Word: nietzscheanisms
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...nihilists, whom Camus makes strongly reminiscent of modern Marxists. Perhaps the play's chief quality is Camus' adroit emphasis of Nikolay Stavrogin (ably played by Pierre Vaneck), the book's most memorably monstrous character. An empty-souled aristocrat, Stavrogin longs to be a sort of Nietzschean superman. He instigates a band of young revolutionaries to murder, rapes his landlady's little daughter, finally commits suicide. In the hands of Camus, Stavrogin emerges as a modern man, a desperate seeker of God who does not know where to look. Says another character in The Possessed: "When...
...right. For the two killers this is impossible, less because of how hideous their crime is than how gratuitous: it lacks an understandably human motive. Clinically, the crime can be explained: given a lawless Jazz Age, two badly spoiled, rich men's sons, a homosexual neurosis and a Nietzschean intellectual arrogance, and such a chemical mixture may explode into murder-for-a-thrill. But the case-and its causes -remain too special to expand into identifiable bedevilment in man's fate. It is Grand Guignol in real life...
André Malraux once defined the task of modern man as filling the void left by the 19th century's loss of faith. He himself has recently retreated to the religion of art, embracing the Nietzschean view that "we have art in order not to die of the truth." At a fellow-traveling distance, Jean-Paul Sartre consoles himself with the shifting certitudes of Communism. Albert Camus has too lucid a mind and too scrupulous a moral conscience to opt for such relatively easy solutions. With each successive book, he seems to be sweeping closer to a Niagara...
...novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman-in the comic-strip or the Nietzschean version? During the book's opening passages-for 300 or 400 pages, that is-the reader cannot be sure. Then the truth emerges: Author Ayn Rand, a sort of literary Horsewoman of the Apocalypse, is smashing the world with half a million words in order to rebuild it according to her own philosophy. And that philosophy must be read to be disbelieved...
...crude consequences of his own controverting eloquence. His victories defeated him. Three years before Hitler came to power, Ortega wrote a famous book with the prophetic title: The Revolt of the Masses. In the U.S., and in Europe as well, it was a Depression-time bestseller, whose striking Nietzschean phrases punctuated parlor talk and political arguments about whether, in the 20th century technological civilization, mass man tends to supplant the elite...