Voyage in the East is a work of Gerard de Nerval, published in 1851.

General presentation

This work reflects a very personal vision of the East. It is in fact a very poetic construction where the symbolic system, the esotericism are, as usual at Nerval, omnipresent. The various parts which form the Voyage started to be published as from 1840 and were gathered for the publication of the unit more than one ten years later.

This literary course, if it starts with the Suisse and the Germany, is not delayed there. In its introduction (" Towards Orient"), Nerval described Vienna and adventures that it saw there, then the Greece. But they will be the Egypt (" Women of Caire"), the Lebanon (" Druzes and Maronites") and Constantinople (" Nights of Ramazan") who will constitute successively the main objects of its account.

The " Voyage" is certainly based on personal physical experiments of " Gérard" , i.e. on its displacement until Vienna in 1839 - 1840 and on its visit of Egypt, of Lebanon, of Rhodos, the Syria and the Turkey in 1843. It is also the occasion to benefit from a fashion (one thinks of Byron, with Chateaubriand, Lamartine) and to show its talent of prosator. He reflects especially a possibility that Nerval believed to seize: that to find the common origins of various civilizations by expressing the singularity of its destiny, its trajectory as well mystical as poetic.

Quotations

• " I am unaware of if you will take great interest with the peregrinations of a tourist left Paris in full November ". In " Towards Orient".
• " I saw it thus, I saw it: my day started like a song of Homère! It was really the Dawn with the fingers of pink which opened the doors of the East to me! " In " Towards Orient".
• " the black sun of the melancholy, which pours obscure rays on the face of the angel dreamer Albert Dürer, rises also sometimes to the luminous plains of the Nile, as on the edges of the Rhine, in a cold landscape of Germany. I will even acknowledge as in the absence of fog, dust is a sad veil with the one day clearnesses of Orient." In " Women of Caire" , " Esclaves".

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