Jean Malaquais: A French Orwell?

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• 作者：John Rodden ; John P. Rossi
• 关键词：Jean Malaquais ; Les Javanais ; Prix Renaudot ; George Orwell ; Eric Blair ; André Gide ; Leon Trotksy ; Trotskyism ; Soren Kierkegaard ; Vichy France ; Victor Gollancz ; Popular Front ; Norman Mailer ; The Naked and the Dead ; Barbary Shore ; POUM (the United Marxist Workers-Party) ; Marc Chirik ; Amadeo Bordiga ; Manuel Aza?a ; Isaac Rosenfeld ; Lionel Trilling ; Dwight Macdonald ; Victor Serge ; Varian Fry ; Genevieve Nakach ; Yvonne Davet ; Clio ; Posterity ; Cultural celebrity ; Literary immortality ; Down the memory h
• 刊名：Society
• 出版年：2015
• 出版时间：August 2015
• 年：2015
• 卷：52
• 期：4
• 页码：360-371
• 全文大小：383 KB
• 作者单位：John Rodden (1)
  John P. Rossi (1)
  
  1. 118 Beautybush Trail, Georgetown, TX, 78633, USA
  
• 刊物主题：Sociology, general; Political Science, general;
• 出版者：Springer US
• ISSN：1936-4725

文摘

This essay discusses the uncanny parallels, paradoxes, and puzzles in the lives and careers of author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the famous George Orwell, and the virtually unknown French writer and political radical, Jean Malaquais. The striking affinities between Orwell and Malaquais, both of whom came to literary maturity in the 1930s, involve both their themes and genres. Both men fully engaged the issues of their times as independent leftists. Both also wrote political novels, documentary reportage, war diaries, and anti-utopias that addressed the conditions of the poor and working class (especially miners), the agonies of war-torn Europe, and the dangers of a totalitarian dystopia in the near future. Their remarkable affinities even extended to participation as volunteer soldiers in the same militia during the Spanish Civil War, the POUM (United Marxist Workers-Party). Yet no biographer or scholar has ever compared the two men or even noted their numerous, arresting similarities. The divergent “afterlives-of Orwell and Malaquais raise large questions about cultural memory, the literary Zeitgeist, and Clio’s caprice.