Achdiat Karta Mihardja
Atheis (translated The Atheist)
Lontar, originally published 1949
Atheis (The Atheist), first published in 1949, portrays the spiritual and intellectual crisis of Hasan, a young Muslim who is raised to be devout but comes to doubt his faith after becoming involved with a group of modern young people. Upon publication, religious thinkers, Marxist-Leninists, as well as anarchists decried the novel for not explaining their ideologies in more detail; but literary figures and many in the general public praised it. The novel, considered to be a masterpiece of modern Indonesian literature, is included in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Literary Works.
About the Author
Achdiat Karta Mihardja, a journalist-cum-literary editor and member of the Socialist Party of Indonesia, was a man of wide intellectual tastes. He studied Western philosophy and in 1950 was one of the founders of LEKRA (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat), a literary and social movement associated with the Indonesian Communist Party. In 1961, after obtaining his advanced degree in adult education, he became a professor of Indonesian literature and language at Australian National University in Canberra where he lived to the remarkable old age of ninety-nine. He was honored by the Indonesian government several times for his service to Indonesian literature.
