Boucquey Thierry (General Editor). Encyclopedia Of World Writers. 3 volumes

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Elytis, Odysseus

Hikmet, Nazim

Kanik, Orhan Veli

Kazantsakis, Nikos

Seferis, George

Italy

Calvino, Italo

D’Annunzio, Gabriele

Eco, Umberto

Fallaci, Oriana

Fo, Dario

Foscolo, Ugo

Ginzburg, Natalia

Lampedusa, Giuseppe di

Leopardi, Giacomo

Levi, Primo

Manzoni, Alessandro

Marinetti, Filippo

Montale, Eugenio

Morante, Elsa

Moravia, Alberto

Pasolini, Pier Paolo

Pavese, Cesare

Pirandello, Luigi

Quasimodo, Salvatore

Svevo, Italo

Ungaretti, Giuseppe

Verga, Giovanni

Russia

Akhmadulina, Izabella

Akhmatova, Anna

Amalrik, Andrey

Babel, Isaac

Bely, Andrei

Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich

Bulgakov, Mikhail

Bunin, Ivan

Chekhov, Anton

Chernyshevsky, Nikolay

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

Dudintsev, Vladimir

Ehrenburg, Ilya

Fadeyev, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich

Gogol, Nikolai

Goncharov, Ivan

Gorky, Maxim

Gumilev, Nikolai

Herzen, Aleksandr

Karamzin, Nikolai

Lermontov, Mikhail

Mandelstam, Osip

Mayakovsky, Vladimir

Nabokov, Vladimir

Ostrovsky, Nikolai

Pasternak, Boris

Pavlova, Karolina

Pushkin, Aleksandr

Shalamov, Varlam

Sholokhov, Mikhail

Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr

Tolstoy, Leo

Tsvetaeva, Marina

Turgenev, Ivan

Voinovich, Vladimir

Yesenin, Sergey

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

Zamyatin, Yevgeny

Spain and Portugal

Alberti, Rafael

Arrabal, Fernando

Baroja y Nessi, Pío

Bécquer, Gustavo Alfonso

Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente

Castro, Rosalía

Cela, Camilo José

Espronceda y Delgado, José de

García Lorca, Federico

Generation of 98

Guillén, Jorge

Jiménez, Juan Ramón

Machado y Ruiz, Antonio

Machado y Ruiz, Manuel

Madariaga, Salvador de

Nobre, António

Ortega y Gasset, José

Pardo Bazán, Emilia

xxx Encyclopedia of World Writers, 19th and 20th Centuries

Pérez Galdós, Benito

Pessoa, Fernando

Queiroz, José Maria Eça de

Quental, Antero Tarquínio de

Saramago, José

Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de

THE MIDDLE EAST

Adonis

Agnon, Samuel Joseph

Aleichem, Shalom

Amichai, Yehuda

Appelfeld, Aharon

Bitton, Erez

Darwish, Mahmud

Djebar, Assia

Habibi, Emile

Idris, Yu¯suf

Al Jayyusi, Salma al-Khadra

Kabbani, Nizar

Kemal, Yas¸ar

Mahfouz, Naguib

Malaika, Nazik al-

Memmi, Albert

Oz, Amos

Pagis, Dan

Pamuk, Orhan

Ravikovitch, Dahlia

Sadawi, Nawal

Sammam, Ghada

Writers Covered, by Geographical Area xxxi

Abbas, K(hawaja) A(hmad) (1914–1987)

novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter

Khawaja Ahmad Abbas was born in Panipat, India,

into a privileged, upper-middle-class family. After

graduating from the University of Aligarh, Abbas

became a journalist and went on to write novels

and screenplays. While studying law, Abbas

founded a fledgling newspaper called Aligarh

Opinion. He was also a major Hindi movie director

and screenwriter. Throughout his career, Abbas

used films because of their accessibility to the un-

educated and poor to promote his views on social

castes and class conflicts.Abbas was also one of the

founders and a member of the Indian People’s

Theatre Association (IPTA), which produced two

of his plays.

Like many other writers, Abbas was concerned

with national politics and wrote from a Marxist,

sociopolitical perspective. This attitude was fos-

tered and grew under the influence of Sri Au-

robindo (1872–1950) and Mohandas

GANDHI

(1869–1948). Some of Abbas’s most famous Eng-

lish works are Tomorrow Is Ours: A Novel of the

India of Today (1943) and Inquilab: A Novel of the

Indian Revolution (1955). These novels are good

examples of Abbas’s treatment of the oppressed as

they struggle against social and political systems

such as untouchability, fascism, and imperialism.

His screenplay for the classic Hindi movie Awara

(Vagabond, 1952) is perhaps one of Indian cin-

ema’s most lyrical and compelling compositions

on the irrepressible human spirit against the

shadow of colonial capitalism.

In 1951, Abbas established his own film pro-

duction company. His movie Pardesi (Foreigner)

was selected for screening at the 1958 Cannes Film

Festival in France. In 1968, Abbas was awarded the

Padma Shri in recognition of his contribution to

Indian literature.

Another Work by K. A. Abbas

The World Is My Village: A Novel with an Index.

Columbia, Mo.: South Asia Books, 1984.

Abe Kimifusa

See ABE K¯OB¯O.

Abe K¯ob¯o (Abe Kimifusa) (1924–1993)

novelist, short-story writer, playwright

Abe K¯ob¯o was born in Tokyo to Abe Asakichi and

Yorimi. He moved to Manchuria with his family in

1925 but returned to Tokyo to finish high school. In

1943, he entered the medical department of Tokyo

Imperial University, graduating in 1948.



Abe’s first work was reflective of his experiences

in Manchuria. In On the Sign at the End of the Road

(1948), an opium addict relates his story of flight

and imprisonment in Manchuria at the end of

World War II. The narration is conveyed through a

series of notebooks that the protagonist kept dur-

ing the war as he mused over the nature of his na-

tive country and the loss of his home.

Abe’s writing quickly became more surrealistic.

The novel The Crime of S. Karma (1951) portrays a

man who wakes up one morning to find that he

has lost his identity. When he arrives at work, he

finds that his business card has stolen his identity

and, with the help of his fountain pen, wristwatch,

and glasses, is making a play for his secretary. Like

many of Abe’s stories, The Crime of S. Karma com-

bines logic and fantasy. The story won the Akuta-

gawa Prize for new writers.

In the 1950s, Abe joined the Japanese Commu-

nist Party (JCP) and wrote for publications asso-

ciated with the party. However, by the late 1950s,

Abe was writing articles critical of the JCP’s re-

strictive policies, which earned his expulsion in

1962.

During this period, Abe also began writing sci-

ence fiction stories. As a genre, science fiction was

new to Japan, but Abe broke open the field with his

novel Inter Ice Age 4, serialized in the journal Sekai

from 1958 to 1959. In the story, the scientist Kat-

sumi uses a computer to predict the future and dis-

covers that a future race of gilled underwater

dwellers has condemned him because he cannot

adapt to the changes that are in store for society.

Abe’s most acclaimed writing was published in

the 1960s: The Woman in the Dunes (1962), The

Face of Another (1964), and The Ruined Map

(1967). All three novels explore the theme of alien-

ated protagonists who must overcome or accept

change. For example, in The Face of Another, the

protagonist’s face has been disfigured, so he creates

a latex mask to hide his scars. However, with the

mask, he assumes a new identity, and the mask

eventually forms its own identity and threatens to

take over the wearer. The Ruined Map follows suit

with a detective who searches for a missing hus-

band and, during the process, becomes jealous of

the freedom the escaped husband has found. The

most well known of the three novels, The Woman

in the Dunes, portrays the kidnapping of a man

who collects insects as a hobby. Held in a dwelling

beneath the sand dunes, he must come to terms

with his new life.

