Proust Between Two Centuries

Was Marcel Proust the last of the great classics or the first of the revolutionaries? Proust was thirty in 1901 and he died in 1922, living longer in the nineteenth century than he did in the twentieth. His work, especially the monumental sixteen-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, draws its aesthetic affinities from the century of Baudelaire, Wagner, and Ruskin but at the same time escapes late nineteenth-century decadent aestheticism to reach toward an early twentieth-century modernist stance.