Arthur Adamov

Arthur Adamov (born Aug. 23, 1908, Kislovodsk, Russia—died March 16, 1970, Paris, Fr.) was an avant-garde writer, a founder and major playwright of the Theatre of the Absurd.

In 1912 Adamov’s wealthy Armenian family left Russia and settled in Freudenstadt, Ger. He was subsequently educated in Geneva, Mainz, and Paris, where, having mastered French, he settled in 1924, associating with Surrealist groups. He edited a periodical, Discontinuité, and wrote poetry. In 1938 he suffered a nervous breakdown, later writing L’Aveu (1938–43; “The Confession”), an autobiography that revealed his tortured conscience, delving into a terrifying sense of alienation and preparing his personal, neurotic stage for some of the most powerful of all Absurdist dramas. He spent almost a year of World War II in the internment camp of Argelès, Fr. A severe depression followed.

Strongly influenced by the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg—with whose own mental crisis Adamov identified—and by Franz Kafka, he began writing plays in 1947. Believing that God is dead and that life’s meaning is unobtainable, Adamov turned to a private, metaphysical interpretation of Communistic ideals. His first play, La Parodie, features a handless clock that looms eerily over characters who are constantly questioning one another about time. The world of the play is a parody of man, whom Adamov saw as helplessly searching for life’s meaning, which, although it exists, is tragically inaccessible to him. In L’Invasion, he attempted to depict the human situation more realistically; it impressed André Gide and the director Jean Vilar, and, under Vilar’s direction, it opened in Paris in 1950, with his third play, La grande et la petite manoeuvre. The latter reveals the influence of his friend, Antonin Artaud, theoretician of the “theatre of cruelty.”

Le Professeur Taranne (performed 1953) was about a university professor unable to live up to his public role; though the play is dictated by the absurd logic of a dream, the construction and characterizations are firm and clear. In his best known play, Le Ping-pong (performed 1955), the powerful central image is that of a pinball machine to which the characters surrender themselves in a never-ending, aimless game of chance, perfectly illustrating man’s adherence to false objectives and the futility of his busy endeavours. Adamov’s later plays (Paolo Paoli, 1957; Le Printemps 71, 1961; La Politique des restes, 1963) embodied radical political statements, though his interest in dramatic experimentation continued. Finally admitting that life was not absurd but merely difficult, he committed suicide. In a preface to Théâtre II (1955), his second volume of plays, Adamov describes his attitudes toward his work and comments on his career.