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Romain Rolland (1866-1944) | |
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French novelist, dramatist, essayist, mystic, pacifist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915. Romain Rolland saw that art must be a part of the struggle to bring enlightenment to people. In his work he attacked all forms of nazism and fascism, and struggled for social and political justice. Despite never joining any party, Rolland acquired a reputation as an ardent Communist. "The little German Jew, clod as he was, had made himself the chronicler and arbiter of Parisian fashion and smartness. He wrote insipid society paragraphs and articles in a delicately involved manner. He was the champion of French style, French smartness, French gallantry, French wit—Regency, red heels, Lauzun. People laughed at him: but that did not prevent his success. Those who say that in Paris ridicule kills do not know Paris: so far from dying of it, there are people who live on it: in Paris ridicule leads to everything, even to fame and fortune. Sylvain Kohn was far beyond any need to reckon the good-will that every day accumulated to him through his Frankfortian affectations." (The Market-place, in Jean-Christophe in Paris: The Market-place, Antoinette, The House by Romain Rolland, translated by New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 15; original title: La Foire sur la place, 1908) Romain Rolland was born in Clamecy, in Nièvre, into a
middle-class family. On his father's side, Rolland had five
generations of notaries. Antoinette-Marie Courot Rolland, his mother,
came from a family of iron-masters and notaries. "The Courots always took life very seriously," Rolland recalled. (Journey Within by Romain Rolland, translated from the French by Elsie Pell, New York: Philosophical Library, 1947, p. 39; original title: Le voyage intérieur, 1942) "They love it and know how to enjoy it, but they have never been able to forget its uncertainty. I have been told that Jansenism had cast the shadow of its wing over certain of my ancestors." Rolland's father Emile, a lawyer and patriot, was jovial by nature – "he never loved me any less because of my heresies; and even laughed at them, I believe – God forgive me! – and, deep in his heart, was proud of it." (Ibid., p. 37) In 1880, at Romain's mother's insistence, the family
moved to Paris in order to obtain a better schooling for him. Rolland
entered in 1886 the École Normale Supérieure. After passing his agrégation
examination in history, Rolland continued his studies at the
French School of Art and Archaeology in Rome, where he formed a lasting
friendship with Malwida von Meysenbug. She knew Wagner, Liszt,
Nietzsche, and Ibsen, and encouraged his first attempt to write.
Tolstoyan ideas fascinated Rolland, and later she said of him: "In this young Frenchman I discovered the
same idealism, the same lofty aspiration, the same profound grasp of
every great intellectual manifestation that I had already found in the
greatest men of other nationalities." (quoted in 'Preface,' Jean-Christople: Dawn, Morning, Youth, Revolt, translated by Gilbert Cannan, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910, p. iv) In 1892 Rolland married Clotilde Bréal, a French Jew. Clotilde, who shared his love of music, came from a family of prominent Parisian intelectuals and academics. They lived for some time in Rome, where Rolland researched the origins of opera before Jean-Baptiste Lully and Alessandro Scarlatti. Rolland received in 1895 his doctoral degree in art for his dissertation The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama – the first dissertation on music ever presented at the Sorbonne. In spite of the Bréal family's insistence, Rolland refused to take a public stand on the Dreyfus Affair. His marriage to Clotilde was dissolved in 1901. Rolland then lived closely attached to his parents, especially to his mother. His dilemma as an independent left-wing intellectual in the climate of hatred, Rolland examined in Les loups (1898), his first play on the French Revolution. However, decades later Rolland reproved himself for having neglected a just cause. Rolland became professor of art history at the École Normale
in Paris. In 1904 he continued his academic career as a professor of
the history of music at the Sorbonne. While still a teacher, Rolland's
first literary vocation was the theatre. In his mid-30s he wrote
successful dramas about the French Revolution. After finishing his magnum opus, Jean-Christophe
(1904-1912), Rolland
devoted himself entirely to literary pursuits. The ten-volume novel was
dedicated to
"the free souls of all nations who suffer, struggle, but shall
vanquish." Rolland
had already published a biography on Beethoven in 1903. Although he
drew from the life of the composer, the story incorporated elements
from the careers of Mozart and Wagner. Unexpectedly, in the heyday of
Mahler and Strauss, Rolland stated in an essay that "there is too much music in Germany.
