Tormented shade

Thomas Epstein

pp. 143-159

in: Emmanuelle A. Vanborre (ed), The originality and complexity of Albert Camus's writings, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

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.