Henri Troyat

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Henri Troyat

Henri Troyat ; actually Lev Aslanowitsch Tarasow or Levon Aslan Torossian (born November 1, 1911 in Moscow , † March 2, 2007 in Paris ) was a French writer .

Life and work

Henri Troyat (as he called himself on the advice of his first publisher at the age of 24) came from a well-off Moscow merchant family of Armenian origin. Thanks to a Swiss nanny , he learned French at an early age . During the October Revolution , the family fled first to the Crimea and later via Istanbul and Venice to Paris. By the time she settled there in 1920, the family had largely lost their property. Troyat completed his high school at the Lycée Pasteur in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine . He completed a subsequent study of law with the first final examination, the license. He then became an employee of the administration of the Seine department , but at the same time continued the writing that he had started as a student.

At the age of 24 he became a successful author when he received the “Prix populiste” for his first novel entitled Faux-Jour . At just under 27 (1938), he received the Prix ​​Goncourt , France's most coveted literary prize, for his fifth novel, L'Araigne ( Eng . The Poison Spider ) . After that he changed the genre and wrote his first biography , that of Dostoevsky (1940). He subsequently kept this alternation between novels and biographies. He wrote his last novel, La Traque , at the age of 94. In total, he came up with a good hundred titles, which often reached millions of dollars. Measured by the scope of his work, he was one of the most prolific French authors of his generation.

In 2003 he and his publishing house Flammarion were sentenced to 45,000 euros in damages for plagiarism . For his biography of Juliette Drouet , Victor Hugo's long-time partner, Troyat had all too freely used a biography of the authors Gérard Pouchain and Robert Sabourin published in 1997 .

In his novels, Troyat mostly depicts Russian history and conditions , although he never returned to Russia , not even on trips . In the German-speaking world, he was best known for his biographies, including those about Dostoyevsky, Pushkin (1946), Tolstoy (1965), Catherine the Great (1977), Peter the Great (1979), Chekhov (1984) and Rasputin (1996).

1959 Troyat was elected to the Académie Française , although the university literary criticism and leading intellectuals classified him as a rather undemanding author. He himself promoted this image by seeing himself more as a “storyteller in the marketplace” than as someone who tries to convey a philosophical or political message to the reader.

Awards

Works (selection)

Novels

  • Faux jour , 1935
  • Le Vivier , 1935
  • Grandeur nature , 1936
  • La Clef de voûte , 1937
  • L'Araigne , 1938 (German: The poison spider , 1950)
  • La Fosse commune , 1939
  • Judith Madrier , 1940
  • Le Jugement de Dieu , 1941
  • Le Mort saisit le vif , 1942 ( Eng . A dead reaches into life , 1949)
  • Le Signe du taureau , 1945
  • Du Philanthrope à la Rouquine , 1945 ( Eng . A deal with Pilatus , 1960)
  • Tant que la terre durera , 1947 ( as long as the world exists , 1952)
  • Le Sac et la Cendre , 1948
  • Étrangers sur la terre , 1950 (German foreigners on earth , with Le Sac et la Cendre, 1953)
  • La Neige en deuil , 1952 (Eng. The Mountain of Temptation , 1954; filmed as: The Mountain 1956).
  • Les Semailles et les Moissons , 1953 ( Before the storm , 1955)
  • Amélie , 1955 (German Amelie, 1956)
  • Tendre et violente Elisabeth , 1957 (German Tender Wilde Elisabeth , 1960)
  • La Rencontre , 1958 (German The Encounter , 1961)
  • La lumière des justes (novel cycle):
    • Les Compagnons du Coquelicot , 1959 (Eng. The Brothers of the Red Poppy , 1960)
    • La Barynia , 1960 ( Eng . The Mistress of Kaschtanowka , 1961)
    • La Gloire des vaincus , 1961 (German: The glory of the vanquished , 1962)
    • Les Dames de Sibérie , 1962 (Eng. The ladies of Siberia , 1963)
    • Sophie ou la Fin des combats , 1963
  • Une extrême amitié , 1963 ( A strange friendship , 1967)
  • Le Geste d'Eve , 1964 (German Eve's apple , 1967)
  • Les Eygletière , 1965 (German and didn't build a house for the children , 1966)
  • La Faim des lionceaux , 1966 ( In their own way , 1967)
  • La Malandre , 1967 (German like chaff in the wind , 1968)
  • Les Héritiers de l'Avenir , 1968 ( The heirs of the future , 1972)
  • Grimbosq , 1976 (German: The Tsar's Architect , 1977)
  • Le Front dans les nuages , 1976 (German head in the clouds , 1979)
  • Le Prisonnier n ° 1 , 1978 (Eng. The Chosen One , 1980)
  • La Gouvernante française , 1989 (German Summer in Petersburg , 1991)
  • La Femme de David , 1990 (Eng. The oath of the Horatians. The life of the painter Jacques Louis David in his wife's notes , 1993)
  • Votre très humble et très obéissant serviteur , 1996 (Eng. Your very devoted servant. A life at the court of Tsarina Catherine II. , 1997)
  • L'Affaire Crémonnière, 1997 ( Eng . The Crémonnière Affair , 1998)

