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Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland, 1914
Born	(1866-01-29)29 January 1866 Clamecy, France
Died	30 December 1944(1944-12-30) (aged 78) Vézelay, France
Occupation	Dramatist essayist art historian novelist musicologist
Period	1902–1944
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature 1915
Spouse	Clothilde Bréal, m. 1892–1901; Jify Romain Rolland, m. 1934–1944
Relatives	Madeleine Rolland (sister)
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Romain Rolland (French: [ʁɔmɛ̃ ʁɔlɑ̃]; 29 January 1866 – 30 December 1944) was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings".

He was an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, wrote a still relevant biography of Gandhi, and is also noted for his correspondence with numerous writers and thinkers across the globe including Maxim Gorki, Rabindranath Tagore and Sigmund Freud.

Biography

Rolland was born in Clamecy, Nièvre into a family that had both wealthy townspeople and farmers in its lineage. Writing introspectively in his Voyage intérieur (1942), he sees himself as a representative of an "antique species". He would cast these ancestors in Colas Breugnon (1919).

Accepted to the École normale supérieure in 1886, he first studied philosophy, but his independence of spirit led him to abandon that so as not to submit to the dominant ideology. He received his degree 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 of Wagner–and his discovery of Italian masterpieces were decisive for the development of his thought. When he returned to France in 1895, he received his doctoral degree with his thesis Les origines du théâtre lyrique moderne. Histoire de l’opéra en Europe avant Lulli et Scarlatti (The origins of modern lyric theatre. A History of Opera in Europe before Lully and Scarlatti). For the next two decades, he taught at various lycées in Paris before directing the newly established music school of the École des Hautes Études Sociales from 1902 to 1911. In 1903 he was appointed to the first chair of music history at the Sorbonne, he also directed briefly in 1911 the musical section at the French Institute in Florence.

His first book was published in 1902 when he was 36 years old. Through his advocacy for a 'people's theatre', he made a significant contribution towards the democratization of the theatre. As a humanist, he embraced the work of the philosophers of India ("Conversations with Rabindranath Tagore" and Mohandas Gandhi). Rolland was strongly influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of India, primarily through the works of Swami Vivekananda.

A demanding, yet timid, young man, he did not like teaching. He was not indifferent to youth: Jean-Christophe, Olivier and their friends, the heroes of his novels, are young people. But with real-life persons, youths as well as adults, Rolland maintained only a distant relationship. He was first and foremost a writer. Assured that literature would provide him with a modest income, he resigned from the university in 1912.

Romain Rolland was a lifelong pacifist. He was one of the few major French writers to retain his pacifist internationalist values; he moved to Switzerland. He protested against the first World War in Au-dessus de la mêlée [fr] (1915), Above the Battle (Chicago, 1916). In 1924, his book on Gandhi contributed to the Indian nonviolent leader's reputation and the two men met in 1931. Rolland was a vegetarian.

In May 1922 he attended the International Congress of Progressive Artists and signed the "Founding Proclamation of the Union of Progressive International Artists".

In 1928 Rolland and Hungarian scholar, philosopher and natural living experimenter Edmund Bordeaux Szekely founded the International Biogenic Society to promote and expand on their ideas of the integration of mind, body and spirit. In 1932 Rolland was among the first members of the World Committee Against War and Fascism, organized by Willi Münzenberg. Rolland criticized the control Münzenberg assumed over the committee and was against it being based in Berlin.

Rolland moved to Villeneuve, on the shores of Lake Geneva to devote himself to writing. His life was interrupted by health problems, and by travels to art exhibitions. His visit to Moscow (1935), on the invitation of Maxim Gorky, was an opportunity to meet Joseph Stalin, whom he considered the greatest man of his time. Rolland served unofficially as ambassador of French artists to the Soviet Union. Although he admired Stalin, he attempted to intervene against the persecution of his friends. He attempted to discuss his concerns with Stalin, and was involved in the campaign for the release of the Left Opposition activist and writer Victor Serge and wrote to Stalin begging clemency for Nikolai Bukharin. During Serge's imprisonment (1933–1936), Rolland had agreed to handle the publications of Serge's writings in France, despite their political disagreements.

