Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875–1926)
Rainer Maria Rilke combined the German genius for expressing abstract thought with innovations in the use of the German language, which give his poetry an unusual musical quality. Rilke traveled widely throughout Europe and felt closely akin to the French Symbolists, who strongly influenced his poetic style. His life was a task in almost every way, and his works reflect a long religious search for the meaning of life and for the clarification of the human’s role in the world. As Rilke became increasingly saddened by the inhumanity of World War I, by his own marital problems, by the death of his friend (the sculptor Rodin), and by constant fear of losing his poetic gifts, Rilke slowly withdrew into solitude. The action is significant, because the theme of some of his greatest poems is reconciliation through withdrawal.
Among Rilke’s last works are the ten Duino Elegies (named for a castle he once retreated to in Switzerland), which are laments for humanity. In one of these elegies, Rilke gives voice to what might be the climax of his long search for meaning and purpose—he expresses confidence in the importance of literature as the explanation of the earth, as the means of making transitory things endure forever.
Rilke suffered for years from a form of leukemia, a cancer of the blood which can prevent blood from clotting. He died after he was pricked by a thorn from the roses he was gathering to give to a young friend.
Luigi Pirandello
(1867–1936)
Luigi Pirandello was not a well-disciplined student when he attended the University of Rome, but he was inspired by one of his professors from whom he learned about the traditions and customs of his native Sicily. As a young man, Pirandello wrote poetry and fiction and made translations from German to Italian. Fairly late in life, Pirandello turned to playwriting. His first play, Right You Are If You Think You Are (1916), was a success. Five years later his most famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, was produced.
Over the course of his life, Pirandello became increasingly introspective. He was intrigued by the themes of despair, jealousy, and death. After the first World War, another theme emerged in his writings: the conflict between reality and illusion. In 1934, one year after the dictator Mussolini condemned his plays for their "introspective, moody, and unrealistic" style, Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
Behind the mirage that was life, Pirandello tried to reveal the nature of the real world. Characteristic of Pirandello’s attitude toward life are his last instructions for his funeral: "The hearse, the horse, the driver, and—basta!"(Basta means "enough.")
Franz Kafka
(1883–1924)
As a child, Franz Kafka excelled in school and was well liked by his teachers. They encouraged him to write, but Kafka’s parents disapproved. Kafka’s parents didn’t understand his interest in literature and were more concerned with his ability to make a profit. Although he was an obedient child, Kafka was rebellious against dogmatic religion, strict education, fascist politics, and his authoritarian father. He maintained this rebellion throughout his life.
After graduating from an elite high school, Kafka continued his education at the University of Prague where he studied law. Although the subject did not interest him, Kafka received his doctorate in 1906 and began working in an insurance company.
Kafka was a hard worker, and his coworkers enjoyed his charming and humorous personality. However, Kafka despised his routine job as well as many of the quirks of the society in which he lived. At night, he escaped by writing. Like his thoughts, his writing was very private, and he often used imagery from his dreams. It wasn’t until 1922 that tuberculosis forced Kafka to retire and dedicate his life to writing. He then left his family and moved to Berlin. He didn’t live there long, though. In 1924, Kafka died of tuberculosis.
Isak Dinesen
(1885–1962)
Isak Dinesen’s parents christened her Karen Dinesen at her birth in Rungsted, Denmark, but her friends called her "Tanne." Because of the artistic talent she demonstrated in writing and drawing, Tanne was encouraged by her mother to attend art schools in Switzerland, France, and England. During her formal schooling she adopted English as her second language and later used it in her writing.
After her marriage in 1914 to Baron Bror Blixen, Dinesen took the name of Baroness von Blixen and emigrated to East Africa with her husband. They settled in Kenya to start a coffee plantation, which they managed jointly until their separation in 1921. Dinesen then ran the farm herself, but in seventeen years, it never made a profit. By 1931 the Great Depression, the collapse of the coffee market, and Kenya’s unreliable weather combined to make the situation seem impossible, and Dinesen finally sold the farm. Out of Africa tells of her experiences on the coffee plantation.
