Books: Death on the Mountain

THE MOUNTAIN (122 pp.) — Henri Troyat—Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

Leon Tarasov was born in Moscow in 1911, but like a lot of other White Russians, he and his family wound up in Paris. The boy took to his adopted language like a Cossack to vodka, and under the name of Henri Troyat, became a successful young writer. Although he wrote brilliant biographies of Dostoevsky and Pushkin, his specialty has been winning the top French prizes for fiction. At 24 he took the Roman Populiste, at 27 the Prix Goncourt. Then the stuffy French Academy...