SELECTED LETTERS OF ROMAIN ROLLAND

Edited by FRANCIS DORE and MARIE-LAURE PREVOST

1990, 139pp., index, ISBN: 0-19-562551-x, Rs 125 (HB) 

This selection of letters of Romain Rolland, many of which are published here for the first time, was presented on the occasion of the Festival of France in India. They recall the privileged dialogue between India and the French writer. Attentive to the messages of other cultures, Rolland assigned himself the role of a sort of archway linking together the minds of men and women, of people and races and particularly between Asia and Europe.

Addressed to a wide range of correspondents from Leo Tolstoy to Albert Schweitzer, Paul Seippel, Pastor Louis Ferriere and Barbusse, the theme of “Oppressive Violence of Human Society” is the unifying thread. The correspondences with Nehru, Tagore and Gandhi represent a gradual transition, from intensity to a quite fluid probing into the nature of man, the creative process and the place of the socially responsible citizen in the modern world, along with an inner life of reflection. Even in these few letters, all of the mt.Yor movements and issues of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth century are laid before us.