Invention of self

“Life is other than what we write.“

André Breton, Nadja (1928)

Friday 7 March 2025

Landschlacht, Schweiz

Above: Landschlacht, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland

Literature is both a mirror and a chisel:

One reflecting the world as it is.

The other carving out the world as it could be.

This blog may not be literature, but the concept is the same.

There is what is.

There is what should be.

Above: St. Leonhard’s Chapel, Landschlacht

I have a golden opportunity to spend 3.5 months in relative leisure that should be used to write.

The reality is that my world here is filled with distraction and interruption.

I have a man cold:

Stuffed nose, coughing, sinus headache.

The body craves sleep, but the mind is restless.

Am I never happy?

This involuntary banishment is an opportunity and yet I cannot but feel it is a punishment.

I am dealing with the situation as best as I can.

I have contacted Eskişehir to maintain my apartment and my online lessons during my absence.

Above: Sazova Park, Eskişehir, Switzerland

I have visited St. Gallen in search of work, but I don’t want to pretend that I seek fulltime employment that I will then just abandon after a mere three months.

So instead I wander the streets.

St. Gallen is a museum of my history.

I did that there.

I worked over here.

Above: St. Gallen, Canton St. Gallen, Switzerland

Persons A, B and C have moved on.

Persons X, Y and Z are still here.

X has changed her apartment, her relationship status, her hair.

Her job remains the same, because she is a realist.

Some things are unwise to change.

Some things must go.

Y tells me of A, B and C.

A has his own store, has married, has a child, is apparently deliriously happy.

B still has his own store, remains happy as husband and father, continues to prosper.

C found a new girlfriend with whom he lives, still in physical pain but emotionally healthy.

Y’s life remains the same.

She is as constant as the North Star.

Z remains active – her own business, raising a daughter on her own.

Hasn’t got time for the pain or much else for that matter.

And tell me, I am asked, what’s new with you?

Not much.

Worked at one school 3.5 years, at another 3.5 months, and ended at a third for 3.5 weeks.

Will be in Switzerland for 3.5 months before returning back to Eskişehir and Türkiye.

Uncertain if that return is a loss or a win.

Above: Flag of Switzerland

I have dined out with the wife already three times this week.

Monday afternoon coffee at street café Sorriso in Kreuzlingen.

Reason for being in Kreuzlingen?

Above: Kreuzlingen, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland

Shopping for shoes for me.

Apparently my Eskişehir-repaired shoes resemble an old tramp’s.

Above: Charlie Chaplin, The Tramp (1915)

Salad and cola and potato chips from grocery store.

Walk along Bohmer Wiehre – a pond beyond the city centre.

Tuesday dinner at the Rotes Haus, a half-timbered house in the village of Landschlacht, an Italian restaurant on Highway 13, my first taste of gluten-free pizza in months.

The wife doesn’t want to cook after a long hard slog of work.

I don’t cook in a kitchen whose geography I do not dare disturb.

Ordnung ist Alles.

Order is everything.

A place for everything and everything in its place.

I was meant to be a guest for five days, not a lodger for 15 weeks.

Guests don’t need to know where things go.

Lodgers learn quickly.

Above: Rotes Haus Restaurant, Landschlacht

Wednesday lunch at the Ignaz Restaurant, across from the main train station in Konstanz – a shopping trip for food and clothes.

Potato soup and skewered lamb for lunch.

Above: Brasserie Ignaz, Konstanz, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

I accompany her about town, led around like a helpless child whose impatient parent tries to tolerate her charge’s reluctance.

Three months linger longer than three months.

Above: Konstanz, Germany

Yesterday, a return to St. Gallen for a reunion with old friend/former student.

I clandestinely restart to build my home library from Orell Füseli and Lüthy bookshops.

There will be books in Landschlacht.

Books will be luggage to Eskişehir.

Already a dozen added to collection.

Meet friend in town.

Gluten-free spaghetti carbonara, cola and espresso at Dolce Lucia Italian restaurant.

Tea at Benedikt Buchcafé.

Coffee at Chocolaterie.

My friend has found religion.

Or has religion found him?

Above: The conversion of Saul into Paul the Apostle on the road to Damascus

Zealot seeks to seduce me to his cause.

I am unmoved but remain polite.

Our sole subject:

My soul.

Heathen hesitation harried.

Did I become Muslim?

No, I respond.

Like Groucho Marx, I refuse to join any organization that unwisely welcomes me into its ranks.

He does not see the humor.

Above: American comedian Groucho Marx (1890 – 1977)

Zealots rarely laugh.

Well I was born an original sinner.
I was borne from original sin.
And if I had a dollar bill
For all the things I’ve done
There’d be a mountain of money
Piled up to my chin

My mother told me good
My mother told me strong.
She said “Be true to yourself
And you can’t go wrong.”
“But there’s just one thing
That you must understand.”
“You can fool with your brother
But don’t mess with a missionary man.“

Don’t mess with a missionary man.
Don’t mess with a missionary man.

Well the missionary man
He’s got God on his side.
He’s got the saints and apostles
Backin’ up from behind.
Black eyed looks from those Bible books.
He’s a man with a mission
Got a serious mind.

There was a woman in the jungle
And a monkey on a tree.
The missionary man he was followin’ me.
He said “Stop what you’re doing.”
“Get down upon your knees.”
“I’ve a message for you that you better believe.“

I work on my blog – easier than the slog of book-writing.

I had intended to visit Joan Miro exhibition in Rorschach’s Fondation Würth Museum.

This idea is squashed.

No museums unless accompanied by a spouse.

Above: Rorschach, Canton St. Gallen, Switzerland

I had considered a walking day:

Train to Frauenfeld, bus to Oberneunforn, walk 14.3 km back to Frauenfeld via Uesslingen, Buch and Ittingen.

Above: Frauenfeld, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland

Above: Gemeindehaus (Municipal Hall), Oberneunforn, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland

Above: Uesslingen, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland

Above: Buch, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland

Above: Kartause (Charterhouse) Ittingen, Warth, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland

Above: Thurgauer Rebenweg (Wine Way) – Wanderroute (Walking trail) 910

Man-cold keeps me housebound.

I return to my blog.

I consult my journal which I had the forethought to bring from Eskişehir.

Wednesday 19 February 2025

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Conversation online with student friend.

Discussion about my dismissal.

I should try private schools, he says.

Think beyond Eskişehir – Istanbul and Izmir, Ankara and Antalya, Konya and Kastamonu.

Above: Bridge over Porsuk River in Eskişehir, Turkey

Above: Istanbul, Turkey

Above: Izmir, Turkey

Above: Ankara, Turkey

Above: Antalya, Turkey

Above: Konya, Turkey

Above: Kastamonu, Turkey

There is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

I mention Baku.

Above: Baku, Azerbaijan

He counters with the observation that:

If Azerbaijan is so wonderful, then why did your Azerbaijani friend leave?

Above: Flag of Azerbaijan

I respond with:

If Canada is so wonderful, why did I leave Canada?

Answer:

Sometimes you need to leave the forest to truly see the beauty of it.

Above: Flag of Canada

I focus on my reading.

On 19 February, the world welcomed several writers who, in their own ways, reshaped literature, bending reality to their vision.

Their works remind us that storytelling is not merely about chronicling events but about preserving and reinterpreting human experience.

Of the past, what should be preserved?

Of the past, what interpretation of human experience can be gleaned?

Above: The Thinker, Auguste Rodin (1904), Paris, France

Count Froben Christoph of Zimmern (19 February 1519 – 27 November 1566) was the author of the Zimmern Chronicle and a member of the von Zimmern family of Swabian nobility.

Above: Froben and his wife Kunigunde with their heraldic achievements

Froben Christoph was born at Mespelbrunn Castle in the Spessart as the son of Johann Werner and his wife Katharina of Erbach.

Above: The Mespelbrunn Castle, a moated castle on the territory of the town of Mespelbrunn, is situated remotely in the Elsava valley in the Spessart (between Frankfurt and Würzburg), Bayern (Bavaria), Deutschland (Germany).

Since the early 15^th century it has been owned by the family Echter of Mespelbrunn.

The oldest parts were built in 1427, the current appearance was created from 1551 to 1569.

The castle was location of the 1958 German comedy film The Spessart Inn with the the famous German cinema actress Liselotte Pulver.

Consequently it gained nationwide popularity.

It is one of the most visited moated castles in Germany and is frequently featured in tourist books.

The annual numbers of visitors are just under 100,000.

Above: Poster from Das Wirtshaus im Spessart (1958)

He was raised there and in Aschaffenburg by his step-grandfather Philipp Echter and his grandmother, the Countess of Werdenberg.

Above: Aschaffenburg Castle, Bavaria, Germany

He did not visit Meßkirch (Zimmern) until 1531.

Above: Messkirch, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

During a short stay at Falkenstein Castle, he had a conflict-charged meeting with his father.

Above: Falkenstein Castle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

After that meeting, he moved in with his uncle Gottfried Werner in Meßkirch.

It is remarkable that Froben had virtually no contact with his father during the first 23 years of his life.

He didn’t see his father at all during the first twelve years.

He met his father only four times in the next 11, for a total time of significantly less than twelve months.

Their dislike was mutual.

It is therefore not surprising that Froben spent the years until he’d inherit the county in Meßkirch with his uncle Gottfried Werner, rather than at Falkenstein Castle with his father.

Gottfried may have seen Froben as the son he didn’t have himself, or at least as a guarantee for the continued existence of the von Zimmerns.

In any case, he took care of Froben’s education.

The next twelve years were hard, as Werner Gottfried kept his protégé on a very short leash.

Nevertheless, the Zimmern Chronicles suggests a cordial relationship still existed between them.

He fulfilled social obligations for his uncle, and after his father’s death in January 1548, also for his own properties.

Above: Messkirch Castle, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

In 1533, Froben Christoph and his elder brother Johann began studying at the University of Tübingen.

Above: Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

After a stay in Strasbourg, he studied from early 1534 to 1535 in Bourges.

Above: Strasbourg, Alsace, France

Above: Bourges, Cher Department, France

During the winter of 1536 – 1537, he studied in Köln, and from Easter 1537, without his brother, in Leuven, where he remained until July 1539.

Above: Köln (Cologne), North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Above: Leuven, Brabant Province, Belgium

After a short stay at home, he travelled to Leuven in November 1539, intending to continue his studies in Spain.

He then changed his plans and in December 1539, he travelled via Paris to Angers.

Above: Images of Angers, Maine et Loire Department, France

On 23 February 1540 in Paris, he completed his first historical work, the liber rerum Cimbriacarum, which is virtually a first (short) version of his Zimmern Chronicle.

Above: Paris, France

Shortly after Easter 1540, Froben traveled to Angers, together with his younger brother Gottfried, whom he had met in Paris.

In the winter of 1540 – 1541, they continued their studies in Tours, as the cost of living in Angers had become too high.

Froben became very ill during that period.

This may have been a case of smallpox, or the effect of one of his alchemical experiments.

Above: Plumereau Square, Tours, Indre et Loire Department, France

After his recovery, he made a hasty return to Meßkirch, because he, because he feared for his life, due to a feud against his family.

He reached Meßkirch at the end of July 1541.

Above: Bird’s eye view of Meßkirch in 1575

His fears proved unfounded, so he continued his studies in the fall in Speyer.

In Speyer, he lived in the house of his uncle Wilhelm Werner, who was at that time assessor at the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court) and would be promoted to a full judge in 1548.

In July 1542, Wilhelm Werner temporarily suspended his work for the Reichskammergericht – one of the two highest judicial institutions in the Holy Roman Empire, the other one being the Aulic Council in Wien (Vienna).

Froben Christoph finished his studies.

Above: Speyer, Rheinland-Palatinate, Germany

In 1544, Froben married Kunigunde, a daughter of Wilhelm IV of Eberstein.

Above: Tombstone of Wilhelm IV of Eberstein (1497 – 1562) and Johanna of Hanau-Lichtenberg (1507 – 1572), Gernsbach, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Three years later, in 1547, he took part in the Diet of Augsburg.

Above: Saxon Chancellor Christian Beyer (1482 – 1535) proclaiming the Augsburg Confession (the primary confession of faith of the Lutheran Church and one of the most important documents of the Protestant Reformation) in the presence of Emperor Charles V (1500 – 1558) – 25 June 1530.

After his father died in 1548, he took care to secure his inheritance.

This included paying his father’s mistress and securing his brother’s renunciation of his rights to inherit.

In June 1549, he traveled to Innsbruck, to receive confirmation of a fief in Austria.

Above: Innsbruck, Tirol (Tyrol), Österreich (Austria)

His only son, Wilhelm, was born on 17 June 1549.

This proved to be a trigger to initiate construction projects, like his uncle Gottfried Werner had done.

In 1550, he started construction of a new suburb of Meßkirch.

On 9 March 1554, his uncle suffered his first stroke.

His uncle then handed the keys and title to all his worldly possessions to Froben, in the presence of witnesses.

After Gottfried Werner died on 12 April 1554, Froben immediately asked his subjects to swear an oath of fealty to him.

He also quickly invited his brothers to renew the renunciation of their right to inherit.

