Romain Rolland

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Romain Rolland

Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944) was a French writer. His first book was published in 1902, when he was already 36 years old. Thirteen years later, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature 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."

His mind sculpted by a passion for music and hero-worship, he sought a means of communion among men for his entire life. Because of his insistence upon justice and his humanist ideal, he looked for peace during and after the First World War in the works of the philosophers of India ("Conversations with Rabindranath Tagore", and Mohandas Gandhi), then in the new world that the Soviet Union had built. But he would not find peace except in writing his works. Romain Rolland was strongly influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, and authored several books (see bibliography below) on the subject.

[edit] Life

Rolland was born in Clamecy, Nièvre to a family of notaries; he had both peasants and wealthy townspeople in his lineage. Writing introspectively in his Voyage intérieur (1942), he sees himself as a representative of an "antique species". He will cast these ancestors in a truculent bawdy tale 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 Meysenburg – who had been the 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 The origins of modern lyric theatre and his doctoral dissertation, A History of Opera in Europe before Lully and Scarlatti.

[edit] A teacher, a pacifist, and a loner

Rolland with Gandhi in Switzerland, 1931. The two were friends and regular correspondents.

He became a history teacher at Lycée Henri IV, then at the Lycée Louis le Grand, and 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.

A demanding, yet timid, young man, he did not like teaching. Not that he was indifferent to the youth: Jean-Christophe, Olivier and their friends – the heroes of his novels – are young people. But with living youths, like adults, Rolland only maintained distant relationships. He was above all 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 protested against the first World War in Au-dessus de la Mêlée (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.

In 1928 he 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 and the virtues of a natural, simple, vegetarian lifestyle.

He moved to the shores of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) to devote himself to writing. His life was interrupted by health problems, and by travels to art exhibitions. His voyage to Moscow (1935), on the invitation of Maxim Gorky, was an opportunity to meet Stalin, whom he considered the greatest man of his time.^{[citation needed]} Rolland served unofficially as ambassador of French artists to the Soviet Union.

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 December 30, 1944 in Vézelay.

[edit] Quotations

"If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India....For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with all its thousand branches and their millions of twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. It renews itself tirelessly showing no signs of decay." [1], Life of Ramakrishna

"The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe." [2], Life of Vivekananda.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Romain Rolland

• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1915
• Works by Romain Rolland at Project Gutenberg
• Sven Söderman on Rolland
• Association Romain Rolland
• Romain Rolland's thoughts on Vedanta