Five Short Novels of Stendhal Author:Stendhal The Duchess of Palliano; Vittoria Accoramboni; The Abbess of Castro; Vanina Vanini; The Cenci — The five short novels in this volume appeared originally in 1839, toward the end of Stendhal's life, under the title Italian Chronicles (Chroniques Italiennes). Based on historical memoirs and chronicles which Stendhal had been gathering and studying ... more »for many years, they are stores of violence and crime, adultery, incest, parricide, and rape; two of them are accounts of world-famous murders. These melodramatic plots are seized upon by Stendhal as opportunities to study essential psychology; as he writes of these narratives: "I have selected in them that which appealed to me as revealing the human heart..." For their setting, Stendhal establishes his image of Italy as a theatre open to the savage energies of ardent passion and Machiavellian plotting--a setting which constitues for him a fundamental image of life released from the order of conventional society and traditional ethics.
Readers of The Charterhouse of Parma will find these short novels, both in their settings and in their interplay of passion and politics, a prelude to that final masterpiece of Stendhal's career.« less