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"Lors du premier conflit mondial, les États ont manifesté une telle barbarie que la coopération des cultures, aux yeux de Romain Rolland, est seule capable de faire émerger une nouvelle humanité. Les nombreuses correspondances entre l'écrivain et ses amis indiens, ses études consacrées à Ramakrishna et Vivekananda, les visites dans sa villa de Villeneuve en Suisse, d'hôte prestigieux tels Tagore et Gandhi, constituent les conditions idéales d'un échange sans équivalent dans l'histoire littéraire du XXe siècle entre l'Europe et l'Inde. Ainsi se développe un échange fructueux dont le présent volume aborde les différentes expressions tant au plan culturel et politique que religieux et social. En observant un respect mutuel, le dialogue entre les continents indien et européen fait ainsi apparaître des rapports de complémentarité dans lesquels deux mondes unis montrent le chemin à suivre pour l'avenir"-- From his years of training at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Rolland became interested in the religions of Asia, which he discovered in French and German Romanticism. The theme of the Orient is several times addressed in Jean-Christophe. Very involved after the war in the East-West debate, Rolland is interested in Mohandas K. Gandhi and his satyagraha as a non-violent means of liberation of peoples. Following the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore, the writer is even tempted by the journey to the "high plateaus of the Himalayas", "cradle of Humanity" in his eyes. Dialogue with the East must enable Europe to emerge from the darkness into which the war has plunged it and to reconcile the "two hemispheres" of the spirit, even if rationalism and spiritualism do not intersect the two geographical continents. His universalist profession of faith made him relate Hindu mysticism (Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda) and the mysticism of the Christians of Europe (Master Eckhart, St. John of the Cross); The Brahmo Samaj realized the religious revival he called for when he evoked in Jean-Christophe the "small legion of the modernists" of the Catholic Church. His convictions as a committed intellectual do not then contradict the assertion of the power of the spiritual forces ("The Annunciator," the last part of the Enchanted Soul ). The expectation of the Grand Soir is merged with the hope of an ideal city built by faith in the brotherhood of men, that of the neo-vedanta, but also Leo Tolstoy and Walt Whitman, or the American transcendentalists Such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau--Resume from Calenda : translate.google.com/translate
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