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Henri Barbusse
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (January 2010) |
Henri Barbusse | |
|---|---|
 Photo of Barbusse published in 1935 | |
| Born | Adrien Gustave Henri Barbusse 17 May 1873 Asnières-sur-Seine, France |
| Died | 30 August 1935 (aged 62) Moscow, Russian SFSR |
| Occupation | Writer, poet, journalist |
| Nationality | French |
| Period | 1895–1935 |
| Genre | Novel, short story, poetry, biography, opinion journalism |
| Notable work | Under Fire |
| Signature | |
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Henri Barbusse (French: [ɑ̃ʁi baʁbys]; 17 May 1873 – 30 August 1935) was a French novelist, short story writer, journalist, poet and political activist. He began his literary career in the 1890s as a Symbolist poet and continued as a neo-Naturalist novelist;[1] in 1916, he published Under Fire, a novel about World War I based on his experience which is described as one of the earliest works of the Lost Generation movement[2] or as the work which started it;[3] the novel had a major impact on the later writers of the movement, namely on Ernest Hemingway[4] and Erich Maria Remarque.[5] Barbusse is considered one of the important French writers of 1910–1939 who mingled the war memories with moral and political meditations.[1]
Before World War I, Barbusse was a pacifist, but in 1914, he volunteered for wartime service and was awarded the Croix de guerre; during the war, he was influenced by the Communists and came to the belief that a Revolution against the imperialist governments would be the only quick way to end the war and to deal with militarism and reaction.[6] In years following the war, his work acquired a definite political orientation; he became a member of the French Communist Party[1] and an Anti-Fascist and an anti-war activist. In the 1930s, he supported the Stalinist regime despite having a friendly relationship with Leon Trotsky in the middle of the 1920s[6] and contributed to Joseph Stalin's personality cult by writing his biography which became a 'canonical' text for the French Stalinists but wasn't in line with the glorification of Stalin in the USSR.[7] He died in 1935 and didn't see the events that followed, like the Moscow trials and the Nazi-Soviet pact.
He was a lifelong friend of Albert Einstein.[8]
- ^ a b c "Henri Barbusse | World War I, Novelist, Fire | Britannica". 26 August 2023.
- ^ The European Powers in the First World War. p. 432
- ^ Gutiérrez, E.A. (2017). Doughboys on the Great War: How American Soldiers Viewed Their Military Experience. University Press of Kansas. p. 41. ISBN 978-0-7006-2444-7.
- ^ War in Ernest Hemingway's a Farewell to Arms. Greenhaven Publishing LLC. 14 March 2014. ISBN 9780737770698.
- ^ Tate, Trudi (2009). "The First World War: British Writing". In McLoughlin, Catherine Mary (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to War Writing. Cambridge University Press. pp. 160–174. ISBN 978-0-521-89568-2.
- ^ a b Field, Frank (1975). Three French Writers and the Great War: Studies in the Rise of Communism and Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-20916-8.
- ^ Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941. Oxford University Press, USA. 12 January 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-979457-7.
- ^ Einstein on Politics, Princeton University Press, 2007
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