Dostoevsky via Camus

France's Algiers-born Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall) was a man of the theater long before he turned novelist. As a poor, radical student in 1934, he started Algeria's only theater, for which he wrote, acted, directed. To get experience, he used to play one-night stands all over North Africa, finally wrote three dramas between 1944 and 1949. Fellow actors remember him as pale, sickly, with "an extraordinary radiance." Last week the Camus radiance was back onstage, in one of the year's most exciting theatrical events: the opening in Paris of Camus' long-awaited dramatic version of Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Le Monde expressed the consensus of Paris critics: "A magnificent and stupendous spectacle."

Said Dostoevsky: "If there is no everlasting God, there is no such thing as virtue." The Possessed was partly written to illuminate that point. The book swept from Russia's liberals, who reveled in sentimental idealism, straight to the awful result: the young nihilists of the 1870s, who believed that terrorism was justified as a means to political reform. Camus read the book at 20 ("A soul-shaking experience"). Like Dostoevsky, Camus broods about the ailment of freedom without God, about political mass murder in the name of life and the future. Although he has been unable to accept Dostoevsky's remedy (return to God and the soil), he says: "The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx."

As both playwright and director of The Possessed, Camus combined his evolving philosophy with his considerable theatrical skill. To handle the novel's bewildering rush toward chaos, Camus uses an onstage narrator who streamlines the transition between scenes (some take only eight seconds). The play roils with the deluded intrigues of nihilists, whom Camus makes strongly reminiscent of modern Marxists. Perhaps the play's chief quality is Camus' adroit emphasis of Nikolay Stavrogin (ably played by Pierre Vaneck), the book's most memorably monstrous character. An empty-souled aristocrat, Stavrogin longs to be a sort of Nietzschean superman. He instigates a band of young revolutionaries to murder, rapes his landlady's little daughter, finally commits suicide. In the hands of Camus, Stavrogin emerges as a modern man, a desperate seeker of God who does not know where to look. Says another character in The Possessed: "When he believes, he does not believe that he believes, and when he does not believe, he does not believe that he does not believe."

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