Roland’s life was wholly devoted to creativity, and for him creativity was both a means of self-expression and an act—struggle. Roland wrote for those who stood at the head of armies on the march, for the people. And the people remember and honor Romain Rolland, the writer who, as he put it himself, went down the road—winding upward—with all the most advanced of humankind.
In the novel, with great fullness, is reflected the path of the author’s ideological searching after the First World War and the revolutionary outcome of these searches. In this narrative he embodied the most important life processes of the era: the death of the old world and the birth of the new. He recreated the paths and crossroads of Western intellectuals seeking the truth—their errors and breakthroughs toward truth, their defeats and victories.
The novel “The Enchanted Soul” is the pinnacle of Romain Rolland’s work. The novel’s central problem is the paths and fates of French intellectuals.
The artistic-philosophical axis of the cycle is the interaction between the heroes’ inner world and the external circumstances of their existence. The author gives priority not to depicting events in the heroes’ lives, but to analyzing their spiritual universe.