Sometimes memories and impressions of great literature are reduced to one image, particularly powerful, that cupped and symbolizes the variety of emotions spread over hundreds of pages.

Those who read Dostoevsky will forever remember the ax, in which Raskolnikov beat the lender with the elderly interest;

In Tolstoy, the railway on which Anna Karnina ended her life was engraved;

And those who have read Marcel Frost will have a hard time parting from the memory of the cookies the narrator relishes at the beginning of the novel "On Swan's Side," from "Following the Lost Time."

These are simple Madeleine cookies, shaped like a conch shape, which the number dips into her daughter.

Yet their touch on the palate creates a magic of recollection and evokes a chain of reflections on the essence of life.

Scientists will call it mechanisms of memory, others will settle for the ambiguous terminology "Frost effect", but no reader has not imagined the miracle cookies and does not think of them when a mention of the French writer appears before him.

So it was a hundred years ago, when his name resonated far and wide in the European literary space, and so it is today, when around the world marked this year 150 years since the birth of Marcel Frost.

A symbolic creator who traces the nature of memory becomes himself the object of the miraculous and involuntary mechanism.

The fame as the main protagonist of European literary modernism was acquired by Frost thanks to the monumental novel series "Following the Lost Time", which included 7 books ("Swan's Side" is the first) and "populated" close to 2,500 characters (four parts of the work were published in Hebrew in the 90 in a translation by Halit Yeshurun, who also translated the last part, "The Time Found", in 2012, published by the new library).

Frost wrote the work for 14 years, and did not get to see it published in its entirety in his lifetime.

The last three novels came out after the writer died of pneumonia in 1922, and the one who completed the editing work and corrections on them was his brother, Robert.

Glimar's zigzag

Whether we glorify the Madeleine cookie story or put it aside, Frost is a writer of feelings and senses, not a plot.

The life of the high Parisian society described in the books "In the Footsteps of Lost Time" readers see through the narrator's coat of emotions, and what happens to characters (infatuations, disappointments and conversations) secondary as opposed to the writer's mental psyches.

Quite a few literary scholars have linked Frost's over-sensitivity to his tangle of diseases, such as asthma, from which he suffered as a child and became isolated from the world in its wake, and to his neurotic dependence on the supportive and strengthening mind of the environment.

Still, he was much more than a frightened and tormented narrator.

It is enough to conjure up forgotten details from his life, such as his participation in a duel or his courageous stand against Alfred Dreyfus' false accusation of treason, for Frost - the man and the writer - to be portrayed in more practical and less anxious shades.

Frost himself advocated an anti-biographical approach to literature, arguing in one of the essays included in his collection of articles "Contre Sainte-Beuve" that the literary work is the author's special "I", which usually has little in common with The "I" known to his relatives and acquaintances in real life.

Do not look in the novels for my life, hinted at readers, but they did not stop looking.

Frost continues to excite the masses, especially in France, and the souls of many in the country were cut off on March 18 this year, when his book "Les Soixante-quinze feuillets" (Seventy-Five Pages) was first published.

This book was written by him even before his work on the book "Following the Lost Time", and is considered lost for more than 60 years.

According to Glimar Publishing, the book's publishing house, it includes keys to understanding Frost's masterpiece.

Glimar's publisher celebration was, of course, ironic, as Gaston Glimar, the publisher's publisher - like other publishers in the French publishing house of the time - returned to Frost Rick's face when he asked to publish his first books.

Many editors have wondered why the master corrupts 30 pages to describe how he turns in bed from side to side before falling asleep, and Frost is forced to publish "Swan's Side" at his expense.

The pace of the period

The difficulty of understanding Frost is illustrated by the amusing story about his brief encounter with another literary star, James Joyce.

"The meeting was cunningly organized by fans of the two, who wanted to witness a meeting of the two geniuses of modernism," says veteran editor and translator Haim Pesach.

"Frost arrived neatly dressed, refined and well-groomed as usual, and then Joyce the Irishman came in, drunk and rude. 'Excuse me sir, but I did not read anything of what you wrote,' Frost began politely. 'I did not read what you wrote either,'" Joyce replied. That, in fact, ended the meeting. "

"Seventy-Five Pages" has not yet been translated into Hebrew, and Hebrew readers have not been given the opportunity to examine whether it justifies the aura of mystery and anticipation, but according to Pesach, Israelis have always shied away from his books.

"There is nothing farther from Israeliness than Frost's writing," Pesach explains.

"His softness and vulnerability are the antithesis of the rigidity inherent in the Israeli ethos. Frost the narrator is completely exposed, he presents the fears and anxieties, while here the writers used to shield themselves and defend themselves from exposure, from vulnerability, from ridicule and shame.

To this is added the dimension of values: Frost lives in a world full of aesthetics, which is completely foreign to the Jewish and Israeli experience. A Jew is accustomed to delving into ethics: The miracle of the cookie's taste is a miracle, and it is the embodiment of aesthetic sensuality. "

Frost's preoccupation with beauty is indeed unique, not to say compulsive, and is characterized by the search for harmony, which he is able to find in almost everything - smell, color, engineering and other everyday things, which pass us by at any moment without us noticing them.

Miraculously, the trivial beauty blends into the object of his inquiry: the French nobility at the end of its days.

"The description of an anonymous Count or a Falcon Marquis is a daunting subject for the Jews, since we have never had and will never have an aristocracy," Pesach claims.

"The culture of nobility - how they behave, what they eat, what they talk about - is far from the Jewish reality, which completed the transformation of Frost's work, himself a son of a Jewish mother, into a foreign plant in the eyes of the Israeli reader."

Literary scholars have found it difficult to classify "Following the Lost Time" into a particular genre.

Some defined it as a "symphony novel", a "river novel", a "temple novel" and a "cycle novel".

Most of them believe, however, that although one can read the few novels that make up the series, if one wants to understand who has been dubbed the "Great Nobelist of the 20th Century" one should read them all in sequence.

Pesach sees Frost as continuing faithful to the French literary tradition, a tradition involving an era that may have ended before his eyes.

“When the writer writes at length about things that seemingly lack drama, it belongs to the lost world, where people had a time, or a completely different sense of time than the one that exists today,” he says.

"Frost's pace of writing embodies the period when he had time to think and think. No contemporary writer can afford to write at Frost's pace, but anyone who has been fascinated by Frost - like me - is weaned."

Passover recalls a symbolic anecdote around Frost.

"I once rode a train in Norway and noticed that the passenger in front of me was reading Frost," he says.

"Norwegians, as you know, do not often open up to strangers, and yet, from the moment I started talking to him, the conversation about the book lasted three hours."