In 1937, he came back to live in Vézelay, which, in 1940, was occupied by the Germans. During the occupation, he isolated himself in complete solitude. Never stopping his work, in 1940, he finished his memoirs. He also placed the finishing touches on his musical research on the life of Ludwig van Beethoven. Shortly before his death, he wrote Péguy (1944), in which he examines religion and socialism through the context of his memories. He died on 30 December 1944 in Vézelay.

In 1921, his close friend the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig published his biography (in English Romain Rolland: The Man and His Works). Zweig profoundly admired Rolland, whom he once described as "the moral consciousness of Europe" during the years of turmoil and War in Europe. Zweig wrote at length about his friendship with Rolland in his own autobiography (in English The World of Yesterday), discussing, for example, their failed efforts to organize a conference of antiwar intellectuals from both warring camps in neutral Switzerland.

Victor Serge was appreciative of Rolland's interventions on his behalf but ultimately thoroughly disappointed by Rolland's refusal to break publicly with Stalin and the repressive Soviet regime. The entry for 4 May 1945, a few weeks after Rolland's death, in Serge's Notebooks: 1936-1947 notes acidly that "At age seventy the author of Jean-Christophe allowed himself to be covered with the blood spilled by a tyranny of which he was a faithful adulator." However, this is completely denied by Romain Rolland's biographer Bernard Duchatelet in his French biography Romain Rolland: Tel qu'en lui-même. Duchatelet and other Rollandians believe that Rolland remained faithful to his own well-known integrity.

Rolland's life was 'the story of a conscience', as mentioned in the title of the book on him by Alex Aronson.

Hermann Hesse dedicated Siddhartha to Romain Rolland "my dear friend".

People's theatre

Rolland's most significant contribution to the theatre lies in his advocacy for a "popular theatre" in his essay The People's Theatre (Le Théâtre du peuple, 1902). "There is only one necessary condition for the emergence of a new theatre", he wrote, "that the stage and auditorium should be open to the masses, should be able to contain a people and the actions of a people". The book was not published until 1913, but most of its contents had appeared in the Revue d'Art Dramatique between 1900 and 1903. Rolland attempted to put his theory into practice with his melodramatic dramas about the French Revolution, Danton (1900) and The Fourteenth of July (1902), but it was his ideas that formed a major reference point for subsequent practitioners.

The essay is part of a more general movement around the turn of that century towards the democratization of the theatre. The Revue had held a competition and tried to organize a "World Congress on People's Theatre", and a number of People's Theatres had opened across Europe, including the Freie Volksbühne movement ('Free People's Theatre') in Germany and Maurice Pottecher's Théâtre du Peuple in France. Rolland was a disciple of Pottecher and dedicated The People's Theatre to him.

Rolland's approach is more aggressive, though, than Pottecher's poetic vision of theatre as a substitute 'social religion' bringing unity to the nation. Rolland indicts the bourgeoisie for its appropriation of the theatre, causing it to slide into decadence, and the deleterious effects of its ideological dominance. In proposing a suitable repertoire for his people's theatre, Rolland rejects classical drama in the belief that it is either too difficult or too static to be of interest to the masses. Drawing on the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he proposes instead "an epic historical theatre of 'joy, force and intelligence' which will remind the people of its revolutionary heritage and revitalize the forces working for a new society" (in the words of Bradby and McCormick, quoting Rolland). Rolland believed that the people would be improved by seeing heroic images of their past. Rousseau's influence may be detected in Rolland's conception of theatre-as-festivity, an emphasis that reveals a fundamental anti-theatrical prejudice: "Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought. If we were happier and freer we should not feel hungry for theatre. A people that is happy and free has need of festivities more than of theatres; it will always see in itself the finest spectacle".