In the next decade, Abe founded an experimen-

tal theater troupe called the Abe K¯ob¯o Studio. For

nine years, he directed plays, adapted a number of

his stories and wrote several plays for the troupe.

Notably, one of these adaptations—Friends

(1967)—has been translated into several languages

and performed internationally. It tells the story of

a man whose life is invaded by a family who adopts

him, moves into his apartment, and basically takes

over his life.

Following the closing of the troupe in 1979, Abe

wrote only three major novels: Secret Rendezvous

(1977), The Ark Sakura (1984) and Kangaroo Note-

book (1991). Unlike his earlier stories, these novels

were not greeted with acclaim because they are dif-

ficult to interpret. For example, in Secret Ren-

dezvous, a man searches for his missing wife in a

hospital. During his investigation, he meets a man

with a horse’s body as well as a cavalcade of other

strange characters. The reader is bombarded not

only with bizarre visual images but also with a ca-

cophony of sound imagery.

Abe died of heart failure while writing his final

novel, The Flying Man, which was published

posthumously in 1993.

Other Works by Abe K¯ob¯o

Beyond the Curve. Translated by Juliet Winters Car-

penter. New York: Kodansha International, 1991.

The Box Man. Translated by E. Dale Saunders. New

York: Knopf, 1974.

Three Plays. Translated by Donald Keene. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1993.

Works about Abe K¯ob¯o

Currie, William. Metaphors of Alienation: The Fiction

of Abe, Beckett and Kafka. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Uni-

versity Microfilms, 1973.

2 Abe K¯ob ¯o

Yamanouchi, Hisaki. “Abe K¯ob¯o and

Oe Kenzabur¯o:

The Search for Identity in Contemporary

Japanese Literature.” In Modern Japan: Aspects

of History, Literature and Society. Edited by W. G.

Beasley. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1975.

Aboriginal movement

Aboriginal people have inhabited Australia for be-

tween 40,000 and 100,000 years. Prior to English

settlement in 1788, Aboriginal people had minimal

contact with other peoples. Their culture was very

diversified, with more than 200 different languages

spoken, but they shared a commonality of territo-

riality, kinship, family structures, the Dreamtime,

spirituality, and ceremonies. The Dreamtime and

dream songs of the Aborigines reveal their sense

of sacred interrelation with the land and all other

living creatures. They also explain the group’s spir-

itual life and history and are the traditional source

of their music, painting, and storytelling. Dream-

time connects the past, present, and future in a sa-

cred spiritual reality.

A well-known musical form is the corroboree, a

singing of life stories, rich in rhyme, rhythm, repe-

tition, and poetry. This is part of a translation of a

corroboree called Moonbone: “Now the moon is

changing, having cast away his bone/ Gradually he

grows larger, taking on new bone and flesh.” Rock

paintings and engravings also show the richness of

the imagination in Aboriginal culture. Sacred ritu-

als include singing, music, dance, and performance.

After colonization, European settlers appropri-

ated Aboriginal lands and, through conquest and

policies of forced assimilation (children were

stolen from their parents and placed in European

families), almost wiped out Aboriginal culture.

However, beginning in 1938, an Aboriginal move-

ment emerged that began to demand civil rights.

This movement, influenced by the American Civil

Rights movement, became stronger in the 1960s

and again in the 1990s when Aborigines won some

land rights and an apology from the Australian

government for past abuses.

Aboriginal storytelling and poetry is very

strongly influenced by traditional oral narratives.

The storyteller Pauline McCleod, for example, has

revived and created dream songs for a modern

Aboriginal audience that had largely forgotten

them. The following few lines of a typical modern

poem, by Stephen Clayton, express the Aboriginal

loss of a connectedness to nature:

I am born of the land, my soul is the sun

Nature is my mother,

I am Mother Nature’s son

The wind is my spirit, running wild,

running free

Water is my mirror, reflecting visions in me

I am like a great river that slowly runs dry

Polluted and abused, I am the River

slowly—I die....

