Les Héritiers de l’avenir
One of 85 copies on Lana vellum (no. 166).
The trilogy comprises: Le Cahier, Cent un coups de canon and L'Éléphant blanc.
From the Napoleonic Wars to the dawn of the twentieth century: through the story of a young, high-born French émigré and that of a former serf and his master caught up in the upheaval of the abolition of serfdom and finding themselves in Paris, Henri Troyat traces a century of Russian history. Across two novel sequences and the paradoxical destinies of his characters, he explores “the mysterious bonds of affinity and culture that unite, beyond centuries and regimes, two countries as seemingly dissimilar as Russia and France.”
“With this creative abundance, this conscientious craftsmanship, this method and regularity of finished work that make him one of our two or three most prolific and most widely read novelists, Henri Troyat, having barely completed the Eygletière trilogy, has begun a new fresco, to be titled Les Héritiers de l’avenir (…). The Russian world at the beginning of the reign of Alexander II is well studied, shown from two angles: the life of nobles and peasants in the countryside, and the intellectual and moral climate in Moscow” (Pierre-Henri Simond, review in Le Monde, 11 May 1968).
A fine copy.