less by concrete biography than by intellectual and spiritual posture — and that elusiveness is deliberate. D'Annunzio is less interested in telling a conventional story than in articulating a vision: of paternity, of superiority, of a new kind of man capable of reshaping the world according to his own sovereign will.
The result is D'Annunzio's most politically charged work of fiction — a novel that reads in equal parts as literary achievement and ideological manifesto. Beautiful, unsettling, and impossible to dismiss, The Virgins of the Rocks stands as the clearest window into the philosophical obsessions that would define both his writing and, ultimately, his turbulent public life.
Among the contents
After the inevitable tumult of early youth had been controlled, the vehemence of conflicting desires defeated, and a barrier raised against the confused and multifold overflow of sensations, I had sought during the momentary silence that ensued on my consciousness to find out whether life might not become something different from the usual exercise of the faculties of adaptation to changing circumstances; that is to say, whether my will might not be able, by means of selection and exclusion, to build up some new and artistic work out of the elements which life had already stored up within me.
I felt assured, after some self-examination, that my consciousness had reached that arduous point when it becomes possible to appreciate this too simple axiom: The world represents the sensibility and the thought of a few superior men who created it, and in course of time have enlarged and adorned it, and who in the future will continue to enlarge and adorn it more and more. The world, as it appears to us to-day, is a magnificent gift from the few to the many, from free men to slaves, from those who think and feel to those who work. And then I recognised my own highest ambition in the desire to bring some ornament, to add some new value to this human world which is being eternally embellished with beauty and sorrow.
