Word: existentialist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Moscow theater, French existentialist Playwright Jean-Paul Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute, with some minor changes made by Political Mugwump Sartre himself, was regaling Soviet audiences, but hiding behind the odd alias of Lizzie McKay. Reason for the title change, according to Sartre's secretary: "There is no good Russian equivalent for 'respectful prostitute...
...describes the nightmares of such varied and notable personalities as the Queen of Sheba, the Shakespearean expurgator Bowdler, Stalin, Dean Acheson, a modern psychoanalyst, a metaphysician, and an existentialist. Bowdler, or example, dreams that his wife reads a copy of the original Shakespeare, goes mad out of remorse for her dread deed, and is carried off to the asylum, shouting Shakespearean obscenities to the neighbors as the departs...
Camus pushes these questions up the fashionable modern Parnassus-inhabited by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Gide, and all manner of existentialists. In the end, a little existentialist moss clings to his rolling stone, and Camus achieves his answer: "Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged . . . There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." Sisyphus has achieved "a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair)." Rope or Cravat? While it is no news, of course, that French intellectuals of the Left have left the church, a lot of people will wish that they would stop arguing so noisily...
Heir to this proud tradition, the intellectual in France today has the authority of a statesman or a guru. In the sidewalk cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, crew-cut young French students hotly dispute the exact degree of "despair" advocated by Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre or his former disciple Albert Camus. Sometimes the great men themselves appear at the Café de Flore or the Deux Magots. When they do not, their movements, habits, tastes and idiosyncrasies are reported as if they were movie stars. By others, who call them "the mandarins." the French intellectuals...
...propound and quarrel. Every week 380,000 Frenchmen buy the four intellectual weeklies that record their latest pronouncements. In regular newspapers, they often command more attention than politicians or priest Roman Catholic Novelist François Mauriac, in Le Figaro, urges French youth to a more dynamic Christian socialism. Existentialist Merleau-Ponty attacks Sartre for his latter-day allegiance to Stalinism in L'Express, is answered by Simone de Beauvoir in Les Temps Modernes...