Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 - December 30, 1944) was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian, and mystic who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings." He was a key Stalinist supporter in France, and he is also known for his correspondence with and effect on Sigmund Freud. Rolland was born in Clamecy, Nièvre, from a family that included both affluent townpeople and farmers. In his introspective Voyage intérieur (1942), he sees himself as a "antique species" representative. In Colas Breugnon (1919), he would play these forefathers. Accepted into the École Normale Supérieure in 1886, he initially studied philosophy, but his freedom of spirit drove him to forsake it in order to avoid submission to the prevalent ideology. In 1889, he got his bachelor's degree in history and spent two years in Rome, where he met Malwida von Meysenbug, a friend of Nietzsche and Wagner, and discovered Italian masterpieces that shaped his thinking.