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Henri Barbusse | |
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Born | Adrien Gustave Henri Barbusse 17 May 1873 Asnières-sur-Seine, France |
Died | 30 August 1935 Moscow, Russian SFSR | (aged 62)
Occupation | Writer, poet, journalist |
Nationality | French |
Period | 1895–1935 |
Genre | Novel, short story, poetry, biography, opinion journalism |
Notable work | Under Fire |
Signature | |
Henri Barbusse (French pronunciation: [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]