HENRI TROYAT
The Times (London)
March 6, 2007, Tuesday
Henri Troyat, writer, was born on November 1, 1911. He died on March 4,
2007, aged 95
Vastly prolific writer whose interests ran from multivolume novels
to popular history and biography
A popular novelist and biographer of enormous fecundity, Henri Troyat
was the doyen, or oldest member, of the Academie francaise, and the
author of a bewildering number of books reflecting his chief passions:
France and Russia.
Despite the name he assumed as a young man in France, Troyat was a
Russian of Armenian extraction. He was born Lev Aslanovitch Tarasoff
in Moscow in 1911, the son of Lucien Tarasoff, an immensely rich cloth
merchant and railway baron, and his wife, nee Lydia Abessolomov. When
the Revolution broke out in 1917 Troyat, then 6, began a hair-raising
journey with his family. The first stage took them from Moscow to the
Caucasus. At one point they were stranded on the Volga while the Reds
closed in. The only way out was the river, but the one available boat
refused to take them -it was already too packed. Then it transpired
that the captain was a school friend of his father’s. He allowed them
to travel -in the bathroom. Troyat claimed that saved his life.
Troyat’s father possessed huge estates in the Crimea, but it was not
wise to stop.
They went to Constantinople and thence to Venice. The odyssey ended
in when they arrived in Paris in 1920. Troyat felt at home at once.
He had always spoken French, thanks to his Swiss governess, and he
adapted easily to life in his new country. He attended the Lycee
Pasteur in Neuilly where he was encouraged to keep a diary by a
schoolmaster who soon recognised his literary talents. He studied
in the law faculty of the university, taking a licence in law, but
instead of practising he passed the exam to become a functionary in
the prefecture that administers Paris.
He did his obligatory military service at Metz in Lorraine. He was
still in uniform when his first novel, Faux jour, was published in
1935. It snapped up the Prix du roman populiste, the first in an
impressive sequence of prizes he received in the years immediately
before the Second World War.
He returned to the prefecture, working in the budget department.
Neither he nor his employers seem to have had any problems with
him writing at the same time. In 1938 the corpus of his works were
"crowned" by the Academie francaise. That same year a colleague
dropped into his office and said: "Quick, go down to Plon (his
publishers). You’ve got the Goncourt." He had won it for his novel
L’Araigne (The Web).
Troyat served briefly as an officer in the war, but was demobilised in
1940, and from 1942 onwards he devoted himself entirely to literature.
His novels examined human failure and inadequacy. They disappointed
some people in that they were not novels of ideas, but derived much
more from the Russian classics he had known from his childhood. He
was capable of lashing out at his detractors and his novel La Tete
sur les epaules is an attack on Jean-Paul Sartre.
Between 1946 and 1948 he published Tant que la terre durera (As long as
the earth lasts), one of his most important works, a trilogy that told
the story of a Russian family from the outbreak of the First World War
to their arrival in exile in Paris. The product of a decade of work,
it was naturally based on the experience of himself and his family.
He liked the old-fashioned canvas of the multi-volume novel. Both
Les Semailles et les moissons (the sowing and the reaping) and La
Lumiere des justes (the light of the just), for example, came out in
five volumes.
His novels were often dominated by female characters, and when asked
about this Troyat said they were better "fuel for the novelists,
their lives being closer to those of animals".
He liked to alternate between fiction and non-fiction. His approach to
biography was very broad brush, bringing with it the accusation that
he was "l’historien des concierges" -a historian for char ladies. He
gave his public what they wanted, and they definitely wanted it:
his books were printed in runs of 600,000 copies.
His productivity was phenomenal. Over the decades he brought out lives
of the great Russians -Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Gogol,
Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Alexander I, Alexander II,
Alexander III, Nicholas I, Nicholas II, Ivan the Terrible, Chekov,
Turgenev, Gorky and Rasputin -as well as of such French greats as
Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Balzac and Dumas
pere.
Troyat was elected to the Academie francaise on May 21, 1959, taking
seat 28, which had previously been occupied by Claude Farrere.
He was appointed Grand-croix of the Legion d’honneur, Commandeur de
l’ordre nationale du Merite and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.
At 65, in 1976 he published his memoirs, Un si long chemin. And the
road was to continue for another 30 years. In 2003 a court case
cast a shadow over his distinguished career when he was found to
have committed plagiarism in his 1997 biography of Juliette Drouet,
the mistress of Victor Hugo.
He lived in a detached house in the rue Bonaparte near the Metro
Pereire in the north of Paris, and then in a flat on the rue de
Rivoli. He impressed those journalists granted an interview by his
prodigious memory: he was able to recite some of the works of favourite
authors like Zola and Mauriac by heart, and read the dictionary every
day to expand his French vocabulary.
He was twice married, and had a son by his first marriage and daughters
by his second.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress