ABSTRACT
The French republic of letters, after being submerged for five years by war and occupation, gave a first sign of quickly recovered vitality by broadcasting the word Existentialism into a less resilient world. Reports on lectures given by Jean-Paul Sartre came across the ocean. In fact, Sartre’s literary productions, though interesting and even brilliant, are anything but engaging. The air of decadence which pervades them and their preoccupation with diseased pleasures, lurid incidents, and promiscuous loves suggest cynicism rather than a constructive philosophy. The Existentialist idea of crisis bears a certain resemblance to the religious ideas of repentance, conversion, and spiritual rebirth. The “battle of the demons” raged with greatest fury in the minds of Russian intellectuals. Unrestrained by the Christian-Humanist tradition of the West and intoxicated by their newly acquired intellectual freedom, they seized upon Hegelian dialectic as a method by which to think out extreme possibilities.
