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group committed to radical democratic reform.
Büchner anonymously published a pamphlet, Der
Hessische Landbote (The Hessian Courier, 1834),
which called for a peasant revolt to end the op-
pressive rule of the elite class. To avoid arrest,
Büchner had to flee to Darmstadt in 1834 and to
Strasbourg in 1835.
While at Darmstadt, Büchner wrote the com-
plex historical drama, Dantons Tod (Danton’s
Death, 1835). Considered a masterpiece of Ger-
man literature, this work displays many levels of
meaning in its study of the French Revolution and
the purpose of history. He later translated two of
Victor HUGO’S works. Büchner’s last work,
Woyzeck (1877), is a drama about an army barber
who murders his unfaithful lover. Noted for its
originality, the play was a precursor to both ex-
pressionism and naturalism in German theater.
In 1836, Büchner took a position as a lecturer in
comparative anatomy at the University of Zurich.
He soon became ill and died in February 1837
from typhoid.
Aside from Dantons Tod, all of Büchner’s works
were published posthumously. His melancholy
writing addressed the conflict between the ideals of
human freedom and the circumstances of history.
Büchner captured the contradictions of his age
and in the 20th century became an important in-
fluence in the development of German mod-
ernism. In his book Georg Büchner: The Shattered
Whole, scholar John Reddick explains that Büch-
ner’s genius stems in part from “the sheer subtlety
and complexity of his poetic vision” and “his com-
pulsion to explore questions rather than present
answers.” The Georg Büchner Prize for literature
created by the city of Darmstadt in 1923 is one of
the most coveted German literary awards.
Another Work by Georg Büchner
Leonce and Lena. Translated by Hedwig Rappolt. New
York: Time and Space Limited, 1983.
A Work about Georg Büchner
Reddick, John, Georg Büchner: The Shattered Whole.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Bulgakov, Mikhail (1891–1940) novelist,
short-story writer, dramatist
Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in Kiev,
Ukraine, to Afanasy Bulgakov, a professor of his-
tory of religion and a censor, and Varvara
Pokrovskaya, a teacher. He was the youngest of six
children. When Bulgakov was 16 years old, his fa-
ther died unexpectedly. Bulgakov studied medicine
at the Imperial University of St. Vladimir in Kiev,
married Tatiana Lappa in 1913, and received his
degree in 1916.
Russia was in the middle of World War I when
he volunteered to work as a doctor at the front line
for the Russian Red Cross. Along with his wife, a
trained nurse, Bulgakov worked in the army for
several months. Between 1916 and 1919, he inter-
mittently worked as a doctor in villages and towns
throughout Russia. After the Bolshevik revolution
in 1917, Russia was engulfed by civil war. Bulgakov
served as an army doctor in the forces opposing
the revolutionary regime and witnessed firsthand
the horrors of war. Discharged in 1919, he settled
in the city of Vladikavkaz.
Between 1919 and 1920, Bulgakov gave up his
medical career to work as a journalist and drama-
tist. He wrote feuilletons (short literary articles or
sketches that appear in the entertainment section of
a newspaper), gave lectures on literature, and pro-
duced his first plays. Despite these efforts, Bulgakov
and his wife lived in poverty. They survived by
cutting and selling Bulgakov’s golden chain, given
to him by his father, piece by piece. During the
summer of 1921, Bulgakov attempted to emigrate
from Russia, now controlled by the Communist
regime, but health and money problems prevented
him from leaving the country. He moved to
Moscow, where he lived for the rest of his life.
In 1924, Bulgakov published the first part of
White Guard, a novel largely based on the experi-
ences during his service in the army at the time of
the Russian civil war. Set in Kiev, the novel de-
scribes the war’s effect on a middle-class family.
White Guard was not published in its entirety in
the Soviet Union until the 1960s, but the complete
text, edited by Bulgakov, was published in Paris in
68 Bulgakov, Mikhail
1929. He also published his first collection of short
stories, Diaboliad, during the same period. Be-
tween 1925 and 1927, Bulgakov also published in-
dividual short stories based on his experiences as a
doctor before and during the war. These stories
were later compiled as Notes of a Young Doctor.
In 1925, Bulgakov published a novella, Heart of
a Dog. Bulgakov tells a tale of a stray dog that gains
human intelligence when a Moscow professor
transplants human glands into the animal’s body.
The work’s elements of surrealism were offensive
to Communist orthodoxy of the time and brought
Bulgakov under close government scrutiny.
From 1927 until his death in 1940, Bulgakov
was in constant conflict with government censors.
According to the official Big Soviet Encyclopedia,
Bulgakov was considered as a “slanderer of Soviet
reality” because of his satirical treatment of the So-
viet regime and government officials. Bulgakov
continued to work in various theaters in spite of
the censorship, but by 1929 his plays Days of the
Turbins, Zoya’s Apartment, and The Crimson Island
were officially banned. In despair, Bulgakov
burned all of his manuscripts. Ill and poverty
stricken, he wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin, the
leader of the Soviet Union, requesting permission
to leave the country, stating, “there is no hope for
any of my works” in Russia. His petition was de-
nied; instead, he was granted a minor position in a
Moscow theater.
Between 1928 and 1940, Mikhail Bulgakov
wrote his most famous and complex novel The
Master and Margarita. Now considered a major
masterpiece of Russian literature, the novel re-
mained unpublished until 1966, more than 25
years after its completion.
After an extended illness that resulted in kid-
ney failure, Bulgakov died in 1940 at the age of 49.
Shortly before his death, Bulgakov suffered a nerv-
ous breakdown. He eventually lost his sight and his
ability to speak and communicated with his wife
through gestures. Bulgakov completed The Master
and Margarita on his deathbed. He did not achieve
his current reputation as one of the most influen-
tial Russian writers until after his death.
Critical Analysis
As Bulgakov admitted in his diaries, The Master
and Margarita was mostly influenced by Nikolai
GOGOL
, an earlier master of Russian mysticism. Be-
sides being a devastating political satire, the novel
is an allegory of good and evil. The work’s main
character, Satan, appears in the guise of a foreigner
and self-proclaimed black magician named
Woland. Along with a talking black cat and a
“translator” wearing a jockey’s cap and cracked
pince-nez, Woland wreaks havoc throughout liter-
ary Moscow. The parallel narrative in the work
centers on Master, a writer driven to insanity by
criticism and political persecution, and his unpub-
lished book about Pontius Pilate. Irreducible to a
single theme, Master and Margarita comments on
authorship, religion, spirituality, politics, and the
role of an individual in a socially repressive society.
During the early 1950s, the monument of Niko-
lai Gogol’s grave was renovated by the government.
Bulgakov’s widow purchased the original head-
stone and placed it on the grave of her husband.
Bulgakov had referred to Gogol as a teacher, writ-
ing in one of his letters, “Teacher, cover me with
your heavy mantle.” The request came true after
Bulgakov’s death.
Other Works by Mikhail Bulgakov
Black Snow. Translated by Michael Glenny. New York:
Harvill Press, 1999.
The White Guard. Translated by Michael Glenny.
Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995.
Works about Mikhail Bulgakov
Curtis, J. A. E. Mikhail Bulgakov: A Life in Letters and
Diaries. New York: Overlook Press, 1992.
Proffer, Ellendea. A Pictorial Biography of Mikhail
Bulgakov. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1984.
Bunin, Ivan (1870–1953) poet, novelist,
short-story writer, translator
Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin was born in Voronezh,
Russia, to poor provincial aristocrats Alexei and
Ludmila Bunin. The family situation of the Bunins
Bunin, Ivan 69
was in constant jeopardy because of the father’s
heavy drinking and gambling. In 1881, Bunin was
accepted into a small grammar school where he re-
ceived a classical education suitable for entry into
the civil service. Bunin’s brother, Julian, joined the
socialist cause, for which he was sent into exile by
government authorities. Bunin briefly joined his
brother’s revolutionary clique, but he was ulti-
mately disenchanted with politics and left revolu-
tionary circles to concentrate on his writing.
Bunin first published his poems in 1887 and re-
leased his first volume of poetry in 1891. To earn
money, Bunin worked as a translator. In 1899, he
completed translations of the English poet George
Gordon, Lord Byron and the American poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow that were so successful that
Bunin was awarded prestigious Pushkin Prize in
1903. Inspired by his friendships with Anton
CHEKHOV and Maxim GORKY, Bunin turned to
prose. Bunin’s fiction, influenced by Ivan TURGENEV
and Leo TOLSTOY, often addresses the dynamics of
family and the social position of an individual in
rapidly changing Russia. The revolution of 1905
had a dramatic effect on Bunin: He saw the grow-
ing power of the Bolsheviks as a threat to Russian
social and cultural traditions.
Despite Bunin’s aversion to radical reform, his
prose often exposes social injustices. In the inter-
nationally acclaimed novel The Village (1910),
Bunin reveals the horrors of peasant life in Russia.
In Dry Valley (1911), Bunin analyzes the degenera-
tion of family order and economic stability among
the aristocratic gentry in provincial Russia. Bunin’s
themes, however, are not limited to a social agenda.
In his collection of short stories, The Gentleman
from San Francisco (1915), Bunin’s thematic focus
explores moral decay, death, and pride. Bunin’s fic-
tion is marked by a delicate understanding of
human nature, as well as by a keen awareness of
the social environment.
As a result of the Bolshevik revolution, Bunin
left Russia for France in 1919. In France, he con-
tinued his prolific output of prose. The Well Days
(1930), Bunin’s autobiographical novel, was
hailed as a masterpiece by a number of critics. In
1933, Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize in
literature.
Bunin lived the rest of his life in Paris, where he
died in 1953. His contribution to Russian literature
is immeasurable. His elegant prose, combined with
lively poetic diction, is remarkable for its literary
value, as well as for its social commentary and in-
sight.
Other Works by Ivan Bunin
Edited and translated by Thomas Gaiton Marullo.
Cursed Days: A Diary of Revolution. Chicago: Ivan
R. Dee, 1998.
The Life of Arseniev: Youth. Translated by Gleb Struv
and Hamish Miles. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1994.
Sunstroke: Selected Stories of Ivan Bunin. Translated
by Graham Hettlinger. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
2002.
Works about Ivan Bunin
Marullo, Thomas Gaiton. If You See the Buddha: Stud-
ies in the Fiction of Ivan Bunin. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1998.
Woodward, James B. Ivan Bunin: A Study of His Fic-
tion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1980.
Burkart, Erika (Erika Halter)
(1922– ) poet, novelist
Erika Burkart was born in Aarau, Switzerland. Her
father was a writer, hunter, and adventurer.
Burkart became a schoolteacher and taught at a
primary school from 1942 to 1952.At age 30, how-
ever, she gave up teaching to write full time and
lived in isolation to better connect with nature—
the inspiration for her writing.
Burkart’s early volumes of poetry include Der
dünkel Vogel (The Dark Bird, 1953) and Die
gerettete Erde (The Saved Earth, 1960). These col-
lections convey her belief in the divinity of nature
and her empathy with the natural world. Burkart’s
reputation increased after she won the Annette von
Droste-Hülshoff Prize in 1957. Her poems in the
70 Burkart, Erika
1960s express her anxiety about the threats to na-
ture. Her first novel Moräne (1970) vividly de-
scribes the Swiss countryside and, with its
attention to the beauties of nature, reflects the in-
fluence of the French writer Marcel PROUST.
Burkart’s works in the 1980s and 1990s show her
continued affinity and concern for the landscape.
She is widely admired for her commitment to ecol-
ogy and her efforts to heal the rift between hu-
manity and nature.
Another Work by Erika Burkart
Der Weg zu den Schaffen. Zurich: Artemis, 1979.
A Work about Erika Burkart
Rudin-Lange, Doris. Erika Burkart, Leben und Werk.
Zurich: Juris Druck and Verlag, 1979.
Busia, Abena (1953– ) poet, essayist,
scholar
Abena Busia was born in Ghana, daughter to the
former prime minister. As a youth her family was
forced into exile following a coup d’état. Her per-
sonal history is marked by the experience of exile,
as she traveled the world encountering other peo-
ple of African descent in the Americas and Europe.
Her focus became the points of cultural connec-
tion within the African Diaspora (the scattering of
African peoples throughout the world through
slavery). She received her Ph.D. from Oxford writ-
ing her dissertation on images of Africa in the
colonial imagination.
