MULTATULI. — Pseudonym of Edoardo Douwes Dekker, man of letters, born in Amsterdam on 2 March 1820, died at Nieder-Ingelheim on 19 February 1887. A brilliant prose writer with a fiery and restless temperament, he was sent, while still young, as a civil servant to Java. He returned in 1856, recalled and disillusioned: in the Dutch colonies the native chiefs exploited the people and the mother country’s government did not trouble itself to defend them.
This is the thesis of M., which forms the basis of his famous novel *Max Havelaar* (Amsterdam 1859), a work pre-eminently Romantic, unequal, disordered, overflowing here and there with a gentle lyricism (the episode of Saidyah and Adinda), full of moving pages and rare beauty. The author poured his whole heart into it: indignation sometimes drives him to the most biting sarcasm. After the publication of this impassioned book, the author lived a wandering life, separated from his wife, passing his days in the most painful poverty, working desperately on seven volumes which he called *Ideen* (Amsterdam 1862–77), containing reflections, oddities, stories and even a drama. For his conception of art, despite his imbalances, he opened new paths in Dutch literature, wholly absorbed by what, rightly or wrongly, he called “svelerity.” A mind little given to philosophy, M. characteristically expressed the ideas and commonplaces of the age of positivism and materialism, so that it is no surprise that those currents remaining on the ground of “free thought” continue to see in him one of their champions.