When his brother-in-law Philipp of Eberstein married Countess Joanna of Donliers in St. Omer in 1556, Froben and his relatives used the occasion to organize a journey to Flanders via Zweibrücken, Trier, Liège, Tongeren, Leuven and Brussels.

Above: Cathedral, St. Omer, Pas de Calais Department, France

Above: Zweibrücken, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

Above: Trier, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

Above: Liège, Belgium

Above: Grote Markt, Tongeren, Limburg Province, Belgium

Above: Grand Place, Brussels, Belgium

On 9 May 1557, he laid the foundation stone for the reconstruction of the castle in Meßkirch.

It would be the first four-winged, Italian style castle in southern Germany.

Above: Messkirch Castle

In the spring of 1558, he added an orchard modeled after one at the court in Heidelberg.

Above: Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

On 8 October 1558, his 7th child was born.

This was the last entry in the Zimmern Chronicles (apart from the supplements).

In 1559, he retired from all public duties.

However, he did attend the Diet in Augsburg.

Above: Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany

Manuscript A of the Zimmern Chronicles most likely originated around this time. 

Manuscript B was drafted from 1565.

Above: Zimmern Chronicle (Manuscript B)

In the winter of 1565 – 1566, he probably made a journey to Italy, which had been a long cherished dream from his youth.

He had wanted to study in Bologna, but his father had not allowed this.

Above: Map of Bologna, Italia (Italy) (1640)

Notes from the Chronicle mention visits to Venice and Rome.

Above: Grand Canal, Venezia (Venice), Italy

Above: Roma (Rome), Italia

He died on 27 November 1566, probably in Meßkirch.

Above: Messkirch

The Zimmern Chronicle (German: Zimmerische Chronik or Chronik der Grafen von Zimmern) is a family chronicle describing the lineage and history of the noble family of Zimmern, based in Meßkirch, Germany.

It was written in a Swabian variety of Early New High German by Count Froben Christoph of Zimmern (1519 – 1566).

The Chronicle is an eminent historical source of information about 16th century nobility in Southwest Germany, its culture and its values.

It is also an important literary and ethnological source for its many folkloristic texts.

The text has survived in two manuscripts, both in possession of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek (Württemberg State Library) in Stuttgart.

Above: Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, Germany

When the anonymous, unpublished chronicle was rediscovered in the 19th century, historians were not sure about the identity of the author.

(Most of the Chronicle is written in the third person, while at some times the writer slips into the first person.)

Above: Zimmern Chronicle folio

While some considered the author to be the famous law scholar and Imperial judge, Wilhelm Werner von Zimmern (Froben Christopher’s uncle), others believed Count Froben Christopher and his secretary Johannes Müller (1600) to be the writers.

In 1959, Beat Rudolf Jenny proved in his thoroughly researched book that Froben Christopher is the sole author of the Chronicle.

However, Wilhelm Werner’s influence on his nephew is palpable in some passages.

Above: Zimmern Chronicle illustration

Writing or ordering a genealogy was a rather common form of representation for Germany’s noble families of the time.

However, the Zimmern Chronicle surpasses other contemporary texts in both volume and scope.

It is a compilation of many types of texts, including simple genealogical information, psychologically rich biographies of ancestors and members of other noble families, fables, schwanks (droll stories) and facetiae (comic and/or erotic short stories).

The purpose of the work is probably twofold:

Firstly, Froben Christopher wanted to prove the nobility of his family and to preserve that knowledge to posterity.

Secondly, the Chronicle was a means to educate future family members.

The author does not only tell the stories of shining examples of nobility, but he also gives proof of bad examples.

He clearly condemns some of his more spendthrift ancestors for selling family goods and hence giving away economic and political power.

The Zimmern Chronicle begins with the history of the Cimbri, an ancient Germanic tribe, and tells the story of the Cimbri’s forced relocation to the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) under the reign of Charlemagne.

Above: The defeat of the Cimbri

Above: Frankish King Charlemagne (748 – 814)

While the link between the Cimbri and the Zimmern family is fictional and only induced by the similar-sounding name, Froben recounts several episodes woven into a stream of historical information to prove it.

The work also includes a complete fictional genealogy starting in the 10th century.

Historical evidence is entered with the first actually known family member, Konrad von Zimmern, Abbot of Reichenau Abbey from  1234 to 1255.

Above: Reichenau Abbey, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Starting with the early 14th century, the genealogical and historical parts of the Zimmern Chronicle are finally reduced to facts.

Still, Froben inserts entertaining stories to enliven his characterizations and to prove his political points.

The Zimmern Chronicle differs from other contemporary aristocratic and diocesan chronicles (and thus also from the work of Wilhelm Werner von Zimmern) in that it goes beyond genealogical lists of generational successions and presents the people described as psychologically differentiated personalities.

Above: Wilhelm von Zimmern (1549 – 1594)

This is done not only for the Zimmern family members, but also for neighboring noble families:

• Württemberg

Above: Coat of arms of Württemberg

• Zollern

Above: Coat of arms of Hohenzollern dynasty

• Werdenberg

Above: Werdenberg Castle, Grabs, Canton St. Gallen, Switzerland

• Waldburg

Above: Coat of arms of Waldburg dynasty

• Fürstenberg

Above: Coat of arms of the Fürstenberg dynasty

Images and fables as well as factions known to the literary-educated contemporary reader are also used for characterization.

Some of the reports therefore take on the character of what we today call urban legends.

The Chronicle is mostly told in the third person, with the first person occasionally creeping in.

Count Froben Christoph von Zimmern has been considered the sole author.

His secretary Johannes (Hans) Müller (d. 1600) was previously considered a co-author, but he probably only worked as a scribe.

It is certainly true that the Chronicle was significantly influenced by Froben Christoph’s uncle, the chamber judge and historian Wilhelm Werner von Zimmern.

However, Froben Christoph’s work is characterized by an independent style and a completely different narrative approach.

A distinction between a scientifically working uncle and an amateur nephew is therefore not tenable.

Froben Christoph wrote the Liber rerum Cimbriacarum as early as 1540.

This can be considered the forerunner of the Zimmer Chronicle.

The original has not survived, but we know of it through two copies.

The content already corresponds to the basic framework of the later Chronicle:

• Cimbrian induction – derivation of Zimmern’s descent from the Cimbrians

Above: Migrations of the Cimbri and Teutons

• Forced relocation of Roman nobles to the Black Forest by Charlemagne, the first rooms

Above: Statue of Charlemagne

• Gap of 120 years

• Invasion of the Huns in 934 : Beginning of the lineage with the victorious hero of a duel with a Hunnic giant (missing in the Chronicle)

Above: Battle of Lechfeld, Bavaria – 10 August 955

• A complete list of the names of the family tree (husband, wife, children)
• 1104: Legend of the Deer Miracle on the Stromberg

Above: Stromberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

• The historical news begins with Konrad von Reichenau

Above: Coat of arms of Konrad von Zimmern (died 1255)

• The Rohrdorf Heritage, beginning of the 14th century, is the final departure from inventions.

Above: Ruins of Benzenburg, Rohrdorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

• The complaint about the accident of the family (Werdenberg feud, ostracism of the grandfather) in 1486, introduces the “present” – The Werdenberg feud was the dispute between the 
  branch of the Werdenberg family based in Sigmaringen and their immediate neighbors in Meßkirch, the Zimmer family.

Above: Ruins of Herrenzimmern, Oberndorf am Neckar, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

• The father, Johannes Werner, is only mentioned by name.

Above: Johann Werner von Zimmern (1480 – 1548)

• Uncle Gottfried Werner is honored with a panegyric (lavish eulogy).

Above: Gottfried Werner von Zimmern (1484 – 1554)

The comments about Wilhelm Werner are the most fruitful.

Froben Christoph thanks him for his advice, support and encouragement.

In contrast to the Liber rerum Cimbriacarum, the Zimmer Chronicle is much more narrative in nature, which is only the case in the Liber rerum in the Cimbrian deduction and in the Stromberg saga.

Froben Christoph uses jokes and entertaining stories very consciously and purposefully.

They serve to characterize the people he describes using literary patterns that were very familiar to readers at the time.

The purpose of the Chronicle was, firstly, to provide future generations with evidence of the family’s origins and property after the house’s rise to the rank of Count.

(Past generations were negligent in preserving documents.

Gottfried Werner still allowed glue to be made from old parchments.)

Secondly, the actions of the Zimmern ancestors were to serve as instructions for future members of the House of Zimmern.

Therefore, the condemnation of wasteful behavior and the sale of Zimmern property on the one hand and the praise of increasing property on the other hand run like a common thread through the Chronicle.

Service for more powerful ruling houses, e.g. Austria or Württemberg, is condemned.

In retrospect, it was usually associated with disadvantages for the House of Zimmern.

Examples from other noble houses are also used solely from this point of view.

Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke):

You come from a family of thieves and butchers.

And like all guilty men, you try to rewrite your history.

To forget all the lives that the Stark family has destroyed.

José Eustasio Rivera Salas (February 19, 1888 – December 1, 1928) was a Colombian lawyer and author primarily known for his national epic The Vortex.

Above: José Eustasio Rivera

José Eustasio Rivera was born in Aguas Calientes, a hamlet of the city of Neiva, later that year the hamlet was incorporated into the newly created municipality of San Mateo, which was later renamed Rivera in honor of José Eustasio.

Above: Rivera, Huila Department, Colombia

His parents were Eustasio Rivera Escobar and Catalina Salas.

He was the first boy and fifth child out of eleven children, of whom eight reached adulthood: José Eustasio, Luis Enrique, Margarita, Virginia, Laura, Susana, Julia and Ernestina.

Above: Nevia, Huila Department, Colombia

In spite of his family’s economic situation, he received a Catholic education thanks to the help of other relatives and his own efforts.

He attended Santa Librada school in Neiva and then San Luis Gonzaga in Elías.

Above: Elias, Huila Department, Colombia

In 1906 he received a scholarship to study at the normal school in Bogotá.

Above: Bogotá, Colombia

In 1909, after graduating, he moved to Ibagué where he worked as a school inspector.

Above: Ibagué, Tolima Department, Colombia

In 1912 he enrolled at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of National University, graduating as a lawyer in 1917.

Above: Coat of arms of the Escudo de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia

After a failed attempt to be elected to the Senate, he was appointed Legal Secretary of the Colombo-Venezuelan Border Commission to determine the limits with Venezuela, there he had the opportunity to travel through the Colombian jungles, rivers, and mountains, giving him a first hand experience of the subjects he would later write.

Disappointed with the lack of resources offered by his government for his trip, he abandoned the Commission and continued travelling on his own.

He later rejoined the Commission, but before that he went to Brazil, where he became acquainted with the work of important Brazilian writers of his time, particularly Euclides da Cunha.

Above: Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha (1866 – 1909)

Euclides da Cunha was a Brazilian journalist, sociologist and engineer.

His most important work is Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), a non-fictional account of the military expeditions promoted by the Brazilian government against the rebellious village of Canudos, known as the War of Canudos.

Influenced by theories like positivism and social Darwinism from the end of the 19th century, Cunha discussed the forming of a new Brazilian Republic and also its racial composition and its promising future of progress and civilization.

The book is originally divided into three parts:

• 1) “A Terra” (The Land), which portrays the northeastern backland and the physical setting of the war
• 2) “O Homem” (The Man) exposes the land’s inhabitants and their race composition, explaining the individual by its phenotype and emphasizing the opposition between the coast and the backlands men. Here Da Cunha utilizes much of the racial and psychiatric theories then in vogue to explain the backwardness and “objectified insanity” of the sertanejos.
• 3) “A Luta” (The Rebellion), which narrates the conflict between the republican army and the sertanejos who, despite being considered “racially degenerate“, succeed in winning many battles, even though they lost the war.

Throughout the book, Da Cunha seems to have sympathy for the oppressed sertanejos and to doubt the progress and modernity of Republican ideals.

Through their conflict with the Canudos commune, the forces of modernity and progress are revealed to be just as irrational as their supposedly “uncivilized” opponents and the legitimacy of the Republic is shaken at its foundations. 

Os Sertões is considered one of the most important Brazilian works from this historical period, an effort to represent the nation as a totality.

Despite its outdated scientific and historical ideas, Da Cunha’s book is a cornerstone of Brazilian literary and political culture.

Mixing science and literature, the author narrates the true story of a war that happened at the end of the 19th century in Canudos, a settlement of Bahia’s Sertão (“backland“), an extremely arid region where, even now, struggles against poverty, drought and political corruption continue.

During the war (1893 – 1897) against the Republican army, the sertanejos (inhabitants of the backlands) were commanded by a messianic leader called Antônio Conselheiro.

Above: The only photograph of Antonio Conselheiro (1830 – 1897), the mystic rebel and spiritual leader of the War of Canudos, taken after his death

This book was a favorite of American poet Robert Lowell, who ranked it above Tolstoy. 

Above: American poet Robert Lowell (1917 – 1977)

Above: Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

Jorge Luis Borges also commented on it in his short story “Three Versions of Judas“.

Above: Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986)

Os Sertões characterized the coast of Brazil as a chain of civilizations while the interior remained more primitive.

Da Cunha served as inspiration for the character of The Journalist in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World.

Above: Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa

In this venture Rivera became familiar with life in the Colombian plains and with problems related to the extraction of rubber in the Amazon jungle, a matter that would be central in his major work, La vorágine (1924) (translated as The Vortex), now considered one of the most important novels in Latin American literary history.

