Lawrence Durrell (Darrell Lawrence)

(1912-1990)
By Alexandria Quartet, the cycle of four interrelated novels, his remarkable compositional complexity and poetry.
Born February 27, 1912 in Jalandhar (pc. Punjab, India). When he was eleven years old, the family moved to England. In 1935, Darrell fled from 'English life, endless, enduring, like a toothache' on the island of Corfu, where he wrote his first major work - the novel The Black Book (The Black Book, 1938). From 1940 to 1957, he wandered the entire Mediterranean region - lived on Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Yugoslavia, was occupied various positions in public institutions such as the British Council and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Great Britain. In 1957, settled in the south of France. Darrell died in Somere (France), November 7, 1990.

For Darrell, any locality where he lived, became a place of work, or the reason for his writing. Among his travel essays on the islands of the Aegean Sea - Prospero's cell (Prospero's Cell, 1945), Reflections on Penorozhdennoy (Reflections on a Marine Venus, 1953) and Bitter Lemons (Bitter Lemons, 1957). Impressions of Sicily, reflected in his travel essays Genius terrain (Spirit of Place, 1969) and Sicilian Carousel (Sicilian Carousel, 1977)

. In Alexandria Quartet (The Alexandria Quartet, . 1957-1960), . Darrell owned and such novels, . as the Dark Labyrinth (The Dark Labyrinth, . 1947), . Tunc (1968) and its sequel Nunquam (1970; names go back to the phrase Petronius 'Aut tunc aut nunquam' - 'Now or never'), . pentalogiya Lord (Monsieur, . 1975), . Livia (Livia, . 1979), . Constance, . or single class (Constance: or Solitary Practices, . 1982), . Sebastian (Sebastian, . 1983) and Quinx (1985),
. His poetry is collected in the book Selected Poems (Collected Poems, 1960).

Higher achievement Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, tetralogy, conceived as 'a study of love in the modern world'; on the author's intention, it should be seen as an integral work. Its composition is based on space-time theory of relativity Einstein. In the first three books - Justine (Justine, 1957), Balthazar (Balthazar, 1958), Mauntoliv (Mountolive, 1958) - where the events occur at approximately the same amount of time, we investigate the possibility of three-dimensionality of time. In Klia (Clea, 1960) is considered a temporary element of space-time continuum.