Dictionary of Literary Influences

Beckett, Samuel Barclay

questions on language and novel writing (Tidd 1999, 138). Émmanuel Lévinas, Alexandre Kojève, Alfred Adler, and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenologie de la perception were also important points of reference for de Beauvoir, especially for Le Deuxième Sexe. Gunnar Myrdal’s writings on racism inf luenced her L’Amerique au jour le jour (1954). F. R. Chateaubriand and Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) were especially important in the construction of her narrative methodologies and testimonial discourses, especially in Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958). Finally, de Beauvoir also read Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Nathalie Barney, Henri Bergson, Søren Kierkegaard, George Eliot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Montaigne.

Archives

Libraire Gallimard, Montreal. For an account of the de Beauvoir archives, see Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir: Gender and Testimony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Printed Sources

Ascher, Carol. Simone de Beauvoir, A Life of Freedom (Brighton: Harvester, 1981). Bair, Deirdre. Simone de Beauvoir, A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990).

Beauvoir, Simone de. All Said and Done, 4 vols., Patrick O’Brian (trans.), (New York: Putnam, 1974). Most important autobiographical source, evoking the mood of the age, as well as carefully chronicling her life.

Crosland, Margaret. Simone de Beauvoir: The Woman and Her Work (London: Heinemann, 1992).

Evans, Mary. Simone de Beauvoir, a Feminist Mandarin (London: Tavistock, 1985).

Mahon, Joseph. Existentialism, Feminism and Simone de Beauvoir (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

Marks, Elaine. Simone de Beauvoir: Encounters with Death (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973). Perceptive study of de Beauvoir’s literary and autobiographical works, including underlying philosophies.

Moi, Toril. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

Monteil, Claudine. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Mouvement des femmes, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rebelled (Monaco: Du Rocher, 1996).

Tidd, Ursula. Simone de Beauvoir: Gender and Testimony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Vintges, Karen. Philosophy as Passion, The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996).

Winegarten, Renée. Simone de Beauvoir (Oxford: Berg, 1988).

Cyana Leahy

BEAVERBROOK, LORD

See Aitken, William Maxwell.

BECKETT, SAMUEL BARCLAY (1906–1989)

Samuel Beckett was born in Foxrock, Ireland, to a low-church Protestant family. He attended Portora Royal School at Enniskillen, excelling in sports and French, and read for a degree in modern languages at Trinity College Dublin with poet and scholar Thomas Rudmose-Brown. In 1928 he was awarded a lectureship at the

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École Normale Supérieure. In Paris he came in touch with the literary circles around Thomas MacGreevy, Eugene Jolas, and James Joyce and published his first writings, an essay on Finnegans Wake (1929) and a long poem called Whoroscope (1930). The desire for a literary career soon overshadowed any academic aspirations, although it could not offer him any financial or emotional security. Troubled by psychosomatic ailments, for which he underwent psychoanalytic treatment with Wilfred Bion, and disillusioned about his writing career and life in general, he permanently left Ireland in 1936. Recognition of his talents arrived with More Kicks than Pricks (1934) and Murphy (1938), yet finding publishers remained difficult. During the war he worked for the Resistance and lived in hiding for three years in Rousillon, while Watt (1953) remained an unpublished manuscript. As a relaxation from prose and fiction, he turned to writing in French (a language without style, he said) and to drama, leading to his first real successes with the performance of En attendant Godot in 1953, directed by Roger Blin, followed by Fin de partie in 1957. Beckett continued experimenting with theater and fiction, writing stories, short plays, radio and television scripts, and even a movie, Film (1964), starring Buster Keaton; nonetheless, his longer works, such as the Trilogy (Molloy [1951], Malone Dies [1956], The Unnamable [1958]) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) were still received unfavorably. In 1969 he received the Nobel Prize, but did not accept the prize in person. Living practically in seclusion, he further purified his writing to the barest essentials; his literary production decreased as he devoted his time to supervising productions of his plays across Europe. In 1986 he was diagnosed with emphysema and he moved to a nursing home. He died three years later.

