Romain Rolland

Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 in Clamecy, Nièvre - December 30, 1944 in Vézelay, Yonne) was a French writer. His first book by him was published in 1902, when he was thirty-six years old. Thirteen years later, he won the 1915 Nobel Prize for Literature "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary output and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described various kinds of human beings."

His existence was marked by a passion for music and heroism, and throughout his life he sought means of communion among men. His compelling need for justice led him to seek peace beyond the strife during and after World War I. He was an admirer of Leo Tolstoy, a great figure of non-violence, of the philosophers of India ( Conversations with Rabindranath Tagore , and Mohandas Gandhi), of the teachings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; he became fascinated by Bahá & # 39; u & # 39; lláh (whom he refers to in Clerambault , a novel in which he expounds his ideas on war) and later by the new world that the Soviet Union advocated in its beginnings. But nowhere, but in the writing of his works, he knew how to find peace. Romain Rolland received a strong influence from the Hindu philosophy of Vedānta, a subject to which he dedicated several books.

Biography

He was born into a family of notaries, although his ancestors included both peasants and notables. Writing introspectively in his Voyage intérieur (1942), he saw himself as a representative of the "ancient species". He would involve these ancestors in the gruesome and risque story Colas Breugnon (1919).

Accepted to the École normale supérieure in 1886, he first studied philosophy, but his independence of spirit led him to abandon it in order not to submit to its dominant ideology. He graduated in history in 1889] and spent two years in Rome, where his encounter with Malwida von Meysenbug —who had been a friend of Nietzsche and Wagner— and his discovery of Italian masterpieces were decisive in the development of history. thought of him. When he returned to France in 1895, he received his doctorate with the thesis The origins of the modern lyric theater and his dissertation A history of opera in Europe before Lully and Scarlatti .

Teacher, pacifist and loner

He began as a history teacher at the Lycée Henri IV, then at the Lycée Louis le Grand and at the École française de Rome. He later became a professor of music history at the Sorbonne and a professor of history at the École normale supérieure.

Demanding, shy and young, he did not like to teach. He was not indifferent to youth: Jean-Christophe, Olivier and his friends – heroes of his novels – are young. But with the young, as with the adults, Rolland had only distant relations. He wanted to be above all a writer. Certain that he could live devoted to literature alone, he resigned from the university in 1912. In 1915 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 1922 he founded the magazine Europe .

He was a militant pacifist. In 1924, his book on Gandhi contributed to his later reputation, and the two met in 1931.

He moved to the beaches of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, to devote himself to writing. His life was interrupted by health problems, travel and art exhibitions. His trip to Moscow (1935), at the invitation of Maxim Gorky, was an opportunity to meet Stalin, and he served unofficially as ambassador of French artists to the Soviet Union.

In 1937, he returned to live in Vézelay, which in 1940 was occupied by the Germans. During the occupation, she isolated herself in complete solitude.

Without stopping work, in 1940 he finished his Memoirs. He also dedicated himself to putting the finishing touches on his musical research into the life of Ludwig van Beethoven. Shortly before his death, he wrote Péguy (1944), in which he examines religion and socialism in the context of his memoirs. He died in Vezelay.

In 1921, his close friend, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, wrote his biography: The man and his works; Zweig deeply admired Rolland, of whom he once asserted that he was "the moral conscience of Europe" during the years of turmoil and war in the Old Continent.

Works

His masterpiece is Juan Cristóbal (10 vols.) a novel cycle in which he describes the life of a great German musician and where the author's universalism and love for humanity is shown. Other narrative works of his are Above the contention, Colas Breugnon and The enchanted soul (7 vols.). For the theater he wrote Tragedies of Faith , Tragedies of the Revolution , July 14 and Robespierre . His essays include The Great Creative Times , Opera in Europe , The Theater of the Revolution . From his biographies, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Saint Louis and Peguy. His Carnets , begun in 1906, are his intimate diary, of singular autobiographical value. His life and his work were a constant aspiration towards the light and he tried to express a conception of life and superior individual values within the historical reality and social coexistence and the most determined pacifism and internationalism, for which he was banished. to Switzerland. A collaborator of Péguy, he maintained contact with the most important figures in European literature of his time, from Tolstoy and Gorky to Rilke and Stefan Zweig.

Writings

Romain Rolland

Historical and philosophical dramas

• Aërt, 1897
• The wolves1897 (based on the Dreyfus case)
• The triumph of reason, 1899
• Danton, 1901
• The 14th of July, 1902
• The Montespan, 1904

Biographies

• Beethoven1903
• Miguel Angel1907
• Haendel, 1910
• Tolstói, 1911
• Mahatma Gandhi, 1923
• Life of Ramakrishna, 1929
• Life of Vivekananda, 1930
• Goethe and Beethoven, 1930
• Péguy, 1944

Novel

• Jean-Christophe (1904-1912)
• Colas Breugnon (1919)
• The Loved Soul (1922-1934), series of political novels.
• Clérambault, History of a Free Consciousness During the War (1920)

Peace Essays

• Over the conflict, 1915
• To the murdered peoples, 1917
• Precursors 1923

Autobiography

• The inner journey1943, published in 1956.

Quotes

"If there is any place in the face of the earth where all the dreams of the living men will find a home from the first days of when man began the dream of existence, that place is India... For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with its thousands of branches and millions of branches, has flourished in this torid land, the fiery uterus of the gods. It renews itself without fatigue without showing any signs of decadence." [1], Life of Ramakrishna

"The true Vedic spirit begins with a system of preconceived ideas. It has absolute freedom and courage without rival between religions with respect for the observed facts and the various hypotheses placed for its coordination. Without ever being hindered by a priestly order, every man has been entirely free to seek wherever he could satisfy the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe." [2], Life of Vivekananda