Henri Troyat:Henri Troyat, who has died at the age of 95, was one of the most prolific and popular French writers of the 20th century. The author of short psychological novels, long, multi- volume historical frescos, short stories, plays, reportage and biographies, he had a literary career that spanned 70 years and was particularly distinctive for its blend of French and Russian cultures.
Troyat was born Lev Aslanovich Tarassov in Moscow, the son of a wealthy Armenian draper who had made a fortune through investment in railways and banking. He was brought up in a privileged environment, with a coachman, a chauffeur and, most significantly, a Swiss governess who taught him French. All this came to an end, however, when the Russian revolution broke out in 1917.
Initially, the family retreated to their estate in the Caucasus to await the collapse of Bolshevik rule; but by 1920 it was clear that the counter-revolution was failing and that they would have to leave their homeland. They managed to catch the last emigre boat from the Crimea to Constantinople, from where they joined the exiled Russian community in Paris, settling in the prosperous suburb of Neuilly, where Troyat attended the Lycée Pasteur.
Like many Russian exiles, however, the family found life in the west difficult and drifted slowly into debt, culminating with the arrival of the bailiffs and an enforced move to the Place de la Nation.
Although his parents experienced the classic problems of once-wealthy emigres - loss of status, isolation and a growing reliance on an unreal Russian community, still transfixed by a belief in the imminent downfall of the Soviet regime - Troyat himself adapted quickly to his new environment. True, the themes of exile and political caution remain powerful in his fiction, but he studied law at the Sorbonne, acquired French citizenship in 1933, and was appointed as a civil servant in the prefecture of the Seine, a post he held until 1942.
At the same time, he began a literary career with a series of short psychological novels, which derived a great deal from his attendance at lectures on psychoanalysis at the Sainte-Anne Hospital. Faux Jour (Deceptive Light) appeared in 1935 and immediately won the Prix du Roman Populiste. It was followed that same year by Le Vivier (The Fish-Tank), by Grandeur Nature (Life-Size, 1936) and La Clef de Voûte (The Keystone, 1937). In 1938, he won both the Prix Max Barthou de l'Académie Française and the Prix Goncourt for the novel L'Araigne (The Web).
Thus by the age of 27, Troyat was a well-known and relatively prosperous writer, although his parents' experience had taught him caution and he retained his post in the prefecture. With the outbreak of the second World War, Troyat was mobilised as a lieutenant in the supply section at Tulle and returned to Paris in 1940 - at which point his career took a major shift. Although he continued with his short psychological fiction - such as La Neige en Deuil (Snow in Mourning, 1952) - he embarked on two major innovations that would dominate his subsequent work: the long novel cycle and biography.
Immediately after the completion of L'Araigne, he had begun preparing for a biography of Dostoevsky. Not only did this introduce him to the work of archival research, which was to prove invaluable for his historical fiction, it initiated a sequence of biographies of Russian writers and tsars.
This continued to develop until his death and included studies of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol and Chekhov, together with works on Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Alexander I and Ivan the Terrible. Troyat's biographies were major achievements, not least because they brought to the attention of a broad French public an introduction to Russian literary and political culture.
The historical material developed in Troyat's biographies fed into a series of long historical novels, mostly based in Russia, which together constitute a fictional bio-graphy of the nation. Beginning with his own experiences of exile, assimilation and the memories of his parents, Troyat devoted a trilogy, Tant que la Terre Durera (While the Earth Endures, 1947-50), to pre-revolutionary Russia, the revolution and civil war, and the phenomenon of exile. Then, in its pendant tetralogy, Les Semailles et les Moissons (The Seed and the Fruit, 1953-58), he explored France from the same perspective - the novels were made into a popular French television series of the same name in 2001.
These long novel-cycles were followed by La Lumière des Justes (The Light of the Just, 1959-63), Les Eygletière (The Eygletière Family, 1965-67), Les Héritiers de l'Avenir (The Inheritors of the Future, 1968-70) and Le Moscovite (1974-76). It could be argued that few French writers have done so much to make historical Russia real to a mass French readership.
However, as impressive as the short novels, novel cycles and biographies are, it is probably in his short stories that Troyat demonstrates the most originality and skill. Heavily influenced by Gogol and by the German romantics, collections such as La Fosse Commune (The Common Grave, 1939), Du Philanthrope à la Rouquine (From the Philanthropist to the Redhead, 1945) and Le Geste d'Eve (The Story of Eve, 1964) blend light social satire with a genuinely disturbing sense of the fantastic and evil.
Troyat eventually abandoned his civil-service post in 1942 and devoted himself full time to literature for the rest of his life. His early achievement in combining critical recognition with commercial success continued throughout his career: in the 1950s, he became one of France's first best-sellers, and in 1959, at the age of 47, he was elected to the Académie Française.
His second wife predeceased him, and he is survived by a son from his first marriage.
Henri Troyat (Lev Aslanovich Tarassov): born November 1st, 1911; died March 4th, 2007