With Beckett influence is a contested matter, and one rather speaks of affinity than of literary precursors. He produced very little criticism (an essay, Proust [1931], and his contribution on “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” to Our Exgamination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress) and few writings bear the weight of his influences; nonetheless most of his work is strewn with allusions to Dante, the Bible, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Malebranche, and Mauthner. For many authors, such as Dante and Racine, Beckett showed a lifelong predilection; but mostly influence is a matter of borrowing abstractions: the axiom of Arnold Geulincx, a Belgian disciple of Descartes, “Ubi nihil vales, ibi nil velis” (Where you can do nothing, there wish nothing), pervades Beckett’s existentialism and absurdism; silent movies and the filmic types of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin inspired his dramatic techniques; Carl Jung’s theory on the presence of fragmentary personalities in the unconscious stimulated his sense of characterization; Bion’s “grid system” in the field of group therapy returns in the schematic structures of his writings. Furthermore, Beckett took his sense for structure, synthesis, and abstraction largely from chess and from his reading of Marcel Duchamp and Vitali Halberstadt’s manual Opposition et cases conjugées sont reconciliées

(1932). Other affinities reveal themselves through transposition: the romantic nostalgia in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings Beckett interpreted as a feeling of alienation; the truth or untruth of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics was secondary to his attempt to justify unhappiness; even Dante works on an existential level as infernal doom represents the futility of desiring a paradisiacal state. That Beckett was troubled by influence shows in his relationship to Joyce; styling himself as adopting the “Joyce method” as a young man, he spent great efforts during his career trying to distance himself from Joyce’s shadow.

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Bell, Daniel

Archives

University of Reading, U.K.: Manuscripts and typescript drafts, theatrical notebooks, published works, translations, ephemera, including programs, recordings and press, personal art collection, secondary criticism.

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas: Manuscripts and typescripts, correspondence, publication announcements, interviews, press cuttings.

Printed Sources

Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). Carey, Phyllis, and Ed Jewinski (eds.). Re: Joyce’n Beckett (New York: Fordham University

Press, 1992). A collection of essays on various interconnections between Joyce and Beckett that range from the biographical to the intertextual, including the use of allusion and the common influence of Dante.

Coe, Richard. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1964). Examines philosophical ideas in Beckett and their parallel with the ideas of, among others, Proust, Descartes, Geulincx, and Wittgenstein.

Corcoran, Neil. After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Traces the literary legacy of Yeats and Joyce through twentiethcentury Irish literature, including their influence on Beckett, Kinsella, Friel, and Heaney.

Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). Esslin, Martin. “Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self.” The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd ed.

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 29–91. General survey of influences for Beckett’s drama.

Farrow, Anthony. Early Beckett: Art and Allusion in More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1991).

Fletcher, John. Samuel Beckett’s Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967). Contains a chapter on “Sources and Influences.”

Kennedy, Sighle. Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and Sur-Real Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1971). Traces Vico, Bruno, Dante, Homer, and Joyce as well as the influence of surrealism and other modernist movements in Murphy.

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

Murray, Patrick. The Tragic Comedian: A Study of Samuel Beckett (Cork: Mercier Press, 1970). Chapter on “Beckett and Tradition” places Beckett in context of Anglo-Irish influences.

Pilling, John. Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1976). Thorough analysis of Beckett’s personal, intellectual, cultural, and literary development.

Robinson, Michael. “From Purgatory to Inferno: Beckett and Dante Revisited,” Journal of Beckett Studies 5 (1979), 69–82.

Scruton, Roger. “Beckett and the Cartesian Soul.” The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (London: Methuen, 1983). On Beckett’s philosophical influences.

