Roger Martin du Gard French writer, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature Date of Birth: 23.03.1881 Country: France

Biography of Roger Martin du Gard

Roger Martin du Gard was a French writer and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1937. Unlike many French novelists, such as Andre Gide, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Erard, whose prose was often judged by critics based on their membership in the Communist Party, Martin du Gard was not a member of this organization.

Martin du Gard was born during the Third Republic in 1881 and lived until the Fifth Republic in 1958. He witnessed the ups and downs of French republicanism throughout his lifetime. In 1922, the same year Marcel Proust passed away, Martin du Gard embarked on a series of family novels, intending to write them one after another. Initially, he did not have any grandiose plans for an epic narrative. However, by the time the six-volume chronicle "The Thibaults" was finally completed in 1940, the author was already a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"The Thibaults" is an extensive and magnificent novel that is impressively written. Martin du Gard consciously wrote a family saga spanning three generations, focusing solely on the family narrative without introducing any side plots. The character of Oscar Thibault is particularly impressive; he is not a Balzacian nouveau riche with remnants of demonism and romanticism but a Montecristo-like Jean Valjean who miraculously becomes wealthy. Equally compelling is the character of Jacques Thibault, the heir to his father's fortune, a cultural connoisseur and intellectual of early 20th-century France, whose illusions are shattered by the First World War.

"The Thibaults" is one of those books whose monumental size should not deter readers who seek a coherent understanding of the European novel. The subtleties of postmodernism and non-linear writing rest on the strong foundation of such creations. The so-called critical realism, in its highest manifestations, is the art of representing reality through the eyes of a person free from ideological phantoms. "The Thibaults" by Roger Martin du Gard is a book created in that brief historical moment when the experience of the golden age of European culture had already been assimilated, and the destructive experience of the 20th century had not yet taken on its all-encompassing character.