Existentialism and the novel

Existentialism, as a trend in Western philosophy after the First World War and as a circle of ideas on which a certain literary practice is based, is in its essence a typical product of a doomed social system and a crisis of public psyche. And although existentialists make desperate efforts to present their problematic as universal, dictated by the great tremors of our modernity, they cannot hide the connection of their inconsolable and nightmarish prophecies with the hopeless state of the imperialist world. In all its diversities and wings - from the Christian-philanthropic of Gabriel Marcel or the mystical Orthodox of the Russian émigré Nikolai Berdyaev to the atheistic of Jean-Paul Sartre - existentialism sounds an alarm about the fate of the individual and seeks salvation for modern man, abandoned in tragic solitude and helplessly faced with the dark and incomprehensible, destructive elements of our century. But in vain do the prophets of world catastrophe abstract the individuality of the contemporary from any public and social dependence, in vain do they isolate it in the abstract and absolute categories of fear, hopelessness and Nothingness. If we lift the veil of ghostly abstractions and nebulous, universal incantations, we will not see modern man in general, but the man of a certain social system, the crisis man of a society without economic and life security, who himself does not know how to curb the demons of atomic civilization and technology, threatening at any moment to attack him and carry him into non-existence.