Wim van Mierlo

BELL, DANIEL (1919– )

Daniel Bell was born in the Lower East Side of New York City. He attended the City College of New York (1935–38), and spent the following 20 years as a journalist working as writer and editor for New Leader and Fortune magazines. He also entered into academia at various times, teaching social science at the University of

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Chicago for three years in the mid-1940s and occasionally acting as an adjunct lecturer in sociology at Columbia University in the 1950s. In 1958 Bell was accepted as a full-time professor at Columbia and received his Ph.D. in 1960 with the acceptance of a collection of his previously published work. He moved to Harvard in 1969 and was appointed Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences in 1980 until he retired in 1990. Bell’s main influence stemmed from his analysis of the nature of postindustrial society and his later conservative readings of contemporary culture.

Like most sociologists in America after World War II, Bell was influenced by the major intellectual figures of Western thought including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Thorstein Veblen. But Bell always acknowledged that his major intellectual inspiration for the study of modernity came from the sociological writings of Max Weber. Bell even described Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as the most important sociological work of the twentieth century. But Bell was also heavily influenced by his association with the New York intellectuals, the community of independent scholars and thinkers including Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Irving Kristol who profoundly influenced American intellectual life in the latter half of the twentieth century. Bell’s famous 1960 declaration concerning the “end of ideology in the West” and the exhaustion of Marxism as a political tool was a phrase borrowed from the writings of the French philosopher Albert Camus, and an idea developed in connection with the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1955, attended by Raymond Aron, Michael Polanyi, Edward Shils, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Bell readily acknowledged the importance of Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) as a source of inspiration. Bell’s analysis of the “coming of post-industrial society” was influenced by the growing body of sociological literature after the Second World War concerned with the transformation in the nature of capitalism. Bell mentioned the importance of Ralf Dahrendorf’s

Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society (1959), David Riesman’s essay, “Leisure and Work in Post-Industrial Society” (1958), and W. W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth (1960). His understanding of the importance of technological changes to economic development was influenced by the work of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, in particular his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). Bell mentioned the influence of Colin Clark’s Condition of Economic Progress (1940) in his understanding of the changing composition of the workforce. Bell’s analysis of the relationship between economics, culture, and social change in works such as

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) was shaped by the literary criticism of Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, the economic writings of Robert Heilbroner, and in particular the work of Max Weber.

Archives

Daniel Bell Files, Tamiment Institute Library, New York University, New York.

Printed Sources

Brick, Howard. Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1986).

Dittberner, Job L. The End of Ideolog y and American Social Thought, 1930–1960 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1979).

Leibowitz, Nathan. Daniel Bell and the Agony of Modern Liberalism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985).

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Benda, Julien

Rose, Margaret. The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Walker, Malcolm. Daniel Bell (London: Routledge, 1996).

Robert Genter

BENDA, JULIEN (1867–1956)

Julien Benda was born in Paris and educated at the lycées Charlemagne and Condorcet 1876–84; he studied engineering at the Ècole Centrale and later received a License ès lettres from the Sorbonne.

Although little read today, Benda was one of the leading lights of the Third Republic’s literary culture. Benda’s distinction was that he was a complete contrarian. Throughout his long career he was reluctant to ally with any school of, and remained a trenchant critic of, contemporary thought. Much of his best-known writing is to be found in Charles Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine and André Gide’s La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, yet he consistently quarreled and eventually broke with both men. His most famous work by far, La Trahison des Clercs (translated The Treason of the Intellectuals), was a ringing condemnation of what he saw as current intellectuals’ surrender to material and lay forces. The upshot, Benda argued, was the politicization of all aspects of life, and the unleashing of irrational passions throughout society. Benda preferred the notion of clerk over that of intellectual in that the former was devoid of contemporary connotations. The virtue of the clerk consisted in its devotion to reason and the universal as opposed to the contingent and particular. In the light of 1927, Benda’s assault on intellectuals stirring the fires of nationalist and class hatred appeared timely and prescient.

