Velká přátelství – Maritainová Raissa (2012)

Raissa Maritain (1883–1960), born Umancova, was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, into a Jewish family. After ten years, her parents emigrated with their daughters to Paris, where Raissa met her future husband Jacques Maritain while studying at the Sorbonne in 1901. The spiritual and intellectual development of the couple took place in close connection, as they jointly based their philosophical thinking on medieval philosophy and the thought of H. Bergson, whom they studied under. They also converted to Catholicism under the influence of L. Bloy. In their home in Meudon, they gathered a circle of spiritually close friends from cultural, philosophical, and church circles. In 1940, they emigrated to Canada and later lived in New York (in 1944, Charles de Gaulle appointed J. Maritain as ambassador to the Vatican; the Maritains spent the years 1945–1948 in Rome). This period of her life is addressed by Raissa Maritain in the present book (originally two volumes: New York 1941, 1944; first published in France in one volume: 1948), considered her most significant work. In it, she recalls her childhood in Mariupol, the emigration to France, her studies, her professional career, her conversion to Catholicism, the friends who accompanied her in life, and their shared life with...