What new contributed Camus to the artistic and philosophical understanding of man?
For a long time, the culture of France has been generous to the writers of a special warehouse, successfully invading the border area between philosophy and literature. It is the French word “moralist” that implies the expression in one person of the master of the pen and thinker, who reveals in his books the riddles of the human soul, like Montaigne, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld in the 17th, Voltaire, Rousseau in the 18th century. France XX century gave birth to another constellation of such moralists: Malraux, Sartre, Camus… When Camus died, Sartre wrote: “His stubborn humanism, narrow, stern and sensual, led a dubious battle in its outcome against the crushing and ugly trends of the era. , in defiance of the golden corpuscle of everyday life – strengthening in her heart moral foundations. “
Camus polemicized both with Christianity and with Marxism. He managed very convincingly and reliably, remaining the protector of his generation, to convey
To answer the question of the topic, it is necessary to read not only the “Stranger”, but also the novel “Plague”, about which the critic wrote in 1949: “In this harmonious work, so serene in appearance, many different voices sound. and rebellion, indifference and passion, coldness and enthusiasm, a feeling of the eternal and the momentary. “
Camus on the novel “Plague” said more clearly: “The content of the Plague” – the struggle of the European Resistance against fascism. “The main issues: the absurdity of being, the freedom of man, his choice in the face of death.” And he comes to the conclusion that “there are more reasons to admire people than to despise them.”
In the late 30-ies of the XX century A. Camus wrote a book of philosophical essays: “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The book is an expression of A. Camus’ tragic optimism. The hero of Greek mythology, Corinthian king Sisyphus, condemned by the gods for heavy and useless work, becomes
The idea of the novel “Stranger” arose in 1937. The topic is defined by the author as follows: a person who does not want to excuse himself. He prefers to keep about himself the idea that has developed around him among others. He dies, content with the consciousness of his rightness.
“Outsider” was published in 1942 and was a huge success, for a long time becoming one of the read works of French literature of the XX century. “If only this short story remained in a few centuries as evidence of a modern man, then it would be enough to get acquainted with a man of the twentieth century,” Camus, the critic, described this criticism.
The work reflected Camus’s worldview, which most of all corresponds to the mindset of the “philosophy of existence”, or existentialism. This philosophy is shared by his protagonist, Merso: life goes on as usual, and sooner or later there will come a time when all of the elected representatives will be sentenced to death. And this truth makes doubtful in the eyes of the hero Camus all the accepted rules of the joint human community. Merso is an existentialist version of the “natural man” J.-J. Rousseau.
A friend of Camus after reading the “Stranger” noted the influence of F. Kafka on the style of the novel. A. Camus answered that he “studied at Kafka’s spirit, but did not style.”
Few of the writers of the twentieth century managed to say so much about a man as Camus did. Therefore, it becomes clear the recognition of the features of Camus’ prose and the appropriation to him in 1957 of the Nobel Prize for literary works.
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