Today, when you can see less and less in transport or on a park bench a person reading a book, when instead of the phrase “good literature” they’ll rather say “printed matter” and don’t have to think about fiction, it’s hard to find an adequate conversationalist who wants to discuss the best novels about love. They will be discussed in this article.
Love stories are the oldest in human culture. This feeling is sometimes given to a person for happiness, but sometimes for flour, it can give paradise, but it can also lead in all circles of hell. Stories about surprisingly strong and pure love were admired even at the dawn of the birth of literature. The ancient Greeks knew its strength, so even their powerful gods could not resist it. The love of the wise Solomon for the beautiful Sulamifi was embodied in a lyrical monument - “Song of Songs”, placed in the holy book, the Bible.
Medieval European readers would probably have introduced the chivalrous adventure genre into the best love novels. For example, the story of Tristan and Isolde was read in the twelfth century. And in Russia of the sixteenth century - the work of Yermolai-Erasmus "The Tale of Peter and Fevronia of Murom."
The famous work "Three Comrades" by Erich Maria Remarque, the most popular German writer, is included in the best love novels of the twentieth century. It came out in 1936 and talks about the friendship of three soldiers who returned from the trenches of the First World War to devastated Germany. The strong male fraternity of old school, and later front-line friends Robert Lokamp, ​​Otto Kester and Gottfried Lenz helped them survive the war and amid the post-war chaos, general despair caused by inflation and devastation.
It so happened that Robert, on the day of his thirtieth birthday, suddenly fell in love with a wonderful girl, Patricia Holman. But happiness was marred by the fact that Pat was sick. Love brought to Robert Lokamp's life a different meaning and content - you had to earn a lot of money to cure your beloved. To do this, Rob had to work tirelessly, showing ingenuity and fighting off other unemployed competitors, using all the qualities that nature endowed the lover and his siblings, who gladly accepted Pat into their close friendly circle.
Trying to keep her outgoing forces, with his strong, but trembling hands of tenderness and fear, he grasped Pat, as life itself, but for him it meant much more. But even a huge, strong feeling did not help the heroine survive. Robert is losing Patricia, his brave and beloved comrade.
What features of the novel give him the right to be included in the literary category "Best Love Stories"? First, the writer does not address the reader’s mind, but his feelings, which resonates with the hearts of receptive readers. Secondly, the characters are portrayed so masterfully that they evoke deep sympathy among the reader. And thirdly, the author focuses on such value concepts as life and death, love and friendship, fidelity and betrayal, meanness and nobility.
Great writers of different nations at all times created the best love novels so that people do not forget how to compassion, empathize and retain forever the ability to experience the feeling that makes a person a person. Among their authors there are women. Gone With the Wind, a masterpiece by Margaret Mitchell, part of women's love stories, American literature is rightly proud.