Anthropologists such as Robert Louis Nathan

and Kingsley Palmer have revealed Aboriginal cul-

ture to the rest of the world, but it was not until the

1960s that the world heard the voice of the Aborig-

ines speaking for themselves about their lives.

Monica Clare’s Karobran: The Story of an Aborigi-

nal Girl (1978) is the first novel ever written by an

Aboriginal woman. It was completed, edited, and

published by Jack Horner because Monica Clare

died in 1973 before she could finish the book.

Karobran means “togetherness.” The book is a

moving autobiographical novel about Isabelle, an

Aboriginal girl who was removed from her family

and ill-treated as a domestic servant.

Several other Aboriginal writers followed Mon-

ica Clare. Hyllus Maris (1934– ) wrote Women of

the Sun in the early 1950s, but the book was not

published until 1985. It is a collection of stories of

the lives of strong Aboriginal women who looked

to the ancestors for guidance. Jack Davis

(1917–2000), a noted poet and playwright, be-

longed to the Nyoongarah people of southwest

Australia and later became the editor of the Abo-

riginal Publications Foundation. His first play,

Kullark (1982), was popular as a documentary on

the history of the Aboriginals in western Australia.

Aboriginal movement 3

He also wrote The Dreamers (1982) and No Sugar

(1986), both known for their depth and closeness

to the reality of the Aboriginal experience. No

Sugar was voted the best stage play of the year by

the Australian Writers Guild.

Oodegeroo NOONUCCAL, commonly known as

Kath Walker, started writing in the 1950s. Her

poems were about the struggles of the Aboriginal

people and their demands for land rights and ed-

ucation. Noonuccal combined social issues with

literature, thus revealing her depth of experience

and a unique skill with the English language. She is

one of Australia’s greatest poets. Faith Bandler

(1920– ) wrote Wacvie (1977), in which she re-

traces her father’s history as a forced worker on a

sugar plantation in Queensland. Writers such as

Noonuccal and Bandler also built political coali-

tions to lobby for positive changes for the Aborig-

ines.

Holding up the Sky: Aboriginal Women Speak

(1999) is a collection of powerful stories by Abo-

riginal women. They talk about issues concerning

displacement from their homelands, forced re-

moval from families, physical abuse, and lost iden-

tities. Collections like this one and Writing Us Mob:

New Indigenous Voices (2000) are of great value be-

cause these are the voices of the Aborigines.

B. Wongar’s The Track to Bralgu (1977) is a col-

lection of 12 short stories that portray the barren-

ness of the once fertile land of the Aborigines and

the exploitation by the white world of all the Abo-

rigines’ resources.

Several writers of mixed origin emerged to tell

the stories of the Aboriginal experience because

the government considered them to be Aborigines.

One such writer is Sally Morgan (1951– ), who

wrote My Place (1987), an autobiography tracing

the lives of her ancestors of the Nyoongal people of

southwest Australia. Morgan captures their strug-

gles to be educated and find jobs to sustain their

families. She emphasizes the importance of the

family roots that kept her family together. She also

talks about the deep Aboriginal spirituality that

believes in the spirits of the ancestors protecting

future generations.

Today, there are institutions that specifically

promote Aboriginal art and literature, such as the

Aboriginal Center in Perth, the Aboriginal Publi-

cations Foundation, the Australian Institute of

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in

Canberra, and the Aboriginal Arts Board of the

Australian Arts Council.

The Aboriginal literary movement emerged

from autobiographies and life experiences. Mem-

oirs written by women are often referred to as

“herstories.” They reveal a strong sense of the writ-

ers’ connection with the land and the spirit world.

Herstories are self-presentations, an expression of

the self as part of others, even across generations.

