The Roman Emperor Caligula, driven to the brink of madness by the death of Drusilla, does whatever he can to hasten his own assassination. He cries not for love but because things are not as they should be – that’s why men cry.

He seeks by all means an exit from the fundamental state of absurdity. "This world, as it is, is unbearable. Therefore, I need the moon or happiness or immortality or something that may be crazy yet does not belong to this world. But precisely because he is a rebel, he feels liberated from the absurdity of life within the absurd: 'my freedom knows no bounds' – words from the mouth of a typically absurd character.

He passed like a meteor across the spiritual horizon of Europe: as soon as he became known, suddenly gaining worldwide fame with the Nobel Prize, he vanished from our contradictory world, with an absurd death. He left behind a model work, dictionaries will write, but incomplete.

This incompleteness, however, pertains to the work he could still give, had he lived, and not the work he left behind – because this work, about thirteen volumes, beyond his Notebooks and various articles, is not small in size, and comprises an entire spherical world, enclosed from all sides.

The French criticism, despite its enthusiasm, will accuse him of lacking novelistic imagination, that his heroes, whether dramatic or fictional, do not possess genuine life; they are myths and literary constructions; and furthermore, that his thought is not among those that astonish with their originality, their sharpness, or their breadth.

Absurdity will also chase him here, for how can the tax collector levy taxes on items we do not have in our luggage, how can we ask of a writer things that were not in his intentions?