Раймонд Радигет: Француз жазушысы мен ақынының өмірі мен шығармалары

French novelist and poet

Raymond Radiguet (18 June 1903 – 12 December 1923) was a French novelist and poet whose two novels were noted for their explicit themes, and unique style and tone.

Radiguet was born in Saint Maur, Val de Marne, close to Paris, the son of a caricaturist. In 1917, he moved to the city. Soon he would drop out of the Lycée Charlemagne, where he studied, in order to pursue his interests in journalism and literature.

In early 1923, Radiguet published his first and most famous novel, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh). The story of a young married woman who has an affair with a 16 year old boy while her husband is away fighting at the front provoked scandal in a country that had just been through World War I. His second novel, Le bal du Comte d'Orgel (The Ball of Count Orgel), also dealing with adultery, was only published posthumously in 1924, and also proved controversial. In addition to his two novels, Radiguet's works include a few poetry volumes and a play. Radiguet also had several well documented relationships with women. An anecdote told by Ernest Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé" – Mister Baby) with decadence for his tryst with a female model: "Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes." ("Baby is depraved. He likes women." [Note the use of the feminine adjective.]) Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career: being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil."

In 1945, Steadman and Blake write that admirers of his first novel "include the most discriminating of critics." Aldous Huxley is quoted as declaring that Radiguet had attained the literary control that others required a long career to reach. François Mauriac said that Le Diable au corps is "unretouched and seems shocking, but nothing so resembles cynicism as clairvoyance. No adolescent before Radiguet has delivered to us the secret of that age: we have all falsified it."

The artist David Cilnius has dedicated his lyric/poem Whip the poor will to the writer's premature death, quoting Radiguet's last words.