Her collection of poems, Testimonies of Exile
(1990), speaks to multiple experiences of exile.
Her poetry expresses the complexity of her cul-
tural experience: She dresses in traditional Ghana-
ian attire and speaks with a British accent that
reveals the history of colonization yet never
betrays the pulsating rhythms and culture of her
native Africa.
As a professor she has taught at Yale, UCLA, and
University of Ghana and is currently an associate
professor at Rutgers University. Much of her recent
work focuses on black feminism, exploring the is-
sues of identity, race, and politics. She is currently
the codirector of Women Writing Africa, a Ford
Foundation literary project of the Feminist Press
that publishes African women’s written and oral
narratives.
Another Work by Abena Busia
“What Is Your Nation? Reconnecting Africa and Her
Diaspora through Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for
the Widow.” In Cheryl Wall, ed., Changing Our
Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writ-
ing by Black Women. London: Rutgers University
Press, 1989.
Busia, Abena 71
72
C
Cabrera Infante, Guillermo (G. Cain)
(1929–2005) novelist, essayist
Cabrera Infante was born in Gibara, Cuba. His fa-
ther was a journalist and typographer. Both of his
parents were leaders in the then-underground
Cuban Communist Party. When Cabrera Infante
was 14 years old, his parents were arrested for
holding secret political meetings in their home and
spent three months in jail. This infringement on
their freedom gave Cabrera Infante a strong dis-
like for authority. Even after the Cuban revolution,
when he was given a number of prestigious literary
appointments, he was still unable to abide govern-
ment censorship and control.
Because his father had lost his job, after Cabrera
Infante’s parents were released from jail, the fam-
ily was forced to move to Havana. The urban cul-
ture and nightlife of Havana affected Cabrera
Infante enormously, and the city at night became
the setting for his most famous novel, Three
Trapped Tigers (1971).
When he was 18, he read El Señor Presidente by
Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias
(1899–1974). Cabrera Infante decided that if As-
turias was considered a writer, he could be one too,
and he began to write short stories and sketches.
During the next few years, he published his writing
in and founded several small magazines. At age 23,
he was jailed for what the government called “pub-
lishing profanities in English.” When he was for-
bidden to publish anything using his name, he
assumed the pseudonym G. Cain and continued to
write and publish until the Cuban revolution.
It was not until Cabrera Infante was sent to Brus-
sels as a cultural attaché at the Cuban embassy that
he completed and published Three Trapped Tigers
(1970), which gained him international attention.
In this book, Cabrera Infante uses humor and word-
play to challenge every type of authority, even the
authority of language itself. The book is written
using a great deal of Cuban slang, undermining the
authority of standard literary Spanish. Cabrera In-
fante’s idiomatic language captures the flavor of
nightlife in prerevolutionary Havana one evening in
1958. On first reading, the book appears to be a se-
ries of unrelated episodes that are unified only by
their setting. However, on careful examination, it
becomes obvious that the book is carefully struc-
tured so that each episode corresponds to a biblical
story, beginning with a creation story and moving
on to stories that correspond to the fall from the
Garden of Eden, the events related to the Tower of
Babel, and the apocalypse. This structuring is both
profound, giving depth to the frivolous scenes
of nightlife, and irreverent, proposing a highly
unorthodox commentary on the Bible and society.
Infante’s Inferno (1984), his second novel, cen-
ters on a single character. The book follows a
young boy growing up in Havana and is semiau-
tobiographical. It focuses on the loves and erotic
adventures of the narrator, who claims to be a
modern-day Don Juan. The book begins when the
boy is 12 years old and follows him, as he matures,
through a series of frivolous relationships. Finally,
as an adult, he finds an exalted and ideal form of
love. Like Cabrera Infante’s other works, this book
is filled with game playing, literary allusion, and
humor. However, it also established that he is one
of the great erotic writers of Latin America.
Cabrera Infante has been a major proponent of
interpreting books based on the text alone, with-
out relying on historical context. He believes that
once a fact is placed into a work of fiction, it is no
longer connected to the reality that may have in-
spired its author to create it. This idea, combined
with his playful literary style, has made him one of
the major proponents of “art for art’s sake” in
20th-century Latin American literature.
