Official thief


Journal of the thief (Journal du voleur) - autobiographical song of Jean Genet from 1949. It partially describes real events, partly fictitious. The author traverses Europe in the 1930s, strangely depoliticised, in rags and suffers from hunger, contempt, fatigue and vice. Spain, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Nazi Germany, Belgium - everywhere is the same for him: bars, dorms, night shelters, theft, imprisonment, expulsion.

The work is based on a series of homosexual romances and cases of male prostitution between the author / anti-hero and various criminals, cheats, pimps and even a detective.

In this world values ​​are reversed: betrayal is the highest form of devotion, petty crime is brazen heroism, imprisonment gives freedom. The trinity of the virtues of holiness is homosexuality, theft and betrayal. Each burglary is a quasi-religious ritual.

The book is dedicated to Sartre and "Castor", i.e. Simone de Beauvoir, because it arose under the influence of the idea of ​​existentialism in the work of Byt and nothingness Sartre (1943). Sartre also wrote an essay, Saint Genet, concerning the Thief's journal in part in 1952.

The Polish translation of Piotr Kamiński appeared in 1984 in Krakow (Wydawnictwo Literackie).

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