Word: malraux
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Though legend has it that he attended two "institutes," the institutes have no record of him. Malraux, ever willing to foster the legend of himself, has always refused to supply detailed data on his personal life. But somehow he acquired a vast knowledge of archaeology, art and ancient cultures. Already, he had begun to chafe at the bourgeoisie's world of "fact, ordered by no transcendence, and subjecting them to nothing," and yearned to "leave a scar on the face of the earth...
...Khmer statues still lay undiscovered along the ancient Royal Way to Angkor Vat. In 1923, he and his first wife, Clara Goldschmidt, plunged into Cambodia's jungles, found the statues, and lugged them out on oxcarts. The French colonial authorities promptly impounded them as historical monuments, and put Malraux on trial for trying to remove them. His wife rushed back to France, succeeded in getting an impressive list of important writers to protest his arrest. His trial was dropped, and the saturnine young man returned to France as the dashing hero of a cause...
...Soon Malraux was back in Indo-China, seeking fresh testing places for his soul, and "something outside himself" in revolutions. He organized the "Young Annam" movement, then moved on to Canton. There he met Mikhail Borodin, Russian adviser to China's revolutionaries. Malraux in 1925 helped organize the Canton general strike aimed at British Hong Kong and directed propaganda for the Communist wing of the Kuomintang. He lingered on in China, was probably in Shanghai shortly after the Communist uprising in 1927. Between revolutions, he wandered the world, from India to Japan, from Central Asia...
Dagger with Talent. Out of his revolutionary adventuring, Malraux forged his novels and his ideas. The 1933 publication of La Condition Humaine (a bestseller in the U.S. under the title Man's Fate) broke upon the intellectual world like a revolutionist's bomb. Its theme was the 1927 revolt of the Chinese Communists in Shanghai, when they tried to wrest the city from foreign control, only to die when Chiang Kai-shek turned on them and bloodily suppressed their strike. Its intellectual revolutionists spoke of revolution as lyrically as a mystical communion, a tragic but glorious experience which...
Literary Paris lionized the young man with the dark forelock drooping over his incandescent eyes and talking, always talking "as if he were pursued." Two days after the Spanish civil war broke out, Malraux dashed off to join the Loyalists, explaining, "I am always more comfortable in a revolution than in a salon." There he organized and ran the España squadron, a collection of ancient planes begged, bor rowed or bought from anywhere and everywhere, some so inadequate that bombs were dropped by hand through toilet holes and gunners defended themselves by firing pistols at antiaircraft fire...