Un héros de leur temps

• Main Author: Vlasta Dufková
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Portugaise d'Etudes Françaises 2015-05-01
• Series: Carnets
• Subjects: Camus (Albert); Éluard (Paul); Kalandra (Záviš); political trials; civic engagement
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/carnets/1526

The current article is based on a pastiche of Paul Éluard’s poem "Liberty" in Albert Camus’s Notebooks III when Camus was working on the last of his larger prose texts published, i.e. The Fall, and one of the provisory titles of which bore a Lermontovian borrowing of A Hero of Our Time. The author of the article attempts to disclose in Camus’s novel a possible projection of French resistance poet Éluard’s reaction to the Czechoslovak show trial with his pre-WWII Czech friend Záviš Kalandra, sentenced on trumped-up charges and executed in 1950, and poses a more general question on the civic responsibility and engagement of the intellectual vis-à-vis the period following the end of WWII.