Colas Breugnon

The novella “Cola Brunyón” is the most famous book by Romain Rolland (1866–1944), translated into all cultural languages of the world—a great French writer and public figure, Nobel Prize laureate “for a high idealism in literary works, for sympathy and love of truth.”

An important detail: Rolland received the award in 1915, and he wrote the novella about the talented woodcarver, a lover of life and a rebel, Cola Brunyón, only three years later. That year, in the “sympathy” the Swedish Academy found in Rolland’s work, war-ravaged Europe needed, as never before, encouragement and rescue. And Cola Brunyón—the prankster—supported and saved many who had lost hope.

“It may be the most marvelous book of our days. One has to have a heart capable of creating miracles, to create in France, after the tragedies it has endured, such a buoyant book—an unshakable and courageous faith in one’s own kind person, a Frenchman. I bow to Romain Rolland precisely for this faith of his” (Maxim Gorky).