Discours de Suède

Discours de Suède comprises two addresses delivered by Camus following the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature: the speech of 10 December 1957, given in Stockholm at the award ceremony, and that of 14 December 1957, delivered at the University of Uppsala under the title “L’artiste et son temps” — a text written in 1953 as a preface to Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

An afterword closes the volume, addressing the two totalitarianisms, art for art’s sake, socialist realism and the writer’s much-debated “engagement” — in terms that have lost none of their edge. As Camus writes: “Thus many of our artists aspire to be cursed, feel guilty at not being so, and wish at once for applause and for hisses”; or again: “Right-wing academicism ignores a misery that left-wing academicism exploits.”

The text was printed at the Imprimerie Moderne in Montrouge on 6 February 1958. It is dedicated to Louis Germain, to whom Camus had written as early as November: “My first thought, after my mother, was for you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the poor child that I was, without your teaching and your example, none of this would have happened. I do not make too much of this kind of honor. But it at least gives me an opportunity to tell you what you were, and still are, to me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work and the generous heart you brought to it are still alive in one of your little schoolboys who, despite his age, has never ceased to be your grateful pupil.”

A fine copy in a full binding by Alix.