Rolland's dramas have been staged by some of the most influential theatre directors of the twentieth century, including Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator. Piscator directed the world première of Rolland's pacifist drama The Time Will Come (Le Temps viendra, written in 1903) at Berlin's Central-Theater, which opened on 17 November 1922 with music by K Pringsheim and scenic design by O Schmalhausen and M Meier. The play addresses the connections between imperialism and capitalism, the treatment of enemy civilians, and the use of concentration camps, all of which are dramatised via an episode in the Boer War. Piscator described his treatment of the play as "thoroughly naturalistic", whereby he sought "to achieve the greatest possible realism in acting and decor". Despite the play's overly-rhetorical style, the production was reviewed positively.

Novels

Rolland's most famous novel is the 10-volume novel sequence Jean-Christophe (1904–1912), which brings "together his interests and ideals in the story of a German musical genius who makes France his second home and becomes a vehicle for Rolland's views on music, social matters and understanding between nations". His other novels are Colas Breugnon (1919), Clérambault (1920), Pierre et Luce (1920) and his second roman-fleuve, the 7-volume L'âme enchantée (1922–1933).

Academic career

He became a history teacher at Lycée Henri IV, then at the Lycée Louis le Grand, and a member of the École française de Rome, then a professor of the History of Music at the Sorbonne, and History Professor at the École Normale Supérieure.

Correspondence with Richard Strauss

In 1899 Rolland started what became a voluminous correspondence with the German composer Richard Strauss (the English translation, edited by Rollo Myers, runs to 239 pages, including some diary entries). At the time, Strauss was a celebrated conductor of works by Wagner, Liszt, Mozart, and of his own tone poems. In 1905, Strauss completed his opera Salome, based on the verse play by Oscar Wilde, originally written in French. Strauss based his version of Salome on Hedwig Lachmann's German translation which he had seen performed in Berlin in 1902. Out of respect for Wilde, Strauss wanted to create a parallel French version, to be as close as possible to Wilde's original text, and he wrote to Rolland requesting his help on this project.

Rolland was initially reluctant, but a lengthy exchange ensued, occupying 50 pages of the Myers edition, and in the end Rolland made 191 suggestions for improving the Strauss/Wilde libretto. The resulting French version of Salome received its first performance in Paris in 1907, two years after the German premiere. Thereafter, Rolland's letters regularly discussed Strauss's operas, including the occasional criticism of Strauss's librettist, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal: "I only regret that the great writer who gives you such brilliant libretti too often lacks a sense of the theatre."

Rolland was a pacifist and concurred with Strauss when the latter refused to sign the Manifesto of German artists and intellectuals supporting the German role in World War I. Rolland noted Strauss's response in his diary entry for October 1914: "Declarations about war and politics are not fitting for an artist, who must give his attention to his creations and his works."(Myers p. 160)

Correspondence with Freud

1923 saw the beginning of a correspondence between psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Rolland, who found that the admiration that he showed for Freud was reciprocated in equal measures (Freud proclaiming in a letter to him: "That I have been allowed to exchange a greeting with you will remain a happy memory to the end of my days."). This correspondence introduced Freud to the concept of the "oceanic feeling" that Rolland had developed through his study of Eastern mysticism. Freud opened his next book Civilization and its Discontents (1929) with a debate on the nature of this feeling, which he mentioned had been noted to him by an anonymous "friend". This friend was Rolland. Rolland would remain a major influence on Freud's work, continuing their correspondence right up to Freud's death in 1939.

