Swann's Way

The novel “Swann in Love,” opening the cycle “In Search of Lost Time,” made—after its publication in 1913—quite an ambiguous impression on French critics: Proust’s stylistic innovation, boldly playing with time and events and weaving them into a fairly complex chronologically unified whole, was accepted by far from everyone. However, time has proved both the critics’ limitations and the genius of the writer: his exquisite, piercing, and sad work about love, jealousy, growing up, and misunderstanding—the eternal loneliness of the man who feels society so acutely—and the unsuccessful and desperate search for ever-elusive beauty still fascinates readers.