A Life Worth Living. Albert Camus and the Search for Meaning

This is the first biography of Albert Camus in Russian. For its author, American historian Robert Zaretsky, the life and works of Camus, which have become classics of world literature and existential philosophy, are not so much a part of the past as the prehistory of the present. 'The nobility of the writer's craft lies in the obligations to live not by lies and to fight oppression,' said the author of 'The Plague,' 'The Myth of Sisyphus,' and 'The Stranger' in his Nobel speech in 1957. The five themes of the hero that particularly troubled the French philosopher — absurdity, silence, measure, fidelity, and rebellion — became for him a hieroglyph, a garden of diverging paths, and a navigation system in this 'ugly but stunning world.' One can wander through them in search of the meaning of life, when it is important, if not to find hope, at least not to fall into despair. This drifting led Camus to understand that in the midst of winter, there lives within him an 'invincible summer.' Not bad already, is it?