The Captive

20 hrs. 40 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Marcel Proust

Narrator Elizaveta Krupina

"The Captive" (French: La prisonnière) is a work by Marcel Proust published after the death of the author. It is the fifth novel of the cycle "In Search of Lost Time," first published in 1923.

Plot:
The novel continues the theme of love. The main hero deeply analyzes his feelings and strives not only to understand them, but also to overcome them. In his view, love doeses not bring happiness—the kind that nature and art can give.

From the novel’s history:
During Proust’s lifetime, two excerpts from "The Captive" were published in the journal "Nouvelle revue française" (November 1, 1922): "I watch her sleeping" and "My awakenings." In the journal version, the heroine of the book, Albertine, was called Giselle. The writer prepared two more excerpts for this journal—"A Morning in the Trocadéro" and "The Death of Bergotte"—but they saw print after his death, on January 1, 1923.

A separate edition of the book was prepared by the author’s brother, Dr. Robert Proust, and one of the employees of "Nouvelle revue française," Jacques Rivière. It was released in November 1923.
The Russian translation of the novel, done by Adrian Frankovsky in 1940, was published only in the 1990s.
In 1990 a translation by Nikolai Lyubimov was published.

Features of the novel’s text:
Marcel Proust did not have time to complete the work on "The Captive" for submission of the manuscript to the printing set. In addition to numerous preparatory sketches in his working notebooks, he prepared a fair-copy manuscript of the book, densely filled with numerous corrections, additions in the margins, and insertions on separate sheets (these insertions were sometimes quite extensive, and the writer folded them like an accordion and pasted them to the corresponding notebook page). He handed this manuscript in for typesetting again.

After receiving the beginning, Proust significantly revised it, which required a new complete re-typing. In this second typescript, as usual for Proust, so many corrections, insertions, and so on were made that a third typescript was produced. The author managed to revise it properly only in some places. Thus, the work on preparing the final text was not completed, which led to separate contradictions in the development of the plot.

1. Swann's Way (narrated by Oleg Fedorov) 2. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (narrated by Maya Violina) 2. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Part One (narrated by Mikhail Nordshir) 3. The Guermantes Way (narrated by Konstantin Korolkov) 3. The Guermantes Way (narrated by Ilya Prudovsky) 4. Sodom and Gomorrah (narrated by Vyacheslav Gerasimov) 5. The Captive 7. Time Regained (narrated by Evgeny Ternovsky)