This
is not a paradox. There is no worse misfortune for art than a
super-abundance of it. The music is drowning the musicians. Festival
succeeds festival: the day after the Strasburg festival there was to be
a Bach festival at Eisenach; and then, at the end of the week, a
Beethoven festival at Bonn. Such a plethora of concerts, theatres,
choral societies, and chamber-music societies, absorbs the whole life
of the musician. When has he time to be alone to listen to the music
that sings within him? This senseless flood of music invades the
sanctuaries of his soul, weakens its power, and destroys its sacred
solitude and the treasures of its thought." ('French and German Music,' in Musicians of To-day
by Romain Rolland, translated by Mary Blaiklock, with an introduction
by Claude Landi, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1919, p.
232) In the epic Jean-Christophe – "perhaps the one European book since Faust" ('Saga Symphonic of Romain Rolland' by Lucien Price, The Atlantic, January 1926) – Rolland portrayed his protagonist, Jean-Christophe Krafft, as a fighter for social justice, and a seeker throughout his life. La Révolte (1905) presents his
courageous, uncompromising soul. "He would rather die than live by
illusion. Was not Art also an illusion? No. It must not be. Truth!
Truth! Eyes wide open, let him draw in through every pore the
all-puissant breath of life, see things as they are, squarely face his
misfortunes,—and laugh." (Revolt, in Jean-Christople: Dawn, Morning, Youth, Revolt, p. 563) La Foire sur la place (1908, The Market-place) criticized the
literary and artistic scene in Paris. In Antoinette
(1908, Antoinette), a short novel, the central characters are
Antoinette Jeannin and his brother, Jean-Christophe's best friend
Olivier. After killing a policeman, Jean-Christophe flees
to Switzerland, and starts his career as a composer. He returns to
Paris as a celebrated artist, and dies there. In the end his life
rejoins the River of Life. While WWI was still going on, the French-born American academic Albert Léon Guérard said that the work "it is a plea for the reconciliation and harmony of the two leading "culture-nations" of continental Europe, France and Germany. Completed in 1912, it prophesied the present war, and looked beyond it. When the cataclysmic madness which now possesses our brothers east and west of the Vosges has subsided, all good Europeans will eagerly seek for instruments and materials of reconstruction". (Five Masters of French Novel by Albert Léon Guérard, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916, pp. 251-252) Jean-Christophe earned Rolland the Nobel Prize. In his later works he remained faithful to the Romantic idea of the artist as a lonely genius. With the antiwar article 'Au-dessus de la
mâlée' (1914, Above the Battle) published in Swiss
newspapers, Rolland established himself as one of the most prominent figures in the pacifist movement
during World War I. Due to his views he was called
traitor in France. As a reaction to "infatuation of public opinion" Rolland wrote the play Liluli (1919), a satire on
war. "You cannot, of course, keep off suffering by laughter," Rolland said in Colas Breugnon, "but a Frenchman will always meet pain with a smile, and sad or merry you will find he has his eyes wide open." (Colas Breugnon, translated by Katherine Miller, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1919, p. 177) From 1914 Rolland lived principally in Switzerland. Many other writers and artists also moved to Zurich, among them James Joyce, who wrote there much of Ulysses. After the war, Rolland's plays were more popular in Germany than in France. Their declamatory, didactic nature probably influenced Brecht's concept of epic theatre. To protect his intellectual freedom, Rolland did not join Henri Barbusse's (1873-1935) Clarté movement. Barbusse shared his antiwar views but Rolland dismissed Clarté as undemocratic and inefficient. (Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919-22 by Bertrand Russell, edited by Richard A. Rempel and Beryl Haslam, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 118) Rolland had lost his religious faith as a young man. Influenced by the thought of Spinoza, he adopted a pantheistic faith in
nature. Although Rolland welcomed the international Socialist movement, he never was a member of the Communist
Party and did not read Marx nor Engels. In 1923 Rolland founded the magazine Europe,
which opposed nationalism. Taking an interest in Indian philosophy, Rolland
wrote a biography of Mahatma Gandhi (1924). The spiritual leader
of India visited him in Switzerland in Villeneuve, on the shore of Lake
Leman, in 1931.
