Novelist
In 1736/37 he published, anonymously, a novel describing a utopian society established by shipwrecked religious dissidents (the Inqviraner) near an unnamed North-African mountain range, in which complete religious freedom existed. The novel drew from his own experiences of his time in Constantinople and on French and British novels, like Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
At the urging of Jesuits, presumably for his liberal opinions on religion, he was imprisoned and killed (by strangulation) in Nieswiez in Poland-Lithuania (now Belarus) in 1742.
Read more about this topic: Johann Bachstrom
Famous quotes containing the word novelist:
“The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)