After selling the plantation, Dinesen returned to her family home in Denmark and began writing under the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen. She did not disclose her identity until the success of her first book, Seven Gothic Tales (1934). Her other works include Winter’s Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, and Shadows on the Grass.
Anna Akhmatova
(1889–1966)
Anna Gorenko began writing poetry when she was eleven years old, much to the chagrin of her parents. To dispel her father’s fears that she would shame the family by becoming a "decadent poetess," Anna took Akhmatova, her great-grandmother’s name, as a pseudonym.
Although Akhmatova studied law, she returned to literature and joined a group of poets who practiced acmeism, a movement that encouraged writers to use precise, carefully-chosen words rather than vague symbols. Nikolay Gumilyov was the leader of the group, and in 1910 Akhmatova and Gumilyov married.
During World War I, Gumilyov enlisted in the calvary. While he was away, Akhmatova wrote many poems and had them published in her first book, Evening, which became very popular. Her second book, Rosary (1914), was even more widely acclaimed.
Akhmatova’s career suffered a tremendous blow in 1921 when Nikolay Gumilyov was arrested and executed for attempting a plot against the Soviet government. Although Akhmatova had divorced Gumilyov four years earlier, her association with him made it virtually impossible for her to publish her work. It wasn’t until 1940 that she was able to publish again. Even then, her book was withdrawn from the market several months after its publication.
When Akhmatova’s son Lev was arrested in 1949, she worked diligently to gain his release. Despite her dislike for Stalin, she wrote poems in praise of Stalin and the government. Her efforts did not succeed, though, and Lev was exiled to Siberia until 1956. During the time of Lev’s imprisonment, Akhmatova refrained from writing her poetry on paper. Instead, she memorized her poems. After Stalin’s death she began to publish her poetry again. However, her work was heavily censored.
Through all her difficulties, Akhmatova remained extremely popular with the Russian people. On one rare occasion when Stalin allowed her to give a reading, three thousand people gave her a standing ovation in Moscow’s largest auditorium. Threatened by the large turnout, Stalin sought to penalize any person he could find who participated in organizing the standing ovation.
Akhmatova wrote very few political poems. In fact, it was her personal poetry that was most controversial. However, she is well remembered for her poem Requiem, a tribute to Stalin’s victims, which was not fully released in Russia until the late 1980s.
Federico García Lorca
(1898–1936)
The tragic murder of Lorca in the early days of the Spanish Civil War made him a symbol of those soon to be victimized, not only in the years of bitter fighting in Spain, but also by the horrors of the larger war in Europe. Prophetically, Lorca’s poems and poetic dramas show violent emotions and a preoccupation with blood and death. His "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías," written about the death of the famed Spanish bullfighter and hailed as the greatest elegy in modern Spanish poetry, expresses a dread, hypnotic fascination with agony, death, and decay, and Lorca cannot forget the bullfighter’s spilt blood.
Lorca’s distaste for the urban life led him back to the folklore and music of his native Andalusia. The spontaneous music of his poetry reflects the rhythms of the Andalusian folk songs, which Lorca enjoyed singing in public. A friend of the Spanish Surrealist painter Salvador Dali, Lorca experimented with Surrealistic techniques in his poetry, often freely using a startling juxtaposition of multisensory images.
Albert Camus
(1913–1960)
Albert Camus is world-famous as a novelist, though he considered himself primarily a man of the theater, as an actor, director, and playwright. He was born in Algiers, and French North Africa is the setting for his earliest fictional sketches and for his two major novels, The Stranger and The Plague. During the German occupation of France in World War II, Camus was a vigorous worker in the underground resistance movement. For twenty years he was deeply concerned with the problems of Algeria, and as the struggles became more fanatical on both sides—French and Algerian—Camus spoke out, warning, suggesting, protesting. Yet, scandalized as he might be, Camus felt that the artist’s task is to reconcile.