Other Works by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Guilty of Dancing the Chachacha. Translated by the au-
thor. New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2001.
Holy Smoke. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
View Of Dawn in the Tropics. Translated by Suzanne
Jill Levine. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.
Works about Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Hall, Kenneth E. “Cabrera Infante as Biographer” in
Biography 19:4 (Fall 1996): 394–403. Hawaii: Uni-
versity of Hawaii Press, 1996.
Souza, Raymond D. Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two
Islands, Many Worlds. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1996.
Caeiro, Alberto
See PESSOA, FERNANDO.
Cain, G.
See CABRERA INFANTE, GUILLERMO.
Calvino, Italo (1923–1985) novelist, short-
story writer, journalist
Born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, Italo Calvino
is the son of Mario Calvino and Eva (Mameli)
Calvino, both tropical agronomists. Calvino grew
up on the family farm in San Remo, where his father
grew tropical fruit for experimentation and acted
as a curator for a botanical garden. Early on, Calvino
was enchanted by Rudyard Kipling’s stories. He en-
rolled in the University of Turin with plans to study
agronomy, but his plans changed in the early 1940s
when he joined the Italian resistance in World War
II to fight against the Nazis and fascists.
After the war, Calvino resumed studies at the
University of Turin in 1945, this time focusing his
attention on literature. He wrote his thesis on nov-
elist Joseph Conrad. In 1945, Calvino combined
writing with his wartime efforts by contributing to
leftist newspapers such as Il Politecnico. He pro-
duced his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders
(1947), two years later. The book, which won him
the Premio Riccione award, is based on his time as
a partisan fighter, yet it retains an innocence that is
part of much of his early narratives.“The problems
of our time appear in any story I write,” Calvino
told the New York Times Book Review in 1983.
The Path to the Nest of Spiders lacks the grim-
ness of much of Italian neorealism, both in fiction
and in films, partly because of an exuberant, pica-
resque flavor for which Calvino is indebted to his
boyhood reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kid-
napped and Treasure Island.
Other notable works followed, including the
collection, Short Stories (1958) and a three-volume
edition of Italian Folktales (1956). In his introduc-
tion to the latter, Calvino states,“Folktales are real.
These folk stories are the catalog of the potential
destinies of men and women, especially for that
stage in life when destiny is formed, i.e., youth.”
Calvino’s stories and novels use elements of fantasy
and fable, displaying the influence of Italian folk-
tales and other traditional narratives. In one of his
best-known novels, Invisible Cities (1972), for
example, an imaginary Marco Polo describes the
cities of his empire to Kublai Khan.
Calvino, Italo 73
One of his most popular novels with readers in
the United States was If on a Winter’s Night a Trav-
eler (1979). In this work, the protagonist is the
reader. Calvino’s characters are highly self-con-
scious, and his novels are self-referential. Irish au-
thor Silas Flannery, one of the characters in If On
a Winter’s Night a Traveler, states, “I have had the
idea of writing a novel composed only of begin-
nings of novels. The protagonist could be the
reader who is continually interrupted.”
At his death in 1985, Italo Calvino was the best-
known and most-translated contemporary Italian
writer. He has accumulated numerous honors and
accolades through the span of his career, earning
the Italian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in liter-
ature in 1972.
Other Works by Italo Calvino
Mr. Palomar. Translated by William Weaver. San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
Under the Jaguar Sun. Translated by William Weaver.
Harvest Books, 1990.
Works about Italo Calvino
McLaughlin, Martin. Italo Calvino. Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 1998.
Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1995.
Campos, Alvaro de
See PESSOA, FERNANDO.
Camus, Albert (1913–1960) novelist,
essayist, playwright
Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, on
November 7. Perhaps because he was born to a
poverty-stricken family, his education was taken
seriously. He attended the university in Algiers,
where he became interested in both sports and the
theater. He was forced to end his education early,
however, by an acute bout with tuberculosis, a dis-
ease that continued to plague him throughout his
life. The experience of poverty and the fear of
death take on major significance in Camus’s series
of Algerian essays, collected in L’Envers et l’endroit
(The Wrong Side and the Right Side, 1937), Noces
(Nuptials, 1938), and Été (Summer, 1954).
