Romain Rolland 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".
24 Facts About Romain Rolland
2.
Romain Rolland was a leading supporter of Joseph Stalin in France and is noted for his correspondence with and influence on Sigmund Freud.
3.
Romain Rolland would cast these ancestors in Colas Breugnon.
4.
Romain Rolland was strongly influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of India, primarily through the works of Swami Vivekananda.
5.
Romain Rolland was not indifferent to youth: Jean-Christophe, Olivier and their friends, the heroes of his novels, are young people.
6.
Romain Rolland was one of the few major French writers to retain his pacifist internationalist values; he moved to Switzerland.
7.
In 1932 Romain Rolland was among the first members of the World Committee Against War and Fascism, organized by Willi Munzenberg.
8.
Romain Rolland criticized the control Munzenberg assumed over the committee and was against it being based in Berlin.
9.
Romain Rolland moved to Villeneuve, on the shores of Lake Geneva to devote himself to writing.
10.
Romain Rolland's life was interrupted by health problems, and by travels to art exhibitions.
11.
Romain Rolland's visit to Moscow, on the invitation of Maxim Gorky, was an opportunity to meet Joseph Stalin, whom he considered the greatest man of his time.
12.
Romain Rolland served unofficially as ambassador of French artists to the Soviet Union.
13.
Romain Rolland 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.
14.
Romain Rolland placed the finishing touches on his musical research on the life of Ludwig van Beethoven.
15.
Romain Rolland was a disciple of Pottecher and dedicated The People's Theatre to him.
16.
Romain Rolland's approach is more aggressive, though, than Pottecher's poetic vision of theatre as a substitute 'social religion' bringing unity to the nation.
17.
Romain Rolland indicts the bourgeoisie for its appropriation of the theatre, causing it to slide into decadence, and the deleterious effects of its ideological dominance.
18.
In proposing a suitable repertoire for his people's theatre, Romain Rolland rejects classical drama in the belief that it is either too difficult or too static to be of interest to the masses.
19.
Romain Rolland believed that the people would be improved by seeing heroic images of their past.
20.
Romain Rolland's dramas have been staged by some of the most influential theatre directors of the twentieth century, including Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator.
21.
Romain Rolland became a history teacher at Lycee Henri IV, then at the Lycee Louis le Grand, and member of the Ecole francaise de Rome, then a professor of the History of Music at the Sorbonne, and History Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure.
22.
In 1899 Romain Rolland started what became a voluminous correspondence with the German composer Richard Strauss.
23.
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 Romain Rolland requesting his help on this project.
24.
Romain Rolland would remain a major influence on Freud's work, continuing their correspondence right up to Freud's death in 1939.