A strange "foreigner", uncompromising and lonely, solidarity and humanist, apologist for the "absurd", creator and leaver, "hermetic" and impetuous, but above all "artist", this could be a brief "identity" of Albert Camus. Philosopher and writer, a great revolutionary of literature, lyrical and denouncer, deeply intellectual, "eternal" devoted to the eternal search for the meaning of life, staunchly negative towards dogmas, unique in the invention and imposition of myths, permanent judge of himself, carrier of questioning and doubt, champion of renewal against collective but also personal futility.
"Creating is like living two lives", he said, and the truth is that he managed to "live" several of them, despite the fact that he died young, at the age of only 46, after a car accident. Today, 108 years after his birth (7/11/1913), Magazine dedicates a few lines to the romantic anti-authoritarian, who through his inspired "triptychs", developed the concepts of formulation, setting and quest, above the lines and - much more - behind them. A non-conformist by conviction, a critical in-depth analyst of every personal reflection and a tireless fellow traveler of his inner commitment, Camus marked the 20th century with his presence and his work.
DIFFICULT CHILDHOOD YEARS IN ALGIERS
Born in 1913 in a working-class district of Drean, a small seaside town in French Algeria, he never met his father, who was killed a year later in the Battle of the Marne. That first "absence" marked little Albert, who became overly attached to his mother. The family settled in Algiers, surviving in extreme poverty. Camus attended a high school in the city on a scholarship and in 1930 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. At that time he came into contact with philosophy for the first time, studying the ancient Greeks, but also Nietzsche, while at the same time doing odd jobs to earn a living.
Albert was also involved in sports, swimming and football, competing as a goalkeeper in the local Racing Youth team in Algiers. He had offers from French professional teams to continue his career there, but declined, as his own plans prioritized his studies. In 1933 he enrolled at the University and three years later, received his degree in philology. In addition to Nietzsche, he was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, and studied writers such as Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Stendhal. As early as 1930 he had begun to write his first essays, some of which were published in Sud magazine.
THE BREAK WITH THE FRENCH COMMUNIST PARTY
In 1935 he joined the French Communist Party, but left two years later, believing that the dictatorship of the proletariat was incompatible with human rights and refusing to accept that the gulag world was a response to the errors and crimes of capitalism. As World War II began, he once again came into conflict with the GKK because he defended the rights of Algeria's indigenous people, arguing that the struggle should not only be anti-Nazi and anti-fascist, but also anti-colonial. His origin was something that was never "forgiven" by the French intelligentsia. And Camus made sure to feed this "antipathy".
He himself was a "pied-noir", as the French pejoratively called those born - of French descent - in French Algeria and had the opportunity to experience first-hand the oppression of the Arabs and Berbers while living with them. So he stood by them, "confounding" and irritating his "comrades" in the party. In 1936 he became a member of the newly founded Algerian Communist Party, creating and organizing the "Théatre du Travail" (Theatre of Work), which he later renamed the "Theater of the Group". In 1938, he began to write articles in the left-wing Franco-Algerian newspaper "Alger républicain" by Pascal Pia, unleashing "bites" against French colonialism.
THE CIRCLE OF THE "IRREGULARITY"
Two years later, in 1940, the newspaper was banned and Camus settled in Paris, where he took a job at "Paris-Soir" as editor-in-chief. There he was now determined to begin the creation of a great work. His resources were combative thinking, contempt for ideological doctrines, insightful analysis, the "responsibility" of choice. His goals were the search for immediate meaning, the knowledge of the world, the distancing of the reader. His first triptych, a novel, an essay and a play, was completed with the so-called cycle of the "paralogue":"The Stranger" (1942), "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942) and "Caligula" (1938) .
"Mom died today. Maybe yesterday, I don't know." The first sentence of "The Stranger", inspired by the author's personal experiences, also made his intentions clear. Taking the baton from Siren Kierkegaard, he presented the absurd as a conflict:on the one hand, man's attempt to discover the meaning in his life, and on the other, the pointlessness of this effort, since after all meaning does not exist. In "The Myth of Sisyphus", the "absurdity" reached its climax:man must continue to live, despite the fact that he knows that death is inevitable. Faith in man, however, always leaves open the option of "acceptance without resignation", a conscious "state" of understanding the absurdity of life.
THE CIRCLE OF "REBELLION"
In the meantime, Camus had been fired from "Paris-Soir", married Francine Faure, a French pianist and mathematician, returned to Algeria and finally ended up in the French Alps due to a new bout of tuberculosis. In 1943 he took over the management of the newspaper "Combat" - banned by the Nazi occupiers, playing an active role in the French resistance and met Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he became friends, while he also came into contact with other French intellectuals, such as Simon de Beauvoir and Andre Breton. In 1947 he disagreed with the editorial team of "Combat" and left, at the same time starting the second cycle of his writing work, that of "insurrection".
It consisted of "Plague" (1947), "Rebellious Man" (1951) and "The Righteous" (1949). In the prophetic "Plague" isolation and despair are defined in a "sick" atmosphere, where the roles of the bad and the good are clear, in an allegory-denunciation of totalitarianism, against which man can and must resist, this at least it is Camus's belief, which stems from his belief in the power of the impossible, when he has to face the "morbid" power. But in the Rebellion trilogy, it was the essay "Rebellious Man" that brought the author into conflict with left-wing intellectuals.
