Literary Portraits. In Search of the Beautiful

André Morua is a renowned French writer, a member of the French Academy, a classic of 20th-century French literature. His creative legacy is vast and multifaceted — psychological novels, short stories, travel essays, historical and literary studies, and more. But above all, Morua is a recognized master of romanticized biographies of Dumas, Balzac, Victor Hugo, and others. Therefore, the writer's appeal to the genre of literary portrait — a kind of mini-biography, a brief essay dedicated to a fellow colleague in the field — was not accidental. By organizing essays into cycles, Morua constructed his history of the development of literature. In this book, Morua pays much attention to his contemporaries — French writers André Gide, Romain Rolland, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Aragon, and others. However, there are sections dedicated to outstanding authors from other countries and eras — Herodotus, Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and others. Incredible erudition, precision of observations, and mastery of exposition allow Morua to splendidly convey the psychological and creative portraits of his heroes. This edition consists of two author collections — “From Gide to Sartre” and “From Aragon to Monterlan.” Most of the texts are published in Russian for the first time.