Benda was born into a privileged and secularized Jewish household. Although he was never active in the Parisian synagogue, he closely identified with Jews as a people and as a historically persecuted group. Indeed, his first public writings addressed the Dreyfus Affair. Benda was an ardent Dreyfussard, and his first work, Dialogues à Byzance (1900), focused on the leading intellectuals of the antiDreyfussard movement—Ferdinand Brunetière, Maurice Barrès, and Jules Lemaître. Benda’s focus was less on the innocence or guilt of Dreyfus, but rather on the employment of authoritarian and irrationalist arguments on the part of the antiDreyfussards (Sarocchi 1968, 17). From the outset Benda was thus concerned with the activity of letters and ideas in the realm of public affairs.

In the immediate post-Dreyfus period Benda was torn in a number of different directions. On the one hand, he associated with Péguy and Georges Sorel and the circle associated with the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. There were frequent discussions of socialism, and group expeditions to Henri Bergson’s philosophy lectures at the Collège de France. At the same time Benda pursued a more independent tack and read deeply in the works of the philosopher Charles Renouvier and the psychologist Théodule Ribot (Nichols 1978, 57, 61). Renouvier and Ribot were pillars of establishment Third Republic philosophy. Benda employed the staid elder statesmen’s neo-Classical and neo-Kantian rationalism in shaping a multipronged attack on Bergson. The work Le Bergsonisme (1912) dealt less with the technical philosophical aspects of Bergson’s writing than it did with teasing out what Benda saw as the dangerous implications of Bergson’s thought. Essentially, Benda argued that Bergson’s stress on intuition and élan vital were an upshot of late-romanticism and

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irrationalism (Grogin 1978, 27). He was especially scornful of the salon crowd that touted Bergson.

Le Bergsonisme generated a great deal of discussion and paved the way for Benda’s prolific career. La Trahison extended Benda’s deeply negative critique to all modernist turns-of-thought ranging from Nietzsche to Marx. Although he valorized Spinoza, Kant, and Renan as exemplars of dispassionate reason, his own style was most frequently bitter and polemical. In other words, his own writings stood in sharp contrast to those he held out as models. Despite his loathing of most forms of modernism he was not a simple reactionary (Revah 1991, 209–10). As the political situation degenerated in the 1930s his writings took an increasingly political cast, and he most frequently sided with the left.

Benda was outspoken in his denunciation of the rise of Nazism. He was forced to flee Paris following the occupation, and his library and papers were destroyed by the authorities. Following the war Benda once again achieved notoriety through his strident defense of the execution of collaborators (Schalk 1979, 45). He would write up to his last days in 1956, but clearly his star had peaked with the publication of La Trahison.

Archives

Bibliothèque nationale, Départment des manuscrits, Fonds Benda.

Printed Sources

Cornish, Martin. “Catalyst for Intellectual Engagement: The Serialization of Julien Benda’s

La Trahison des clercs in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 1927–1932,” French Cultural Studies

4 (1993), 31–49.

Grogin, Robert C. “Rationalists and Anti-Rationalists in pre–World War I France: The Bergson-Benda Affair,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 5, 2 (1978), 223–31.

Nichols, Ray. Treason, Tradition and the Intellectual: Julien Benda and Political Discourse

(Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1978). The most comprehensive book on Benda in English. The extensive bibliography of Benda’s works is especially helpful.

Niess, Robert J. Julien Benda (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956). An early, searching commentary on Benda’s works.

Revah, Louis-Albert. Julien Benda: Un Misanthrope juif dans la France de Maurras (Paris: Plon, 1991).

Sarocchi, Jean. Julien Benda: Portrait d’un intellectuel (Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1968). The standard French biography.

Schalk, David L. The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). This fine work situates Benda within the intellectual landscape of interwar France.

