Henri Troyat — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Henri Troyat was born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov in Moscow on 1 November (19 October, Old Style) 1911, into a wealthy merchant family. His father's family was Armenian, and in his autobiography he gave the original form of the surname as Torossian; his mother's ancestry included Circassian, Georgian and German lines.
After the Revolution the family left Moscow and made a long journey south, to the Caucasus and then the Crimea, crossing the Black Sea to Constantinople and travelling on by way of Venice before reaching Paris in 1920. There, like other Russian refugees, they held Nansen status. Lev was schooled in Paris, took a degree in law and, at twenty-two, became a French citizen, a step he later described as a declaration of love for the country that had adopted him.
His first novel, Faux Jour, appeared in 1935 under the pen name Henri Troyat and won the Prix du roman populiste; Le Vivier, Grandeur nature and La Clef de voûte followed in quick succession. In 1938, at twenty-seven, he received the Prix Goncourt for L'Araigne, becoming one of its youngest laureates. Over the next seven decades he published more than a hundred books, writing only in French. Many returned to Russia: the cycles Tant que la terre durera (1947–50), drawing on the family's flight, and La Lumière des justes (1959–62), as well as Le Moscovite and Aliocha. Les Semailles et les moissons (1953–58) and Les Eygletière (1965–67) depicted French society; he also wrote for the stage, beginning with Les Vivants (1946); and La Neige en deuil was filmed in English as The Mountain (1956).
He was equally known as a biographer, with lives of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev and Gorky, of Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander I, Alexander II, Nicholas II and Rasputin, and of Flaubert and Maupassant, and he wrote Daily Life in Russia Under the Last Tsar. In 1959, at forty-eight, he was elected to the Académie française, of which he became the longest-serving member. In 2001, as a former refugee, he was invited to address the National Assembly on the fiftieth anniversary of the Geneva Convention on refugees.
He died in Paris on 2 March 2007, aged ninety-five, and is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.
"The family left Moscow after the Revolution and travelled through the Caucasus, the Crimea and Constantinople, reaching Paris in 1920; he was naturalised French at twenty-two."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Moscow (Russia)
Born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov in Moscow in 1911 into a wealthy merchant family of Armenian descent, he left Russia with his family as a child after the Revolution, reaching Paris in 1920; much of his work returned to Russian subjects.
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Moscow (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"To write about Russia, I had to become French. Only from a distance can you see the whole."