Arthur Adamov Biography

Arthur Adamov

(Kislovodsk, 1908-Paris, 1970) French-language playwright, founder of the theater of the absurd.He left Russia when he was only four years old.He studied in Switzerland, first, and then in Germany.In 1924 he moved to Paris, where he began to frequent surrealist environments.In this period he published some poetry, but immediately stopped writing, until 1946, when he published a heartbreaking and provocative little book, L'aveu , a ruthless analysis of his psychological and spiritual crisis.A year later, under the influence of Strindberg, he wrote his first theatrical text, La parodie .

From 1946 to 1955 he developed the themes of what critics called New theater of isolation or Theater of the absurd , and he became an exponent of avant-garde drama, expressing in his texts the discomfort of the individual in the face of the structures imposed by society.Through his characters, lacking a precise psychological individuality, he configured impersonal dramas crossed by themes such as the absurdity of existence, the cruelty of social institutions, the loneliness of man, suicide and the tyranny of parental love.

From this stage, characterized by parody, are his works The invasion (1950), The great and the small maneuver (1950), The parody (1952), All against all (1953), Professor Taranne (1953), The sense of the march (1953), and The reunion (1955).

From Ping-Pong (1955), and under the influence of B Brecht, his writing took a turn, lost its extreme pessimism and took on a social dimension.He abandoned the deterministic drama and gave his characters a moral responsibility, understanding that the human being has a margin of choice about his destiny and, therefore, a possibility of rebellion.

This trend was affirmed in his work Paolo Paoli (1957) and in his adaptation of Dead souls (1959) by N.Gogol, and was radicalized in his last texts: Primavera del 71 (1960), The politics of waste (1965), Don Moderado (1968), and Off limit (1969).

Adamov theorized his positions in a collection of essays published in 1964 under the title Here and Now , and his adaptations by Kleist, Marlowe, and Büchner are notable.In the alternative between "theater of the soul" and "theater of commitment" that characterizes his work, resides the uniqueness of Adamov's position in the field of the most advanced contemporary dramaturgy.In 1968 he published The Man and the Child ( L'Homme et l'Enfant ), a compilation of memories and newspaper articles.Shortly before dying, and in the midst of an acute emotional crisis, he wrote an autobiography entitled The confession (1970), where he made a meticulous and stark assessment of his life.

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