ИСТИНА

Blackamerican writer Richard Nathaniel Wright (1908-1962) starts his literary career in the 1930ies as a social realist and naturalist. His best-known novel Native Son (1940) shows him as an unconscious existentialist -- but despite many striking similarities between this novel and Camus’ L’Etranger (1942) it is proved that the two writers didn’t know about each other and didn’t read each other before the mid-1940ies. After Wright’s rupture with Communism in the mid-1940ies there begins his “education of an existentialist”. He is well acquainted with the works of Heidegger, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky; since 1946 he reads English translations of the French existentialists – essays of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus (all the three of them came lecturing to the US in 1946). Wright read Camus’ lecture “The Human Crisis” given in the USA in March, 1946. Later, in August, 1947 he read “The Stranger” (in the English translation) which greatly impressed him. Camus’ ideas as well as his roman a these influenced considerably over Wright’s philosophical novel “The Outsider” (1952). Its protagonist Cross Damon has much in common with Meursault, but his views on politics, his philosophical quest and the relations with his mother and lovers differ considerably, let alone racial and social aspect. Two writers also differ greatly in their manner and sensibility. Despite both writers’ shared attitude towards totalitarism and consumerism, Wright’s ideas about politics at the time differed considerably from the Camus’ . In 1947 Wright moved to France and made personal acquaintances with Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus. He became a close friend to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but with Camus he remained distant. Wright wrote in his journal: “There is something about this Camus that bothers me. Maybe it is because he is the artist and Sartre and de Beauvoir are not primarily” (7.08.1947). Wright couldn’t accept Camus’ “aesthetism” and his attitude to the French-Algerian war. After 1952 Wright broke with Camus, because the latter supported the French community in Algeria. Wright viewed his position as racist and pro-colonialist. The two writers haven’t met ever since