Troyat, Henri (1911–2007)

Russian-born French writer. His works, numbering more than 100, include novels and political and literary biographies. His novels L'Araignée/The Web (1938) won the Prix Goncourt and La neige en deuil/The Snow of Sorrow (1952) was adapted to the popular film The Mountain in 1956.

Tarassoff was born in Moscow, but his family moved to Paris in 1920 after the Russian Revolution, and many of his books draw on his Russian background. He published his first novel in 1934. Tant que la Terre durera/My Father's House (1947–50), a trilogy, is a historical saga of a White Russian family from 1905 until its exile in France after the Revolution; and the five-part Les Semailles et les moissons/The Seed and the Fruit (1953–58) tells the story of a family in the Corrèze département from the end of World War I to the liberation from the Nazis in 1944. Troyat wrote biographies of the writers Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nicolai Gogol, and Leo Tolstoy, and of the Russian rulers Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, and Ivan the Terrible. He was elected to the French Academy in 1959.