To write this novel he read extensively about the situation of rubber workers in the Amazon basin.

The Vortex (Spanish: La Vorágine) is a novel written in 1924, set in at least three different bioregions of Colombia during the rubber boom (1879 – 1912).

Above: Rubber bales, ready for removal, Cachuela Esperanza, 1914

This novel narrates the adventures of Arturo Cova, a hot-headed proud chauvinist and his lover Alicia, as they elope from Bogotá, through the eastern plains and later, escaping from criminal misgivings, through the Amazon rainforest of Colombia.

In this way Rivera is able to describe the magic of these regions, with their rich biodiversity, and the lifestyle of the inhabitants.

However, one of the main objectives of the novel is to reveal the appalling conditions that workers in the rubber factories experience.

 

La Vorágine also introduces the reader to the tremendous hardship of enduring the overwhelming and adverse environment of the rainforest, as the protagonists (Arturo Cova and Alicia) get lost and are unable to be found.

As the book says: ¡Los devoró la selva! (“The jungle devoured them!“).

Above: Amazon Rainforest, Columbia

The novel is written in an elegant and refined prose, full of metaphors and prosaic poetry, that shows the beauty and exoticism of the virgin rainforest.

Above: Amazon Rainforest

The book focuses on two rubber collecting regions, one on the border near Venezuela, during Tomás Funes’ reign of terror.

Above: Amazonas Governor Tomàs Funes (1855 – 1921)

While the second region is in the Putumayo, controlled by Julio César Arana.

Above: Peruvian Senator Julio César Arana del Águila (1864 – 1952)

The author, José Eustasio Rivera, personally visited the region near Venezuela in 1918 as part of a commission.

The novel is divided into six narratives, taking the form of different characters.

Don Clemente Silva’s experience is based on the Putumayo region, while Ramiro Estébanez recalls the crimes of Funes.

La Vorágine is noteworthy as the seminal novel of Latin American regionalism, the “jungle novel“, and recognized as one of the best novels written in Colombia.

After the success of his novel, he was elected, in 1925, as a member for the Investigative Commission for Exterior Relations and Colonization.

He also published several articles in newspapers in Colombia.

In these pieces, he criticized irregularities in government contracts, and denounced the abandonment of the rubber areas of Colombia and the mistreatment of workers.

He also publicly defended his novel, which had been criticized by some Colombian literary critics as being too poetic.

This criticism would be largely silenced by the wide praise the novel was receiving everywhere else.

Above: Flag of Columbia

Rivera had arrived in New York the last week of April 1928 in the hopes of translating his novel into English, publishing it in the US, and turning it into a motion picture film with the goal of exporting Colombian culture abroad.

His venture, although riddled with difficulties, was moving along when, on 27 November, he suffered an attack of seizures.

He was taken to the Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital where he remained for four days in a comatose state until his death on 1 December 1928.

Above: Ottendorfer Public Library (left) and Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital (right), East Village, Manhattan, New York, USA

After his death, his body was transported by ship from New York to Barranquilla on the United Fruit Company’s ship the Sixaola.

Above: Barranquilla, Atlántico Department, Colombia

Above: Maritime flag of the United Fruit Company (1899 – 1970)

At his arrival on port, his body was transported in procession to the Pro-Cathedral of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino where a requiem mass was given and the body laid in chapelle ardente.

The casket then made its way down the Magdalena onto Bogotá on the mail steamship Carbonell González, arriving in Girardot and finishing by train to arrive in Bogotá on 7 January 1929.

It was taken directly to the Capitolio Nacional, where it was placed lying in state for public viewing.

Above: Congreso Columbia, Bogotá, Columbia

His body was finally laid to rest in the Central Cemetery of Bogotá on 19 January.

Above: Portal of the Central Cemetery, Bogotá, Colombia

Unlike the others on this list, José Rivera remains an enigma, with little known about his life.

Perhaps this is fitting — after all, literature often thrives in ambiguity.

Who he was matters less than what he represents:

The countless forgotten writers who have shaped our world, their words surviving even when their names fade.

Above: José Eustasio Rivera / The Vortex

André Robert Breton (19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. 

His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism“.

Above: André Breton

Along with his role as leader of the surrealist movement he is the author of celebrated books such as Nadja and L’Amour fou.

Those activities, combined with his critical and theoretical work on writing and the plastic arts, made André Breton a major figure in 20th century French art and literature.

André Breton was the only son born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, France.

His father, Louis-Justin Breton, was a policeman and atheist.

His mother, Marguerite-Marie-Eugénie Le Gouguès, was a former seamstress.

Breton attended medical school, where he developed a particular interest in mental illness. 

His education was interrupted when he was conscripted for World War I.

Above: Tinchebray, Orne Department, France

During World War I, he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the Alfred Jarry devotee Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. 

Above: Nantes, Loire-Atlantique Department, France

Vaché committed suicide when aged 23.

Above: French writer Jacques Vaché (1895 – 1919)

Vaché was one of the chief inspirations behind the Surrealist movement.

He left behind only a series of letters, a few texts and a few drawings.

The tone of his work is deliberately provocative, pacifist and even anti-militarist.

Called to the Front during the First World War, he returned wounded and deeply marked.

His personality had a profound influence on the surrealists and, in particular, on André Breton, whom he met during his convalescence.

Breton would mythologize Vaché and consider him as the precursor of the movement in his Manifesto of Surrealism.

Breton said:

“En littérature, je me suis successivement épris de Rimbaud, de Jarry, d’Apollinaire, de Nouveau, de Lautréamont, mais c’est à Jacques Vaché que je dois le plus.”

(“In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most.”)

Above: French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891)

Above: French writer Alfred Jarry (1873 – 1907)

Above: French writer Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 – 1918)

Above: French poet Germain Nouveau (1851 – 1920)

Above: Uruguayan French poet Isidore Lucien Ducasse (aka Comte de Lautreamont) (1846 – 1870)

Above: Jacques Vaché

Jacques Vaché came from a family originally from Aytré on his father’s side, whose mother was English, and from Noizay on his mother’s side.

His father, James Samuel Vaché, was an artillery captain.

Born in Lorient, Jacques Vaché lived for a while in Indochina where his father was posted.

Above: Lorient, Morbihan Department, France

Above: French Indochina (1887 – 1954)

In 1910, his father was posted to Senegal.

Jacques was then sent to his uncle and aunt Guibal in Nantes.

Above: Nantes, Loire-Atlantique Department, France

Initially a student at the Externat des Enfants Nantais, Vaché was expelled in March 1911.

He then joined the Grand Lycée de Nantes (now the Lycée Clemenceau), where Vaché demonstrated literary talent.

Above: Lycée Clemenceau, Nantes

With his classmates Eugène Hublet, Pierre Bissérié and Jean Bellemère (alias Jean Sarment), he founded the “Sârs group” also known as the “Nantes group“.

Passionate about poetry, theatre and literature, they all wrote.

At the beginning of 1913, Sarment even became the Nantes correspondent for the magazine Comoedia Illustrée.

Bissérié and Vaché also practiced drawing.

Above: Eugene Hublet (1896 – 1916)

Above: Pierre Bissérié

Above: Jean Bellemère (aka Jean Sarment) (1897 – 1978)

“They have their conventions, their code, their personal accommodations with the French language.

Their sense of values ​​and hierarchies.

Thus, they have established a social classification.

At the top, the “Mîmes”.

Why?

They like the word.

It evokes the “mystical grandeur of silence that expresses itself”, as Jacques Bouvier [alias Vaché] defined it.

Below the “Mîmes”, the “Sârs”, homage to Péladan, to the esoteric “Rose Croix”, to anything you want, which they do not seek to specify.

Below: men (homo vulgaris).

Below men, sub-men.

Below sub-men, “supermen”. 

Further down, going down the ladder, the non-commissioned officer.

And, at the last rung, sunk in shame and ignominy – another delicate idea of ​​Bouvier’s – the “generals”.

No one deigns to use the agreed plural.

A general, generals.

Only Bouvier persists in asking whether one could not find for his father colonel a designation – below general – which would make of this nervous, authoritarian, highly decorated and very aged little man, and doubtless very tired, something like an “untouchable”.

Jean Sarment, Cavalcadour  (1977)

Above: Passage Pommeraye, Nantes

If I had to designate a place of surrealist imagination in Nantes, it would undoubtedly be the Passage Pommeraye.

This covered gallery, with its exuberant and fantastic decor, capturing shadow and light, inspires surrealist writers.

The Parisian covered passages are frequented by these artists: Aragon sees there a “modern light of the unusual“, Breton “the shadow and the prey melted in a single flash“, but it is in Nantes that Pieyre de Mandiargues makes it the subject of one of his short stories.

In Le Passage Pommeraye, the place is mysterious, the encounter with the woman-creature disturbing, the descent into the depths of the Fosse fatal.

“But I suddenly saw this crushing mouth move in front of me.

These beautiful rounded lips opened, hesitated, turned back with the appearance of the most complete confusion, let out a single word that the echo reverberated at length in the emptiness of the deserted gallery:

“Echidna”.

It was the only time I ever heard this voice and this northern hoarseness, a little singsong, coming as if with effort from a tight throat.”

André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Le passage Pommeraye in Le Musée noir (1946)

Sarment also evokes these years of youth in his first novel, 
Jean-Jacques de Nantes:

In the group, Vaché is the Anglomaniac dandy inspired by Oscar Wilde.

He may already be reading Alfred Jarry.

At the beginning of 1913, the Sars founded a first magazine entitled 
En route mauvaise troupe! (“On the road, bad troop!“), in homage to Paul Verlaine, which only had a single issue printed in 25 copies.

Above: French writer Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896)

The tone of the content, described as “subversive and pacifist” – independence of mind, freedom of criticism and hatred of the bourgeoisie, conventions and the army – triggered clashes within the school.

Above: First page of the Sârs magazine En route mauvaise troupe! (February 1913)

In this magazine to which Vaché contributed two poems, an article by Pierre Riveau, inspired by Kropotkin, and entitled “L’anarchie ” appeared, which triggered the affair within the high school.

Above: “Fade and Quiet“, a prose poem by Vaché, published in En route mauvaise troupe!

The controversy swelled in the local newspapers, and was even reported in some conservative Parisian dailies such as l’Écho de Paris.

This incident earned him exclusion from the school.

The four comrades continued their literary activities in spite of everything, and published four issues of Le Canard sauvage in the 
same spirit.

Above: The Sârs’ second magazine Le Canard Sauvage (“the wild duck“)

The young poets finally experiment with collective writing, of which a few rare manuscripts have been preserved by Jean Sarment.

In Cavalcadour, Sarment recounts a session during which the Sârs devote themselves to this “unanimous poetry“:

“Each will add a verse; or two, if inspiration strikes.

HARBONNE [alias Hublet] – I had a heart, I had a soul

BOUVIER [alias Vaché] – Listen to my epithalamium.

HARBONNE – My soul has gone among the trade winds.

PATRICE [aka Sarment] – I searched for my soul everywhere.

BOUVIER – where the riverboats took me…

BILLENJEU [alias Bisserié] – at the Eskimos and Kalmyks.

PATRICE – In my buttercup suit.

BILLENJEU – I went to the pink pole

BOUVIER – the pink pole of the North Pole

HARBONNE – I drank the dew from the evening mirror…

BOUVIER – And then the incense from the censer…

And this continues, ad libitum, until we want to move on to something else.

Jean Sarment, Cavalcadour, 1977.

It is at the port of Trentemoult that the Sârs group meets for the last time.

It is October 1914.

The war has begun.

The young people sit down at one of the port’s cafés.

They already know they are destined for somewhere else.

In Calvalcadour, Jean Sarment recounts that before parting ways and to keep a record of this moment, they once again indulge in a writing game.

The tone is casual and disillusioned:

“You are right.”, said Billenjeu (Bissérié).

“We must not let anything go to waste.”

With his pipe in the corner of his lips, he absorbed himself in a meticulous task.

From a blotter that extolled the virtues of an aperitif, he took yellowish envelopes, emptied them with small jolts, well and evenly distributed, the contents of the ashtray, sealed them, traced an inscription in arabesques on the one that he handed to Harbonne (Hublet).

“Here, old man, put this aside for the future.”

Harbonne reads:

“Ashes of our dreams“.

“Why not?“, he says.

Hip, hip, hip.

Everyone has their envelope.

Everyone writes the inscription on it with ironic gravity.

“Ashes of our dreams“.

“Oh!“, said Bouvier (Vaché).

He dropped his monocle as if overwhelmed with nostalgia and, not to be like everyone else, in his little upside-down handwriting, wrote in green ink:

“Ashes of our dreams“.

Mobilized in August 1914, Vaché was sent to the Front incorporated into the 19th Regiment in June 1915 then into the 64th Regiment.

Above: Jacques Vaché (right) in the French Army

He was wounded in the legs on 25 September 1915 in Tahure, following the explosion of a bag of grenades during the Battle of Champagne (25 September – 6 October 1915).

Above: Tahure, Marne Department, France, before the First World War

The village of Tahure, located near the source of the Dormoise River, covered 2,200 hectares of arable land and 112  hectares of woods.

