{"title":"The Brown Plague and the White Sickness: Fascism and the Crisis of Democracy in Karel Čapek’s The White Sickness and Albert Camus’s The Plague","authors":"Alfred Thomas","doi":"10.1016/j.ruslit.2022.11.010","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This essay examines two crucial examples of twentieth-century plague writing through a psychoanalytic and political lens, arguing that psychic repression lies at the heart of both Karel Čapek’s play <em>The White Sickness</em>, written on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Albert Camus’s novel <em>The Plague</em><span><span>, published ten years later in 1947 but begun in 1942 during the German occupation of France. I shall argue that the nature of the calamity in both cases is political rather than biomedical: how could fascism triumph in an apparently stable democracy like </span>interwar France or Czechoslovakia?</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":43192,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347922001119","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, SLAVIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This essay examines two crucial examples of twentieth-century plague writing through a psychoanalytic and political lens, arguing that psychic repression lies at the heart of both Karel Čapek’s play The White Sickness, written on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, published ten years later in 1947 but begun in 1942 during the German occupation of France. I shall argue that the nature of the calamity in both cases is political rather than biomedical: how could fascism triumph in an apparently stable democracy like interwar France or Czechoslovakia?
期刊介绍:
Russian Literature combines issues devoted to special topics of Russian literature with contributions on related subjects in Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak and Polish literatures. Moreover, several issues each year contain articles on heterogeneous subjects concerning Russian Literature. All methods and viewpoints are welcomed, provided they contribute something new, original or challenging to our understanding of Russian and other Slavic literatures. Russian Literature regularly publishes special issues devoted to: • the historical avant-garde in Russian literature and in the other Slavic literatures • the development of descriptive and theoretical poetics in Russian studies and in studies of other Slavic fields.