Romain Rolland
January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944
Romain Rolland was a French novelist, playwright, music historian and literary critic, winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Romain Rolland was born in 1866 in the Burgundy town of Clamecy to a notary family. Because he displayed great talent at a boy's age, in 1880 his family (especially at the pressure of his mother) decided to move to Paris so that he could get the best possible education. He first studied at louis the great's Lyceum. In 1886, for the third time, he managed to take entrance exams at the École normale supérieure, where he studied history, geography, philosophy and literature until 1889.He then went on to study for two years in Rome at the École française de Rome, where he collected material for his dissertation on the early days of opera in Europe. The paper was published in print in 1895. In Rome, he became friends with Malwida von Meysenbug (1816-1903), which oriented him towards German music, which he later covered all his life. Rolland was still in Rome from 1882 to 1893 and was active in literature. After returning to Paris, he taught art history at the Henry IV Lyceum. From 1895 he was professor of art history at the École normale supérieure. In 1904, the school underwent a reform, and one part of it was integrated into the Sorbonne. Rolland lectured in the history of music here as an associate professor. At the same time he was a music critic; in 1899 he became music editor of La Revue de Paris, in 1901 he co-founded the Revue d'Histoire et de Critique Musicale and wrote musicological monographs. From 1912 he stopped teaching and devoted himself exclusively to artistic activities.
In 1904, Rolland began working on his seminal work, The John Christopher Novel, which was published in 1914 and for which he was awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize "... as a high honour for the lofty idealism of his literary work and for the sympathy and love of truth with which he depicted different types of people" (quotes from the Swedish Academy's reasoning). But Rolland has for the most part donated the prize money to alleviate the hardships of those affected by World War I. Rolland displayed his humanistic and pacifist views both by working on the newly formed Red Cross and by influencing public opinion with numerous essays in the fields of politics, philosophy, theatre and music. It very quickly became one of the strongest cultural spirits of its time.
The years of work on Jan Christopher tied Rolland so much that he longed to write something less extensive after finishing the work. He writes about it himself: "It's a reaction against the decades of nausea in John Christopher's armor, which was done to my standard, but in the end was too close for me. I felt an overwhelming longing for free Gallic hilarity, even ruthlessness.The result of this desire was the novel Colas Breugnon in 1919, which, thanks to a translation by Jaroslav Zaorálka, was still alive under the title The Good Man. The novel takes place in Rolland's native Burgundy and is perhaps his most widely read and beloved work. In addition, he wrote two other less extensive works at this time - the novella Peter and Lucia (1920) and the novel Clerambault (1920).
From 1922 to 1933, Rolland worked on his second large-scale novel, The Enchanted Soul, and became such a well-known figure in world culture that, after Hitler's german occupation of France, the Nazis dared not arrest Rolland so as not to cause a world wave of resentment. Despite promoting the Soviet Union and its socialist form of government, Rolland criticized fascism and its leaders as well as the 1938 Munich Agreement. Following the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, he also took a critical stance on Stalin.
In addition to his prosaic work, Rolland is the author of a wide range of biographies of important world figures (e.g. Beethoven, Michelangelo or Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy) as well as many plays designed for so-called folk theatre. In creating a theatre for the widest sections of the people to convey their deep moral ideals, Rolland saw the possibility of the ascension of mankind.
Rolland was married twice. In 1892 he married the daughter of archaeologist Michal Bréal. The marriage remained childless and was divorced in 1901. Rolland's second wife since 1934 has been a translator of his books, Maria Pavlovna Kudasheva. Romain Rolland died in Burgundy in 1944, in the town of Vézelay near his birthplace.
He was a vegetarian, close friends with Gandhi, about whom he also wrote a book. He was very interested in Indian philosophy, especially the mystical school of the vedane.