Nathalie Sarraute — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Nathalie Sarraute was born Natalia Ilinichna Tcherniak on 18 July 1900 (5 July, Old Style) in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a textile town north-east of Moscow, now Ivanovo; for much of her life she gave her birth year as 1902. Her father, Ilya Tcherniak, was a chemist and factory owner, and her mother, Pauline, née Chatounovsky, a writer; the family was Jewish and thoroughly assimilated.
Her parents divorced when she was two. She spent her early childhood moving between them, with her mother and stepfather in Paris and Russia and her father in Russia, Switzerland and France; her father emigrated and settled in Paris in 1909 or 1910. From then on she lived with him and his second wife in Paris, and French became her language. She described these years more than seventy years later in Enfance (1983).
She studied English at the Sorbonne, history at Oxford and sociology in Berlin, and in 1922 enrolled in the law faculty in Paris. In 1925 she married Raymond Sarraute, a fellow lawyer, with whom she had three daughters, and from 1926 to 1941 she practised at the Paris bar. She began writing in 1932. Her first book, Tropismes, a series of short prose pieces on the barely perceptible movements of feeling beneath ordinary conversation, appeared in 1939 to little notice. She left the bar in 1941, and during the German occupation, being of Jewish origin, she hid her identity, at one point posing as the governess of her own children.
After the war she published Portrait d'un inconnu (1948), for which Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a preface calling it an anti-novel. Her essays collected as L'Ère du soupçon (The Age of Suspicion, 1956) argued that the traditional novel, with its characters and plots, no longer fitted modern experience, and made her a leading figure of the nouveau roman. Her later novels include Martereau (1953), Le Planétarium (1959), Les Fruits d'or (1963) and Vous les entendez? (1972), and she wrote plays for radio and the stage.
Enfance became the most widely read of her books. In 1996 her complete works were published in the Pléiade during her lifetime, an honour granted to few authors. She died in Paris on 19 October 1999, aged ninety-nine.
Tracing the roots — Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Vladimir Governorate (now Ivanovo, Russia)
Born Natalia Tcherniak in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in 1900 into an assimilated Russian-Jewish family, she spent her early childhood between her divorced parents in Russia, Geneva and Paris, and from about 1909 lived with her father in Paris.
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Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Vladimir Governorate (now Ivanovo, Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Literature is the art of making the unsayable said."