A trove of French author Marcel Proust’s correspondence is to be digitised and put online for free, with the first batch of letters timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, organisers of the U.S.-French initiative say.
The nearly 6,000 letters to and from the author of In Search of Lost Time , one of the great masterpieces of western literature, are drawn mainly from the work of Philip Kolb, a University of Illinois professor.
Kolb, who died in 1992, assembled and published all of Proust’s surviving correspondence — about 5,300 letters — in 21 volumes between 1970 and 1993. Several hundred more letters have since been identified.
Kolb estimated the size of Proust’s correspondence at some 20,000 documents, but most were lost or destroyed over the years.
First step
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is leading the project to digitise the collection, with collaboration from the University of Grenoble Alps, the Institute of Texts and Modern Manuscripts and the National Library in France. The project will first focus on 200 letters that Proust wrote related to the First World War, with the goal of having them online by November 11, 2018, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War.
“That will allow us to have a first display, with a coherent set,” said Francois Proulx, a literature professor at the University of Illinois.
“We were not convinced that the letters from his youth were especially the most interesting to start out with,” said Caroline Szylowicz, the librarian in charge of the University of Illinois' Proust collection.
Proust, who was frail and of poor health, did not fight in the war. However, his younger brother Robert did, and the two exchanged letters during the conflict.
