Bohemia is beyond saving. The lesson being that a basically worthless and mediocre piece of literature can achieve more ill than a good book can ever achieve good. It is a paradox; and there is little power in the art of skepticism to disprove it, how a thoroughly anodine and banal writer can influence the fate of an entire nation. After all Bohemia was a country we thought we all knew…
With the entrance of Henri Murger, and his triumph, La Vie de Boheme in 1848, the name of this ancient country entered on its decadence. It was Murger who put across to the curious middle-classes the idea of “Bohemianism,” cafe-gypsies of both bed and board, sharing everything and anybody. And with everybody.
—“Bohemia is the first stage in artistic life; it is the preface to the Academy, the hospital, or the Morgue.”
With these words French author Henri Murger characterised the phenomenon in his 1851 novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème: as a transitional stage which provokes and fascinates by a way of living that contravenes the norm. The image of the artist as an outsider who lived in romantic poverty in the bourgeois age came to be viewed through rose-tinted glasses and elevated to undying popularity by Puccini’s opera based on Murger’s original text. That Bohemia became synonymous with the 19th century artist who was at the mercy of an anonymous market and compelled to hawk his skills in order to survive.—Read More:http://www.museenkoeln.de/museum-ludwig/default.asp?s=3230
In time, the word “Bohemian” became an excuse for almost any sort of moral obliquity or lack of manners. Anyone who never paid a debt, or lounged about the world never doing anything and getting in the way of those who did, was called a Bohemian. And alas, attracted by the popularity of the book, and seeing in it the possibility of a popular opera, Puccini later lent his genius to this debasing process.
La Boheme must have sullied Bohemia even more than Carmen tainted the idea of Spain. In time, therefore, the name extended from the improvident to include the rich; any rich young man who wasted his fortune and sat up till morning in expensive nightclubs, and girl of the “bright young thing” period, who possessed her own flat in a mews and learned to live on cocktails and do drugs, was a “Bohemian.” The name became a reproach equally to the genuine artist, to the Bohemian by nationality, and to the gypsy. ….
Courbet. The Painter’s Studio. —The novel appeared at a time when Romanticism was on the decline and Realism in the ascendant, and it combined elements of both movements: the sentiment and pathos of the one and the reportorial accuracy of the other. Adherents of Romanticism found it sweet enough to their liking, while exponents of Realism found it tart and true enough to theirs.
Henry Murger was the first chronicler to establish in the conventional mind that romantic picture of Bohemian life which has persisted to this day. —Read More:http://www.vintagevenus.com.au/bohemia/eblinks/spirboho/paris1830/murger/index.html
When Bohemia recovered its independence after the was of 1914-18, the provisional government very naturally shied at the implication of the word “Bohemia.” Murger, though dead since 1861, had rendered it impossible as the name of a country. And so the citizens of the Bohemian state were now called “Czecho-Slovaks.” And they became the most prosperous small state in Europe; that is until Germany’s Nazis were able to deflect attention of aid by positing that this now hyphenated nation had not existed until twenty years earlier, in effect scrubbing its deep past off the map. Literally.
Thus, the work of Murger was completed, a nation passed into servitude because a bad author had written a cheap romance….
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Henri Murger can be considered sort of an Amerigo Vespucci of the art world in that he was the first to chart Bohemia’s murky waters that were unkown by the outside bourgeois world. Murger’s Boheme was the Latin Quarter in Paris, so called because of the language spoken there by the students of the Sorbon, which had its origin in the 13th century. Many artists and writers began frequenting the Sorbon and the Latin Quarter soon became the territory of the creative souls and scholars from Paris and beyond. The French called the Gypsy Roma people bohemiens because they were believed to have all come from the Czechoslovakian province of Bohemia. The Parisians, and French in general, wrongly assumed that the strange, foreign looking artists and writers who had unkempt hair, strange manners of almost medieval style dress, unconventional behavior, and a general refusal to conform, were gypsies, so this is why they started calling them Bohemians….
…Henri found employment as a secretary to a traditional Slav named Count Tolstoy, who paid him 10 francs more a month and gave him access to
huge library. The Count was a diplomatic agent for the Russian Ministry of Instruction.It was during this time that Henri had an affair with a married woman named Marie Vimal. Marie was very much the inspiration for Mimi in Vie de Boheme and was the heroine of all of his future books. Marie’s husband Fontblanc stayed out mysteriously all night at unknown locations. Henri and Marie would read Shakespeare all evening and he would sneak out of Marie’s bed early every morning just before the husband returned home. Fontblanc, it turned out, was part of a gang of petty thieves (which explains the night incursions) and was arrested by the police. Marie, who kept her husband’s books, was incriminated by police. Henri hid her in his friend’s art studio. This friend, an artist named Guilbert, promised Murger that he would take very good care of Marie’s needs, which he did all too well. Marie began sleeping with Guilbert and the two ran off together (Les Amours d’Olivier, written 15 years after this incident, recounts this story). …Read More:http://youngbohemia.blogspot.ca/2012/02/henri-murger.html
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