Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire is the title figure in the essay titled “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Baudelaire was a 19th century French poet and translator. Baudelaire is a figure recurring throughout the writings of Benjamin as he focused on the poet’s “close connection…between the figure of shock and contact with the metropolitan masses” and “the crowd, of whose existence Baudelaire is always aware.”
Marcel Proust
Another writer who figures prominent in the essay on Baudelaire is Marcel Proust, but he also gets his own starring role in another essay, “The Image of Proust.” Proust is the author of the multi-volume narrative collective known as Remembrance of Things Past. In the title of his essay, Benjamin is referencing the commonly held belief that the image of the author is inseparable from the narrator of his long semi-autobiographical work. From this starting point, Proust becomes a symbolic personification of the blurring borderline between art and life, reality and illusion.
Franz Kafka
Although internationally renowned, known by even American high schoolers thanks to the story about the bug and the inspiration for an adjective describing sensations of being trapped in a nightmarish twist on reality bearing his name, at the time that Benjamin wrote not just one, but two essays included in this collection, Kafka was still obscure enough to allow for critics like Benjamin to mold and shape his future legacy. Benjamin find the Kafka-esque world not so much an urban nightmare as dark parables without an immediately apparent moral truth.
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov
The most interesting thing about this Russian writer is how he has come to incarnate the very proposition that the essay “The Storyteller” is forwarding. Benjamin’s conceptualization of the divergence between storyteller and writer prompts him to assert that the storyteller has “already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant.” Leskov is then immediately introduced as a master storyteller whose talent comes into sharper focus when viewed from the distance of time. The irony being that as time has moved forward, Leskov became, by far, the least well-known writer serving as the central character of an essay in this book.
