Literary Portraits: Wizards and Magicians

André Maurois is a renowned French writer, a member of the French Academy, and 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, Maurois is a recognized master of romanticized biographies (Dumas, Balzac, Victor Hugo, etc.). Therefore, the writer's appeal to the genre of literary portrait – a kind of mini-biography, a brief essay about one of his colleagues – was not accidental. This book by Maurois is entirely dedicated to English literature, the specifics of its development, which resulted in the emergence of such world-famous writers as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Herbert Wells, and Bernard Shaw. Maurois, who wrote these essays in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, was concerned about the influence of English authors on all European literature and the fate of the creative heritage of his contemporaries – Lytton Strachey, Katherine Mansfield, David Herbert Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Many texts are published in Russian for the first time.