It had 185 inhabitants in the 1911 census.

The church, which the municipality had just equipped with a new clock in the spring of 1914, lost its bell tower during the fighting in September 1914 and was reduced to ruins following incessant artillery fire.

The terrible fighting that took place in this sector where the Germans had firmly entrenched themselves after the First Battle of the Marne (5 – 12 September 1914), wiped out the village.

It never rose again, a victim of this war.

When the Suippes military camp was created in 1950, the commune was officially abolished and its territory attached to the neighboring commune of Sommepy, which then took the name Sommepy-Tahure to perpetuate the memory of the vanished village.

The memory of Tahure is preserved in the poem Le poète by Guillaume Apollinaire:

“For ten days at the bottom of a corridor too narrow
In the landslides and the mud and the cold
Among the suffering flesh and in the rot
Anxious we keep the road to Tahure“

Tahure is also mentioned in Guignol’s Band by Louis-Ferdinand Céline:

“Under the floods of fireworks.

Prancing for the challenges! and Tahure!“

Above: French writer Louis Ferdinand Céline (1894 – 1961)

Above: Frontline trench, Champagne, France

The objective set by General Joffre was fourfold:

• to limit the reinforcement of the German army on the Russian front and thus help Russia, which had lost Poland and whose armies were in retreat
• to convince certain still neutral nations to enter the war on the side of the Allies, particularly Italy
• relaunch the war of movement to restore the morale of the French military, which had been considerably undermined by the Allied inaction, and to end the War as soon as possible
• possibly allowing Joffre to strengthen his credibility with the French political authorities.

Above: French General Joseph Joffre (1852 – 1931)

The principle was to launch a massive offensive in a sector limited to 25 kilometers between Aubérive on the Suippe valley and Ville-sur-Tourbe to obtain the break, ensure a deep exploitation on the rear of the German army, and force the withdrawal of the entire western part of its device.

Above: Aubérive Church, July 1915

Above: Ville sur Tourbe, before the First World War

This is the reason why each army was reinforced by a cavalry corps.

This attack was coordinated with a joint Franco-British offensive in Artois which served as a fixed point for the Germans.

Above: French-British offensive, 1915

This sector of Champagne was chosen by General de Castelnau because of its geographical characteristics.

The terrain was relatively flat.

There were no built-up areas that could serve as a point of resistance for the Germans.

The terrain was either open or diffusely wooded, suitable for ensuring a smooth progression of the assault waves.

It was therefore a question, after a massive artillery preparation to be guided by the Air Force, of conquering the German lines by attacking the resistance points head-on and enveloping them from the flanks with interval troops in continuous waves until the rupture was created and exploited with the help of the second line troops.

Above: French General Édouard de Castelnau (1851 – 1944)

The Second Battle of Champagne left 27,851 killed, 98,305 wounded, 53,658 prisoners or missing on the French side and much lower losses on the German side.

The Front advanced 3 to 4 km, but the breakthrough was not achieved.

The Germans were able to cope initially with local reserves and, in a second phase, with the arrival of the 10th Corps  initially intended for Russia.

It demonstrated the impossibility of crossing two lines of defense in a single movement without inter-arms preparation and coordination and the need to treat each line separately.

It also demonstrated the lack of cooperation between the lines within the French armies, particularly between heavy artillery and infantry, partly due to the absence of aviation due to weather conditions to inform the gunners.

It saw the introduction of the Adrian helmet and the massive use of trench artillery.

The Battle was a significant success in terms of logistics and movements, but showed a lack of preparation for the number of shells in reserve.

Foch’s failed offensive in Artois a few months earlier had made a serious dent in the stocks.

Above: French General Ferdinand Foch (1851 – 1929)

The allocation was 1,200 rounds per 75mm cannon.

It was burned in six days.

1,200,000 shells were consumed on this offensive.

The strategic reserves would be doubled.

Above: Logistics was an essential element in enabling major battles. Here, French supplies at Sainte-Menehould station.

Vaché was repatriated to Nantes for treatment.

At the military hospital on rue Marie-Anne-du-Boccage (future Lycée Guist’hau), to pass the time, he painted postcards depicting fashion figures accompanied by bizarre captions.

Above: Lycée Guist’hau, Nantes

A pacifist and anarchist, he was disgusted by war.

In his writings, he spoke of “the absolute reign of mud“, “the trench of corpses“, like a “sea of ​​excrement” where “in the evening great desolate red twilights drag themselves“.

“I will come out of the war gently senile“, he admitted.

Above: Jacques Vaché

In January 1916, he met André Breton and Théodore Fraenkel assigned as medical interns to the military hospital. 

A commemorative plaque erected on the centenary of this event commemorates this.

The two young men were barely 20 years old, but had already been confronted with the atrocities of war.

Jacques Vaché was assigned to the 64th Infantry Regiment in June 1915 and sent to the Front.

Wounded in the leg in September, he returned to Nantes at the end of the year.

André Breton was then an intern at the hospital on rue du Boccage.

For a few months, the two men conversed and discussed literature.

Together, they shared Mallarmé, Valéry, Apollinaire and Rimbaud.

Above: French poet Stéphane Mallarmé

Above: French writer Paul Valéry (1871 – 1945)

Beyond intellectual affinities, it is also a form of relationship to the world and to life that they maintain together, André Breton admiring in his friend his taste for dandyism and subversion.

These moments are short-lived since Jacques Vaché returns to the front in May 1916.

A few letters and a few meetings will follow.

André Breton keeps a tenacious memory of this period, having a deep admiration for Jacques Vaché, to the point of making him, posthumously, a figure of surrealism.

“Jacques Vaché is surrealist in me.”

André Breton, Manifesto of surrealism, 1924.

Above: André Breton (top right) and Théodore Fraenkel (top left), at the Lycée Chaptal, Paris, in 1912, who would become friends with Vaché during the war

André Breton was immediately seduced by the attitude of this “very elegant young man, with red hair“, who introduced him to Alfred Jarry, opposed to everyone “desertion within oneself” and obeyed only one law, “humor (without an h)“.

Above: Jacques Vaché

Despite his attempt to have the concept of umor explained by Vaché, Breton would spend part of his life looking for a definition.

It was probably a kind of black humor.

From his research, Breton would draw his Anthology of Black Humor.

As for Fraenkel, Vaché nicknamed him in his letters “the Polish people” and took him as a model for his short story “The Bloody Symbol” (character of Théodore Letzinski).

Above: French writer/doctor Theodore Fraenkel (1896 – 1964)

In March, Jacques Vaché was assigned to the auxiliary service due to myopia (short-sightedness).

In the month of May 1916, Jacques Vaché joined the 81st Infantry Regiment.

Above: Badge of the 81st Regiment

Later, because he spoke English fluently, he was sent back to the front as an interpreter for the British troops.

Contact with André Breton resumed in October with a first letter: 

“I walk from ruins to villages with my crystal monocle and a theory of disturbing paintings – I have successively been a crowned writer, a famous pornographic cartoonist and a scandalous cubist painter.”  

On 27 October 1916, his former comrade from the Nantes group, Eugène Hublet, was killed on the Somme Front.

Above: Tank, Battle of the Somme (1 July – 18 November 1916)

On 24 June 1917, while on leave, he attended the premiere of Guillaume Apollinaire’s play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (“The breasts of Tirésias“), subtitled surrealist drama.

The show turned into a fiasco.

In December 1916, the poet Pierre Albert-Birot asked Apollinaire to write a play that would be in the theatre, “what they do on all other levels of art.”

Above: French poet Pierre Albert-Birot (1876 – 1967)

The latter accepted, wishing to develop an idea that had been his in draft form since 1903:

A woman decides to change gender, and her breasts represented by balloons fly away from her bodice.

Apollinaire set to work, writing and rewriting his play.

He profoundly modified his text over the course of the rehearsals, depending on their effect, as Albert-Birot testifies:

“Apollinaire understood more and more clearly that theatre is poetry that is seen.“

Apollinaire was inspired by the myth of the blind soothsayer of Thebes, Tirésias, while applying modern and provocative themes: feminism and anti-militarism, perhaps themselves mocked.

Above: Relief of Ulysses consulting Tirésias

The story is based on that of Tirésias, who undergoes a gender transition to gain power among men.

Her goal is to change customs, rejecting the past to establish gender equality.

The conclusion of the play nevertheless sees her accept the role of procreator that they want to assign to her and puts an end to the carnivalesque reversal.

The play was written during the First World War, a period when women were doing jobs traditionally done by men, the latter having gone to the Front.

Above: Rosie the Riveter

The first presentation took place on 24 June 1917 at the Conservatoire Renée Maubel, rue de l’Orient, Paris, in a staging by Pierre Albert-Birot.

Above: Théâtre Montmartre Galabru, Paris, France

In the idea of ​​abandoning referential realism, masks were used.

The work was created under uncertain conditions.

With the exception of Louise Marion, all the actors were young beginners making their first appearance on a theatre stage.

Herrand also nearly withdrew five days before the performance, following the death of his father.

Due to the war context, the budget was reduced:

The set was made of paper.

Thérèse’s breasts flying away were to be represented by helium -filled balloons, but since the gas was reserved for the army, bales of pressed fabric were used.

A single pianist was responsible for the music and the sound effects.

Apollinaire announced that the music initially written for an orchestra had to be reduced, but there is no evidence that such a version of Germaine Albert-Birot’s music existed.

Above: Interior of the Théâtre Montmartre Galabru

This premiere took place in front of a packed house.

“A large number of advertisements in the newspapers” attracted “a good part of the artistic world and the Parisian press critics.”

The evening had a taste of a Dada evening:

First of all, through the passionate reactions, the show was as much on stage as in the audience, the latter having been excited by a “crush to get in” and several hours of delay, the sets not being finished.

(Dada or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement.

Above: Cover of the 1st edition of the publication Dada, Zürich, 1917

Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin.

Above: Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition, Berlin, 5 June 1920

Within a few years, the movement had spread to New York City and a variety of artistic centers in Europe and Asia.

Within the umbrella of the movement, people used a wide variety of artistic forms to protest the logic, reason and aestheticism of modern capitalism and modern war.

To develop their protest, artists tended to make use of nonsense, irrationality, and an anti-bourgeois sensibility.

The art of the movement began primarily as performance art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture.

Above: Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Epoch of Weimar Beer-Belly Culture in Germany, 1919

Above: Bonset sound-poem, “Passing troop“, 1916

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Tristan Tzara

Above: Romanian artist Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963)

Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism and maintained political affinities with radical politics on the left-wing and far-left politics.

The movement had no shared artistic style, although most artists had shown interest in the machine aesthetic (art that draws inspiration from industrialization).

There is no consensus on the origin of the movement’s name.

Above: Francis Picabia, Dame! Illustration for the cover of the periodical Dadaphone, n. 7, Paris, March 1920

A common story is that the artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife randomly into a dictionary, where it landed on “dada“, a French term for a hobby horse. 

Above: German artist Richard Huelsenbeck (1892 – 1974)

Others note it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group.

Above: Child with a hobby-horse

Still others speculate it might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement’s internationalism.

The roots of Dada lie in pre-war avant-garde.

The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 to characterize works that challenge accepted definitions of art. 

Above: French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968)

Cubism and the development of collage and abstract art would inform the movement’s detachment from the constraints of reality and convention.

Above: Girl with a Mandolin, Pablo Picasso (1910)

The work of French poets, Italian Futurists, and German Expressionists would influence Dada’s rejection of the correlation between words and meaning. 

(Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century.

It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city.)

Above: Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin, Gino Severini (1912)

(Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century.

Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. 

Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.)

Above: The Scream, Edvard Munch (1893)

Works such as Ubu Roi (1896) by Alfred Jarry and the ballet Parade (1917) by Erik Satie would be characterized as proto-Dadaist works.

 

Above: Programme for the première of Ubu Roi (1896)

(Ubu Roi (French: “Ubu the King“) is a play by French writer Alfred Jarry, then 23 years old.

It was first performed in Paris in 1896, by Aurélien Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre at the Nouveau-Théâtre (today, the Théâtre de Paris).

The production’s single public performance baffled and offended audiences with its unruliness and obscenity.

Considered to be a wild, bizarre and comic play, significant for the way it overturns cultural rules, norms and conventions, it is seen by 20th- and 21st-century scholars to have opened the door for what became known as modernism in the 20th century.)

Above: Parade (1917)

(The poet Guillaume Apollinaire described Parade as “a kind of surrealism” (une sorte de surréalisme) when he wrote the program note in 1917, thus coining the word three years before Surrealism emerged as an art movement in Paris.

The ballet was remarkable for several reasons.

It was the first collaboration between Satie and Picasso, and also the first time either of them had worked on a ballet, thus making it the first time either collaborated with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. 

The plot of Parade incorporated and was inspired by popular entertainments of the period, such as Parisian music halls and American silent films. 

Much of the settings used in Parade‘s plot occurred outside of the formal Parisian theater, depicting the streets of Paris. 

The plot reproduces various elements of everyday life such as the music hall and fairground.

Before Parade, the use of popular entertainment materials was considered unsuitable for the elite world of the ballet. 

The plot of Parade composed by Cocteau includes the failed attempt of a troupe of performers to attract audience members to view their show. 

