Henri Troyat

Henri Troyat, born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov in Moscow in 1911 and died in Paris in 2007, was a novelist, biographer and historian who wrote in French. Of Russian and Armenian background, he became one of the most widely read French authors of the twentieth century. His long family novels and his biographies of Russian figures remain a common entry point for readers who want to learn about tsarist and revolutionary Russia.

His family left Russia after the 1917 revolution. Their long flight took them through the Caucasus and Crimea, then by sea to Istanbul and Venice, before they settled in Paris around 1920. There the young Lev went to school and took a law degree. He won a popular fiction prize at twenty-four and the Prix Goncourt at twenty-seven for The Spider (1938), a psychological novel in the intimate tradition of French fiction. He later turned to the fantastic in short stories, such as The Common Grave (1939).

After the war he devoted himself to large cycles of novels. While the Earth Endures (1947-1950) follows a Russian family from 1888 to 1939, with revolutionaries, loyalists to the tsar and opportunists set against one another. The Light of the Just (1959-1963) traces a young Russian officer through the first half of the twentieth century, while The Sowing and the Reaping (1953-1958) and The Heirs of the Future (1958) portray modern society through French families. His manner is realist: he patiently details the everyday life of his characters.

An admirer of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Zola and Balzac, he wrote substantial biographies of all four, as well as of Gogol, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Nicholas II and Nicholas I. He published at a remarkable pace, often two thick volumes a year. His last novel, La traque, appeared in 2006. He was elected to the Académie française in 1959 and, at his death, was its longest-serving member.

His legacy lies mainly in popular history. He brought Russian history to a broad readership and blended the family saga with historical biography. Critics have judged his work unevenly, but it is still read as a door into that world.