Montherlant, Henry de

Montherlant, Henry (-Marie-Joseph-Millon) de

(born April 21, 1896, Paris, France—died Sept. 21, 1972, Paris) French novelist and dramatist. Born into a noble family, he wrote stylistically concise works that reflect his own egocentric and autocratic personality. His major work of fiction is a cycle of four novels (1936–39) translated as The Girls, which describes the relationship between a libertine novelist and his adoring female victims. In the 1940s he turned to theatre; his best dramatic works include Malatesta (1946), Port-Royal (1954), and La Guerre civile (1965).

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Montherlant, Henry de 

Born Apr. 21, 1896, in Paris; died there Sept. 21, 1972. French writer. Member of the Academic Française (1960).

Montherlant studied at the Sainte-Croix Institute in Neuilly. His early works were influenced by M. Barres. Montherlant’s novels The Matador (1926) and The Bachelors (1934; Russian translation, 1936), which reflect his enthusiasm for sports, and especially his tetralogy The Girls (1936), Pity for Women (1936), Costals and the Hippogriff (I937), and The Lepers (1939) show him to be, like F. Nietzsche, an adherent of extreme egocentricity and intransigence toward human weaknesses.

During the fascist occupation of France, Montherlant came to justify Hitlerite policy and the French collaboration as in The June Solstice (1941). In his dramas The Dead Queen (1942), No Man’s Son(\943), Ma la testa (1946), and Le Cardinal d’Espagne (1960), he expressed his support of a strong political authority, for which the masses are only passive and inert material.

WORKS

Romans et oeuvres de fiction. Paris, 1959.
Théatre. Paris, 1954.
Essais. [Paris, 1963.]
Un Assassin est mon mattre. [Paris, 1971.]

REFERENCES

Istoriia frantsuzskoi literatury, vol. 4. Moscow, 1963.
Perruchot, H. Montherlant [4th ed. Paris, 1959.]
Blanc, A. Montherlant [Paris, 1968.] (Contains bibliography.)
“H. de Montherlant. “Nouvelle revue franca ise, February 1973, no. 242, pp. 1–126. (Issue devoted to Montherlant.) [Obituary.] L’Humanite, Sept. 23, 1972.
Les Critiques de notre temps et Montherlant. Paris [1973].

V. P. BOL’SHAKOV