Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894–1961) is the most scandalous, most controversial, most unfortunate and most talented French writer of the 20th century. All his life he strived to escape poverty - and all his life he worked like hell for pennies. He tried to push away the people, besotted with alcohol and fooled by the rulers - and in response he received hatred. He pointed out the true instigators of bloody wars - and he was branded as a Nazi and an anti-Semite. Being a doctor by training, he himself was seriously ill due to a wound received in the war and the hardships of imprisonment. He loved France passionately - but had to be an exile in Denmark. Some exalted him as a genius, others cast him down as an ambitious nonentity. “Céline remains the greatest of modern French novelists... with a powerful lyrical gift,” claimed playwright Marcel Aimé. “I developed a disgust for Celine almost immediately... I can’t stand literature that strives for effect, because it is willing to slander and dig in the dirt, because it appeals to the basest in a person,” objected Nobel laureate Albert Camus. Celine himself called himself “mandarin of dishonor” and “knight of the Apocalypse.” One of his most shocking books is “Death on Credit” (1936). In it, the writer, without mincing words, harshly and hysterically described all the ugliness of the life of the Parisian bottom, which he observed in his youth. Reading about militant immorality, you will feel at all pores the abomination of the surrounding situation with its hopeless hopelessness and lies. However, the novel evokes mixed emotions. On the one hand, pictures of absurdity and injustice awaken feelings of indignation and protest. On the other hand, the author’s almost masochistic intoxication with chaos is surprising. But this is the whole Celine, whose works still cause fierce debate and discordant opinions.