Some of Picasso’s Cubist costumes were in solid cardboard, allowing the dancers only a minimum of movement. 

Above: Picasso costume design for Parade

The score contained several “noise-making” instruments (typewriter, foghorn, an assortment of milk bottles, pistol, and so on), which had been added by Cocteau (somewhat to the dismay of Satie). 

It is supposed that such additions by Cocteau showed his eagerness to create a succès de scandale. 

Although Parade was quite revolutionary, bringing common street entertainments to the elite, being scorned by audiences and being praised by critics, nonetheless many years later Stravinsky could still pride himself in never having been topped in the matter of succès de scandale. 

The ragtime contained in Parade would later be adapted for piano solo and attained considerable success as a separate piano piece. 

The finale is “a rapid ragtime dance in which the whole cast makes a last desperate attempt to lure the audience in to see their show“.

The premiere of the ballet resulted in a number of scandals.

One faction of the audience booed, hissed, and was very unruly, nearly causing a riot before they were drowned out by enthusiastic applause. 

Many of their objections were focused on Picasso’s cubist design, which was met with cries of “sale boche“.

According to the painter Gabriel Fournier, one of the most memorable scandals was an altercation between Cocteau, Satie, and music critic Jean Poueigh, who gave Parade an unfavorable review. 

Satie had written a postcard to the critic which read:

“Monsieur et cher ami – vous êtes un cul, un cul sans musique! Signé Erik Satie“.

(“Sir and dear friend – you are an arse, an arse without music! Signed, Erik Satie.“).

The critic sued Satie.

At the trial, Cocteau was arrested and beaten by police for repeatedly yelling “arse” in the courtroom.

Satie was given a sentence of eight days in jail.)

The Dada movement’s principles were first collected in Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto in 1918.

Ball is seen as the founder of the Dada movement.)

Above: German writer Hugo Ball (1886 – 1927), Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, Switzerland, 1916

Above: Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, Switerland

“We piled in like the ingredients of a bomb.

At that time, politics was that of letters.

Everything became passionate, explosive for us.”

Jean Cocteau

Above: French poet Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963)

The spectators reacted to the play in a stormy and contrasting manner, with both boos and applause. 

“The journalists cry scandal.

The play ends in an indescribable hubbub.” 

Apollinaire appeared on stage and shouts to the audience “Pigs!“.

The play attracted the wrath of the press, which raged as much against Apollinaire as against Albert-Birot.

“This joke might have seemed funny, told on a Tuesday by the unctuous and mocking Apollinaire, or performed by Max Jacob in a workshop on the Left Bank, but to call it a surrealist drama and present it seriously to the public is, frankly, improper.

The play was performed by people whose profession it was clearly not.

The sets, it is said, cost the organizers seven francs.

They were stolen.” 

L’Heure, 26 June 1917

The young Louis Aragon, on the other hand, pressed by Albert-Birot, gave a glowing report in SIC.

Above: French writer Louis Aragon (1897 – 1982)

Above: Logo for SIC (Sons Idées Couleurs, Formes), a Parisian avant-garde magazine published from 1916 to 1919 under the direction of the poet Pierre Albert-Birot.

Initially written entirely without an author’s name by the latter and his wife Germaine, it was open to avant-garde circles and was also the second Parisian magazine, after Nord-Sud, to distribute, without affiliating itself with the movement, the texts of the
Zürich Dadaists, namely those of Tristan Tzara.

At the end of its publication, it had 54 issues divided into 41 deliveries.

Some articles saw the play as an anti-feminist satire.

“It is a satire against feminism or rather against the excesses of feminism.

Women may well take the oranges off their bodices, but they remain women nonetheless, and at the first opportune opportunity, they put them back on.” 

Victor Basch, Le Pays

Above: Hungarian-French philosopher Victor Basch (1863 – 1944)

“This buffoonery is not devoid, as we can see, of philosophical and satirical meaning.

It is even very topical, given the ambitions of these ladies who will not be content with being municipal councilors.

And this makes us think of Aristophanes’ Assembly of Women.”

Guillot de Saix, La France (1862 – 1884)

(The Assembly of Women is an ancient Greek comedy by
 Aristophanes composed around 392 BC.

The Athenian women, at the instigation of one of their own, Praxagora, gather at dawn in the agora to take the necessary measures in place of the men to save the city.

When Athenians wake up the next day, they are astonished to discover the reforms that the women intend to adopt: pooling of property, the right for the ugliest and oldest women to choose a companion.

In the evening, a grand banquet celebrates the establishment of the new order of things, and the play ends in a truly Dionysian atmosphere.

By staging the debates of the Athenian women, which are laughable for their lack of political scope, but also for their lack of practical sense and the immoderate defense of particular interests that appears there, it is the constitutional projects that animate the Athens of his time that Aristophanes intends to ridicule.

We also observe in this play the disillusionment of the great comic poet, whose bitterness only increases after the capitulation of Athens which ended the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, as well as in the face of the degradation of Athenian political institutions, which led to the reestablishment of tyranny in 411 and again in 404.)

Above: Bust of Greek playwright Aristophanes (445 – 375 BC)

Les Mamelles de Tirésias also caused several Cubists to distance themselves from Apollinaire, “who saw in Férat’s decorations a fanciful and silly trivialization of their painting.”

Above: Self-portrait (1912) of Cubist artist Juan Gris (1887 – 1927)

Disguised as an English officer, revolver in hand, Vaché ordered the performance to be stopped, which he found too artistic for his taste, under threat of using his weapon against the audience.

Breton managed to calm him down.

However, in his biography of Breton, Mark Polizzotti doubts the veracity of this fact.

He notes that out of about 20 reports of this show, none mention Vaché’s “spectacular” reaction.

Only Louis Aragon “testified” to this incident although he was not present.

On 18 August 1917, Vaché wrote to André Breton: 

“Art is stupidity.

Almost nothing is stupidity.

Art must be a funny and somewhat boring thing – that’s all.

Besides…

Art does not exist, no doubt.

It is therefore useless to sing about it – however:

We make art – because that’s how it is and not otherwise.

Well – what do you want to do about it?” 

Above: Jacques Vaché

In his last letter of 19 December 1918, to Breton, he wrote: 

“I rely on you to prepare the ways of this disappointing God, a little sneering, and terrible in any case.

How funny it will be, you see, this true NEW SPIRIT is unleashed.” 

Above: Jacques Vaché

On 6 January 1919, Jacques Vaché and a friend, Paul Bonnet, were found dead in a room at the Hôtel de France, Place Graslin in Nantes.

An opium addict, he succumbed to an overdose.

Accidental death or suicide?

His surrealist friends were inclined to believe it was an intentional act.

Above: Opium pipe

In 1920, André Breton published his Lettres de guerre , prefacing them with the words:

“Jacques Vaché, the man I loved the most and who undoubtedly had the greatest and most definitive influence on me.“

A member of the Nantes group, Jacques Vaché astonishes with his style:

He cultivates a form of dandyism, cross-dressing, changing his name, living in a common-law relationship even before he was 20.

Even more than his remarkable originality, Jacques Vaché embodies in André Breton’s eyes the free spirit dear to the surrealist.

The following day, the newspaper Le Télégramme des provinces de l’Ouest reported the events.

It announced the discovery of the naked bodies of the two young men, lying on a bed in a room at the hotel.

They had apparently succumbed to taking too much opium. 

A third man, an American soldier named AK Woynow, had tried to find help but it was already too late.

The two victims were presented as “young fools” with no experience of drugs, as well as “brave soldiers who had done their duty in front of the enemy and had been wounded“.

To preserve the honor of the families, only their first names and the initial of their surname were mentioned.

Another Nantes newspaper, Le Populaire, stated in its edition of January 9 that the opium had been supplied by Vaché, and cites the testimony of his father, who says he “saw a covered and tied earthenware pot” which he took for a jam jar.

What the newspapers do not report is the presence in the room of two other people:

• André Caron, a member of the Nantes group
• a man named Maillocheau, who they had met on the evening of the 5th to celebrate their upcoming demobilization.

Once in the hotel room, Vaché took out an earthenware pot containing opium, which they made into balls that they swallowed.

Maillocheau, who was not interested in drugs, left.

Later, Caron, who had become ill, returned home.

At dawn on the 6th, Vaché and Paul Bonnet undressed, carefully folded their clothes, settled down on the bed and had a few more balls of opium.

Woynow, who had also had a little more opium, fell asleep on the couch.

When he woke up in the evening, he found his two comrades still lying there motionless, barely breathing.

He ran to get the hotel doctor.

In August 1919, Breton published the 15 letters from Vaché sent to his surrealist friends during the war under the title of Lettres de guerre.

André Breton only learned of his friend’s death between 1300 and 1400 hours on 22 January. 

The dismay and the lack of details regarding the circumstances of the death lead him to think that it could be an assassination.

In a letter addressed to Fraenkel, on 30 January, he inserts a newspaper clipping which associates the murder of Jean Jaurès, on 31 July 1914, to that of Karl Liebknecht, on 16 January 1919.

Above: French journalist/politician Jean Jaurès (1859 – 1914)

On 31 July 1914, Jaurès was assassinated.

At 9 pm, he went to dine at the Café du Croissant on Rue Montmartre, Paris.

Forty minutes later, Raoul Villain, a 29-year-old French nationalist, walked up to the restaurant window and fired two shots into Jaurès’s back. 

He died five minutes later at 9:45 pm.

Jaurès had been due to attend an international conference on 9 August, in an attempt to dissuade the belligerent parties from going ahead with the war. 

Villain also intended to murder Henriette Caillaux with his two engraved pistols. 

Above: French Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux’s wife Henriette Caillaux (1874 – 1943)

Irony: On 16 March 1914, she shot and killed Gaston Calmette, editor of the newspaper Le Figaro.

Tried after World War I and acquitted, Villain was later killed by the Republicans in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War.

Above: Mugshot of Raoul Villain (1885 – 1936)

Shock waves ran through the streets of Paris.

One of the government’s most charismatic and compelling orators had been assassinated.

His opponent, President Poincaré, sent his sympathies to Jaurès’s widow.

Above: French President Raymond Poincaré (1860 – 1934)

Paris was on the brink of revolution:

Jaurès had been advocating a general strike and had narrowly avoided sedition charges.

One important consequence was that the cabinet postponed the arrest of socialist revolutionaries.

French Prime Minister René Viviani reassured Britain of Belgian neutrality but also said that.

“The gloves were off.“

Above: French Prime Minister René Viviani (1863 – 1925)

Jaurès’s murder brought matters one step closer to world war.

It helped to destabilize the French government, whilst simultaneously breaking a link in the chain of international solidarity. 

Speaking at Jaurès’s funeral a few days later, CGT (General Confederation of Labor) trade union leader Léon Jouhaux declared:

“All working men, we take the field with the determination to drive back the aggressor.” 

As if in reverence to his memory, the Socialists in the Chamber agreed to suspend all sabotage activity in support of the Union Sacrée (a political truce in which the left-wing agreed during World War I not to oppose the government or call any strikes).

Poincaré commented that:

“In the memory of man, there had never been anything more beautiful in France.“

On 23 November 1924, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon.

Above: The Pantheon, Paris, France

Between these two dates, Breton writes:

“? January 1919: Jacques Vaché“.

Above: German politician Karl Liebknecht (1879 – 1919)

The “intelligence services of numerous ‘associations representing the interests of the state‘” actively sought the leading figures of the KPD (German Communist Party). 

Above: Logo of the German Communist Party

In December 1918, numerous red, large-format posters directed against the Spartacus League (a Marxist revolutionary group) were posted in Berlin, culminating in the demand:

“Beat their leaders to death!

Kill Liebknecht!” 

Hundreds of thousands of handbills with the same content were also distributed. 

Above: Flag of the Spartacus League (1914 – 1919)

Eduard Stadtler’s (1886 – 1945) Anti-Bolshevik League was among those involved.

Above: Anti-Bolshevist League propaganda poster, 1919. The text reads: “Join the Anti-Bolshevist League“.

In the SPD’s newspaper Vorwärts (Forward), Liebknecht was repeatedly portrayed as “mentally ill“. 

The entire Council of People’s Deputies signed a leaflet on 8 January announcing that:

“The hour of reckoning is approaching.” 

The following day the leaflet’s text appeared as official news in the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger, the German Reich’s newspaper of record.

Rumors circulated among civilians and military personnel that bounties had been placed on the Spartacist leaders. 

On 14 January an article appeared in a newsletter of two Social Democratic regiments, stating that “the next few days” would show that:

“As for the heads of the movement, the gloves are now coming off.”

Since their lives were now in danger, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg went into hiding, initially in the Berlin suburb of Neukölln, but after two days they moved to new quarters in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf neighborhood. 

Above: Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (1871 – 1919)

The owner of the apartment, the merchant Siegfried Marcusson, was a member of the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party) and belonged to the Wilmersdorf Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council.

His wife was a friend of Rosa Luxemburg.

In the early evening of 15 January, five members of the Wilmersdorf Bürgerwehr – a middle class civilian militia – entered the apartment and arrested Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

It is not known who tipped off the Bürgerwehr or gave it the order, but it is certain that it was a targeted raid, not a random search.

Each person involved in the arrest received a reward of 1,700 marks from the chairman of the Wilmersdorf Civic Council. 

