A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning

This is the first biography of Albert Camus in Russian. For its author, American historian Robert Zaretsky, Camus’s life and works—already becoming classics of world literature and the philosophy of existentialism—are less part of the past than a prehistory of the present.

“The nobility of the writer’s craft lies in the obligation to live without lies and to fight oppression,” the author of "The Plague," "The Myth of Sisyphus," and "The Stranger" said in his Nobel address in 1957. The five themes of the hero—especially those that stirred the French philosopher—absurdity, silence, measure, fidelity, and rebellion, became for him a kind of hieroglyph, a garden of diverging paths, and a navigation system in this “ugly but astonishing world.” You can wander by them in search of the meaning of life—when it matters not so much to gain hope as at least not to fall into despair. Camus’s own drifting led him to the understanding that, in the midst of winter, an “invincible summer” lives in him. Not bad, is it?