Zoé Oldenbourg Explained

Birth Date:	31 March 1916
Birth Place:	Petrograd, Russia
Occupation:	Writer, historian
Nationality:	French
Genre:	Middle Ages, History of France, Crusades, Cathars

Zoé Oldenbourg (Russian: link=no|Зоя Сергеевна Ольденбург|Zoya Sergeyevna Oldenburg; 31 March 1916^[1] – 8 November 2002)^[2] was a Russian-born French popular historian and novelist who specialized in medieval French history, in particular the Crusades and Cathars.

Life

She was born in Petrograd, Russia into a family of scholars and historians. Her father Sergei was a journalist and historian, her mother Ada Starynkevich was a mathematician, and her grandfather Sergei was the permanent secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg.^[3] Her early childhood was spent among the privations of the Russian revolutionary period and the first years of communism. Her father fled the country and established himself as a journalist in Paris.

With her family, she emigrated to Paris in 1925 at the age of nine and graduated from the Lycée Molière in 1934 with her French: [[Baccalauréat]] diploma. She went on to study at the Sorbonne and then she studied painting at the Académie Ranson. In 1938 she spent a year in England^[4] and studied theology. During World War II she supported herself by hand-painting scarves.

She was encouraged by her father to write and she completed her first work, a novel, Argile et cendres in 1946. Although she wrote her first works in Russian, as an adult she wrote almost exclusively in French.^[5]

She married Heinric Idalovici in 1948^[6] and had two children, Olaf and Marie-Agathe.^[7]

Work

She combined a high level of scholarship with a deep feeling for the Middle Ages in her historical novels. Her first novel, The World is Not Enough, offered a panoramic view of the twelfth century. Her second, The Cornerstone, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in America. Other works include The Awakened, The Chains of Love, Massacre at Montsegur, Destiny of Fire, Cities of the Flesh, and Catherine the Great, a Literary Guild selection. In The Crusades, Zoe Oldenbourg returned to writing about the Middle Ages.^[8]

Awards

She won the Prix Femina for her 1953 novel La Pierre angulaire.

Works

Fiction

• Argile et cendres (1946), published in English as The World is Not Enough (translated by Willard A. Trask).
• La Pierre angulaire (1953), published in English as The Corner-stone (translated by Edward Hyams).
• Réveillés de la vie (1956), published in English as The Awakened (translated by Edward Hyams).
• Les Irréductibles (1958), published in English as The Chains of Love (translated by Michael Bullock).
• Les Brûlés (1960), published in English as Destiny of Fire (translated by Peter Green).
• Les Cités charnelles, ou L'Histoire de Roger de Montbrun (1961), published in English as Cities of the Flesh, or The Story of Roger de Montbrun (translated by Anne Carter).
• Catherine de Russie (1966), published in English as Catherine the Great (translated by Anne Carter).
• La Joie des pauvres (1970), published in English as The Heirs of the Kingdom (translated by Anne Carter).
• La Joie-souffrance (1980).
• Le Procès du rêve (1982).
• Les Amours égarées (1987).
• Déguisements (1989), short stories.

Non-fiction

• Le Bûcher de Montségur, 16 mars 1244 (1959), published in English as Massacre at Montségur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade (translated by Peter Green).
• Les Croisades (1965), published in English as The Crusades (translated by Anne Carter).
• Saint Bernard (1970), includes a selection of texts on Saint Bernard by Abélard, Pierre le Vénérable, Geoffroi de Clairvaux, Bérenger de Poitiers and Bossuet.
• L'Épopée des cathédrales (1972).
• Que vous a donc fait Israël ? (1974).
• Visages d'un autoportrait (1977), autobiography.
• Que nous est Hécube ?, ou Un plaidoyer pour l'humain (1984).

Plays

• L'Évêque et la vieille dame, ou La Belle-mère de Peytavi Borsier, pièce en dix tableaux et un prologue (1983).
• Aliénor, pièce en quatre tableaux (1992).

Further reading

• Steinberg, Theodore L., "The Use and Abuse of Medieval History: Four Contemporary Novelists and the First Crusade", Studies in Medievalism, II.1 (Fall 1982), pp. 77–93.
• Wilson, Katharina M., (editor), An Encyclopedia of continental women writers, New York : Garland Pub., 1991. . Cf. entry for Zoé Oldenbourg, Volume 1, pp.935–937.

External links

• Photograph of Zoé Oldenbourg at Babelio
• 1953 Press photograph of Zoé Oldenbourg

Notes and References

1. Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century: O to Z, Volume 3 (F. Ungar, 1971:), p. 11.
2. Histoires littéraires: Revue trimestrielle consacrée à la littérature française des XIXème et XXème siècles 4/13-14 (2003): 124.
3. Christiane P. Makward and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, Dictionnaire littéraire des femmes de langue française (KARTHALA Editions, 1996:), p. 448.
4. https://books.google.com/books?id=NlYqut4rJQMC&q=%C3%A9tudie+la+th%C3%A9ologie&pg=PA448 Dictionnaire littéraire...
5. Lucille Frackman Becker, Twentieth-Century French Women Novelists (Twayne Publishers, 1989:), p. 55.
6. Cf. Wilson, p.936
7. European Biographical Directory, vol. 2 (Editions Database, 1991), p. 1627.
8. Book: Oldenbourg, Zoé. The Crusades. Random House. 1966. New York, N.Y. the book jacket.