Around 9 p.m. Wilhelm Pieck, who was to become President of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1949 to 1960, entered the apartment unsuspectingly and was also arrested.

Above: German politician Wilhelm Pieck (1876 – 1960)

Liebknecht was first taken to the Wilmersdorf Cecilia School.

From there a member of the Bürgerwehr called the Reich Chancellery and informed its deputy press chief, Robert Breuer of the Wilmersdorf SPD, that Liebknecht had been captured. 

Breuer said he would call back but reportedly did not. 

At about 9:30 p.m. members of the Bürgerwehr drove Liebknecht to their command office, the headquarters of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division in the Eden Hotel. 

Liebknecht, who up to that point had denied who he was, was identified by the initials on his clothing in the presence of the de facto commander of the division, Captain Waldemar Pabst.

After a few minutes of reflection, Pabst decided to have Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who was brought in around 10 p.m., “taken care of“. 

Above: German soldier Waldemar Pabst (1880 – 1970)

He called the Reich Chancellery to discuss further action with Minister of Defense Gustav Noske.

Above: German politician Gustav Noske (1868 – 1946)

Noske urged him to consult with the commander in chief of the Provisional Reichswehr (German Armed Forces), General von Lüttwitz, and if possible obtain a formal order from him.

Above: German General Walther von Lüttwitz

Pabst said that it was out of the question, to which Noske replied:

“Then you yourself must know what is to be done.“

Pabst charged a group of naval officers under the command of Captain Lieutenant Horst von Pflugk-Harttung with carrying out Liebknecht’s murder.

(In January 1932 Pflugk-Harttung said in an interview that Noske had explicitly ordered Liebknecht’s shooting, but when Noske publicly contradicted him, he claimed that he had been misunderstood by the journalist.) 

Above: German officer Horst von Pflugk-Harttung (1889 – 1967)

The officers left the Hotel with Liebknecht at around 10:45 p.m., dressed in enlisted men’s uniforms for disguise.

As they were leaving, Liebknecht was spat on, insulted and struck by hotel guests. 

Just after he was put into a waiting car with the officers, Private Otto Runge, who had been promised money by a Guards Cavalry officer not privy to the full plan, hit him with the butt of his rifle.

Lieutenant Rudolf Liepmann, who also had not been informed by Pabst of the intention to murder Liebknecht, drove the car to the nearby Tiergarten Park.

Above: Tiergarten Park, Berlin, Germany

There he feigned a breakdown at a spot “where a completely unlit footpath branched off”. 

Liebknecht was led away from the car and after a few meters shot from behind “at close range” by the shore of a lake.

Shots were fired by von Pflugk-Harttung, Naval Lieutenant Heinrich Stiege, Naval First Lieutenant Ulrich von Ritgen and by Liepmann, who “instinctively joined in“. 

Also present were Captain Heinz von Pflugk-Harttung (Horst’s younger brother), Second Lieutenant Bruno Schulze and Private Clemens Friedrich, the only enlisted man involved in the crime.

The perpetrators delivered the dead man as an “unknown body” to the ambulance station opposite the Eden Hotel at 11:15 p.m. and then reported to Pabst.

Half an hour later, Luxemburg was taken away in an open car and shot about 40 meters from the entrance to the Eden Hotel, apparently by Naval Lieutenant Hermann Souchon.

Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal by First Lieutenant Kurt Vogel and was not found until 31 May.

Above: Landwehr River, Tiergarten Park, Berlin, Germany

Pabst’s press officer Friedrich Grabowski subsequently circulated a communiqué stating that Liebknecht had been “shot while fleeing” and Luxemburg “killed by a mob“.

In 1969, Pabst commented on the background to the murders in a private letter:

The fact is:

The execution of my orders unfortunately did not take place as it should have.

But it did take place, and for that these German idiots should thank Noske and me on their knees, erect monuments to us, and have streets and squares named after us!

[Because Pabst thought that the murders had prevented Germany from becoming Communist.]

Noske was exemplary at the time, and the party [SPD] (except for its semi-communist left wing) behaved impeccably in the affair.

That I could not carry out the action without Noske’s approval (with Ebert in the background) and also that I had to protect my officers is clear.

But very few people understood why I was never questioned or brought up on charges, and why the court-martial went the way it did, Kurt Vogel was freed from prison, and so on.

As a man of honor, I responded to the behavior of the SPD of the time by keeping my mouth shut for 50 years about our cooperation.

If it is not possible to skirt the truth and I get so angry I’m ready to explode, I will tell the truth, which I would like to avoid in the interest of the SPD.”

Liebknecht was buried on 25 January along with 31 other dead from the Spartacist uprising.

Above: Burial on 25 January 1919 of Karl Liebknecht and 31 others killed in the Spartacist uprising

The burial initially planned by the KPD at the Cemetery of the March Fallen in Friedrichshain was forbidden by both the government and Berlin’s municipal authorities. 

Above: Picture of the fights between revolutionaries and the royal military in the Breite Strasse Street, Berlin during the March 1848 revolution

Instead the burial commission was referred to the cemetery for the poor in Friedrichsfelde, then located on the urban periphery.

The funeral procession turned into a mass demonstration in which several tens of thousands of people took part in spite of a massive military presence.

Chairman Paul Levi spoke at the graves for the KPD and Luise Zietz and Rudolf Breitscheid for the USPD.

In 1926 the November Revolution Monument was dedicated at the gravesite of the militants in the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.

Nazi authorities had it demolished in 1935.

Above: A memorial to the fallen Spartacists, after 1935 destroyed by the Third Reich

The remains of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg have never been definitively found or identified.

In 1951, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were honored with symbolic graves at the Memorial to the Socialists (German: Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten) in the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.

Above: Speech at the 1951 Memorial to the Socialists 

Alongside the theory of assassination, Breton also mentions that of suicide.

In 1940, in the Anthology of Black Humor, Breton reports comments made by Jacques Vaché on 14 November 1918 some time before his death:

“I object to being killed in war.

I will die when I want to die, but then I will die with someone.

Dying alone is too boring.

Preferably with one of my best friends.” 

Throughout his life, Breton could not bring himself to see Jacques Vaché’s death as anything other than a banal accident.

He remained convinced that his friend had committed a final macabre prank.

He was convinced that Vaché had consciously orchestrated his suicide.

To the couturier Jacques Doucet, he wrote the following:

4 January 1921:

“His death had this admirable quality that it could pass for accidental.

He wanted by disappearing to commit a final funny trick.”

Above: French fashion designer Jacques Doucet (1853 – 1929)

Breton takes up this expression from a letter from 12 August 1918 from Vaché to Fraenkel:

“I dream of good, well-felt eccentricities, or of some good, funny trickery that causes a lot of deaths.”  

Above: Theodore Fraenkel

Michel Leiris is sensitive to the suicide theory.

When he draws up the “Palmarès de generation“, he writes:

“Jacques Vaché: Suicide?” 

Above: French writer Michel Leiris (1901 – 1990)

Breton’s theory of suicide is based on his conviction that Vaché knew exactly what he was doing, even though his “experience” with drug use has never been established.

For him, a death inspired by “humor” was the only end worthy of his friend.

Similarly, he will only see in the circumstances of the discovery of the naked bodies lying on a bed the characteristics of the haughty dandy, asexual and insensitive to the temptations of the flesh.

He will refuse to consider the slightest inclination towards homosexuality on the part of Vaché, Breton himself not failing to mention a rare intolerance in this regard.

Other avant-garde movements were interested in the Vaché myth. 

Isidore Isou, founder of Lettrism (also called 
hyper-creativism or hyper-novatism, is originally an artistic movement, then multicultural, renouncing the use of words, initially focused on the poetics of sounds, onomatopoeia, and the music of letters), derisively evoked the fate of Jacques Vaché in his work L’agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie in 1947.

Above: French writer Isidore Isou (1925 – 2007)

Another influential Lettrist, Gabriel Pomerand, used the mythical figure of Vaché to better criticize Breton.

Above: French poet Gabriel Pomerand (1925 – 1972)

(Lettrism has been defined as “art which accepts the material of letters reduced and simply become themselves (adding or totally replacing the poetic and musical elements) and which goes beyond them to mold coherent works in their block.”

Lettrism has also been defined as a cultural movement based on innovation in all disciplines of knowledge and life.

Lettrism represents an extreme attempt to surpass creative activity, based on a rigorous knowledge of the areas covered – kladology, from the Greek klados (a branch) that literally means 
“science of the branches of culture and life” – and which aims to make a deep and complete description of culture, which it divides into the fields of art, science, philosophy, theology and technology, of which it specifies the sectors of research and discovery.)

The situationist Guy Debord was greatly inspired during his youth by the second edition of Lettres de guerre.

Above: French writer Guy Debord (1931 – 1994)

(The Situationist International (SI) is an organization of 
revolutionary theorists, strategists, and activists operating in the cultural, artistic, political, and social fields who seek to put an end to 
class society and the “dictatorship of the commodity“.

Its founders defined themselves, in the first issue of their journal in 1958, as those “who work to construct situations“, a “constructed situation” being a “moment of life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary atmosphere and a set of events.”)
 . 

Above: Situationist grafitti, Il est interdit d’interdire!, (“It is forbidden to forbid!”)

While parodying the surrealists on several occasions, Breton’s writings are filled with references to Vaché.

The figure of the suicide is often represented as well as expressions from Vaché’s vocabulary such as “umoureux“.

Apart from their correspondence, Vaché and Breton did not meet more than five or six times, but the influence of the former on the latter is undeniable.

Breton used it to create the myth of Vaché.

In the month of August 1919, Breton collected the War Letters in a volume and wrote the preface: 

“There are flowers that bloom especially for obituaries in inkwells.

This man was my friend.“

André Breton considers Jacques Vaché as the precursor of surrealism.

He proclaims in the Surrealist Manifesto (1924): 

“Jacques Vaché is a surrealist in me.” 

In the letter of 4 January 1921 to Jacques Doucet, he presents the War Letters as “a marvelous introduction to everything that is covered by the Dada label.

There are all the manifestos that one could want, not a single negation is missing.“

In a letter from 30 January to Théodore Fraenkel, Breton adds a poem “Clé de sol“, which “transposes the emotion that he felt at the announcement of the death of Jacques Vaché“. 

On 3 March, he confided to Jean Paulhan that he had just experienced “the most painful event of life“, which obliged him to wear “armor against emotion.” 

In the same letter: 

“Without him I might have been a poet.

He foiled in me this plot of obscure forces which leads one to believe oneself to be something as absurd as a vocation. “

Above: French writer Jean Paulhan (1884 – 1968)

Breton married his first wife, Simone Kahn, on 15 September 1921.

Above: Simone Kahn (1897 – 1980)

The couple relocated to rue Fontaine No. 42 in Paris on 1 January 1922.

The apartment on rue Fontaine (in the Pigalle district) became home to Breton’s collection of more than 5,300 items:

• modern paintings
• drawings
• sculptures
• photographs
• books
• art catalogs
• journals
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Above: Inside rue Fontaine 42, Paris

Breton launched the review Littérature in 1919.

In Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields)(1920), a collaboration with Soupault, he implemented the principle of automatic writing.

Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) is a 1920 book by André Breton and Philippe Soupault.

It is famous as the first work of literary Surrealism.

The authors used a surrealist automatic writing technique.

The book is considered Surrealist, rather than Dadaist, because it attempts to create something new rather than react to an existing work.

Les Champs magnetiques is characterized by rich textured language that often seems to border on the nonsensical.

This is considered a “normal” result of automatic writing and is considerably more logical than the output from other Surrealist techniques, such as “exquisite corpse” (a method whereby each of a group of collaborators, in sequence, adds words or images to a composition).

A typical paragraph in (a translation of) Les Champs magnetiques is:

“It was the end of sorrow, lies.

The rail stations were dead, flowing like bees stung from honeysuckle.

The people hung back and watched the ocean.

Animals flew in and out of focus.

The time had come.

Yet king dogs never grow old:

They stay young and fit, and someday they might come to the beach and have a few drinks, a few laughs, and get on with it.

But not now.

The time had come.

We all knew it.

But who would go first?“

The division between chapters was the point where the writers stopped writing at the end of the day.

The next chapter was started the following morning.

Breton gave many interviews about the creation of the book.

“When the great birds take flight forever, they leave without a cry and the striped sky no longer resounds with their call.

They pass over lakes, over fertile marshes.

Their wings push aside the too languid clouds.

We are no longer even allowed to sit down:

Immediately, laughter rises and we must shout out loud all our sins.“

“Beautiful August nights, lovely sea twilights, we laugh at you!

Bleach and the lines of our hands will rule the world.

Mental chemistry of our projects, you are stronger than these cries of agony and the hoarse voices of the factories!“

“Yes, that night more beautiful than all the others, we could cry.

Women passed by and held out their hands to us, offering us their smiles like a bouquet.

The cowardice of the previous days squeezed our hearts, and we turned our heads away so as not to see the jets of water that joined the other nights.“

“Only ungrateful death respected us.“

“Everything is in its place, and no one can speak anymore:

Every sense was paralyzed and the blind were more worthy than us.“

“All we have to do is look straight ahead, or close our eyes:

If we turned our heads, the vertigo would creep up on us.“

“Our habits, delirious mistresses, call us:

They are jerky neighs, even heavier silences.

