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Romain Rolland (1866-1944) |
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Romain Rolland is a great writer, pacifist, historian and composer; he was born in Clamency, France to a middle class family.
Not only he was aware of the suffering of the poor and of the working class families but he himself experienced the plight of tuberculosis in his childhood, which made his whole life miserable and finally caused his death.
He believed that art must be a part of the struggle to bring enlightenment to people. In his works he always fought for political, economic and social justice.
Romain Rolland acquired a reputation as an antifascist, anti-racist and an ardent communist. In 1935, he met Stalin and Gorky in Moscow, but he gradually started to distance himself from Stalinism. He believed that the establishment of socialism is not possible in the absence of political democracy, it is important to say that as early as 1900, in a play named Danton, he showed that the spirit of revolution in France was sacrificed to revolutionary discipline, an idea which was not welcome in that era within the Soviet Union.
Rolland had vast correspondence with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer and Rabindranath Tagore.
Some of his famous works are:
- Jean Christophe (1904-12), for which he received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1915
- Above the Battle (1913)
- Colas Breugnon (1913)
- The Forerunner (1919)
- Clerambault (1920)
- The Soul Enchanted (l’Âme enchantée) (1922-33)
- The Game of Love and Death (1925)
- Beethoven the Creator (1928)
- Charles Pégug (1944)