Sixty years after the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of 46, a new book is arguing that he was assassinated by KGB spies in retaliation for his anti-Soviet rhetoric.
Italian author Giovanni Catelli first aired his theory in 2011, writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had discovered remarks in the diary of the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana that suggested Camus’s death had not been an accident. Now Catelli has expanded on his research in a book titled The Death of Camus.
Camus died on 4 January 1960 when his publisher Michel Gallimard lost control of his car and it crashed into a tree. The author was killed instantly, with Gallimard dying a few days later. Three years earlier, the author of L’Étranger (The Outsider) and La Peste (The Plague) had won the Nobel prize for “illuminat[ing] the problems of the human conscience in our times”.
“The accident seemed to have been caused by a blowout or a broken axle; experts were puzzled by its happening on a long stretch of straight road, a road 30 feet wide, and with little traffic at the time,” Herbert Lottman wrote in his 1978 biography of the author.
Catelli believes a passage in Zábrana’s diaries explains why: the poet wrote in the late summer of 1980 that “a knowledgeable and well-connected man” had told him the KGB was to blame. “They rigged the tyre with a tool that eventually pierced it when the car was travelling at high speed.”
The order, he said, had been issued by Dmitri Shepilov, the Soviet Union’s minister of internal affairs, in retaliation for an article by Camus in the French newspaper Franc-Tireur published in March 1957.
I don't want to go back to the patrician voice on the BBC which brooks no dissent. I don't want to go back to the times over breakfast and everybody all marching to the same beat. I can see why a lot of people do, but I want to go forward to something better.
What do you make of this, luka?
What I was getting at is that you don't have to like someone, or consider them to be a good or a nice person, or someone who is part of your team or side, to appreciate that they can be useful and play a positive role.
Now Andrew Neil is perhaps a stereotypical gammon - the very thing you picked up on was his rubicund complexion! - and yes, he's a sexist old sleaze, an establishment Tory figure and all of that. Granted. But I took some small comfort in seeing him calling out Boris Johnson, the UK's incumbent Tory prime minister, as a coward; issuing a challenge to him, a challenge that went unanswered. It made me think: You know what, these people are actually not all on the same side. And that's an important realisation.
Do you see where I'm coming from?