Bibliography

See also

• List of peace activists

References

1. Liukkonen, Petri. "Romain Rolland". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 24 September 2014.
2. Henderson, Robert (2001). "Romain Rolland". In Sadie, Stanley; Tyrrell, John (eds.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan Publishers. ISBN 978-1-56159-239-5.‎
3. "Thoughts on Ramakrishna". Archived from the original on 4 September 2008. Retrieved 4 October 2008.
4. Walters, Kerry S; Portmess, Lisa. (1999). Ethical Vegetarianism: From Pythagoras to Peter Singer. State University of New York Press. pp. 135-138. ISBN 0-7914-4044-3
5. "Romain Rolland (1866-1944)". International Vegetarian Union.
6. van Doesburg, Theo (22 October 2010). "De Stijl, "A Short Review of the Proceedings [of the Congress of International Progressive Artists], Followed by the Statements Made by the Artists' Groups" (1922)". modernistarchitecture.wordpress.com. Ross Lawrence Wolfe. Retrieved 30 November 2018.
7. Ceplair, Larry (1987). Under the Shadow of War: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Marxists, 1918–1939. Columbia University Press. p. 80. ISBN 978-0-231-06532-0. Retrieved 6 March 2015.
8. Michael David-Fox, . "The 'Heroic Life' of a Friend of Stalinism: Romain Rolland and Soviet Culture." Slavonica 11.1 (2005): 3-29.
9. Zweig, Stefan, The World of Yesterday, p.101 (1953).
10. Serge, Victor (2019). Notebooks: 1936-1947. New York: New York Review Books. pp. 506–509. ISBN 978-1-68137-270-9.
11. ^ David Bradby, "Rolland, Romain". In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). ISBN 0-521-43437-8. p.930.
12. Romain Rolland, Le Théâtre du peuple (Paris: Albin Michel) p.121. Quoted by David Bradby and John McCormick, People's Theatre (London: Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978). ISBN 0-8476-6073-7. p.16.
13. Quoted by David Bradby and John McCormick, People's Theatre (London: Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978). ISBN 0-8476-6073-7. p.32.
14. David Bradby and John McCormick, People's Theatre (London: Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978). ISBN 0-8476-6073-7. p.32.
15. Quoted by David Bradby and John McCormick, People's Theatre (London: Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978). ISBN 0-8476-6073-7. p.32-33.
16. See John Willett, The Theatre of Erwin Piscator: Half a Century of Politics in the Theatre, London: Methuen, 1978 (p.15, 35, 46–7, 179). ISBN 0-413-37810-1.
17. Piscator (1929, 353).
18. ^ Hugh Rorrison, in Piscator (1929, 55–56).
19. Piscator (1929, 58).
20. John Cruickshank, "Rolland, Romain", in Anthony Thorlby (ed.), The Penguin Companion to Literature 2: European Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 661.
21. ^ Richard Strauss; Romain Rolland (1968). Rollo Myers (ed.). Richard Strauss & Romain Rolland: Correspondence. Calder, London.
22. ^ James Morwood (2018). "Richard Strauss's Salome and Oscar Wilde's French Text". The Wildean (52): 63–73. JSTOR 48569305. Retrieved 30 July 2022.
23. William B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 23, 2 Apr. 2007 Archived 4 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine.
24. William B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 19, 2 Apr. 2007 Archived 4 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine
25. Lachman, Marvin (2014). The villainous stage : crime plays on Broadway and in the West End. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-9534-4. OCLC 903807427.

Further reading

• Duchatelet, Bernard. "Romain Rolland: Tel qu'en lui-même", Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 2002.
• Fisher, David James. Romain Rolland and the Politics of the Intellectual Engagement (2003)
• Guha, Chinmoy. "Bridging East and West: Rabindranath Tagore and Romain Rolland Correspondence 1919-1940", New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• David-Fox, Michael. "The 'Heroic Life' of a Friend of Stalinism: Romain Rolland and Soviet Culture." Slavonica 11.1 (2005): 3-29. Online
• Zweig, Stephan. Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work (1921) (online)

External links

• Quotations related to Romain Rolland at Wikiquote
• Works by or about Romain Rolland at Wikisource
•  French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Auteur:Romain Rolland
• Media related to Romain Rolland at Wikimedia Commons
• Romain Rolland on Nobelprize.org
• List of Works
• Romain Rolland at Goodreads
• Sven Söderman on Rolland
• Association Romain Rolland
• Romain Rolland's thoughts on Vedanta
• Romain Rolland at IMDb 
• Newspaper clippings about Romain Rolland in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Electronic editions

