Romain Rolland Rolland, Romain
French novelist, dramatist, and essayist, an idealist who was deeply involved with pacifism, the fight against fascism, the search for world peace, and the analysis of artistic genius. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.
At age 14, Rolland went to Paris to study and found a society in spiritual disarray. He was admitted to the Ecole Normale Superieure, lost his religious faith, discovered the writings of Benedict de Spinoza and Leo Tolstoy, and developed a passion for music. He studied history (1889) and received a doctorate in art (1895), after which he went on a two-year mission to Italy at the Ecole Francaise de Rome. At first, Rolland wrote plays but was unsuccessful in his attempts to reach a vast audience and to rekindle "the heroism and the faith of the nation." He collected his plays in two cycles: Les Tragedies de la foi (1913; "The Tragedies of Faith"), which contains Aert (1898), and Le Theatre de la revolution (1904), which includes a presentation of the Dreyfus Affair, Les Loups (1898; The Wolves), and Danton (1900). In 1912, after a brief career in teaching art and musicology, he resigned to devote all his time to writing. He collaborated with Charles Peguy in the journal Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, where he first published his best-known novel, Jean-Christophe, 10 vol. (1904-12). For this and for his pamphlet Au-dessus de la melee (1915; "Above the Battle"), a call for France and Germany to respect truth and humanity throughout their struggle in World War I, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. His thought was the centre of a violent controversy and was not fully understood until 1952 with the posthumous publication of his Journal des annees de guerre, 1914-1919 ("Journal of the War Years, 1914-1919"). In 1914 he moved to Switzerland, where he lived until his return to France in 1937. | |
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