Stil, André

Born Apr. 1, 1921, in Hergnies, in the Nord department. French writer and publicist. Member of the French Communist Party since 1942.

Stil graduated from the University of Lille with the degree of licentiate in literature and philosophy. He took part in the Resistance Movement. From 1945 to 1949 he was a journalist and was also active in party work. He was editor in chief of the newspaper L’Humanité from 1950 to 1959 and was later its literary reviewer. Between 1950 and 1969 he was often elected an alternate member and a full member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party.

Stil’s first collections of short stories, The Word “Miner,” Comrades (1949) and The Seine Has Cone Out to the Sea (1950; Russian translation, 1951), reflected conditions in France after World War II, as well as the solidarity of the working people in defending their rights and in opposing the colonial war in Indochina. In the trilogy The First Clash (1951–53; Russian translation, 1952–54; State Prize of the USSR, 1952, for part 1), Stil described the peace movement and the patriotic struggle of the French against the establishment of American military bases in their country.

In 1952, Stil’s book of literary criticism Toward Socialist Realism appeared. His subsequent works have constituted the cycle The Question of Happiness Has Been Raised, which reflects such aspects of contemporary life as the unjust war in Algeria, the reorientation of the consciousness of French youth, and the overcoming of a sense of national discord. The works forming the cycle include the novels We Shall Love One Another Tomorrow (1957; Russian translation, 1959), The Collapse (1960; Russian translation, 1961), and The Last Quarter Hour (1962; Russian translation, 1967). The moral development of a young man in a workers’ milieu is dealt with in Let’s Dance, Violine (1964; Russian translation, 1973), and the alienation between an engineer and a worker under capitalism is the subject of André (1965). Other works in the cycle deal with the dignity of labor and the strength of workers’ solidarity, including Handsome as Man (1968), Who? (1969), and the short-story collections Pain (1961; Russian translation, 1962), View of the Sky (1967), and Flowers by Mistake (1973).