Word: malraux
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fighting for France. When the Nazi armies marched into France, Malraux volunteered as a private in the tank corps. For the first time, at the age of 38, he was fighting for his own bourgeois country. His war record was as dashing as a hero would wish. He was captured, escaped to unoccupied France dressed in an artisan's clothes, carrying planks on his shoulder. Soon he was working with the Resistance. As a start, he dynamited locomotives, intermittently returning to writing. By 1944 he had become "Colonel Berger," in command of 1.500 men in the southwest of France...
...heroes were international revolutionary vagabonds. Often they were Communists, and at first Malraux saw in Communism something which gave "dignity back to all those I fight with." In the 1930s, the Communists claimed Malraux as their own. Malraux wrote a pro-Communist novel (Days of Wrath), went to Moscow several times, with Gide carried a protest to Hitler against the conviction of Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov for the Reichstag fire...
...Malraux was concerned with man's greatness, not with the "masses," however oppressed. "I don't like mankind," said one of his characters gloomily. "I don't even like the poor for whom, after all, I am going to fight." As an idealist, he was from the first at odds with the professional Communists. When Trotsky complained that his individualistic heroes needed "a good dose of Marxism," Malraux bristled, retorted that he was not concerned with collective action, but with the tragic men caught up in the stress of revolution...
...Malraux put up with the Communists during the Spanish civil war. They were necessary, he conceded, "to organize the apocalypse." But his characters in his bestselling Man's Hope asked whether "to give them economic freedom you've got to have a system which will enslave them politically...
...disillusionment was at hand. His friend Gide came back from Russia declaring: "Russia is not what we thought." After the Soviet-Nazi pact, Malraux announced bitterly: "What I wanted to defend for 20 years could not be defended by Communism...