Continents manuscrits (Nov 2021)
Nouveaux éclairages sur la genèse du Dernier des Justes au regard d’éléments inédits sur les cinq versions du roman
Abstract
André Schwarz-Bart’s (1928-2006) first novel, Le Dernier des Justes, published by Le Seuil in September 1959, was already a great success before being awarded the Goncourt Prize in December of that year and was immediately translated into some thirty languages. Responding to the inner need to pay homage to the members of his family murdered in Auschwitz, to celebrate the memory of the Jewish people massacred by the Nazis, this novel, conceived as a small pebble placed on a grave of clouds, presents itself as an “identity Saga” (F. Kaufmann), a mythico-historical narrative. After several writing experiments between 1945 and 1953, the initial core of the novel appeared in 1953 around the contemporary character of Ernie Lévy, and then went back in time to inscribe Auschwitz in nine centuries of European anti-Semitism. It was completed six years later, after five versions, each one with different approaches and tones, moving from lyricism to irony, from narrative distance to that of Jewish legends and medieval chronicles. The genetic story of this ample novel is based on a doctoral dissertation and fifty years of research. It is grounded on the analysis of notes and drafts entrusted by the author in the 1970s, or consulted after his death in his house in Goyave (Guadeloupe). The creative process of the novel is also fueled by exchanges with the author (correspondence, notes taken during meetings and telephone conversations), as well as by interviews and literary analyses contained in the three imposing press files gathered by the Seuil publishing house following the publication of The Last of the Just, and studied in 1972. The correspondence between the author and Le Seuil was consulted in the IMEC archives in August 2019. André Schwarz-Bart’s private correspondence with Robert Kocioleck, a post-war friend, was consulted and studied in Jerusalem the same year.
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