These are the posters that insult us.

We loved them so much.

Color of days, perpetual nights, are you also going to abandon us?“

“Hanging from our lips, the pretty expressions found in the letters clearly have nothing to fear from the devils of our hearts, which come back to us from so high that their blows are uncountable.“

“It is by the light of a platinum wire that we cross this bluish gorge at the bottom of which lie the corpses of broken trees and from which rises the smell of creosote which is said to be good for the health.“

“I laugh.

You laugh.

He laughs.

We laugh until we cry, raising the worm that the workers want to kill.

We have the pun on our lips and narrow songs.“

“One day we will see two great wings darkening the sky and we will just have to let ourselves be suffocated by the musky smell everywhere.“

“The two or three guests take off their neck warmers.

When the glittery liqueurs no longer make their throats pleasant enough, they light the gas stove.“

“What separates us from life is something quite different from this little flame running over the asbestos like a sandy plant.

Nor do we think of the flying song of the gold electroscope leaves found in certain top hats, although we wear one of those in society.“

“You see this big tree where the animals go to look at each other:

We have been pouring it water for centuries.

Its throat is drier than straw and there are immense deposits of ash there.“

“Everyone can pass through this bloody corridor where our sins are hung, delicious paintings, where gray nevertheless dominates.”

“You know that tonight there is a green crime to be committed.

As you know nothing, my poor friend.

Open this door wide, and tell yourself that it is completely dark, that the day has died for the last time.“

“These are beautiful plants, more male than female, and often both at the same time.

They tend to curl up many times before dying out like ferns.

The most charming ones take the trouble to calm us down with sugar hands and spring arrives.

We do not hope to remove them from the underground layers with the different species of fish.

This dish would look good on all tables.

It is a pity that we are no longer hungry.“

“A story has never been able to put me to sleep and I find meaning in my little lies of then, pretty rowan trees of the forest.“

Above: Fred Savage / Peter Falk, The Princess Bride (1987)

“I am threatened (what do they not say?) with a bright pink, a continual rain or a false step on my leaps.

They look at my eyes like glow-worms if it is night or else they take a few steps in me on the side of the shadow.“

“I only advance cautiously in marshy places.

I watch the aerial ends weld together at the moment of the skies.

I swallow my own smoke which looks so much like the chimera of others.

Avarice is a beautiful sin covered with algae and sunny encrustations.

Except for audacity, we are the same.

I do not see myself as very great.

I am afraid of discovering in myself these senile maneuvers that are confused with the rosettes of noise.

Must I face the horror of the last hotel rooms, take part in other hunts!

And only then!

There are many places in Paris, especially on the Left Bank.

I think of the small family of the Armenian paper.

They are accommodated with too much complacency, I assure you, especially since the pavilion overlooks an open eye and the Quai aux Fleurs is deserted in the evening.“

Above: Quai aux fleurs, Georges Stein

“Ah!

To go down with your hair down, your limbs abandoned in the whiteness of the rapids.

What cordials do you have?

I need a third hand, like a bird, that the others do not put to sleep.“

“Perhaps I will be able to direct my thoughts to my best interests.

Care of the parasites that enter the ferruginous water, absorb me if you can.“

“The cave is cool and we feel that we must leave.

The water calls us.

It is red.

The smile is stronger than the cracks that run like plants on your house.

Oh, beautiful day and tender like this extraordinary little hoop!

The sea that we love does not support men as thin as us.

We need elephants with women’s heads and flying lions.

The cage is open and the hotel closed for the second time.

How hot!

Instead of the chief we notice a rather beautiful lioness who scribbles her tamer on the sand and lowers herself from time to time to lick him.

The large phosphorescent marshes make pretty dreams and the crocodiles take up the suitcase made with their skin.

The quarry is forgotten in the arms of the foreman.

It is then that the big dust of the wagons intervenes and excuses everything.

The little children of the school who see this have forgotten their hands in the herbarium.

Like you, they will fall asleep tonight in the breath of this optical bouquet which is a tender abuse.“

André Breton, Magnetic Fields (1919)

“Only one mediocre book has been written about famous escapes.

What you need to know is that beneath all the windows through which you might take the fancy to throw yourself, amiable elves stretch out to the four cardinal points the sad sheet of love.

My inspection had lasted only a few seconds.

I knew what I wanted to know.

Moreover, the walls of Paris had been covered with posters representing a man masked with a white wolf and who held in his left hand the key to the fields:

This man was me.“

André Breton, The Year of the Red Hats (1922)

“My wife with hair of wood fire
With thoughts of lightning of heat.

My wife has the waist of an otter between the teeth of a tiger.

My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host.

My wife with eyelashes like child’s writing sticks
With eyebrows like the edge of a swallow’s nest.

My wife with shoulders of champagne
And a fountain with dolphin heads under the ice.

My wife with fingers of chance and aces and hearts
With fingers of cut hay.

My wife with rocket legs
With clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of elderberry marrow
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of bunches of keys

With feet of caulkers who drink

My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks like a swan’s back
My wife with buttocks of spring
With a sex like a gladiolus.

My wife with seaweed sex and old candy.

André Breton, Earthlight (1923)

With the publication of his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 came the founding of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste and the Bureau of Surrealist Research. 

A group of writers became associated with him.

The Surrealist Manifesto refers to several publications by Yvan Goll and André Breton, leaders of rival surrealist groups.

Goll and Breton both published manifestos in October 1924 titled Manifeste du surréalisme.

Breton wrote a second manifesto in 1929, which was published the following year, and in 1942, a reflection or a commentary on the potential for a third manifesto, exploring how the Surrealist movement might adapt to changing times.

“Dear imagination, what I love most about you is that you don’t forgive.

It is not the fear of madness that will force us to leave the flag of imagination at half-mast.

It seems to me that every act carries its own justification.

If the depths of our minds contain strange forces capable of increasing those on the surface, or of fighting victoriously against them, there is every interest in capturing them, in capturing them first, in order to then submit them, if necessary, to the control of our reason.

Why should I not grant to the dream what I sometimes refuse to reality, that is, this value of certainty in itself, which, in its time, is not exposed to my disavowal?

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, apparently so contradictory, that are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, if one can say so.

The marvelous is beautiful, any marvelous is beautiful, only the marvelous is beautiful.

It is up to man to belong entirely to himself, that is to say, to maintain in an anarchic state the band of his desires, which becomes more formidable every day.“

André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism (1924)

Breton’s first manifesto defines surrealism as

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought.

Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”

The text includes examples of applications of surrealism in poetry and literature and maintains that its tenets can be applied outside of the arts.

Breton notes hypnagogia as a surreal state and the dream as a source of inspiration.

The Manifesto concludes that surrealism is non-conformist in nature and does not follow defined rules.

It was written in an absurdist manner influenced by Dadaism.

“The present echo is that of tears, and of the beauty proper to illegible adventures, to truncated dreams.”

“Servants of weakness, servants of happiness, women abuse light in a burst of laughter.”

“Provided I do not miss the correspondence with boredom!

Here we are:

Boredom, the beautiful parallels.

Ah!

How beautiful the parallels are under the perpendicular of God.“

“It is a question of living where life is still capable of provoking general convulsion or conversion without resorting to anything other than the reproduction of natural phenomena.”

“The sky is a sinister blackboard, eerily erased from minute to minute by the wind.”

“Rain alone is divine, which is why when storms shake their great vestments over us, throw their purses at us, we sketch a movement of revolt which corresponds only to the rustling of leaves in a forest.”

“It is in the sweet escape called the future, an escape that is always possible, that the stars that have hitherto leaned over our distress are resolved.”

André Breton, Soluble Fish (1924)

Un Cadavre (A Corpse) was the name of two separate surrealist pamphlets published in France in October 1924, and January 1930, respectively.

The first pamphlet, arranged largely by André Breton and Louis Aragon, appeared in response to the national funeral of Anatole France.

France, the 1921 Nobel Laureate and best-selling author, who was then regarded as the quintessential man of French letters, proved to be an easy target for an incendiary tract.

The pamphlet featured an essay called Anatole France, or Gilded Mediocrity that scathingly attacked the recently deceased author on a number of fronts.

The pamphlet was an act of subversion, bringing into question accepted values and conventions, which Anatole France was seen as personifying.

The effect of the pamphlet was twofold:

On the one hand, it brought considerable attention to the movement of surrealism and its aims.

But on the other, its disrespectful nature alienated certain sympathizers of the movement.

Above: French writer Anatole France (1844 – 1924)

The second pamphlet was arranged by a number of disaffected surrealists, sharply criticizing the movement’s leader, André Breton, in response to criticism Breton made in his Second Surrealist Manifesto. 

The manifesto, published in December 1929, directly criticized certain members of the movement and attempted to set the course for future group activities.

Eager to combine the themes of personal transformation found in the works of Arthur Rimbaud with the politics of Karl Marx, Breton and others joined the French Communist Party in 1927, from which he was expelled in 1933. 

Nadja, a novel about his imaginative encounter with a woman who later becomes mentally ill, was published in 1928.

Nadja (1928), the second book published by André Breton, is one of the iconic works of the French surrealist movement.

It begins with the question:

“Who am I?“

It is based on Breton’s actual interactions with a young woman, Nadja (actually Léona Camille Ghislaine Delacourt: 1902 – 1941), over the course of ten days.

It is presumed to be a semi-autobiographical description of his relationship with a patient of Pierre Janet.

The book’s non-linear structure is grounded in reality by references to other Paris surrealists and 44 photographs.

One of the most beautiful stories in French literature, 
Nadja, is based on a true story:

The love between André Breton and Nadja.

For a long time, it was believed that Nadja was an actress, Blanche Derval, or even a fictional being.

But recent discoveries and sales of Breton’s manuscripts, letters and notebooks have allowed us to rediscover the woman behind the story.

Testimonies of Nadja’s existence that we thought had been lost have reappeared on the market.

And it’s quite disturbing to see her reappear, so long after.

Nadja, a dancer, a courtesan, lived off small contracts.

She was in a state of poverty at that time.

And Breton will support her, in particular he will sell a painting by Derain to allow her to pay off her debts and find a hotel where she can live.

In 1926, when he met Nadja, André Breton was 30 years old.

He liked to wander around Paris.

Open to the chance of the encounter, he accosted a mysterious woman:

It is a wandering that provokes the romantic encounter in the sense that he voluntarily places himself in a state of availability.

Nadja was probably in a similar state.

Probably not for the same reasons:

It is that she herself already finds herself a little wavering, on the edge of delirium.

And that is the fascinating side of this encounter:

Nadja becomes more surrealist than Breton.

She produces very strong images, which upset Breton, who himself encourages them, and perhaps also encourages the worsening of a delirium, behind.

It is the encounter between two causalities that makes this story very magnetic.

Her real name is Léona Delcourt, but she calls herself Nadja because in Russian, it is “the beginning of the word hope, and only the beginning.” 

As a good surrealist, Breton places love as a cardinal value.

 
Mad love is at the center of surrealist ethics in the sense that surrealism is not just a literary movement, it is a philosophy of life, a morality of existence.

André and Nadja spend a week of wandering, fascination and passion together.

But soon disappointed by this unrequited love, in February, Nadja leaves Breton, and predicts that he will write their story.  

This is Nadja’s prophetic side, prophetic always a little on the edge of delirium too, since the delirious person sees associations that do not exist.

Above: The only known photo of Nadja

In March 1927, Nadja descended into madness, she had a delusional episode in her hotel, and she was locked up.

This was the tragedy of this woman:

She would never escape this confinement, and like many people hospitalized in psychiatric institutions, she would die during the Second World War, probably of hunger.

So Breton, at the time of writing Nadja, was faced with this catastrophe, an adventure that deeply challenged him. 

Above: Drawing by Nadja, self-portrait

A few months after his internment, to exorcise this trauma, Breton isolated himself in a Norman manor, to write, in 10 days, the story of this encounter. 

This explains the intensity of the writing as seen in the manuscript.

There is a truth in relation to oneself, which we see in the extreme rigor of the writing.

So it is at the same time an intense writing, and at the same time crossed out, bumpy, difficult for Breton, easy and hindered at the same time.

It is this paradox which is overwhelming with this manuscript.

Above: The Norman manor in which Breton wrote “Nadja”

Less than two years after his meeting with Nadja, Breton published the story.

It was a relief for Breton as he got off the train.

His friends were gathered at the station.

He began reading Nadja.

For Breton, it was such an intimate and moving story that it must have had a more singular importance.

When he returned to Paris, Breton began to gather together the entire iconographic aspect of the story.

Since it is one of the major characteristics of Nadja, it is not only this romantic encounter, but also Breton’s very innovative use of images that punctuates the story to avoid description.

Breton obviously took manic care in choosing these images, since obviously none of them is insignificant.

They all have enormous importance. 

Above: The 1st page of Nadja, original manuscript.

Having fallen in love with another woman, Suzanne, Breton adds a third part to the text on true love made possible by thwarted love with Nadja.  

It is this last part that explains what his adventure with Nadja meant to him:

It was the announcement of love, but it was not yet love.

It is not very nice for Nadja, but that is how Breton experienced it.

It is above all a story of authenticity and self-analysis.