Jim Millhorn

BENESˇ, EDVARD (1884–1948)

Edvard Benesˇ was born in Kozˇlany, in the present-day Czech Republic. The son of a prosperous peasant, Benesˇ studied between 1904 and 1909 at the Czech University in Prague, the Sorbonne, and the University of Dijon, earning a degree in law from Dijon in 1908 and a doctorate in philosophy from Prague in 1909. While a student, he began publishing theoretical works on socialism, sociological studies, and commentaries on Czech national politics. After his return to Prague, he taught at the Czech Commercial Academy and collaborated with his former professor,

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Tomásˇ Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), on issues of Czech national politics. In 1915, Benesˇ followed Masaryk into exile and worked closely with him to secure Allied support for an independent Czech state. After the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, he became foreign minister, representing the new republic at the Paris Peace Conference and later the League of Nations. In 1935 Benesˇ succeeded Masaryk as president of Czechoslovakia. On September 30, 1938, Benesˇ accepted the Munich Agreement between Britain, France, and Germany in order to prevent war between Czechoslovakia and Germany. He resigned the presidency and went into exile in London in October 1938. After the start of World War II in 1939, Benesˇ formed a Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London. Once again he succeeded as a diplomat, gaining the Allies’ denunciation of the Munich Agreement and a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union. He returned home to a hero’s welcome in 1945, following the Soviet Army’s liberation of Czechoslovakia. In poor health after the war, Benesˇ was unable to stave off the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s encroachments against its partners in a coalition government. In February 1948 he accepted a realignment of the cabinet that allowed the Communists to take control of the government. In June of that year, he resigned the presidency for the second time. Three months later a stroke took his life.

Benesˇ regarded himself not only as a master politician and diplomat, but also as a prescient analyst of democracy and international relations. He believed himself to be a scientific student and practitioner of politics, someone who could dispassionately dissect a given set of circumstances and determine a rational solution. In an interview with his biographer, the British author Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972), Benesˇ cited Charles Darwin (1809–82) as a principal influence on his intellectual development and his reliance on the scientific method. He was also inclined toward Social Darwinism, a philosophy that fit well with his personality: prudish, socially isolated, and arrogant, Benesˇ as a politician held many of his colleagues in disdain and exhibited little solidarity with the citizenry. His political opinions were shaped in part by his brother Václav, 19 years his senior, with whom Benesˇ lived while a student at the gymnasium in Prague. A teacher and editor, Václav Benesˇ leaned toward socialism, and he introduced his brother to socialist texts. As a student, Benesˇ also read the novels of Emile Zola (1840–1902), and he translated L’Assomoir into Czech when he was 19. Benesˇ considered himself a socialist throughout his entire political career, although more from the conviction that socialism was the next logical step in Europe’s political development than from a concern about social justice. He viewed Karl Marx (1818–83) and his proponents through a critical lens, arguing that Marx’s thought presupposed a spiritual conception of the equality of humanity, something that Marxist thinkers and politicians, especially Communists, did not recognize. Benesˇ himself, although irreligious, did not hold to a fully materialistic view of the world. He believed that a spiritual understanding of humanity and an acceptance of transcendent moral norms undergirded a successful democratic and socialist society: ideas gained from his association with Tomásˇ Masaryk. Benesˇ’s professor and political mentor was the most important influence upon both his philosophical and political thinking. In memoirs and interviews, Benesˇ cited the influence of René Descartes (1596–1650), Emile Dürkheim (1858–1917), and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) upon his thinking as a student. Yet he pointed out that he viewed these thinkers anew after studying with Masaryk. During his political career, he regarded himself as the inheritor of

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Masaryk’s mantle and the protector of his mentor’s conception of a republic built upon humanitarian ideals.

Archives

Archive of the National Museum, Prague, Czech Republic: Edvard Benesˇ and Hana Benesˇová Papers. Personal correspondence of Benesˇ and his wife, photographs.

Archive of the T. G. Masaryk Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic: Benesˇ Archive and London Archive. Diplomatic and presidential papers from interwar period and exile in London (1938–45), manuscripts of speeches, press clippings, miscellaneous correspondence.

