The Theater of the Absurd was one of the avant-garde directions of theater in the 1950s and 1960s, created after the great shock produced by World War II. One of its founders was an ethnic Armenian writer émigré in France, Arthur Adamov.
The son of a wealthy oilman from Karabagh, Suren Adamov (Adamian), Arthur (Haroutioun) Adamov was born on August 23, 1908, in Kislovodsk, a spa city in the northern Caucasus famous for its mineral waters. In one of his autobiographical novels, he would write: “I forgot to say that my family has Armenian origins. At a certain time I even spoke that language…” In 1914 his family left Russia and settled in Germany, where the future writer attended a French lyceum. Because of their Russian documents, the family was forced to leave Germany and move to Switzerland, where they lived until 1922. In the meantime, the October Revolution had a fatal outcome for the Adamovs, who lost almost their entire fortune. Suren Adamov, who was a known gambler, would leave the last remnants of that future on the card table and commit suicide in 1933.
In 1922 the Adamov family moved to France, and the future writer finally settled in Paris two years later, living the rest of his life in the French capital. The bitterness and deprivations of life in exile would be crucial in the formation of his worldview. In the late 1920s he associated with the newly born Surrealist movement and became friends with poet Paul Éluard. He also edited the surrealist journal Discontinuité. His first poems written in surrealist style became the expression of his pessimism.
In the 1930s Adamov actively participated in the fight against the fascist groups that had appeared in France following the wave of nazi-fascism in Germany and Italy. In 1938 he suffered a nervous breakdown. His autobiography The Confession, written in 1938-1943 and published in 1946, revealed his tortured conscience, delving into his sense of alienation and preparing the stage for some of the most powerful Absurdist dramas. After the defeat of France in the war and the German occupation, he spent almost a year in the internment camp of Argelès-sur-Mer, in southern France.
In the postwar period, Adamov, influenced by Swedish playwright August Strindberg and by Franz Kafka, started writing plays, with The Parody (1947) being the first. The title character of one of his best-known works, Professor Taranne (1953), is accused of various things (public nudity, littering, plagiarism). When he strenuously denied them, his denials are turned against him as further evidence of misdemeanors. His best-known play was The Ping-Pong (1955). Adamov’s later plays (Paolo Paoli, 1957; Spring 71, 1961; The Politics of Rubbish, 1963) featured radical political statements, besides his ongoing interest in dramatic experimentation. In the 1960s he become further radicalized. He translated a number of works by German authors and Russian classics into French. During his later years, he began to drink and use drugs.
The other members of the Absurdist leading trio, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, would go on to great acclaim and recognition. Beckett received the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1969 and Ionesco was inducted into the French Academy in 1970. Forgotten, alone, and impoverished, Arthur Adamov died in Paris on March 16, 1970. His death may have been the result of an accidental suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates.
