Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (redirected from Louis-Ferdinand Destouches)

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand

 orig. Louis-Ferdinand Destouches

(born May 27, 1894, Courbevoie, near Paris, France—died July 1, 1961, Meudon) French writer. Céline was born into poverty. In World War I he suffered wounds and shell shock, the mental and physical effects of which lingered throughout his life. From 1924 he practiced medicine. His Journey to the End of Night (1932), about a man's tortured search for meaning, is written in a vehement and disjointed style that marked him as a major innovator. Death on the Installment Plan (1936) is a bleak portrayal of a world bereft of value, beauty, and decency. He thereafter became increasingly conservative, anti-Semitic, and misanthropic. After World War II he fled to Denmark as a suspected Nazi collaborator, but he was later exonerated. His works include the trilogy Castle to Castle (1957), North (1960), and Rigadoon (1969).

---

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 

(pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches). Born May 27, 1894, in Courbevoie; died July 1, 1961, in Meudon. French writer. Physician by training.

In the novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932; Russian translation, 1934) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Céline naturalistically depicted the horrors of bourgeois existence and the transformation of “the little man” into a wolf among wolves. In 1936 he visited the USSR, and in the same year he wrote the pamphlet Mea culpa, a slanderous attack against communism. An apologist for fascism, he advocated anti-Semitism (the pamphlet Bagatelles for a Massacre, 1937), defended Hitlerite racism (the pamphlet The School of Corpses, 1938), and fawned over the fascist German occupation forces (the pamphlet A Fine Mess, 1941). Céline expressed his bitterness over the defeat of fascism in the memoirs A Fairy Play for Another Time (1952). The autobiographical chronicles Castle to Castle (1957) and North (1960) deal with the final struggles of the collaborationists and the last days of the fascist regime.

WORKS

Romans. Paris, 1962.

REFERENCES

Shkunaeva, I. D. Sovremennaia frantsuzskaia literatura. Moscow, 1961.
Vitoux, F. L.-F. Céline: Misère et parole. [Paris, 1973.]
Guenot, J. L.-F. Céline damné par l’écriture. [Paris, 1973.]

V. P. BALASHOV