Violets on Wednesdays

Andre Maurois, a classic of 20th century French literature, a prose writer and essayist, an astonishing erudite, author of famous romanticized biographies of Dumas, Balzac, Hugo, Byron, Turgenev, Chopin and many others, is considered a true master of the psychological... novel; however, his favorite genre throughout his creative life remained the novella. The collection “Violets on Wednesdays,” which for many years was published in a shortened version in Russian, and which we invariably publish in full, includes Maurois's novellas from different years — true masterpieces of short prose, tinged with lyricism and subtle irony. In these texts, justly continuing the brilliant tradition of Balzac, Stendhal, and Maupassant, the denouement is always unexpected, the insight of judgments is at its height, and the human soul is revealed as a simple, yet wonderful and even exotic flower.