Recovered from his illness, Camus went to work
in the early 1950s as a journalist for the anticolo-
nialist newspaper Alger-Républicain, for which he
wrote daily articles on the impoverished lives of
Arabs in the Kabyles region. He later collected
these works in Actuelles III (1958). His journalistic
background proved invaluable when he went to
France during World War II. While working for the
combat resistance network, he began to edit a clan-
destine journal. The subject of his editorials
showed a strong desire to integrate political ac-
tivism with strict morality.
During the war years, Camus also began to ex-
plore what came to be known as his doctrine of the
absurd. It was his view that all things in life become
meaningless as a result of the fact that the human
mind has no rational capacity to understand the
experience of death. His novel L’Étranger (1942;
translated as The Stranger, 1946), for example, ex-
plores the concept of alienation. The Myth of Sysi-
phus (1942; translated 1955) and two plays
published in 1944, Cross Purpose (1944; translated
1948) and Caligula (1941; translated 1948), all
explore the idea of nihilism.
Although considered an absurdist, Camus had
difficulty with the idea that the absurd entailed a
lack of morality. His own life and his experiences
in occupied France during the war would not allow
him to abandon all concepts of moral responsibil-
ity. This idea became the focus of Letters to a Ger-
man Friend (1945). Camus began to rebel against
the absurd, seeking ways to create a greater
strength of humanity guided by morality. His
novel The Plague (1947; translated 1948), for ex-
ample, details the struggle of those who fight
against the bubonic plague, an allegory for the
struggle against the evils of war. Instead of focus-
ing on whether or not the battle against evil can
be successful, he chooses instead to glorify dignity,
as exemplary of humanity’s strength in the face of
devastation.
74 Campos, Alvaro de
Camus also became embroiled in a bitter con-
troversy with fellow philosopher Jean Paul SARTRE
as a result of the publication of his controversial
essay L’Homme Révolté (1951; translated as The
Rebel, 1954). In this essay, Camus criticized the
absolutism of the Christian belief in eternal life in
heaven and of the Marxist belief in political
utopia. He argued instead that the more moral
concept was that of Mediterranean humanism, a
doctrine that placed value on nature and temper-
ance in behavior over blind belief and the descent
into violence as an acceptable solution to prob-
lems. Camus further explores the concept of mod-
ern amorality in his novel La Chute (The Fall,
1956).
As a playwright, Camus published two political
dramas, State of Siege (1948; translated 1958) and
The Just Assassins (1950; translated 1958), as well as
adaptations of Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun
(1956) and DOSTOYEVSKY’s The Possessed (1959).
In 1957, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize
for literature. He had become the leading voice for
morality and for writing as a means to achieve so-
cial change in his generation. He was at the height
of his popularity when he died in an automobile
accident near Sens, France, on January 4.
Other Works by Albert Camus
Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance
Newspaper “Combat,” 1944–47. Translated by
Alexandre de Gramont. Middletown, Conn.: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1991.
The First Man. Translated by David Hapgood. New
York: Knopf, 1995.
Works about Albert Camus
Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999.
Camber, Richard. On Camus. Belmont, Calif.:
Wadsworth/Thompson Learning, 2002.
Canetti, Elias (1905–1994) novelist, essayist,
playwright
Elias Canetti was born in Ruse, Bulgaria, to a
wealthy Jewish merchant family. After the sudden
death of his father, he moved with his mother to
Vienna, where he learned German, the language he
would ultimately choose for his writing.
Canetti produced his first play Junius Brutus
while studying in Zurich between 1916 and 1921.
However, it was during a visit to Berlin in 1928
when, influenced by the ideas of Bertold BRECHT,
George Grosz, and Isaac BABEL, Canetti developed
the idea for a series of works that would explore
human madness. This later became the basis of his
novel Die Blendung (1935; The Tower of Babel,
translated 1947 and 1964). The tale of a madman
who only feels at home with his books and shuns
human contact in any form, the novel was banned
by the Nazis as subversive but was well received in-
ternationally after World War II.
