Arthur Adamov: Black Satire, Dreams and Politics

Abstract

The name of Arthur Adamov (1908-1970) was once linked very closely with those of Beckett and Ionesco, the three of them being considered the outstanding dramatists of the New Theatre, having, what is more, similar views of the world. As in most other cases of writers being grouped together by critics, the association holds good only in some respects. It is true that Adamov writes about the painfulness of living, consisting mainly of a seeming purposelessness and solitariness, which is partly due to the absence of effective communication between people, and is in that sense an ‘absurdist’ writer. His writing, however, shows him to be less deeply concerned than either Beckett or Ionesco with such ontological matters. While they probe the very essence of living and dying, he is more inclined to study man through the psychology of individuals, and in a social context. Moreover, while some of Adamov’s dramatic works are as melancholy in mood as Beckett’s, it would be difficult to describe them as ‘tragic’, in the sense we have applied that term to Beckett’s plays, because only rarely do they have the same deep seriousness, universality or hauntingly tragic poetry. In most cases, they reflect rather the personal tragedy of the playwright, and a possibly implicit, but secondary, view of the world which is tragic, in that any search for meaning, which he seems to glimpse and long for, leads to nothing more than apparent futility.