Оңтүстік Африка заңгері, табиғатты зерттеуші және ақын Эжен Мари: Өмір және шығармашылығы

South African lawyer, naturalist, poet and writer

Eugène Nielen Marais ('/juː//dʒ//iː//n// //m//ɑː/'/r//eɪ/; 9 January 1871 – 29 March 1936) was a South African lawyer, naturalist, and important writer and poète maudit in the Second Language Movement of Afrikaans literature. Since his death by his own hand, Marais has been widely hailed as a literary and scientific genius and a cultural hero of the Afrikaner people.

Marais was born in Pretoria, the thirteenth and last child of Jan Christiaan Nielen Marais and Catharina Helena Cornelia van Niekerk. He attended school in Pretoria, Boshof and Paarl, and much of his early education was in English, as were his earliest poems. He matriculated at the age of sixteen. His family fluently spoke Afrikaans, Dutch, and English. In Marais's early teens, he started writing English poetry and greedily devoured the verse of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Robert Burns, the Lake poets, and the English Romantics. After leaving school, he worked in Pretoria as a legal clerk and then as a journalist before becoming owner (1891, at the age of twenty) of a newspaper called Land en Volk (Country and (the Afrikaner) People). He involved himself deeply in local politics. In his role as a journalist and newspaper editor, Marais became a vocal critic of Paul Kruger, the widely revered President of the Republic of Transvaal, which made Marais a very unpopular figure. He began taking opiates at an early age and graduated to morphine (then considered to be non habit forming and safe) very soon thereafter. He became addicted, and his drug addiction ruled his affairs and actions to a greater or lesser extent throughout his life. When asked why he took drugs, he variously pleaded ill health, insomnia and, later, the death of his young wife as a result of the birth of his only child. Much later, he blamed accidental addiction while ill with malaria in Mozambique. Some claim his use of drugs was experimental and influenced by the philosophy of de Quincey. Marais married Aletta "Lettie" Beyers (1871–1895), about whom he wrote in a letter to a friend: "She is just about the most perfect female in body and mind that God ever planted in South Africa." Shortly after the birth of a son, and eleven months into the marriage, she died from puerperal fever, purportedly caused by the inebriated doctor who attended the birth. The child, Eugène Charles Gerard Marais (1895–1977) was Marais's only child. The death devastated Marais and caused him to sink further into morphine addiction. In 1897 – still in his mid twenties – Marais went to London to read medicine. However, under pressure from his friends, he entered the Inner Temple to study law. in what has been called "a classic example of academic plagiarism" by University of London's professor of biology, David Bignell. Marais accused Maeterlinck of having used his concept of the "organic unity" of the termitary in his book. Marais had published his ideas on the termitary in the South African Afrikaans language press, both in Die Burger in January 1923 and in Huisgenoot, which featured a series of articles on termites under the title "Die Siel van die Mier" (The Soul of the (White) Ant) from 1925 to 1926. Maeterlinck's book, with almost identical content, It was common at the time for worthy articles published in Afrikaans to be reproduced in Flemish and Dutch magazines and journals. Marais sent a letter to Dr. Winifred de Kock in London about Maeterlinck, in which he wrote that <blockquote>The famous author had paid me the left handed compliment of cribbing the most important part of my work He clearly desired his readers to infer that he had arrived at certain of my theories (the result of ten years of hard labour in the veld) by his own unaided reason, although he admits that he never saw a termite in his life. You must understand that it was not merely plagiarism of the spirit of a thing, so to speak. He has copied page after page verbally. Several years before his death, the Rev. A. J. Louw, an Afrikaner Calvinist dominee known as "The Pope of the Highveld", confronted Marais during a haus bezoek, or ministerial visitation, for believing in Darwinian evolution. Marais replied, "Don't pick on me, Dominee. It's a matter between you and the Almighty. I really had nothing to do with the creation of the Universe." One of Marais's last poems, Diep Rivier ("Deep River"), is an ode to the drug morphine and was written ten years before its author's death by his own hand. Ardrey said in his introduction to The Soul of the Ape, published in 1969, that 'As a scientist he was unique, supreme in his time, yet a worker in a science unborn.' He also refers to Marais's work at length in his book African Genesis. Eugéne Marais and his wife Aletta lie buried in the Heroes' Acre, Pretoria.

Marais's work as a naturalist, although by no means trivial (he was one of the first scientists to practise ethology and was repeatedly acknowledged as such by Robert Ardrey and others), gained less public attention and appreciation than his literary work. He discovered the Waterberg Cycad, which was named after him (Encephalartos eugene maraisii). He was the first person to study the behaviour of wild primates, and his observations continue to be cited in contemporary evolutionary biology. He is among the greatest of the Afrikaner poets and remains one of the most popular, although his output was not large. Opperman described him as the first professional poet in Afrikaans; Marais believed that craft was as important as inspiration for poetry. Along with J. H. H. de Waal and G. S. Preller, he was a leading light in the Second Afrikaans Language Movement in the period immediately after the Second Boer War, which ended in 1902. Some of his finest poems deal with the wonders of life and nature, but he also wrote about his own inexorable death. Marais was isolated due to some of his beliefs. He was a self confessed pantheist and claimed that the only time he entered a church was for weddings. An assessment of Marais's status as an Afrikaner hero was published by historian Sandra Swart. Marais was also fascinated by the folklore, cultures, and traditions of the Bantu peoples of the rural Transvaal; this is often seen in poems such as "Die Dans van die Reën" (The Dance of the Rain). Since his death by his own hand, Eugène Marais has been cited as the prototype of the many dissident Afrikaans speaking poets, writers, and intellectuals in South Africa under apartheid (1948–1994). At the beginning of his 1982 book, The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans, Jack Cope explained that the famous confrontation between Eugène Marais and Rev. A. J. Louw is symptomatic of a much wider dispute in Afrikaner culture. Many highly important figures in Afrikaans literature during the Apartheid felt similarly, according to André Brink, "torn between attachment to their language, situation, and people on the one hand and their desire to bring about innovations, which are rejected or misunderstood. The writers find themselves too far ahead of their people and may become isolated, aliens in their own land – the fate of Eugène Marais."

This 2012 movie directed by Katinka Heyns explores Marais's convalescence from malaria on a farm in the Waterberg.

The progenitors of the Marais name in the region were Charles and Claude Marais, from the Paris region of France. The Marais name has retained its original French spelling and pronunciation in South Africa.