• Works by Romain Rolland in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
• Works by Romain Rolland at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Romain Rolland at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about Romain Rolland at the Internet Archive
• Works by Romain Rolland at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

v t e Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature
1901–1920	1901: Sully Prudhomme 1902: Theodor Mommsen 1903: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1904: Frédéric Mistral / José Echegaray 1905: Henryk Sienkiewicz 1906: Giosuè Carducci 1907: Rudyard Kipling 1908: Rudolf Eucken 1909: Selma Lagerlöf 1910: Paul Heyse 1911: Maurice Maeterlinck 1912: Gerhart Hauptmann 1913: Rabindranath Tagore 1914 1915: Romain Rolland 1916: Verner von Heidenstam 1917: Karl Gjellerup / Henrik Pontoppidan 1918 1919: Carl Spitteler 1920: Knut Hamsun
1921–1940	1921: Anatole France 1922: Jacinto Benavente 1923: W. B. Yeats 1924: Władysław Reymont 1925: George Bernard Shaw 1926: Grazia Deledda 1927: Henri Bergson 1928: Sigrid Undset 1929: Thomas Mann 1930: Sinclair Lewis 1931: Erik Axel Karlfeldt (posthumously) 1932: John Galsworthy 1933: Ivan Bunin 1934: Luigi Pirandello 1935 1936: Eugene O'Neill 1937: Roger Martin du Gard 1938: Pearl S. Buck 1939: Frans Eemil Sillanpää 1940
1941–1960	1941 1942 1943 1944: Johannes V. Jensen 1945: Gabriela Mistral 1946: Hermann Hesse 1947: André Gide 1948: T. S. Eliot 1949: William Faulkner 1950: Bertrand Russell 1951: Pär Lagerkvist 1952: François Mauriac 1953: Winston Churchill 1954: Ernest Hemingway 1955: Halldór Laxness 1956: Juan Ramón Jiménez 1957: Albert Camus 1958: Boris Pasternak 1959: Salvatore Quasimodo 1960: Saint-John Perse
1961–1980	1961: Ivo Andrić 1962: John Steinbeck 1963: Giorgos Seferis 1964: Jean-Paul Sartre (declined award) 1965: Mikhail Sholokhov 1966: Shmuel Yosef Agnon / Nelly Sachs 1967: Miguel Ángel Asturias 1968: Yasunari Kawabata 1969: Samuel Beckett 1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1971: Pablo Neruda 1972: Heinrich Böll 1973: Patrick White 1974: Eyvind Johnson / Harry Martinson 1975: Eugenio Montale 1976: Saul Bellow 1977: Vicente Aleixandre 1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer 1979: Odysseas Elytis 1980: Czesław Miłosz
1981–2000	1981: Elias Canetti 1982: Gabriel García Márquez 1983: William Golding 1984: Jaroslav Seifert 1985: Claude Simon 1986: Wole Soyinka 1987: Joseph Brodsky 1988: Naguib Mahfouz 1989: Camilo José Cela 1990: Octavio Paz 1991: Nadine Gordimer 1992: Derek Walcott 1993: Toni Morrison 1994: Kenzaburō Ōe 1995: Seamus Heaney 1996: Wisława Szymborska 1997: Dario Fo 1998: José Saramago 1999: Günter Grass 2000: Gao Xingjian
2001–2020	2001: V. S. Naipaul 2002: Imre Kertész 2003: J. M. Coetzee 2004: Elfriede Jelinek 2005: Harold Pinter 2006: Orhan Pamuk 2007: Doris Lessing 2008: J. M. G. Le Clézio 2009: Herta Müller 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa 2011: Tomas Tranströmer 2012: Mo Yan 2013: Alice Munro 2014: Patrick Modiano 2015: Svetlana Alexievich 2016: Bob Dylan 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro 2018: Olga Tokarczuk 2019: Peter Handke 2020: Louise Glück
2021–present	2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah 2022: Annie Ernaux 2023: Jon Fosse 2024: Han Kang

• 1866 births
• 1944 deaths
• 19th-century French dramatists and playwrights
• 19th-century French novelists
• 20th-century French dramatists and playwrights
• 20th-century French novelists
• École Normale Supérieure alumni
• French expatriates in the Soviet Union
• French male novelists
• French Nobel laureates
• French pacifists
• Honorary members of the USSR Academy of Sciences
• Lycée Louis-le-Grand alumni
• Nobel laureates in Literature
• Nonviolence advocates
• People from Nièvre
• Prix Femina winners
• Writers about the Soviet Union
• Writers from Bourgogne-Franche-Comté
• Gandhians
• Romain Rolland