Hoover Institution Archive, Hoover Institution for War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.: Eduard Táborsky´ Collection. Personal and official papers of Benesˇ’s personal secretary in London exile, Táborsky´’s wartime diary.

Printed Sources

Lukes, Igor. Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Benesˇ in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Mackenzie, Compton. Dr. Benesˇ (London: Harrap, 1946).

Taborsky, Eduard. President Benesˇ between East and West, 1938–1945 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1981).

Zeman, Zbyneˇk, and Antonín Klimek. The Life of Edvard Benesˇ, 1884–1948: Czechoslovakia in War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Bruce R. Berglund

BEN-GURION, DAVID (1886–1973)

David Ben-Gurion was born in the town of Plonsk, in Russian-dominated Poland. His primary education was in the traditional Jewish manner, learning the Bible, the Talmud, and books of prayer in small rabbinical schools. Tzarist rules restricting the number of Jewish students in Eastern Europe and the lack of financial means to study in Western Europe prevented him from getting a high school or vocational education, and he was self-taught. He was a polyglot and well-read person. In 1906, Ben-Gurion went to Palestine as a pioneer and in 1911, he went to Constantinople to study law, but after the outbreak of World War I, he was expelled from the Ottoman Empire and never pursued formal studies.

Ben-Gurion’s biographers tend to divide his public life after his return to Palestine in 1918 into three phases: some 15 years as general secretary of Histadrut, the federation of labor (1920–35), 13 years as chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency (1935–48), leading the Jews’ struggle for independence from British rule, and 15 years as Israel’s first prime minister (1948–63). His role in the proclamation of the State of Israel and its construction as a modern democratic state had made him, in the eyes of many, the greatest Jewish leader in modern history. Moreover, Ben-Gurion stood out as one of the great world leaders of the twentieth century in combining a far-reaching vision with a strong sense of pragmatism. His political leadership, characterized by the effective utilization of knowledge and manipulation of power in the service of an encompassing vision of state-guided social transformation, served as a model for a modern Western culture in search of a balance between social ideology and political realism.

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Ben-Gurion’s disciple, Shimon Peres, has shown how Ben-Gurion’s reading was related to the skills he deemed necessary in each stage of his career. As leader of the Histadrut he read a great deal of socialist and revolutionary literature as well as books about mass psychology. As head of the Jewish Agency he was greatly concerned with the history of the Jewish people and the prerequisites of a Jewish state. As prime minister of Israel, he was deeply involved with science. The literary and intellectual treasures that influenced Ben-Gurion’s thought can be divided into four categories:

1.The Old Testament: Ben-Gurion was strongly versed in the Old Testament, from which he derived the right of the Jewish people to establish a state in Palestine. He wrote several essays on biblical issues reflecting his identification with biblical

leaders related to the conquest of the Land of Canaan, especially Moses and Joshua.1

2.Rationalist philosophy: Ben-Gurion often mentioned the influence of Plato and Spinoza on his thought. A great admirer of both, he believed that human beings, as an organic part of the material and spiritual world, have the gift of deducing the secrets of nature and of the human conscience. The influence of the two philosophers can also be detected in the cosmic proportions of his model of the Jewish state.

3.National literature: Ben-Gurion made a great effort to mobilize writers to inspire the state-building process, an effort influenced by his admiration of intellectual national leaders, especially Gandhi, and by early modern literature supporting the development of the nation-state, such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

4.Modern Israeli literature: Ben-Gurion was strongly affected by Yizhar Smilansky’s

novel The Days of Ziklag (1958) and by Nathan Alterman’s poems relating to public affairs. He saw both writers as manifesting “a supreme human quality,”2 which, he believed, could only come to bear in a literature produced by Jews living in the land of Israel.

Archives

Ben-Gurion Archives, Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute and Research Center, Sde-Boker, Israel.

The Ben-Gurion archives online: http://bgarchives.bgu.ac.il/archives/frame.asp?arc.

