Raimon Casellas
1855–1910
Biography
Raimon Casellas i Dou (1855–1910) was a Catalan journalist, art critic, writer of fiction and collector. He was born in Barcelona and died in Sant Joan de les Abadesses, a town in the Ripollès, a mountainous district north of the city. He was part of the modernisme movement, the flowering of art and writing in Catalonia around the turn of the twentieth century.
As a critic he wrote about aesthetics and the visual arts for periodicals including L'Avenç, La Vanguardia, L'Esquella de la Torratxa and Cu-Cut!. In 1899 he became editor-in-chief of the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya, and his articles are said to have shaped the outlook of the Catalan artists of his day. He was also a collector: his holdings of more than 4,000 drawings and nearly 400 engravings, the work of some 250 artists, are now kept at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.
His novel Els sots feréstechs, published in 1901, is his best-known work of fiction. It tells of a bishop from the city who is exiled to a rural parish for heresy, and of the disturbance his arrival causes among the people of Sant Pau de Montmany. The book is often counted as the first modernista novel and as a forerunner of rural naturalism. It is worth reading for that position, and one reading treats the story as a comment on the limits of intellectual modernism in changing society.
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Books
Els sots feréstechs
by Raimón Casellas
Raimon Casellas tells of a remote mountain parish through twenty short chapters, among them a locked church, a new rector, a kingdom of the dead and a nightmare. A dark, folkloric novel of a village where faith, fear and old family curses mix.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.