Raïssa Maritain (née Oumansoff) (September 12, 1883 in Rostov-on-Don – November 4, 1960 in Paris[1]) was a French poet and philosopher.
She was the wife of Jacques Maritain, with whom she worked and whose companion she was for more than half a century, at the center of a circle of French Catholic intellectuals.
Her parents were Ilya (Yuda) Oumansoff (Umantzov) (January 25, 1859 in Pavlohrad - February 21, 1912 in Paris) and Hissia (Gisya) Brozgol (December 29, 1859 in Rostov-on-Don - May 21, 1932 in France).
[2] She was deeply shaped by the piety and traditions of her observant family, especially by the example of her maternal grandfather Solomon (Zalman) Brozgol (1830 - March 11, 1896 in Rostov-on-Don).
The family emigrated to France, where Raïssa continued her education in a communal school in the Passage de la Bonne Graine.
However, their encounter with the arid materialism and all-encompassing determinism of their professors, especially Félix Le Dantec, brought them by 1901 to the brink of despair.So we decided to put our trust in the unknown for a while longer; we would extend credit to existence, look upon it as an experiment to be made, in the hope that at our vehement appeal the meaning of life would be revealed, that new values would stand forth so clearly that they would enlist our total adherence, and deliver us from the nightmare of a sinister and useless world.
She was diagnosed with retropharyngeal phlegmon, a disease that caused health problems that she would experience until the end of her life and which prevented her from having a regular occupation.
Henri Bergson's courses at the Collège de France, which Maritain and Raïssa began to attend on the advice of their good friend Charles Péguy, helped them to get out of this despair by enabling them to sense the existence of objective truth and "the very possibility of metaphysical work".
With the help of her husband Jacques and her sister Vera, she managed to find a balance between her prayer life and her place in the world.