Roland Holst-van der Schalk, Henriëtte

Born Dec. 24, 1869, in Noordwijk; died Nov. 28, 1952, in Amsterdam. Dutch socialist and writer.

In 1897, Roland Hoist-van der Schalk joined the Social Democratic Labor Party (SDLP) and the editorial staff of the monthly journal of theory De Nieuwe Tijd. From 1907 to 1909 she edited the Dutch left-wing newspaper De Tribune, but she later broke with the Tribunists. In 1912 she left the SDLP and in 1915 became head of the Revolutionary Socialist League. She took part in the Zimmerwald Conference (1915), later supporting the Zimmerwald Left and contributing to its organ, Vorbote. She welcomed the October Revolution of 1917.

In 1918, Roland Hoist-van der Schalk became a member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN). She attended the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921). In 1927 she left the CPN and became a Christian socialist. During the fascist German occupation of the Netherlands, from May 1940 to early May 1945, she took part in the resistance movement. After the liberation of the Netherlands she contributed for a time to the Trotskyist organ De Vlam.

Roland Hoist-van der Schalk’s first collection of poems was Sonnets and Poems Written in Terza Rima (1895). Her poetry, which reveals the influence of P. B. Shelley, is permeated with revolutionary enthusiasm, as seen in the collections Upward Ways (1907), The Woman in the Forest (1912), and Lost Borders (1918). She glorified the Revolution of 1905–07 in Russia in the lyric dramas in verse The Rebels (1910), The Sacrifice (1921), and The Children (1922). The lyric and epic narrative poem Heroic Saga (1927) is dedicated to the USSR. Concepts of sacrifice and Gandhism appear in some works of the 1920’s and 1930’s, including the verse collections Between Two Worlds (1923) and Between Time and Eternity (1934). Roland Hoist-van der Schalk also wrote the drama Thomas More (1912), a life of Garibaldi (The Hero and the Crowd, 1920), and a biography of Tolstoy (1930). Her antifascist poems were included in the collection From the Very Depths (1946). In 1949 she published the autobiographical The Fire Continues to Burn. She was the author of the studies Socialism and Literature (1899), Communism and Morality (1925), and Poetry and the Renewal of Society (1935).