HENRI TROYAT: PROLIFIC NOVELIST AND BIOGRAPHER WHOSE STYLE REFLECTED HIS ROOTS IN FRENCH AND RUSSIAN CULTURE
Nicholas Hewitt
The Guardian – United Kingdom
Mar 07, 2007
Henri Troyat, who has died at the age of 95, was one of the most
prolific and popular French writers of the 20th century. The author
of short psychological novels, long, multi-volume historical frescos,
short stories, plays, reportages and biographies, he had a literary
career that spanned 70 years, and was particularly distinctive for
its unique blend of French and Russian cultures.
Troyat was born Lev Aslanovich Tarassov in Moscow, the son of a wealthy
Armenian draper who had made a fortune through investment in railways
and banking. He was brought up in a privileged environment, with a
coachman, a chauffeur and, most significantly, a Swiss governess who
taught him French. All this came to an end when the Russian revolution
broke out in 1917. Initially, the family retreated to their estate
in the Caucasus to await the collapse of Bolshevik rule; but by 1920
it was clear that the counter-revolution was failing and that they
would have to leave their homeland. They managed to catch the last
emigre boat from the Crimea to Constantinople, from where they joined
the exiled Russian community in Paris, settling in the prosperous
suburb of Neuilly, where Troyat attended the Lycee Pasteur. Like many
Russian exiles, however, the family found life in the west difficult
and drifted slowly into debt, culminating with the arrival of the
bailiffs and an enforced move to the Place de la Nation.
Although his parents experienced the classic problems of once-wealthy
emigres – loss of status, isolation and a growing reliance on an
unreal Russian community, still transfixed by a belief in the imminent
downfall of the Soviet regime – Troyat himself adapted quickly to
his new environment. True, the themes of exile and political caution
remain powerful in his fiction, but he studied law at the Sorbonne,
accquired French citizenship in 1933, and was appointed as a civil
servant in the prefecture of the Seine, a post he held until 1942.
At the same time, he began a literary career with a series of short
psychological novels, which derived a great deal from his attendance
at lectures on psychoanalysis at the Hopital Sainte-Anne. Faux Jour
(Deceptive Light) appeared in 1935 and immediately won the Prix du
Roman Populiste. It was followed that same year by Le Vivier (The
Fish-Tank), by Grandeur Nature (Life-Size, 1936) and La Clef de Voute
(The Keystone, 1937). In 1938, he won both the Prix Max Barthou de
l’Academie Francaise and the Prix Goncourt for the novel L’Araigne
(The Web).
Thus by the age of 27, Troyat was a well known and relatively
prosperous writer, although his parents’ experience had taught him
caution and he retained his post in the prefecture.
With the outbreak of the second world war, Troyat was mobilised as
a lieutenant in the supply section at Tulle and returned to Paris
in 1940 – at which point his career took a major shift. Although he
continued with his short psychological fiction – such as La Neige en
Deuil (Snow in Mourning, 1952), filmed with Spencer Tracy in 1956 as
The Mountain – he embarked on two major innovations that would dominate
his subsequent work: the long novel cycle and biography. Immediately
after the completion of L’Araigne, he had begun the preparation for
a biography of Dostoevsky. Not only did this introduce him to the
work of archival research, which was to prove invaluable for his
historical fiction, it initiated a whole sequence of biographies of
Russian writers and tsars.
This continued to develop until his death and included studies of
Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol and Chekhov, together with works on Catherine
the Great, Peter the Great, Alexander I and Ivan the Terrible. Troyat’s
biographies were major achievements, not least because they brought
to the attention of a broad French public an introduction to Russian
literary and political culture.
At the same time, the historical material developed in Troyat’s
biographies fed into a series of long historical novels, mostly
based in Russia, which together constitute a fictional biography
of the nation. Beginning with his own experiences of e xile,
assimilation and the memories of his parents, Troyat devoted a
trilogy, Tant que la Terre Durera (While the Earth Endures, 1947-50),
to pre-revolutionary Russia, the revolution and civil war, and the
phenomenon of exile. Then, in its pendant tetralogy, Les Semailles
et les Moissons (The Seed and the Fruit, 1953-58), he explored France
from the same perspective – the novels were made into a popular French
television series of the same name in 2001.
These long novel-cycles were followed by La Lumiere des Justes (The
Light of the Just, 1959-63), Les Eygletiere (The Eygletiere Family,
1965-67), Les Heritiers de l’Avenir (The Inheritors of the Future,
1968-70) and Le Moscovite (1974-76). It could be argued that few
French writers have done so much to make historical Russia real to
a mass French readership.
Ultimately, however, and as impressive as the short novels, the novel
cycles and the biographies are, it is probably in his short stories
that Troyat demonstrates the most originality and skill. Heavily
influenced by Gogol and by the German romantics, collections such as La
Fosse Commune (The Common Grave, 1939), Du Philanthrope a la Rouquine
(From the Philanthropist to the Redhead, 1945) and Le Geste d’Eve
(The Story of Eve, 1964) blend light social satire with a genuinely
disturbing sense of the fanstastic and evil.
Troyat eventually abandoned his civil-service post in 1942 and
devoted himself full time to literature for the rest of his life. His
early achievement in combining critical recognition with commercial
success continued throughout his career: in the 1950s, he became
one of France’s first bes tsellers, and in 1959, at the age of 47,
he was elected to the Academie Francaise.
His second wife predeceased him, and he is survived by a son from
his first marriage.
Nicholas Hewitt
Henri Troyat (Lev Aslanovich Tarassov), writer, biographer and
historian, born November 1 1911; died March 4 2007
Troyat at his desk in 1989: by the age of 27, he was already a
prosperous and well-known writer
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress