Devilish Repressions: Bertrand Russell’s Use of Fiction as Autobiography

Abstract

Whatever the judges had in mind in 1950 when they awarded the Nobel Prize for literature to Bertrand Russell, it was assuredly not that he was a great writer of fiction. Indeed, up until that point, he had not published any. The prize was awarded, rather, for his essays, his History of Western Philosophy, and his last major work of philosophy, Human Knowledge. And yet, perhaps partly inspired by the award, Russell, within a year of winning it, devoted himself to writing short stories. The results — the two volumes published, respectively, in 1953 and 1954 as Satan in the Suburbs and Nightmares of Eminent Persons — are, surely, the weakest attempts at fiction ever produced by a Nobel Prize winner, and they have, for the most part, sunk into a well-deserved obscurity.

There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one’s emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating!

Joseph Conrad¹