Karel van het Reve (19 May 1921 – 4 March 1999) was a Dutch writer, translator and literary historian, teaching and writing on Russian literature. He was born in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

and was raised as a communist. He lost his 'faith' in his twenties and became an active critic and opponent of the

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

regime. With his help, work of dissident

Andrei Sakharov Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov ( rus, Андрей Дмитриевич Сахаров, p=ɐnˈdrʲej ˈdmʲitrʲɪjevʲɪtɕ ˈsaxərəf; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, nobel laureate and activist for n ...

was smuggled to the west, and his Alexander Herzen Foundation published dissident Soviet literature. He is considered to be one of the finest Dutch essayists, his interests ranging from the fallacies of

Marxism Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...

nude beach A nude beach, sometimes called a clothing-optional or free beach, is a beach where users are at liberty to be nude. Nude beaches usually have mixed bathing. Such beaches are usually on public lands, and any member of the public is allowed to ...

etiquette. His works include a history of Russian literature, 2 novels and several collections of

essay An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal a ...

s. In 1978, Karel van het Reve delivered the

Huizinga Lecture The Huizinga Lecture (Dutch: ''Huizingalezing'') is an annual lecture in the Netherlands about a subject in the domains of cultural history or philosophy.See. The lecture is in honour of Johan Huizinga, a distinguished Dutch historian (1872–1945) ...

, under the title: ''Literatuurwetenschap: het raadsel der onleesbaarheid'' (Literary studies: the enigma of unreadability). His brother,

Gerard Reve Gerard Kornelis van het Reve (14 December 1923 – 8 April 2006) was a Dutch writer. He started writing as Simon Gerard van het Reve and adopted the shorter Gerard Reve in 1973. Together with Willem Frederik Hermans and Harry Mulisch, he i ...

, was a prominent prose writer. The

main-belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...

asteroid 12174 van het Reve, discovered by the

Palomar–Leiden Survey The Palomar–Leiden survey (PLS) was a successful astronomical survey to study faint minor planets in a collaboration between the U.S Palomar Observatory and the Dutch Leiden Observatory, and resulted in the discovery of thousands of asteroids, ...

in 1977, was named in his honor.

Bibliography

Novels

* ("Two minutes' silence", 1959) * ("Night on the bare mountain", 1961)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Reve, Karel Van Het 1921 births 1999 deaths Dutch essayists Dutch literary critics 20th-century Dutch novelists 20th-century Dutch male writers Dutch male novelists Dutch translators Dutch anti-communists Netherlands–Russia relations Writers from Amsterdam P. C. Hooft Award winners 20th-century translators Male essayists 20th-century essayists Translators to Dutch Translators from Russian