Abstract
Albert Camus’s engagement with Russian literature, and especially with Fyodor Dostoevsky, is enormous, unparalleled in French letters. Yet Camus did not know the Russian language and, unlike many key French intellectuals, he did not devote monographs to the great nineteenth-century Russian writers. He did, however, adapt Dostoevsky’s The Possessed for the French stage and also wrote a play, The Just Assassins, based on a terrorist cell during the Russian Revolution of 1905. He refers to Dostoevsky frequently in his diaries, his most important nonfiction, and engages in intertextual dialogue with him in almost all his fiction and plays. Nevertheless, Camus is strikingly reticent about the two Dostoevskian texts that probably have the most to tell us about the Camus Dostoevsky relationship: The Idiot and Notes from the Underground. Moreover, there is something fragmentary, not fully articulated, and often elliptical about his overall relation to Russian literature.1 Most important, Camus’s very lucidity tends to blind him to a darkness both in himself and in Dostoevsky. This brief study is thus as cognizant of what Camus does not tell us about Dostoevsky as what he does.
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Notes
André Gide, Dostoevsky, translator unnamed (London: J. M. Dent, 1952), 15.
Albert Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1712. My translation.
Albert Camus, Essais, ed. Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 1923. My translation.
Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Knopf, 1968), 351. Malraux, an avid reader of Dostoevsky, had a strong literary impact on Camus. In The Myth of Sisyphus, before launching into his discussion of Kirillov, Camus writes that he might equally have used Mal-raux’s work to exemplify “the absurd.”
Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Modern Library, 1960), 203. While there is no room for discussion of it here, Camus does invoke Quixote on more than one occasion.
Quoted in Oliver Todd, Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 510. My translation.
The Camus Dostoevsky relation has attracted a fair amount of commentary, including two valuable monographs: Ray Davison’s Camus: The Challenge of Dostoevsky (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1997);
Peter Dunwoodie’s Une histoire ambivalente: Le dialogue Camus Dostoïevski (Paris: Libraire Nizet, 1997);
and Jean Sarocchi’s penetrating and at times brilliant work Le dernier Camus, ou, Le premier homme (Paris: Nizet, 1995). The critical literature shows that traces of Dostoevsky can be found in Camus from the beginning of his career, including in his “prequel” to The Right Side and The Wrong Side, written in 1933. Overall the Camus Dostoevsky intertext presents an embarrassment of riches, and commentators often disagree about which works to partner. I have chosen to analyze Camusian works where Dostoevsky and his works are explicitly named in an attempt to show that here, too, complexity reigns.
Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942–1951, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Paragon, 1991), 198.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 67.
Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1956), 18.
Jeanyves Guérin, ed. Dictionnaire Albert Camus (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2009), 226. My translation.
See Jean Paul Sartre, “An Explication of The Stranger,” in Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), 111.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 309–12.
Albert Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (1938; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 244.
Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935–1942, trans. Philip Thody (New York: Modern Library, 1965), 95.
On this, see Dostoevsky’s crucial letter of January 1868 to his niece Sofia Ivanova, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, trans. and ed. David A. Lowe, vol. 3, 1868–1871 (Ann Arbor: Adris, 1990), 17.
Albert Camus, Œuvres complètes, ed Raymond Gay Gosier and Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, vol. 4 (Paris: Pléiade: 2009), 925, 931. My translation.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2000), part 3, chapter 6.
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© 2012 Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre
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Epstein, T. (2012). Tormented Shade. In: Vanborre, E.A. (eds) The Originality and Complexity of Albert Camus’s Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309471_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309471_11
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