Chamson, Andre

Chamson, André 

Born June 6, 1900, in Nîmes, Gard Department. French writer. Member of the Académie Franchise (1956). Participant in the Resistance.

Chamson graduated from the faculty of letters of the University of Paris. In his early novels, such as Roux, the Bandit (1925) and The Men of the Road (1927; Russian translation under the title People From the Mountains, 1937), Chamson showed himself to be an acute observer of social change in the French countryside.

During the 1930’s, Chamson took part in the struggle of the Popular Front and wrote the antifascist books The Year of the Vanquished (1934; Russian translation, 1936) and The Galley (1939); he also produced a series of essays about republican Spain. The novel The Well of Miracles (1943, published 1945; Russian translation, 1947) is filled with loathing for occupiers and traitors.

Chamson focused on the spiritual degeneration of man in the bourgeois world in The Man Who Walked Before Me (1948) and continued his sharp criticism of social mores in the novel The Snow and The Flower (1951). His novels The Meeting of Hopes (1961) and The Magnificent Woman (1967) were received sympathetically by French democratic critics. Chamson’s book The Sum of Our Days (1954) is autobiographical.

WORKS

La Tour de Constance. Paris, 1971.
In Russian translation:
”Eto nekhoroshii adres.” Znamia, 1967, no. 3.
”Po griby.” In Frantsuzskaia novella 20 v 1900–1939. [Moscow, 1973.]

REFERENCES

Istoriia frantsuzskoi literatury, vol. 4. Moscow, 1963.
Rolfe, L. The Novels of A. Chamson. New York [1971].

M. N. VAKSMAKHER