Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz

Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (born Sept. 24, 1878, Cully, Switz.—died May 23, 1947, Pully, near Lausanne) was a Swiss novelist whose realistic, poetic, and somewhat allegorical stories of man against nature made him one of the most prominent French-Swiss writers of the 20th century.

A city boy, heir to a refined, middle-class culture, Ramuz nonetheless chose to write about rustic people in a language deliberately simple and earthy. Before World War I he spent a few years in Paris, associated with its painters and poets, and struck up a friendship with the composer Igor Stravinsky, for whom he wrote the text of Histoire du soldat (1918; The Soldier’s Tale). But he was untouched by Parisian literary fashions when he returned to Switzerland.

Ramuz wrote his best-remembered works between his 40th and 60th years. His representative theme is of mountaineers, farmers, or villagers fighting heroically but often tragically against catastrophe or the force of myth. In La Grande Peur dans la montagne (1925; Terror on the Mountain), young villagers challenge fate by grazing their cattle on a mountain pasture despite a curse that hangs over it; and the reader shares their panic and final despair. Among his other works are La Beauté sur la terre (1927; Beauty on Earth) and Derborence (1934; When the Mountain Fell).