“Help me, my dear friend!”

'Marat / Sade' (1967) is the result of the conjunction of two geniuses of playwriting, Peter Brook, here in functions of a film director, and Peter Weiss, propellant of such sadistic argument. A bathroom in Charenton’s sanatorium hosts the representation of a hypothetical theoretical confrontation between one of the great instigators of the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat, and a literary figure as the Marquis de Sade.

The episode portrayed stems from a series of plays that took a great success within the French bourgeoisie in the 19th century, whose appeal was based in a staging leaded by mentally ill people. Sade was responsible for memorable adaptations of his writings in Charenton, and Weiss inserted in that context the dialectical conflict between reason and heart with the aim of knowing the keys of the popular revolt of 1789.

Marat stands in one of the most controversial figures in the revolutionary itinerary admired by the less wealthy classes, and it becomes a martyr to the cause after being murdered by Charlotte Corday in 1793. The political activist spends his last days locked in her house as a result of a skin disease that requires him to take baths repeatedly. Corday, attached to the group of girondists –it´s considered the most radical of belonging to the National Assembly-, visited up three times to the cordelier Marat until she has been received: this meeting will result in tragedy and historic milestone.

In Brook’s film, Marat and Sade exhibit conflicting vital philosophies. While 'The friend of the people' defends a society that does not understand inequalities, drawn from Machiavellian precepts, the writer argues for the individualistic dictates of the soul to achieve a better world. These are the transcendental impulses of two idealistic men guided by a disrupted perception of reality.

‘Life and fate’, the overwhelmed magnitude of cruelty

The huge literary work of Vasili Grossman is currently fashionable thanks to the launch of a new edition by Gutenberg Galaxy in Spain. Over a thousand pages in a fascinating itinerary that leads to the significant Battle of Stalingrad, where Soviet troops were able to stop, finally, the oppressive delusions of grandeur of Hitler, Goebbels and their vassals.

The war works to Grossman as a pretext to sketch the human portrait of a nation, Russia, which is trapped between German shells and Stalinist guidelines of dubious socializing interests. The author explains with unusual harshness the effort of survival of different characters, from a Soviet scientist overwhelmed by the ideological inconsistencies of his superiors to a Nazi command who imperturbably ensures the proper functioning of gas chambers, from a Muscovite teacher annihilated for his Jewish descent to a group of political Russian prisoners whose are shot for their alleged opposition to the Stalin’s regime, from a woman who gives birth in the midst of conflict while hopeful awaits the return of her husband to a German leader that verifies how arrives, inexorably, the extinction of his plans for the future, his dreams. Only from a point of view so broad is possible to address the complexity of a conflict of this nature; the bitterness that emanates is masterly portrayed, with a wide capacity for self-criticism.

Grossman's work represents the survival of art above the injustices; not surprisingly, the novelist was persecuted by the Soviet Government, and only twenty years after his death, in 1983, it was possible the publication of 'Life and fate', in French.