Gabriel Michel Hippolyte Matzneff (born 12 August 1936) is a French writer. He was the winner of the Mottard and Amic awards from the Académie française in 1987 and 2009 respectively, the Prix Renaudot essay in 2013 and the Prix Cazes in 2015.
Matzneff described his pedophilia and child sex tourism in some of his books and on his website, and even in television appearances. Despite this, he remained sheltered from prosecution throughout his literary career, benefiting from wide and enthusiastic support within French literary circles despite the fact his books did not sell well among the general public.
In February 2020, following intense media coverage of a recently published book by Vanessa Springora, one of his victims, French prosecutors announced that a criminal investigation had been launched, though the statute of limitations meant the case was dismissed.
Biography
Family, youth and education
Matzneff came from a family of Russian émigrés who settled in France after 1917. According to information available on his official website, "his parents divorced when he was six months old; throughout his childhood, he never saw them in the same room, and would often be separated from his sister Alexandra and his brothers André and Nicolas. His mother was Jewish, while his father was Russian. He was raised in Russian Orthodoxy. It was a childhood tossed to and fro, overshadowed by family breakdowns and war. It was a childhood which still causes him very painful memories."
His family raised him in a refined cultural environment, rubbing shoulders with such famous Russian figures as Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev. It is here he discovered literature and religion. Matzneff spent a year attending the Gerson private Catholic school (1943–44), two in Lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague (1944–46), then moved to a school in Tannenberg from between 1946 and 1952, and from 1952 attended Lycée Carnot. In 1954 he commenced his studies on classical letters and philosophy at the Sorbonne. After completing his military service in Algeria between 1959 and 1960, Matzneff returned to Paris in 1961. He enrolled as a Russian speaker at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales and began a career as a journalist.
He met fellow pedophile Henry de Montherlant in June 1957 and remained his friend, in spite of quarrels, until de Montherlant's suicide in 1972.
He began to keep his diary on 1 August 1953 but did not publish it until 1976. In the first volume, he vowed himself to be a rebel sentimental libertine: "I was Athos, the great misanthrope lord, secret, different...".
Literary career
In October 1962, the publication director of Combat, who had noticed his work, asked him to write a column for his daily. During the following decades, Matzneff was to be a regular or occasional columnist for several newspapers and magazines of all political stripes, including Le Quotidien de Paris, Le Figaro and Le Monde. From 2013 to December 2019, he kept an irregular column on the web edition of Le Point.
In October 1964 he took part in the founding congress of the Coordinating Committee of Orthodox youth, where he met the high school student Tatiana Scherbatcheff. He married her on 8 January 1970 in London before divorcing on 3 March 1973. This divorce caused him a crisis of faith which moved him away from the Church; he then left the Committee and ceased co-production of the television program Orthodoxy which he had helped to create in May 1965.
His first book, Le Défi, a collection of essays, was published in 1965. The following year he published his first novel, L'Archimandrite, which he had begun writing during his military service. During the 1970s, he made a number of trips to the Middle East as well as to Poland and the Soviet Union. During the 1980s, he made several trips to the Philippines where, as he described in one of his books, he raped pre-adolescent boys that he had picked up at Harrison Plaza, Manilla's main shopping center.
The critic Pol Vandromme wrote in 1974 that he was "the most notable writer of his generation".
In 1990, Matzneff joined Gallimard with the help of Philippe Sollers, who published his 1979–1982 collection of diary entries, "Les Soleils révolus". Gallimard paid monthly royalties to Matzneff until 2004.