Ignazio Silone, Albert Camus, and Manes Sperber: Writing Between Stalinism and Fascism

This dissertation examines the role of the literary in the contradictory political experiences of three authors. I argue that Albert Camus, Ignazio Silone, and Manes Sperber create a literary language that speaks about a type of political abuse and betrayal that the ideologies of twentieth-century radical regimes cannot explain. These authors belong to a rare generation of intellectuals that suffered under both fascism and Stalinism. Each made a break with politics at a time when these political parties dictated their intellectual and cultural communities. This break stripped them of their entire sense of belonging in a world in which politics was everything. They were plunged into space between fascism and Stalinism that operated like a political abyss. My analyses show that fiction became for them a new form of political writing for which this abyss, an abyss characterized by political loss and betrayal, offered possibilities of political and artistic renewal. In these writers' attempts to avoid the political in their literature, they came up with political truths only available through literature: the abuses of fascism and Stalinism were not unprecedented events; they were part of an age-old cycle of political destruction.