[Window] The Death of Camus

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Byung-hee] Around 1:55 PM on January 4, 1960. A car traveling on the national road connecting Sancerre, France, and Paris crashed into a plane tree by the roadside and came to a stop. It was the car of Michel Gallimard, the nephew of the president of Gallimard Publishing. The middle-aged man riding with him died instantly at the scene from a broken neck. It was Albert Camus. He had received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, just three years earlier. Camus's death was tragic.

On December 5 last year, the British daily The Guardian posted an interesting new book announcement article on its website. The book introduced by The Guardian was titled 'The Death of Camus.' The author is Italian Giovanni Catelli. In the book, Catelli claims that Camus's death was a murder orchestrated by the Soviet intelligence agency KGB. Catelli has raised suspicions of Camus's assassination since 2011. Camus sided with Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and criticized the Soviet Union for violently suppressing the revolution. The book contains the claim that Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov ordered the KGB to eliminate Camus at that time.

Catelli also refers to the diary of Czech poet and translator Jan Zabrana, written in 1980. The diary entry reads as follows: "A man who knows a lot and has wide connections told me that Camus's death was because of the KGB. The KGB tampered with the tires of Gallimard's car so that they would burst when the car was traveling at high speed."

American biographer Herbert Lottman wrote a biography of Camus in 1978. He wrote the following about the car accident: "The accident appears to have been caused by a tire blowout or axle failure. However, experts were puzzled by the fact that the accident occurred on a 30-foot-wide long straight road and that there was almost no traffic at the time of the accident."

Albert Camus is receiving renewed attention due to the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This is because of his first novel, 'La Peste (The Plague),' published through Gallimard Publishing in 1947. 'The Plague' depicts the story of a city that is quarantined due to a plague outbreak and the people trapped inside. People fall into despair and experience extreme chaos, but at the same time, they come together to overcome the crisis. The message Camus wanted to convey through 'The Plague' is simple and clear: hope can be found through solidarity.