In 1927, another event influenced Canetti’s
writing: A crowd of angry protestors burned
down the Palace of Justice in Vienna, and Canetti
was caught up in the mob. Later, he turned this
incident into the basis for his best-known book,
Crowds and Power (1960), a fictional study of
death, disordered society, and mass movements.
Drawing not only on his own experience but also
on history, folklore, and mythology, this work
received critical acclaim that culminated in
Canetti’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1981.
In his later years, Canetti returned to his focus
on death. He wrote three largely autobiographical
works, including Die Gerettete Zunge (1978; The
Rescued Tongue, translated 1980) about his father’s
death. He lived modestly in Hampstead, England,
avoiding critical attention as much as possible to
the point of writing his own diary in a code so that
intrusive readers would not be able to understand
it after his death.
Other Works by Elias Canetti
Crowds and Power. Translated by Carol Stewart. New
York: Continuum Pub Group, 1982.
The Play of the Eyes. Translated by Ralph Manheim.
New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986.
Canetti, Elias 75
The Wedding. Translated by Gitta Honegger. New
York: PAJ Publications, 1986.
A Work about Elias Canetti
Falk, Thomas H. Elias Canetti. Boston: Twayne, 1993.
Capécia, Mayotte (1928–1953) novelist
Mayotte Capécia was born in Carbet, Martinique,
but spent most of her adult years in France. Barely
able to read when she arrived in Paris in 1946,
Capécia published her first novelette, Je suis Mar-
tiniquaise (I Am a Martinican Woman) in 1948. Ac-
cording to Mayotte Capécia ou l’Alienation selon
Fanon (1999), Capécia drew on a lover’s manu-
script and used several ghostwriters and editors to
construct her novelettes.
Je suis martiniquaise and La Négresse blanche
(The White Negress, 1950), her second novelette,
explore themes of miscegenation, racial identity,
and exile. They also examine people in Martinique
and Guadeloupe during the German occupation of
France in World War II. Frantz FANON criticized
both works for exemplifying the hatred of blacks
and used them as examples of Caribbean alien-
ation. Others have also criticized the novels for po-
sitioning whites as superior.
Counterattacks in defense of Capécia’s work
have since surfaced, acclaiming their exploration
of race relations in the West Indies. In a 1998 re-
view in World Literature Today, Robert P. Smith Jr.,
asserts, “in spite of their date, Capécia’s novelettes
remain contemporary in today’s complex world of
illusion and reality.”
Another Work by Mayotte Capécia
I Am a Martinican Woman & The White Negress.
Translated by Beatrice Stith Clark. Pueblo, Colo.:
Passeggiata Press, 1997.
Works about Mayotte Capécia
Hurley, E. Anthony. “Intersections of Female Identity
or Writing the Woman in Two Novels by Mayotte
Capécia and Marie-Magdeleine Carbet.” The
French Review, 70, no. 4 (1997): 575–86.
Sparrow, Jennifer. “Capécia, Conde and the Antillean
Woman’s Identity Quest.” Journal of the Associa-
tion of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, 1
(1998): 179–87.
Stith Clark, Beatrice. “Who was Mayotte Capécia? An
Update.” CLA Journal, 39, no. 4 (1996): 454–57.
Carey, Peter (1943– ) novelist
Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria,
Australia. He studied chemistry at Monash Univer-
sity but failed his first-year examinations and
dropped out of college. Carey then found work as
an apprentice writer in an advertising agency in
Melbourne, and this became the turning point in
his life. At the agency, Carey met writers and play-
wrights, especially Barry Oakley, who would for-
ever influence him. Oakley introduced Carey to the
works of writers such as James Joyce, William
Faulkner, and Samuel BECKETT, which had a power-
ful influence on Carey’s writings. Carey next worked
in advertising agencies in London and Sydney be-
fore settling down in New York in the late 1980s.
Carey’s novels are often described as a mix of
seriousness and surrealism. His preference for the
macabre and the unusual is exemplified by the as-
sortment of strange and tormented characters in
his stories, such as the minister in the grip of a
gambling compulsion in Oscar and Lucinda
(1988). The absurdity of the characters’ internal
world is complicated by their actual situations in
the external world in which they live. Through the
clever twisting of his tales, Carey is able to com-
municate the phantasmagoric but realistic situa-
tions of ordinary human experiences. His stories
are sardonic commentaries on the bittersweet and
inextricably welded relationship between the indi-
vidual and the society. The often seedy and shad-
owy nature of Carey’s actors makes it hard for
some readers to empathize with their tragic and
unfortunate experiences. This controversial nature
of Carey’s novels makes them compelling and
thought-provoking to read.
