unknown/uncredited · Public domain

A Romanian-French poet and philosopher who became a leading disciple of Lev Shestov and a central figure in Jewish existentialism, arguing against rationalist certainty and for literature's power to confront catastrophe rather than explain it away. His essay on Rimbaud made his reputation as a critic, and his final, unfinished study of Baudelaire was written while he lived in hiding in occupied Paris. He was deported to Auschwitz and killed there in October 1944, one of the many European Jewish intellectuals the Holocaust cut off mid-sentence.