MAROIS, André (1885-1967) - Relativisme - 1930

MAROIS, André (1885-1967). Relativism.

Paris, Editions Kra, collection “Vingtième Siècle”, 1930

194 pp.

Rare original edition enriched by a dedication from André Maurois on the flyleaf. The autograph dedication in blue ink is addressed to docteur Léon Binet.
« Pour le Docteur Léon Binet / qui semble avoir très bien […] / en toute sympathie / André Maurois ».
The recipient is Léon René Binet (1891-1971), a French physician and physiologist, a prominent figure in Parisian medicine in the twentieth century. The inclusion of a dedication to a doctor is particularly coherent with the book’s tone, in which Maurois reflects, with literary and philosophical aim, on relativism, perception, modern science, and the condition of man in the early twentieth century.
André Maurois, pseudonym later adopted as his legal name of Émile Herzog, was born in Elbeuf in 1885 and died in Paris in 1967. A novelist, essayist, biographer, and historian, he was famous for his ability to fuse narrative clarity with psychological analysis; his first success, "Les silences du colonel Bramble" of 1918, arose from his experience as a liaison officer with the British Army during World War I. Britannica most notably notes him as a biographer capable of keeping the pace and interest of novelistic storytelling in the lives of great figures. In 1938 he was elected to the Académie Française, where he remained for nearly thirty years.
Relativisme belongs to the mature and brilliant phase of Maurois’s production, an author already established in the twenties with Ariel, Climats, Bernard Quesnay, and the biographies of English writers. The volume situates itself in the interwar intellectual climate, when the notion of “relativity” had ceased to belong only to physics and had become a moral, psychological, and literary category: changing viewpoints, instability of certainties, crisis of the absolute, the relationship between science and inner life.

Petit in-8 oblong (195 x 210 mm), beige soft cover printed in black and red. A fair margins copy, uncut and in the bindings, on Hollande paper. Original edition, fourth volume of the “Vingtième Siècle” collection. Copy no. 118 of 200 in total, belonging to the deluxe issue on Hollande after the first 100 copies on Arches wove paper. Perfect condition, interior very fresh.

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