साने गुरुजी, लेज मिसराबले आणि व्हिक्टर ह्यूगो...At Death Victor Hugo left less than one per cent of his Considerable Fortune to Charity

मी माझ्या लहानपणी नेटाने साने गुरुजी अनुवादित व्हिक्टर ह्यूगो यांची 'लेज मिसराबले' (Les Misérables), १८६२ कादंबरी, मिरजेतील खरे मंदिर वाचनालयातून घेऊन वाचली आहे. मूळ फ्रेंच कादंबरी १९००पानाची आहे! ह्या शतकात  ॲन हॅथवे असलेला २०१२सालचा सिनेमा पण पहिला.

सौजन्य : युनिव्हर्सल पिक्चर्स
त्या कादंबरीवरती 'The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables’ by David Bellos हे पुस्तक प्रसिद्ध झाल्यावर त्याची दोन-तीन परीक्षणे वाचली.

त्यातील टीम पार्क्स यांचे लंडन रिव्यू ऑफ बुक्स मधले परीक्षण फार आवडले:

"...The discovery of his adultery exposed Hugo to ridicule around the time he began Les Misérables, a book that opens, we remember, with a long account of a man who having ‘given the best years of his life … to worldly pursuits and love affairs’ becomes a priest, a prelate and ultimately a kind of saint. ‘People joked,’ Bellos remarks, ‘that [Hugo] must be doing penance for his unsaintly behaviour,’ but declares himself sceptical of this ‘moralising approach’ or of any idea that a troubled Hugo might have looked for ‘refuge in an uplifting tale’. Rather, ‘the main impact of the Biard affair’ was to convince Hugo to ‘write about everything except that’. The novel ‘is unusual … for not talking at any point about adultery or even sex’...

. Les Misérables is built on a gesture of simplification, even denial...."

 सेक्स नाही, त्यामुळे साने गुरुजींना पण एक comfort feeling, अनुवाद करताना आल असणार.

"For all Bellos’s insistence that Hugo did careful research and has his facts right, we are very far from realism. To turn to Madame Bovary, published six years before Hugo’s novel and equally interested in the hypocrisies of the middle classes, is to find oneself in a world of social and psychological subtlety that simply isn’t there in Les Misérables, isn’t attempted. Essentially, Hugo has split society into innocent and loveable victims (viewed in great detail), callously complacent middle classes (who remain, for all their proper Christian and surnames, an anonymous chorus) and magnificent (Hugo-like), strangely powerful saints."

ही साधी विभागणी, दुष्ट आणि सुष्ट लोकांमध्ये,  हे तर मराठी साहित्याचे ठळक वैशिष्ट्य आहे. गुरुजींना तर ते नक्कीच भावल असणार. 

"Coincidences abound. Hugo isn’t embarrassed by them; they allow for endless turns of plot with just a few central characters who never stop meeting, harming and helping one another. This is why Les Misérables is so successful not just as a film, but as a musical, in a way that Anna Karenina, Middlemarch and the many other fine novels of the time never could be. It is a story of extravagant gesture and irrepressible underlying optimism. Hugo believes in progress. Despite its title, the novel is never a downer."

खालील वाचून मात्र गुरुजींना धक्का नक्कीच बसला असता:

"Hugo’s strategy for publishing Les Misérables; this involved dumping his regular publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, insisting on an enormous 300,000 francs for an eight-year licence (around £3 million today, Bellos calculates), then orchestrating a huge book launch with more or less simultaneous publication in various countries, an equally huge publicity campaign (the novel’s content was kept a secret until the last moment) with queues at the bookshops and so on. And the man who borrowed heavily to effect this huge leap forward in book promotion, Albert Lacroix, had not even read the novel when he signed the deal, since he was in Brussels and the manuscript in Guernsey. Such was Hugo’s celebrity, literary and political, that Lacroix was convinced he could make the novel a must-read work across Europe before anyone even knew what was in it. And he was right.

For Bellos this feat, the complex logistics of copying, proofreading, printing, translating and distributing such a huge text over a short period of time, is part of the reason the book is ‘the novel of the century’..."

"Of course if, as Bellos believes, works like Les Misérables genuinely lead to social reform, one could hardly complain. Others might argue –Leopardi put forward the view in his Zibaldone years before Les Misérables was written – that compassion in literature simply allows the reader to congratulate himself on his humanity without producing any change in behaviour. It encourages people to believe, Muriel Spark commented more recently, ‘that their moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by the emotions they have been induced to feel’. In short, it is a substitute for charity."

"Hugo’s great book sold millions of copies, but did not radically alter social conditions in France, or halt Napoleon III’s drift towards despotism, or stop the thousands of executions after the collapse of the Commune in 1871. Audiences leave West End performances of Les Misérables and walk past the beggars on the pavements much as they always have. Back in Guernsey, though, in the 1860s, Hugo set a charming new trend in philanthropy by inviting the poor children of the island to regular garden parties. He loved children and wrote wonderful poems about his grandchildren, though he did not generally keep track of his illegitimate offspring. At death he left less than one per cent of his considerable fortune to charity. Miserable."

गुरुजी मात्र व्हिक्टर ह्यूगो यांच्या सारखे अजिबात नव्हते.  

मराठी विश्वकोश सांगतो: "...साक्षरतेचे वर्ग चालविणे, खादी विकणे, काँग्रेससाठी निधी जमविणे, देशाच्या स्वातंत्र्यचळवळीत भाग घेतलेल्यांच्या तसेच देशासाठी बलिदान केलेल्यांच्या कुटुंबियांना साहाय्य करणे इ. कार्यांत त्यांनी स्वतःला झोकून दिले.जातिव्यवस्था आणि अस्पृश्यता ह्यांचे निर्मूलन झाले पाहिजे, अशी त्यांची धारणा होती..."

जिवंत असताना सुद्धा स्वतःच्या पुस्तकांची रॉयल्टी त्यांनी किती घेतली वा घेतली का नाही याची मला आज कल्पना नाही.

व्हिक्टर ह्यूगो, १८५३ सालचे आणि साने गुरुजी