"The Almighty" (1948) is the most ambitious and enigmatic work of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003).

In this final novel (he later abandoned the large form in favor of more concise, contemplative novellas), critics tend to discern a wide range of philosophical themes: the end of history and the triumph of Absolute Knowledge, the death of God, the existential concern of Dasein, and death as the guarantor of the literary word. Literary paradigms include the political pamphlet, apocalyptic dystopia, and Kafkaesque parable. However, all these interpretations, which continue to this day, are clearly mere reductions of a text that is fundamentally irreducible to speculative constructs.

The novel, written in the wake of the upheavals caused by World War II, gains unexpected relevance from the fact that its action unfolds against the backdrop of social cataclysms triggered by a monstrous epidemic in an ideally stable totalitarian state—what we would today call a pandemic.

This edition is published as part of the "Pushkin" publishing assistance program by the French Institute at the French Embassy in Russia, with the support of the National Book Center (Centre National du Livre).

"If I wrote some books, it was only because I hoped to put an end to all this with books. If I wrote novels, they were born at the moment when words began to retreat before the truth." — Maurice Blanchot

"To enter Blanchot's prose is to step into an unreliable world that defends its freedom from the comfort and deadening familiarity of mimesis." — Gilbert Sorrentino