Camus’ name has been associated with a way of viewing what he calls the "absurdity" of man’s existence. In general, Camus’ outlook, modified over the course of his life, was an answer to the outlook of the French existentialists, inheritors of the pessimism and skepticism of the fin de siècle, a French literary movement that was popular at the end of the nineteenth century. These existential thinkers had destroyed the façade of orderliness with which previous rational philosophies had viewed life, and most of them were left with the conviction that life had no meaning, so it mattered little how man lived it.
In reaction to these nihilistic attitudes, Camus sought his own answers to the "Why," which he said, one day appears in a person’s life. Camus did affirm that the mind cannot answer this Why. Hence, existence is absurd because life remains meaningless; each of us is a lonely stranger in the universe, an exile from a lost home which no one can even remember. However, Camus also concluded that since our only certainty is life, we must respond positively to the summons to live and even to struggle. To be a human being, to live, is what counts, and to be a human being involves choice, responsibility, and action.
One of Camus’ famous heroes is Sisyphus. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to roll a huge boulder to the top of a mountain, but the rock always rolls back down as soon as it reaches the summit. Camus, in an essay called "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1943), sees Sisyphus, who is pursuing a hopeless task, as an image of humanity. Because Sisyphus accepts his meaningless struggle toward a never-to-be-achieved summit—perhaps even scorning it, Sisyphus is happy. "His rock is his thing," says Camus. He does not allow it to lie inert at the bottom of the slope. To extend the analogy, Camus says that life is our thing. What matters most is that we do something with it.
Elie Wiesel
(1928– )
Eliezer Wiesel, one of the world’s most respected authors and activists for peace, has devoted his life to documenting his experiences in World War II. An author of numerous books and plays and a professor at Boston University, he has shared much of his personal life with the world through both his fiction and his nonfiction.
Born September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Romania, he was part of a community of about 15,000 Jews. He lived with his father Shlomo, a shopkeeper and respected elder of the community, his mother Sarah, and his sisters Hilda, Batya, and Tzipora in this Romanian village that was annexed to Hungary in 1940. Elie Wiesel spent his youth learning both classic and modern Hebrew, aspiring to be a rabbi. With his father’s encouragement, he also studied the more secular fields of philosophy, literature, and psychology. Sighet remained surprisingly unaffected during the first years of World War II, despite daily news reports of Russian troops advancing toward Germany. The Jewish families thought they would escape the tragic fate of all the other European Jews. In April 1944, however, the Germans occupied Sighet. Wiesel’s family was sent to Auschwitz, where his mother and youngest sister died. Elie and his father were sent on to Buchenwald, where his father died from starvation and abuse. Wiesel survived to be liberated by Allied troops.
After the war, Wiesel lived in Paris for over a decade, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and earned a living as a choir director. His career in writing progressed when he became a correspondent for Israel’s newspaper Yedioth Abronoth. In 1954, he broke his self-imposed vow of silence and began writing about his experiences in the war. Wiesel has published more than thirty books including Night. He writes in French, and his wife translates the works into English. Many of his works incorporate direct autobiographical references, and even his fiction reveals much of his extraordinary life. He has intimately experienced what few have survived. For this reason, his stories—which stand on their own literary merit—need to be heard by the world. Wiesel, the historian, tries to link the events from the past to contemporary life, so we will not thoughtlessly repeat the same mistakes.
Seriously hurt in a 1956 car accident while visiting Manhattan, Wiesel was confined to a wheelchair for over a year. He applied for American citizenship and became a naturalized citizen in 1963. Since 1976, Wiesel has held the Andrew Mellon Chair in Humanities at Boston University. He lives in New York with his Viennese wife Marion Wiesel; they have one son.
Wiesel’s honors include the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement, the French Legion of Honor, and a number of literary prizes including the National Jewish Book Award. He chaired the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 1978 to 1986. In 1986, Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, Wiesel emphasized one of the major themes of his work: the importance of preserving the memory of the past.
