Prolific
and popular French novelist and biographer Henri Troyat, a member of
the French Academy for almost half a century, was also of Armenian
origin, even though he had little connection to Armenian life.
He was born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov on November 1, 1911, in Moscow. His last name was the Russianized form of
Torosian,
and
his maternal grandfather was of Armenian-Georgian mixed descent. His
father was a wealthy Armenian draper who had made a fortune through
investment in railways and banking. His privileged environment included a
Swiss governess who taught him French. When the Soviet Revolution broke
in 1917, the family retreated to their estate in the Caucasus, but the
failure of the counter-revolutionary movement forced them to catch the
last émigré boat from Crimea to Constantinople in 1920. From
Constantinople, they traveled with passports of the Republic of Armenia
to France and joined the exiled Russian community in Paris. They settled
in the prosperous suburb of Neuilly, where young Lev attended the Lycée
Pasteur. The family found exile life difficult and was forced to move
to the city, where Lev Tarasov studied law at the Sorbonne. He would
once say: “Success means nothing. I know what I'm talking about: at the
very beginning of my life, I saw my parents lose everything in a
reversal of fortune, and I kept that lesson in mind.”
He
would never return to Russia, even after the fall of the Soviet Union,
claiming that he wanted to keep alive the imaginary country he had
created out of childhood memories and dreams. He acquired French
citizenship in 1933, and departed to Metz to complete his mandatory
military service. He was still under arms when he published his first
novel,
False Light,
in 1935, which obtained the Prix du Roman Populiste, under the pseudonym Henri Troyat.
After
returning from military service, the writer was appointed as a civil
servant in the prefecture of the Seine. He continued his literary
career, publishing a series of short psychological novels. In 1938 his
fifth novel,
The Web,
earned
him both the Prix Max Barthou of the French Academy and the very
prestigious Prix Goncourt. He was mobilized with the outbreak of World
War II and returned to Paris in 1940.
At this point Troyat’s career took a major shift. He continued with his short psychological fiction--his novel
Snow in Mourning
(1952) was filmed with Spencer Tracy in 1956 as
The Mountain
—but
his subsequent work was dominated by two major innovations: the long
novel cycle and biography. In 1942 he left his civil service job to
devote himself entirely to literature. He married twice; he had a son
from his marriage, which ended in divorce, and later married a widow,
the love of his life, with a young daughter whom he raised as his own.
He
initiated a whole series of biographies of Russian writers (Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Leon Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, and Anton
Chekhov) and tsars (Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Alexander I,
and Ivan the Terrible). These works brought an introduction to Russian
literary and political culture to the French public. The historical
research became the grounds for a series of historical novels, mostly
based in Russia. Troyat devoted the trilogy
While the Earth Endures
(1947-1950)
to prerevolutionary Russia, the revolution, the civil war, and the
exile, and then explored France from the same perspective in the
tetralogy
The Seed and the Fruit
(1953-1958),
which became a popular French television series in 2001. These cycles
of novels were followed by other multivolume novels from the late 1950s
to the mid-1970s. He would have more than a hundred literary works in
his count, including novels, short stories, biographies, and plays.
Troyat
became one the first French best-sellers, combining critical
recognition with commercial success. In 1952 he won the Grand Prix
Littéraire du Prince Pierre de Monaco. Seven years later, on May 21,
1959, at the age of forty-seven, he was inducted into the French
Academy. Intriguingly, he sat on seat number 28, which had previously
belonged to Claude Farrere, a novelist well-known for his pro-Turkish
stances. He became the most long-standing member of the group of forty
“immortals” who safeguard the French language. He would later earn a
series of state decorations, including the Grand Cross of the Legion of
Honor, the highest ranking in France.
Henri Troyat published his last novel,
The Hunt,
in 2006, at the age of ninety-five. He passed away on March 2, 2007.