"He is the molder of new humanity," Rolland said. However, he did not
agree with Gandhi in his nationalism and distrust of science and
technology. While traveling in the Soviet
Union in 1935, Rolland met Maxim Gorky, whose Manichean views shocked him,
and Stalin; he was granted two interviews with the dictator. After
seeing Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Vsevolod Pudovkin's The Mother (1926), based on Gorky's novel, he was troubled for their "bloody and sinister vision." (Romain Rolland and the Politics of the Intellectual Engagement by David James Fisher, with a new introduction by the author, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004, p. 248) Like many intellectuals of the period, Rolland did not
publicly criticize the Soviet Union – he praised Russia as a
symbol of "world progress" – but in his private notes he rejected
Stalinism, and support non-violent
social change. As early as 1900 he had written a play, Danton,
in which the spirit of revolution is sacrificed to revolutionary
discipline – a view that was not popular during the Moscow purge
trials. Noteworthy, for a period Rolland
believed that there was a real conspiracy against the communist regime
and the alleged Trotskyites had committed villainous acts. (From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship by Paul Hollander, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 134) The Stalinist "cult of personality" manifested itself in Rolland's study Robespierre (1939). In Switzerland Rolland completed his second novel cycle, The Enchanted Soul (1922-33). This seven-volume novel centers on a female counterpart of Jean-Christophe, Annette Rivière, who becomes disenchanted with material possessions and struggles to achieve her spiritual freedom. Other central characters are Sylvie, Annette's half-sister, and Annette's son Marc. He is an intolerant young man, whose struggle is much overshadowed by her mother, an alter ego of the author concerning his political loyalties – Annette is active in the defence of the Soviet Union. Rolland took a clear stand against Fascism and Nazism. Following the burning of books by the Nazis, the German exile writers founded in 1934 a German Freedom Library under the presidency of Rolland. It soon housed 11,000 volumes. ('The Nazi Attack on "Un-German" Literature, 1933-1945' by Leonidas E. Hill, in The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation by edited by Jonathan Rose, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001, p. 33) In 1934 Rolland married his second wife, Marie Koudachev, the half-French widow of a Russian nobleman. They returned in 1938 to France. During the last years of his life, Rolland's home was
in Vézelay. There he worked on the biography of the poet and essayist
Charles
Péguy (1873-1914). The two-volume biography was published posthumously
in 1945. At the beginning of his career as a writer, Rolland
had contributed to Péguy's Cahiers de la Quinzaine; also Jean-Christophe was serialized in the journal. On December
30, 1944, Romain Rolland succumbed to tuberculosis, an illness that had afflicted
him since his childhood. He was buried privately in Brèves, Nièvre, next to the graves of his parents in Clamecy. Among Rolland's other works are several psychological biographies of artists and politicians (Michelangelo, Danton, Beethoven, Tolstoy etc.). Rather than to concentrate on single novels, Rolland wrote cycles of works. His cycles of plays include The Tragedies and Faith, Saint Louis (1897), The Triumph of Reason (1899), and Theater of Revolution, dramas concerning the French Revolution. For further reading: Romain Rolland: uma consciência livre by Jorge Reis (2022); Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality by Andrew Sobanet (2018); Romain Rolland, guerre et religion: rencontre avec la foi baha'ie by Nazy Alaie Ahdieh (2015); Le Théâtre de la Révolution de Romain Rolland: théâtre populaire et récit national by Marion Denizot (2013); 'Beyond the Conceits of the Avant-garde: Saint-Saëns, Romain Rolland, and the Musical Culture of the Nineteenth Century' by Leon Botstein, in Camille Saint-Saëns and His World, edited by Jann Pasler (2012); Romain Rolland and the Politics of the Intellectual Engagement by David James Fisher (1987/2004); Romain Rolland by R.A. Francis (1999); Romain Rolland by K. Gore (1981); Romain Rolland by Harold March (1971); Romain Rolland by William Thomas Star (1971); Romain Rolland by Zofia Karczewska-Markiewicz (1964); Romain Rolland the Man and His Work by Jacques Robichez (1961); Romain Rolland and a World at War by William Thomas Starr (1956); Romain Rolland by Maurice Descotes (1948); Romain Rolland 1866-1944 by Marcel Doisy (1945); Romain Rolland: the Story of a Conscience by Alex Aronson (1944); Romain Rolland by Stefan Zweig (1921); Romain Rolland: Sa vie, son œuvre by J. Bonnerot (1921) Selected works:
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