Printed Sources

Aronson, Shlomo. David Ben-Gurion: The Renaissance Leader and the Waning of an Age (BeerSheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1999). In Hebrew.

Hazony, Yoram. The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Keren, Michael. Ben-Gurion and the Intellectuals: Power, Knowledge and Charisma (DeKalb,

Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983).

Teveth, Shabtai. Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886–1948 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

Notes

1.David Ben-Gurion, Ben-Gurion Looks at the Bible. Jonathan Kolatch, trans. (London: W. H. Allen, 1972).

2.David Ben-Gurion to Nathan Alterman, letter, August 12, 1960. Ben-Gurion Archives, Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute and Research Center, Sde-Boker, Israel.

Michael Keren

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Bergman, Ingmar

BERGMAN, INGMAR (1918– )

Born in Uppsala, Sweden, on July 14, 1918, the second son of a severe Lutheran minister often explained that he had a bad conscience during childhood, and at 18 years of age he lost his faith and left his parents. His few happy moments came in living with his grandmother, away from his violent father who beat him, as depicted in Bergman’s final masterpiece, Fanny and Alexander (1982). He disliked his university years in Stockholm, but admitted the influence of his professor of Swedish Literature, Martin Lamm (Bergman 1973, 24). Although he became famous in the late fifties for his cold movies about inner life and conflicted souls, Ingmar Bergman began his career as a stage director for many Swedish theater companies; he did some 70 projects, from 1944 until the late eighties, in all kinds of genres: staging plays (and some operas) by Molière, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, Jean Anouilh, August Strindberg, and many Swedish playwrights, including himself. Many of Bergman’s first movies as a director were adapted from plays, and some of them were comedies; his debut was Crisis (1945), adapted from Morderdyret, a Danish play by Leck Fisher; It Rains on Our Love (1947) was adapted from a Norwegian play by Oscar Braathen, Decent People. Bergman was an unique film director, who succeeded perfectly in representing fundamental feelings into pure images and dialogues: the humiliation in The Naked Night (1953); the fear of death in The Seventh Seal (1956) and Wild Strawberries (1957); the doubt about the existence of God in Winter Light (1962); the impossibility of communication in The Silence (1963) and Persona (1966); impressions of guilt in The Shame (1967) and Cries and Whispers (1972). Among the many projects he never made, Bergman wrote a script from Camus’s book, The Downfall, but the latter’s death stopped that collaboration, even though both men exchanged a correspondence (Bergman 1973, 26).

In Laterna Magica, Bergman recalls the strong influence of August Strindberg, Hjalmar Bergman, and Molière. He was not impressed by Strindberg’s The People of Hemsö, but more by Black Banners (Svarta Fanor), and The Red Room, whose opening chapter he knew “virtually by heart” (Bergman 1973, 23). Franz Kafka was another major influence (Bergman 1973, 27). At 16, Bergman staged plays for a kind of family theater, including Strindberg’s Lucky Per’s Travels and Master Olof and Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird (Bergman 1973, 9). He was fascinated by the city of Berlin, both from personal visits and “an early collection of short stories about Berlin by Siegfried Siwertz” (Bergman 1973, 181). He also remembers Hans Fallada’s novels

Kleiner Mann was nun?, A Wolf among Wolves, and Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera (Bergman 1973, 181).

In a long interview given in 1968 to three Swedish film critics, Bergman remembered the first film he saw, a silent adaptation of Black Beauty around 1924 at the Sture Cinema in Stockholm, “how it excited me, and how afterwards we bought the book of Black Beauty and how I learned the chapter on the fire by heart—at that time I still hadn’t learned to read” (Bergman 1973, 6). Bergman also admitted that his masterpiece Wild Strawberries (with Victor Sjöström as an actor) was influenced specifically by Strindberg’s The Dream Play and To Damascus, but also by an obscure Swedish novelist and dramatist, Jonas Love Almqvist (Bergman 1973, 138).

Archives

Svenska Filminstitutet Archiv, Stockholm.

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