They were also a means of resisting government

control. Aboriginal writings are seen by some

scholars as political acts in themselves, as the writ-

ers fight against the oblivion imposed on Aborig-

ines by the white culture to identify, recognize, and

recapture some of the social, spiritual and literary

elements of the Aboriginal past.

Works about the Aboriginal Movement

Brock, Peggy, ed. Women, Rites and Sites: Aboriginal

Women’s Cultural Knowledge. Boston: Allen and

Unwin, 1900.

Clayton, Stephen.“I Am-Aborigine.” Available online

at www.dreamtime.auz.net/StoryAbor.htm.

Nathan, Robert Louis. The Dreamtime. Woodstock,

N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1975.

Simms, Norman. Silence and Invisibility: A Study of

the New Literature from the Pacific. Washington,

D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1986.

Abrahams, Peter Henry (Peter Graham)

(1919– ) novelist, short-story writer,

journalist

When Peter Abrahams was five years old, his fa-

ther, an Ethiopian, died. Abrahams was sent to live

with relatives in Johannesburg, South Africa, far

from his mixed-race mother. Although he returned

three years later, the family’s desperate financial

situation forced young Abrahams to go to work for

a metal worker. This nine-year-old boy was to

4 Abrahams, Peter Henry

grow up to become one of South Africa’s best-

known writers.

When Abrahams was still a young man, an of-

fice worker took him under her wing and read

Shakespeare to him, awakening a lifelong love of

learning. Throughout many years of menial em-

ployment, Abrahams held fast to his educational

dreams, going to school when he could. At one

point, Abrahams even tried to start a school for

poor, black and colored South Africans, one where

native languages could be spoken.

When Abrahams was 20, he took a job as a

stoker on a freighter bound for England. Abra-

hams wrote regularly, publishing his first books

during World War II: a collection of short stories,

Dark Testament (1942), and a novel, Song of the

City (1945), which begins to examine the costs of

urbanization for black South Africans, a theme he

took up again more successfully two years later in

Mine Boy. His growing professional reputation

made it possible for him to return to South Africa

in 1952, when he took a job as a reporter for The

London Observer.

His work as a journalist, including employ-

ment as a scriptwriter for the BBC, provided the

opportunity to write creatively. Of Abrahams’s

eight novels, the two that have most solidified his

reputation are Mine Boy (1946) and Wild Con-

quest (1951). Both novels deal with the great

movements of peoples within South Africa during

its several centuries of settlement and develop-

ment. Wild Conquest focuses on the Great Trek of

the Boers in the 19th century. These descendants

of Dutch settlers spread north from Cape

Province in search of a religious and secular para-

dise. They inevitably encountered indigenous

peoples, including the Matabeles, who challenged

the Boers’ sense of mission. Because the descen-

dants of the Boers were to set the foundation for

the next century’s apartheid laws, Abrahams’s

focus on these interactions combines historical

perspective with contemporary focus. This type of

novelistic approach made him something of a lit-

erary spokesperson for the developing antia-

partheid movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Mine

Boy follows a migration of a different sort: the

economic movement of people in search of jobs in

mines and in urban areas. Such economic migra-

tions led to the dissolution of families and the cre-

ation of company and industry-controlled living

areas. Although this novel calls for a multiracial

coexistence as the only possible future for South

Africa, the story ends with the deaths of many

characters who embraced this noble goal.

Critical reception of Abrahams’s many essays,

novels, and autobiographical writings has been

mixed, in part because of the contradictory mes-

sages of novels such as Mine Boy. However, his fu-

sion of a European narrative style with a focus on

African themes and tendencies made Abrahams

one of the first voices from South Africa to ques-

tion the divisiveness of apartheid from the per-

spective of a person of color.

Other Works by Peter Abrahams

The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobi-

ography and Meditation. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 2001.

A Night of Their Own. New York: Knopf, 1965.

The View from Coyaba. London: Faber and Faber,

1985.

A Wreath for Udomo. London: Faber and Faber,

1956.

Works about Peter Abrahams

Lindfors, Bernth. “Exile and Aesthetic Distance: Ge-

ographical Influences on Political Commitment in

the Works of Peter Abrahams.” International Fic-

tion Review 13 (Summer 1986).

Wade, Michael. Peter Abrahams. London: Evans Bros.,

1972.

———.“Peter Abrahams at 70.” Southern African Re-

view of Books (June/July 1989). Available

online at http://www.uni-ulm.de/~rturrell/

antho4html/Wade.html.

Achebe, Chinua (1930– ) novelist

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe (ah CHAY bay) was

born in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria, when Nigeria was a

Achebe, Chinua 5

British colony. His father, Isaiah Okafor Achebe,

was raised according to the traditions of the Ibgo

people but converted to Christianity and became

a church teacher. His mother, Janet Achebe, told

him traditional folktales as he was growing up.

Achebe learned to respect the old ways even as his

country was adopting new ones.

After studying at University College in Ibadan,

Achebe received a B.A. from London University in

1953. He became a producer and eventually a di-

rector for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company. In

1961, he married Christie Chinwe Okoli, with

whom he had four children. After establishing his

reputation as a writer, he left broadcasting in 1966.

When civil war broke out the following year—east-

ern Nigeria, the Igbo homeland, attempted to se-

cede from the Nigerian federation as a new

country called Biafra—he traveled abroad to pro-

mote the Biafran cause. Beware, Soul Brother

(1971) describes his war experiences, including his

family’s narrow escape when their apartment was

hit by a bomb. In 1976, he became professor of

English at the University of Nigeria. A serious car

accident in 1990 left him paralyzed from the waist

down. He is now professor of literature at Bard

College in New York’s Hudson Valley.

In Home and Exile (1988), Achebe writes that he

decided to become a writer after reading Joyce

Cary’s Mr. Johnson. Critics praised the book’s real-

istic portrayal of Africa, but Achebe thought its

Nigerian hero was “an embarrassing nitwit.” He

decided that “the story we had to tell could not be

told for us by anyone else, no matter how gifted

and well-intentioned.” His novels tell the story of

Nigeria “from the inside,” from Igbo resistance to

British colonization through the coup that estab-

lished the commander of the Nigerian army, Gen-

eral Ironisi, as head of state in 1966.

Critical Analysis

Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), tells

the story of Okonwo, a great man among his people

but someone who cannot adapt to the changes

brought by colonization. Achebe does not idealize

the old ways, but he presents them as worthy of re-

spect. However, as Okonkwo’s son Obierika tells

him, “he [the white man] has put a knife on the

things that held us together, and we have fallen

apart.” Okonkwo’s refusal to adapt leads him to vi-

olence and ultimately to destruction. As Achebe ex-

plained in a 2000 interview in Atlantic, “With the

coming of the British, Igbo land as a whole was in-

corporated...with a whole lot of other people with

whom the Igbo people had not had direct contact

before....You had to learn a totally new reality, and

accommodate yourself to the demands of this new

reality, which is the state called Nigeria.”

Things Fall Apart established Achebe as “the

founding father of modern African literature,”

according to Harvard philosopher K. Anthony

Appiah. Achebe was the first novelist to present

colonization from an African point of view. He

also introduced what he calls a “new English,”

using Igbo proverbs and pidgin English to express

the African oral tradition in English. As editor

of the journal Okike, which he founded in

1971, Achebe continues to promote new African

writing.

The most influential of his works, Things Fall

Apart has been translated into more than 50 lan-

guages. In the Atlantic interview, Achebe explains

its appeal: “There are many, many ways in which

people are deprived or subjected to all kinds of vic-

timization—it doesn’t have to be colonization.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people

in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in

that story.”

At the beginning of Achebe’s second novel, No

Longer at Ease (1960), Okonkwo’s grandson Obi is

on trial for accepting bribes. Obi is one of the ed-

ucated elite to whom the British plan to turn over

the government when Nigeria becomes independ-

ent. “Like his grandfather, Obi was another victim

of cultural conflict,” notes Bernth Lindfors. “Obi

had been weaned away from traditional values but

had not fully assimilated Western ideals; having

no firm moral convictions, he was confused by his

predicament and fell.” Torn between tradition and

modern ways, Obi—and his generation—are “no

longer at ease.”

6 Achebe, Chinua

Arrow of God (1964) is set in the 1920s. Enzelu,

chief priest of the patron god of his Igbo village,

finds himself caught in a conflict between his peo-

ple and British colonial administrators, who want

to make him village chieftain. Gerald Moore, in

Seven African Writers, notes that “As in Achebe’s

other novels, it is the strong-willed man of tradition

who cannot adapt, and who is crushed by virtues in

the war between the new, more worldly order, and

the old conservative values of an isolated society.”

The narrator of Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of

the People, is involved in a fictional coup that fore-

shadows the actual coup the occurred the year the

novel was published. Odili, a schoolteacher, at first

supports M. A. Nanga, a villager who has become

minister of culture, but runs against him when he

realizes that Nanga abuses his power. Although set

in the fictional Republic of Kangan, the satire has

obvious parallels to present-day Nigeria. The novel

reflects the conviction Achebe expressed in The

Trouble with Nigeria (1983): “Hopeless as it may

seem today, Nigeria is not absolutely beyond re-

demption. Critical, yes, but not entirely hopeless.

Nigerians are what they are only because their

leaders are not what they should be.”

In 1979, Achebe received the Order of the Fed-

eral Republic for his contributions to African lit-

erature. “I would be quite satisfied if my novels

(especially the ones I set in the past) did no more

than teach my readers that their past—with all its

imperfections—was not one long night of savagery

from which the first Europeans acting on God’s

behalf delivered them,” he reflected in Morning Yet

on Creation Day (1975). Today, he is recognized as

the first African to adapt the conventions of the

European novel successfully and is Africa’s most

widely translated writer.

Works about Chinua Achebe

Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Chinua Achebe: A Biography. Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Innes, C. L. Chinua Achebe. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1992.

Lindfors, Bernth. Conversations with Chinua Achebe.

Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Moore, Gerald. Seven African Writers. New York: Ox-

ford University Press, 1960.

acmeism

Acmeism (a term derived from the Greek word

meaning “perfection”) was a Russian poetic move-

ment established in St. Petersburg in 1913. In a

sense, acmeism was a reactionary movement that

opposed the mystical elements of

SYMBOLISM

.The

poets Nikolai

GUMILEV, Sergey Gorodetsky

(1884–1967), Anna

AKHMATOVA

, and Osip MANDEL-

STAM

were the leaders of the movement and regu-

larly contributed to Apollon, the main literary

journal of acmeism. According to the acmeists, po-

etry should contain concrete ideas about culture

and human experience rather than abstract and,

often, solipsistic notions that are found in sym-

bolist poetry. At the same time, however, the

acmeists incorporated the symbolist emphasis on

the role of mythical and religious figures in po-

etry. The mythical figures found in acmeist poetry

stressed continuity of history and culture.

The movement lasted until the early 1920s

and eventually disintegrated with the advent of

SOCIALIST REALISM

. The role of the acmeists, however,

is enormous in terms of their influence on the later

generations of poets and writers. The acmeists at-

tempted to provide verse with significance that ex-

tended the bounds of social and political reality.

Their revolution was of linguistic kind. The

acmeists treated the individual as a being of cosmic

significance rather than a dispossessed creature,

tethered to a landscape grown ungovernably hostile.

A Work about Acmeism

Doherty, Justin. The Acmeist Movement in Russian Po-

etry: Culture and the Word. New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1997.

Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id; Adunis)

(1930– ) poet, critic

Adonis is one of the fathers of modernism in Ara-

bic literature and is its leading proponent of avant-

Adonis 7