Plays

  • Les Vivants , 1946 (Eng. The Living , 1946)
  • Sébastien , 1949

Biographies

  • Pouchkine , 1946 (German Pushkin , 1959)
  • Dostoievski , 1940 (German Dostojewsky , 1964)
  • L'étrange destin de Lermontov , 1952
  • Tolstoy , 1965 (German: Tolstoy or The Flight into Truth or Tolstoy. Contradiction of a Life , 1966)
  • Gogol , 1971
  • Catherine la Grande , 1977 (Eng. The great Catherine , 1980)
  • Pierre le Grand , 1979 (German Peter the Great , 1981)
  • Alexandre premier , 1981
  • Ivan le Terrible , 1982 (German Ivan the Terrible , 1987)
  • Tchekhov , 1984 (German Chekhov. Life and Work , 1987)
  • Tourgueniev , 1985
  • Gorki , 1986 (Ger. Gorki. Petrel of the Revolution , 1987)
  • Flaubert , 1988
  • Maupassant , 1989
  • Alexandre II , 1990 (German Tsar Alexander II. , 1991)
  • Nicolas II , 1991 (German Nicholas II. The last Tsar , 1992)
  • Zola , 1992
  • Verlaine , 1993
  • Baudelaire , 1994
  • Balzac , 1995
  • Raspoutine , 1996 (German Rasputin , 1998)
  • Juliette Drouet , 1997
  • Terribles Tsarines , 1998 (about Katharina I. , Anna Iwanowna , Anna Leopoldowna , Elisabeth I. )
  • Les Turbulences d'une grande famille , 1998 (about the Lebaudy family )
  • Nicolas Ier , 1999
  • Marina Tsvetaeva. L'éternelle insurgée , 2001
  • Paul Ier, le tsar mal aimé , 2002
  • La baronne et le musicien, Madame von Meck et Tchaïkovski , 2004
  • Alexandre III Le tsar des neiges , 2004
  • Alexandre Dumas. Le cinquième mousquetaire , 2005
  • Pasternak , 2006

Other publications

  • Les ponts de Paris, illustré d'aquarelles , 1946.
  • La case de l'Oncle Sam , 1948. (German Uncle Sam's hut , 1951)
  • De gratte-ciel en cocotier , 1955. ( Eng . Macumba. On the streets of the conquistadors , 1958)
  • Sainte Russie, souvenirs et réflexions suivi de l'Assassinat d'Alexandre II , 1956.
  • Le Fauteuil de Claude Farrère, discours à l'Académie française , 1959.
  • La vie quotidienne en Russie au temps du dernier tsar , 1959.
    • German This is how the Russians lived at the time of the last tsar , Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 1960.
  • Naissance d'une dauphine , 1960.
  • Un si long chemin , 1976.
The following important information is missing from this article or section: Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

Others

The crash of an airplane on a mountain, described in Troyat's novel “La Neige en deuil” from 1952, is based on a true incident, namely the collision of an Indian airliner with the name “Malabar Princess” on Air India flight 245 on April 3 November 1950 approaching Geneva with the Mont-Blanc pre-summit Rocher de la Tournette in stormy weather and poor visibility, with all 48 people on board killed. Troyat's novel, on the other hand, was the basis for the American feature film " The Mountain of Temptation " from 1956 with Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner in the leading roles.

The flight accident of the "Malabar Princess" also found further media processing, so u. a .:

  • in the 2001 film The fabulous world of Amélie , in which the main character Amelie reads a newspaper report about mountain climbers who accidentally discover a mailbag on Mont Blanc and discover that he was killed by the “Malabar Princess” accident over 40 years ago originates. This headline moves her to make the lonely concierge of her house happy with a forged love letter from her missing husband, which was allegedly in this mailbag and could only be delivered to her after more than four decades.
  • in the French feature film Malabar Princess from 2004, which is about a boy whose mother disappeared in the French Alps in search of the plane wreck of the "Malabar Princess" and who five years later goes in search of her.

literature

  • Nicholas Hewitt: Henri Troyat . Twayne, Boston MA 1984. (= Twayne's world authors series; 616), ISBN 0-8057-6458-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Malabar Princess (2004). Internet Movie Database , accessed June 10, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Malabar Princess. Tout savoir sur Malabar Princess. (No longer available online.) Warner Bros. France , archived from the original on August 8, 2014 ; accessed on February 16, 2016 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Troyat, Henri
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lev Aslanovitch Tarassov (real name); Troyat, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer of Russian descent
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH March 2, 2007
Place of death Paris , France