“You have to make a choice: either die or lie.” This tragic dilemma arose more than once in the life and creative path of the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894–1961). Celine burst into literature like a meteor with his first novel “Journey to the End of the Night” (1932), this, in the words of Marcel Elle, “ a great poem about the insignificance of man." In terms of the strength of passion and brightness of style, in terms of satirical power, the writer was compared with Rabelais and Cervantes, Swift and Anatole France. Celine did not lie, painting monstrous pictures of world carnage, the horrors of colonialism, spiritual savagery and the hopeless suffering of the “little man.” The writer condemned the entire modern civilization for destroying the “music of life” and wallowing in the vulgarity of the heart. The dispute about Selina continues to this day. Who is he - a daring revolutionary of the spirit, a defender of the “humiliated and insulted” or a damned poet, a misanthrope and misanthrope who jubilantly prophesied the onset of a new Apocalypse? “Journey to the End of the Night” was published in Russian in 1934, translated by Elsa Triolet. In August 1936, Celine arrived in the USSR. Everything he saw in that Soviet night shocked the writer to the depths of his soul. Celine spoke of his hatred of communism, which “ended man,” in his furious pamphlet “Mea Culpa” (“My Guilt”). After this, Selin’s work ceased to exist for the Russian reader. Selin’s “rejection” in our country was further aggravated by the fact that during the Second World War he tarnished his name by collaborating with the Nazi occupiers of France. Celine almost paid with his life for his collaborationist past. Until mid-1951, he was in exile in Denmark, where he served a year and a half in prison. In our cruel and bloody century, Louis-Ferdinand Celine is not alone among artists in his tragic political errors: here it is worth remembering Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Gottfried Benn . But politics is transitory, but the art of words is eternal. And after six decades, the novel “Journey to the End of the Night” comes to us again. It is difficult to find another book in world literature that could rightfully open a new series of “Rejected Masterpieces of the 20th Century.”