Portrait of the Author as a Historian

For Albert Camus understanding the past and predicting the future may hinge on one fact: history is absurd.

H.P. Lovecraft asked us to imagine a much deeper past than modern comforts and science allow us to perceive — and the monsters that might dwell there.

If the present, with its conflicts and uncertainties, is impossible to know, asks Italo Calvino, how can we hope to understand the past?

Confronted by a confusing and complex national history, Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk decided to embrace myth rather than debunk it.

The Second World War disrupted narratives of mankind’s ‘progress’, but – as William Golding captured so vividly in Lord of the Flies – human history has always been a balancing act between enlightenment and calamity.

In the chaos unleashed by the October Revolution, Mikhail Bulgakov found a past become fragmented and confused, and history the domain of madmen and devils.

Attempting to recover the human experience of Communism in the post-Soviet era, a Belarusian investigative journalist found pessimistic nostalgia in place of hope for the future. 

In newly independent Indonesia, nationalism, communism and Islam competed for the attention of the people. But the country’s greatest novelist saw humanity behind the ideologies. 

Angered by his native country’s rush towards western-style modernisation, the acclaimed Japanese author committed a shocking act of protest.

Struggling to make sense of the Holocaust, one Hungarian novelist came to the startling realisation that the 20th century’s darkest moment might not yield any lessons for posterity.