Autumn Leaves

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The French title of Autumn Leaves, the collection of André Gide’s essays at hand, Feuillets d’automne is stamped with an allusion to Victor Hugo’s celebrated collection of poems, Les Feuilles d’automne in which the poet, still in his twenties, meditates on his future disappearance from the immense and radiant world, “monde immense et radieux!” Gide’s foliage gathers personal memories of family, friends, important moments and influences of his intellectual, moral and artistic development. Nature, Victor Hugo points out, rejuvenates itself, and so Gide’s pages revive time past.

The opening essay of the collection “Spring,” first published in 1941, one of the darkest years in French history, may be read metaphorically as a comment on the historical season rather than the actual season. “In my time (I mean at the time of my youth), it did not happen this way.” So reads the opening sentence. How “it happened” in the author’s youth, that is to say, the past, is the underlying subject matter of this collection.

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