The Reception of L’Etranger in the Soviet Union

Abstract

Albert Camus is one of the Western writers whose work was not available to Soviet readers for many years. As in most such cases, the reason was political. In the dispute between French intellectuals and writers in the Stalinist era, Camus took the anti-Soviet side. In his letter to Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie he expressed his opposition to the concentration camps in the Soviet Union.¹ He was against Soviet interventions in Poland, in Germany and in Hungary.² Because of his political opinions Camus was published in the Soviet Union only in 1968, when ‘L’Hôte’ and L’Etranger, translated by Nora Gal’, appeared in the review La Littérature Etrangère? Since then translations have continued to appear. The review Le Nouveau Monde published ‘La Femme adultère’ and ‘Les Muets’. Several months later, the same review published La Chute. In the same year a collection of selected works appeared, including L’Etranger (translated this time by Nemchinova), La Peste and La Chute, three stories from L’Exil et le royaume (‘La Femme adultère’, ‘Les Muets’, ‘Jonas’), two essays from Noces (‘Noces à Tipasa’ and ‘Le Vent à Djemila’) and one essay from L’Eté (‘Le retour à Tipasa’). In 1969 L’Etranger and La Peste were also published in French, for students of French, and specialists in French literature. There was also a Russian translation of L’Etranger done in Paris by Georges Adamovitch in 1966.