Balzac, Honoré de

Balzac, Honoré de, b 20 May 1799 in Tours, d 18 August 1850 in Paris. Eminent French realist writer, author of more than 100 novels in the series La Comédie humaine, which was intended as a vast epic of French life. Balzac twice visited Ukraine; these visits included a stay in Kyiv. In 1847 he stayed in the village of Verkhivnia in Volhynia on the estate of the Polish noblewoman E. Hanska, whom he married in Berdychiv in 1850. Balzac's travel notes on Ukraine appeared in his Lettre sur Kiew (1847, first published in 1927). The building in which he lived at Verkhivnia was made into a museum in 1959. Many of Balzac's works have been translated into Ukrainian, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Natan Rybak's novel Pomylka Onore Bal’zaka (Honoré de Balzac's Mistake) was filmed in 1969; the script was prepared by Mykola Ya. Zarudny.