Jacques Schiffrin (1892–1950)

Jacques Schiffrin was born to a prosperous, non-practicing Jewish family in Baku, Azerbaijan, then part of the Russian Empire. He graduated with a law degree from the University of Geneva, and then fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1922, he moved to Paris, where he put his passionate love for literature into founding Les Éditions de la Pléiade. This firm published elegant and affordable editions of literary classics as well as promoting new authors who were shaping intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. The first book published was the first volume of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire in 1931. Schiffrin himself translated Russian authors such as Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky into French. He also befriended many great writers of this period, in particular André Gide, who pushed Gaston Gallimard to integrate the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade as an imprint of Gallimard in 1933. Schiffrin then became the first director of this collection. Schiffrin was called up by the French Army in 1939, but after the defeat of France and the invasion of Nazi Germany in 1940, he fled to the USA with his family. He settled in New York City, where he established Pantheon Books with the German émigré couple Helen and Kurt Wolff, and continued to publish important authors. He wanted to return to France, but never could. Schiffrin was married from 1921 to 1927 to the French pianist Youra Guller. He remarried to Simone Heymann, with whom he had two children, including the influential editor André Schiffrin.