The Righteous

The Righteous

The five-act tragedy, "Camus's The Just Assassins," is another one of his famous plays. "Camus's The Just Assassins" is based on the true historical event in 1905 when a terrorist group from the Russian Social Revolutionary Party assassinated Grand Duke Sergei, the Tsar's uncle, with a bomb. The protagonist, Kaliayev, was tasked with throwing a bomb. After completing the mission, he was arrested and, preferring death to surrender, was hanged on the gallows on a cold night. His former lover, Dora, said: "First to murder, then to the gallows – that's paying with one's life twice." "We paid double." Double – more than the life itself – is eternal life, "perhaps eternal life for humans."
In his novels, plays, essays, and treatises, Camus profoundly reveals human loneliness in an alien world, the increasing alienation of individuals from themselves, and the inevitability of sin and death. However, while revealing the absurdity of the world, he is neither despairing nor despondent. He advocates rising up in revolt amidst absurdity, upholding truth and justice in despair, and points out a path of free humanism for the world beyond Christianity and Marxism. His courage to face a bleak life, his fearless spirit of "knowing it's impossible yet doing it," made him, after World War II, not only in France but also in Europe and ultimately worldwide, the spokesman for his generation and a spiritual mentor for the next.

2013-08-01

上海译文出版社

168

9787532761814