"People's fates are simplified by their names." -- Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti (; 25 July 1905—14 August 1994) was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".
"A "modern" man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.""Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.""All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.""As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.""Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?""He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.""His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.""It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.""Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.""Most religions do not make men better, only warier.""One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.""One should use praise to recognize what one is not.""People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.""Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.""Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.""Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true.""Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence.""Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf.""The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.""The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.""The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.""The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.""The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.""The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.""There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.""There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.""There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.""When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.""Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.""Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.""Words are not too old, only people are too old if they use the same words too frequently."
Born to Jacques Canetti and Mathilde née Arditti in Ruse, a city on the Danube in Bulgaria, Elias Canetti was the eldest of three sons in a wealthy Jewish merchant family. His ancestors were Sephardi Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. His paternal ancestors had settled in Ruse from Ottoman Adrianople. The original family name was Cañete, named after a village in Spain. In Ruse, Elias' father and grandfather were successful merchants who operated out of a commercial building, which they had built in 1898. Canetti's mother descended from one of the oldest Sephardi families in Bulgaria, Arditti, who were among the founders of the Ruse Jewish colony in the late 18th century. The Ardittis can be traced back to the 14th century, when they were court physicians and astronomers to the Aragonese royal court of Alfonso IV and Pedro IV. Before settling in Ruse, they had lived in Livorno in the 17th century.
Canetti spent his childhood years, from 1905 to 1911, in Ruse until the family moved to England. In 1912 his father died suddenly, and his mother moved with their children to Vienna in the same year. They lived in Vienna from the time Canetti was aged seven onwards. His mother insisted that he speak German, and taught it to him. By this time Canetti already spoke Ladino (his mother tongue), Bulgarian, English and some French (he studied the latter two in the one year in England). Subsequently the family moved first (from 1916 to 1921) to Zürich and then (until 1924) to Frankfurt, where Canetti graduated from high school.
Canetti went back to Vienna in 1924 in order to study chemistry. However, his primary interests during his years in Vienna became philosophy and literature. Introduced into the literary circles of first-republic-Vienna, he started writing. Politically leaning towards the left, he participated in the July Revolt of 1927. He gained a degree in chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1929, but never worked as a chemist. In 1934 he married Veza Taubner-Calderon (1897—1963) with whom he had a dynamic relationship. She acted as his muse and devoted literary assistant. Canetti however remained open to relationships with other women. In 1938, after the Anschluss of Austria to greater Germany, Canetti moved to London where he became closely involved with the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, who was to remain a close companion for many years to come. His name has also been linked with that of the author Iris Murdoch (see John Bayley's Iris, A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, where there are several references to an author, referred to as "the Dichter", who was a Nobel Laureate and whose works included Die Blendung [English title Auto-da-Fé]). Canetti's wife died in 1963. His second marriage was to Hera Buschor (1933—1988), with whom he had a daughter, Johanna (born 1972).
Despite being a German writer, Canetti settled and stayed in England until the 1970s, receiving British citizenship in 1952. For his last 20 years, Canetti mostly lived in Zürich.
In 1981, Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power". He is known chiefly for his celebrated tetralogy of autobiographical memoirs of his childhood and of pre-Anschluss Vienna (Die Gerettete Zunge; Die Fackel im Ohr; Das Augenspiel; and Das Geheimherz der Uhr: Aufzeichnungen), for his modernist novel Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung), and for Crowds and Power, a study of crowd behaviour as it manifests itself in human activities ranging from mob violence to religious congregations.
Lesley Brill, " Terrorism, Crowds and Power, and the Dogs of War," Anthropological Quarterly 76(1), Winter 2003: 87-94.
William Collins Donahue, The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
William Collins Donahue and Julian Preece (eds), The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
Taylor, John: "Intriguing Specimens of Humanity (Veza Canetti)," Into the Heart of European Poetry, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2008, pp. 230—231.
La folie Canetti, Roger Gentis, published by Maurice Nadeau (Paris, 1993).