There Camus stood against all the stereotypes of "vulgar" Marxism, but without stopping at the Bolsheviks, going back to the French Revolution! It was more the author's intuition, the one that led him to conclude the absolute other "extremity" of every form of oppression:"I rebel, therefore I exist." Something that - in his opinion - is implemented with a "total" disobedience:"The slave does not rebel only for himself, but for all human beings. The first movement - after all - of the rebel, is to refuse others to touch what he is, struggles for the integrity of a side of himself. So initially, he does not ask to conquer, but to impose".
The "answer" came from Sartre himself, in the literary publication "Les Temps modernes", when he commissioned Francis Jeanson to write a review of "L'Homme Revolté", knowing that Jeanson was an opponent of the works of Camus. After the publication of the text (where Camus' rebellion was characterized as "intentionally static"), Sartre put an end to their long friendship, calling Camus a "bourgeois", which amounted to the greatest insult possible. "You have fallen victim to an excessive sullenness, behind which you hide your inner problems. Sooner or later someone will have to tell you, so let it be me", was the harsh "condemnation" on the part of Sartre.
THE "FALL" AND THE RECONCILIATION WITH CHARTRE
The attacks from his compatriots on the left intellectuals, but also the Algerian war that started in 1954, had unbearably saddened Camus, who decided to limit himself to writing some fiction. One of them, "The Fall", had the author disguise himself as Jean-Baptiste Clements (the hero of the book) and, suspiciously, use hypocrisy to be liked. Until the moment of crisis, when all "truth" will collapse first around him and then within him. "The Fall" (1956) was Camus's "black" diamond, a text of self-mockery, written in a completely different style and was the writer's revenge on Sartre, who was enchanted when he read it.
Sartre's phrase, "I like the book, because Camus made it up and hid the whole thing", was the greatest vindication for the author, even greater than the one that would follow a year later, with his Nobel prize in Sweden Literature. Sartre wanted to say exactly what Camus had feared all his life:"One day you find yourself taking without really desiring." The deep wound in him from what he had experienced, what he had perceived and what he had been "obliged" to put on paper, forced to "renew" his destinations and adapt his style not only in relation to his time, but - above all - in relation to himself, this was the internal "scar" that marked his work.
THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
In October 1957, Camus was informed that he was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a huge surprise for him, since he had considered the choice of his countryman, André Malraux, certain. At 44, he became the second-youngest winner of the award, behind only Rudyard Kipling (1907, aged 41). Camus had co-candidates - among many others - Nikos Kazantzakis, Boris Pasternak (Nobel winner in 1958), Samuel Beckett (winner in 1969), Alberto Moravia and Jean Paul Sartre himself, winner in 1964, who but he refused to accept the award. In Stockholm, the Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Anders Österling, praised the author:
"Active and highly creative, Camus is at the center of interest in the literary world, even outside France. Inspired by an authentic moral commitment, he devotes himself wholeheartedly to the great fundamental questions of life, and surely this ambition corresponds to the idealistic the purpose for which the Nobel Prize was established. Behind the ceaseless affirmation of the irrationality of the human condition, there is no sterile negativism. This view of things is complemented within it by a powerful imperative, an appeal to the will that incites rebellion against irrationality and which, for this reason, creates value".
DEATH AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES
After his award, Camus began another novel, The First Man, autobiographical and based on the author's childhood in Algeria. At the same time, he again turned his attention to the theater, where with the money from the Nobel, he was able to finance the staging of the play "The Demonic", based on the novel of the same name by Dostoyevsky. But fate had different plans. On January 4, 1960, after having spent the New Year with his family in Provence, he decided to return to Paris with his publisher, Michel Gallimard. In the luxury car, a Facel Vega HK500, were the two, together with the publisher's wife and daughter.
A few kilometers before they reached the French capital, outside the small town of Villevevan, Gallimard lost control of the car, which crashed into a plane tree. The collision killed Camus, who was in the passenger seat, instantly, while Gallinar succumbed to his injuries a few days later. The press presented various hypotheses, such as excessive speed (130 km/h), possible driver indisposition or a flat tire, but Camus's friend, writer René Etienne, claimed to have evidence that the car had manufacturing defects and was a mobile "coffin" ", but no newspaper accepted to publish them.
Many years later, the Italian Corriere della Sera published its own investigation, according to which Camus's accident was orchestrated by the KGB, because of the author's harsh criticism of the policies of the Soviet Union, which he was never able to proved. In the wreckage of the car were found 144 handwritten pages from the unfinished novel "The First Man", which Camus had predicted would be his masterpiece. The Nobel laureate was buried in the village of Lourmarand in the Vaucluse region (in southeastern France), with Jean-Paul Sartre calling him at his funeral, "a stubborn humanitarian".
ALBERT CAMUS' REPRESENTATION
The death of Camus shocked the whole intellectual world. The tragic irony was that years before, the author had said the phrase "there is nothing more scandalous than the death of a child and nothing more senseless than death in a car accident". His legacy is precious, having left behind him a work impressive in its content, with an admirable consistency in its devotion to human nature. Throughout his career he refused to serve ideologies and doctrines that required "statements of faith", which is why he found himself facing Christianity, Marxism and existentialism. And his integrity in this, was evident both in his writings and in his own life.
Camus wrote primarily about man, about souls, about the weak, about hope. As he characteristically said in "Panukla":"You know, I feel more solidarity with the vanquished than with the saints. Heroism and holiness do not move me. What interests me is being human." He took care to highlight the morality of life, elevating it above death. As much as he allowed himself to be drawn into constant "transformations" to avoid a futile "routine" in his expressive form, he never strayed from his own constant demand:"There are more things in men to admire than to despise".