Carey sees himself as an Australian writer, and
his works are predominantly set in Australia, either
76 Capécia, Mayotte
in the countryside or on the streets of big cities.
His characters, however, have a variety of back-
grounds and origins. They range from the average
man on the street to infamous outlaws. Though
most of Carey’s characters are fictional figures, he
has also used historical materials to reconstruct the
life and exploits of certain historical figures, such
as Ned Kelly in The True History of the Kelly Gang
(2000). Ned Kelly was a celebrated outlaw who
eluded the police for many years before he was
captured and hanged in 1880. An unlikely hero,
Kelly is a powerful legendary figure who is admired
and respected for his filial piety and loyalty. Many
of Carey’s protagonists share a similar characteris-
tic—they are social failures and misfits. By narrat-
ing their stories, Carey attempts to show that these
characters, through their unconventional behav-
ior and personality, challenge a society that does
not endorse difference; it is society’s inflexible in-
stitutions that make the characters victims within
their own societies.
Critical Analysis
Carey is an accessible writer whose works appeal to
a mass audience. Carey wrote several short stories
before the publication of his first novel (Bliss,
1981). These stories won Carey a large following of
fans in Australia, especially among the younger
generation. One of these stories is “Crabs,” a pow-
erful depiction of the sense of alienation. “Crabs”
tells the tale of a young man who transforms him-
self into a tow truck after he realizes that he and his
girlfriend are marooned at the drive-in theater.
The young man finally realizes in the end that al-
though he has successfully escaped, he is all alone
in the world as is everyone else who is still at the
drive-in theater.
Carey’s later short stories also examine the
theme of estrangement. In “The Fat Man in His-
tory,” for instance, a fat man finds himself caught
in a world that favors slim and muscular bodies.
In a postrevolutionary era, where humanity is re-
duced to forms and shapes of its bodies, the pro-
tagonist declares obesity to be subversive and
challenges the status quo. Through his misfit cen-
tral characters, Carey is able to poke fun at the
mindless fashion trends of contemporary society
where men and women are reduced to mere ob-
jects. “The Fat Man in History” was published in a
collection of short stories of the same title in 1980.
Bliss, which won the Miles Franklin Award in
1982, is a nightmarish and surrealistic tale of a
man who dies three times but is resurrected each
time to face new challenges. This novel combines
light comedy with cynical jabs at the contempo-
rary situation. The story has a political message,
as it laments the role of American companies
and popular culture in influencing and changing
Australia.
Carey’s second novel, Illywhacker (1985), which
is set in Australia’s bushwhacking country, con-
veys a bleak view of Australian society. The narra-
tor, the 139-year-old Herbert Badgery, represents
the first generation of Australia’s inhabitants
whose desire to make good and succeed in society
is not fulfilled. Badgery’s failure to market the plow
he has invented is an allegory of Australia’s own
failure to extract itself from its economic crisis.
The poignancy of Badgery’s experiences is wors-
ened by his observation that, two generations later,
his descendants, now pet-shop owners, find them-
selves imprisoned within metaphorical cage simi-
lar to those in which the pets are kept constrained.
The most influential of all Carey’s books are
those that examine the history of Australia’s social
outcasts, such as the convicts, the poor, and the gang
members. Jack Maggs (1997), which won the 1998
Commonwealth Writers Prize, is the tale of a young
man who inherits money from a convict. It critiques
the oppressive influence of English literary writing
on Australian literature and represents an attempt
to break free of the English conventions of writing.
Carey gains more recognition with every publi-
cation. The True History of the Kelly Gang won the
2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and 2001
Booker Prize and was shortlisted for the Miles
Franklin Award. Anthony J. Hassall, after describ-
ing a harrowing death by drowning in the final
scene of Oscar and Lucinda, remarks, “All of
Carey’s stories offer such fierce and dangerous
Carey, Peter 77