Years later, in 1962, Breton substantially modified the original text and images.

In particular, he erased the night spent with Nadja in a hotel, which the vast majority of current readers do not suspect.

So we lose the carnal dimension of the love story between Breton and Nadja.

It is a reflex of old age that is a little less understandable, which makes Nadja’s story lose a little of its freshness, its spontaneity, whereas that is precisely what is interesting at the base:

It is this profound spontaneity, the authenticity of Nadja’s story.

Breton denied himself by this rewriting.

Since 1928, little by little, the myth of Nadja has ended up erasing even her person.

On several occasions, Breton even received letters from women who claimed to be Nadja.

These were women who were often mad, interned, so taken by the Nadja myth that they ended up identifying themselves. 

Breton himself, at the end of his life, no longer remembered her name well.

It is something that even for Breton at that time, in the 1960s, is a little unreal.

That is also the sad side of this story: to what extent a woman, who nevertheless existed, has disappeared from memory. 

“Is it not to the exact extent that I become aware of this differentiation from other men that I will reveal to myself what among all others I have come to do in this world and what unique message I am the bearer of?“

André Breton, Nadja (1928)

The narrator, named André, ruminates on a number of Surrealist principles, before ultimately commencing (around a third of the way through the novel) on a narrative account, generally linear, of his brief ten-day affair with the titular character Nadja.

She is so named “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning“, but her name might also evoke the Spanish “Nadie“, which means “no one“.

Ultimately, it becomes apparent that she may be the one holding onto a unique perspective, the beginning of hope, while the narrator treats her as if she’s no one.

The narrator becomes obsessed with this woman with whom he, upon a chance encounter while walking through the street, strikes up conversation immediately.

He becomes reliant on daily rendezvous, occasionally culminating in romance (a kiss here and there).

His true fascination with Nadja, however, is her vision of the world, which is often provoked through a discussion of the work of a number of Surrealist artists, including himself.

While her understanding of existence subverts the rigidly authoritarian quotidian, it is later discovered that she is dealing with the emotional weight of losing a family member and spends time in a sanitarium, during which time André seems focused only on himself without considering her inner (or outer) world.

After Nadja shares details of her own life, she in a sense becomes demystified.

The narrator decides that he cannot continue their relationship.

“The temptation to remotely retouch the expression of an emotional state, for want of being able to relive it in the present, inevitably results in dissonance and failure.“

André Breton, Nadja (1928)

In the remaining quarter of the text, André distances himself from her and descends into a meandering rumination on her absence, so much so that one wonders if her absence, and his imagination of her, allows him to continue objectifying her for his own inspiration in a way that her presence as a full fledged person, let alone friend, would be too humanizing for.

It is, after all, Nadja as an ordinary person who André ultimately despises and cannot tolerate to the point of inducing tears.

There is something about the closeness once supposedly felt between the narrator and Nadja before he heard more about her life that indicated to him a depth beyond the limits of conscious rationality, waking logic, and sane operations of the everyday.

He prefers for there to be something essentially “mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering” about her.

This reinforces the notion that their propinquity serves only to remind André of Nadja’s impenetrability.

Her eventual recession into absence is the fundamental concern of this text, an absence that permits Nadja to live freely in André’s conscious and unconscious, seemingly unbridled, maintaining her paradoxical role as both present and absent.

Ironically, while the real life Nadia is in the same city as him, not once does he think to check on her, see how she is doing, or care about her beyond his own ability to exploit her for his own artistic ends.

With Nadja’s past fixed within his own memory and consciousness, the narrator states he is awakened to the impenetrability of reality and perceives a particularly ghostly residue peeking from under its thin veil.

Thus, he uses his imagination of another person to put into practice his theory of Surrealism, predicated on the dreaminess of the experience of reality within reality itself.

“I am forced to accept the idea of ​​work as a material necessity, in this respect I am most in favor of its fairest distribution.

Whether the sinister obligations of life impose it on me, be it asked to believe it, to revere my own or that of others, never.

The event from which everyone has the right to expect the revelation of the meaning of his own life is not at the price of work.“

André Breton, Nadja (1928)

In December 1929, Breton published the Second manifeste du surréalisme (Second manifesto of surrealism), which contained an oft-quoted declaration for which many, including Albert Camus, reproached Breton:

“The simplest surrealist act consists, with revolvers in hand, of descending into the street and shooting at random, as much as possible, into the crowd.”

In 1929, Breton sent letters to surrealists asking them to evaluate their “degree of moral competence“.

Later that year, he published the Second manifeste du surréalisme. 

The Manifesto expelled surrealists hesitant to commit to collective action.

A printed insert was published with the manifesto that was signed by the surrealists who supported Breton and agreed to participate in Surrealism at the Service of the Revolution.

A group of those expelled by Breton founded the magazine Documents. 

It was edited by Georges Bataille, whose philosophy of anti-idealist materialism encouraged surrealism focused on human base instincts.

In reaction to the Second manifesto, writers and artists published in 1930 a collective collection of pamphlets against Breton, entitled (in allusion to an earlier title by Breton) Un Cadavre.

The authors were members of the surrealist movement who were insulted by Breton or had otherwise opposed his leadership. 

The pamphlet criticized Breton’s oversight and influence over the movement.

It marked a divide amidst the early surrealists. 

After the publication of this pamphlet against Breton, the Manifesto had a second edition, where Breton added in a note:

“While I say that this act is the simplest, it is clear that my intention is not to recommend it to all merely by virtue of its simplicity.

To quarrel with me on this subject is much like a bourgeois asking any non-conformist why he does not commit suicide, or asking a revolutionary why he hasn’t moved to the USSR.”

The Automatic Message (1933) (Le Message Automatique) was one of André Breton’s significant theoretical works about automatism.

The book includes two vital “automatic” texts of surrealism.

Breton’s prefatory essay The Automatic Message relates the technique to the underlying concepts and aesthetic of surrealism.

In 1935, there was a conflict between Breton and the Soviet writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg during the first International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which opened in Paris in June.

Breton had been insulted by Ehrenburg — along with all fellow surrealists — in a pamphlet which said, among other things, that surrealists shunned work, favoring parasitism, and that they endorsed “onanism, pederasty, fetishism, exhibitionism, and even sodomy“.

Breton slapped Ehrenburg several times on the street, which resulted in surrealists being expelled from the Congress. 

Above: Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg (1891 – 1967)

“Boys of the severe, anonymous, chained and brilliant performers of the grand spectacle review which throughout a life, without hope of change, will possess the mental theater, have always mysteriously evolved for me theoretical beings, which I interpret as key bearers:

They carry the keys to situations.

I mean by that that they hold the secret of the most significant attitudes that I will have to take in the presence of such rare events which will have pursued me with their mark.“

“I am firmly convinced that any perception recorded in the most involuntary way, such as, for example, that of words spoken to the public, carries within it the solution, symbolic or otherwise, of a difficulty in which one is with oneself.

It is still only a matter of knowing how to orient oneself in the maze.“

“The delirium of interpretation only begins when the ill-prepared man becomes frightened in this forest of clues.“

“Even today I expect nothing but my availability, this thirst to wander in search of everything, which I assure myself keeps me in mysterious communication with other available beings, as if we were suddenly called to reunite.

I would like my life to leave behind no other murmur than that of a watchman’s song, a song to deceive the wait.

Regardless of what happens, or does not happen, it is the wait that is magnificent.“

“Men stupidly despair of love.

I have despaired of it.

They live enslaved to this idea that love is always behind them, never before them:

Centuries gone by, the lie of oblivion at twenty.

They endure.

They harden themselves to admit above all that love is not for them, with its procession of clarities, this look at the world which is made of all the eyes of soothsayers.

They limp with fallacious memories to which they go so far as to attribute the origin of an immemorial fall, so as not to find themselves too guilty.

And yet for each one the promise of every hour to come contains all the secret of life, with the potential to reveal itself one day occasionally in another being.“

“Come on!

It is only in fairy tales that doubt cannot creep in, that there is no question of slipping on a fruit peel.“

“Life is slow and man hardly knows how to play it.

The possibilities of reaching the being likely to help him play it, to give it all its meaning, are lost in the map of the stars.

Who accompanies me?

Who precedes me this night once again?

Tomorrow remains made of determinations willingly or unwillingly accepted without taking into account these charming curls, these ankles like curls.

There would still be time to back down.“

“Love, the only love there is, carnal love, I adore.

I have never ceased to adore your poisonous shadow, your mortal shadow.

A day will come when man will know how to recognize you as his only master and honor you even in the mysterious perversions with which you surround yourself.“

“The recreation, the perpetual recoloring of the world in a single being, as accomplished by love, illuminates the march of the Earth with a thousand rays.

Each time a man loves, nothing can prevent him from engaging with him the sensibility of all men.”

“We will never finish with sensation.

All rationalist systems will one day prove indefensible to the extent that they attempt, if not to reduce it to the extreme, at least not to consider it in its supposed excesses.

These excesses are, it must be said, what interests the poet to the supreme degree.“

“There is enough here to confound all those who persist in calling us to account, incriminating the too adventurous path that they like that we claim to follow.

They say – what do they not say! – that the world has no more curiosity to offer on the side where we are.

They impudently maintain that it has just changed 
like the voice of a young boy.

They object to us lugubriously that the time of tales is over.

Over for them!

If I want the world to change, if I even intend to devote a part of my life to its change as it is socially conceived, it is not in the vain hope of returning to the time of these tales, but rather in that of helping to reach the time when they will no longer be only tales.“

“Surprise must be sought for its own sake, unconditionally.

It exists only in the entanglement in a single object of the natural and the supernatural, only in the emotion of holding and at the same time feeling the lyre escape.

The fact of seeing natural necessity opposed to human or logical necessity, of ceasing to strive desperately for their conciliation, of denying in love the persistence of love at first sight and in life the perfect continuity of the impossible and the possible, testify to the loss of what I hold to be the only state of grace.“

“Mutual love, as I see it, is a system of mirrors which reflect back to me, from the thousand angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful image of the one I love, always more surprising in the divination of my own desire and more golden in life.”

André Breton, Mad Love (1937)

In 1938, Breton accepted a cultural commission from the French government to travel to Mexico.

Above: Flag of Mexico

After a conference at the National Autonomous University of Mexico about surrealism, Breton stated after getting lost in Mexico City (as no one was waiting for him at the airport).

Above: Seal of the UNAM

“I don’t know why I came here.

Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.“

Above: (in green) Mexico

However, visiting Mexico provided the opportunity to meet Leon Trotsky.

Above: Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (1879 – 1940)

Breton and other surrealists traveled via a long boat ride from Patzcuaro to the town of Erongarícuaro. 

Above: Erongarícuaro, Michoacán, Mexico

Erongarícuaro, which means “Place of waiting” in the Purepecha language, is a town located about an hour drive to Morelia or Uruapan and just 25 minutes from the famous colonial town of Pátzcuaro.

The estimated population is about 7,000 people.

Erongarícuaro is hidden high in the mountains of Michoacán at 2,200 m (7,130 feet) of elevation.

To the east is Lake Pátzcuaro, one of Mexico’s highest lakes.

The town retains its ancient atmosphere.

It consists of largely one-story adobe or plaster-over-brick buildings with red tile roofs.

The streets are dusty cobblestones traveled by horse and car. The plaza has a fountain, stage and amazing collection of trees.

Wandering the streets uphill, there is a cemetery and a chapel.

Notable Residents

• Lázaro Cárdenas, the popular leftist President of Mexico was rumored to take his boat across the lake where no road reached.

Above: Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas (1895 – 1970)

During Mexico’s postwar art scene:

• Leon Trotsky
• Frida Kahlo

Above: Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954)

• Diego Rivera

Above: Mexican painter Diego Rivera (1886 – 1957)

• Jean Charlot

Above: French American artist Jean Charlot (1898 – 1979)

• André Breton
• Roberto Matta

Above: Chilean painter Roberto Matta (1911 – 2002)

• Remedios Varo

Above: Spanish Mexican painter Remédio Varo (1908 – 1963)

• Spanish painter Esteban Francés (1913 – 1976)
• Pierre Mabille (1904 – 1952)

Above: French writer/doctor Pierre Mabille

• Benjamin Péret

Above: French poet Benjamin Péret (1899 – 1959)

• Gordon Onslow Ford 

Above: French painter Gordon Onslow Ford (1912 – 2003)

• his wife, American writer Jacqueline Johnson

• César Moro

Above: Peruvian poet/painter César Moro (1903 – 1956)

• Miguel Covarrubias

Above: Mexican artist/anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias (1904 – 1957)

• Carlos Mérida

Above: Guatemalan artist Carlo Merida (1891 – 1985)

• Wolfgang Paalen 

Above: Austrian Mexican painter Wolfgang Paalen (1905 – 1959)

• Alice Rahon

Above: French Mexican painter/poet Alice Rahon (1904 – 1987)

• Eva Sulzer

Above: Swiss Mexican photographer Eva Sulzer (1902 – 1990)

Current artists:

• Painter and ceramic artist Jon Skaglund lives and works in the village.
• Maureen Rosenthal, artist and founder in 1981 of UNEAMICH, the Erongarícuaro artists’ cooperative.

Together, Breton and Trotsky wrote the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art (published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera) calling for “complete freedom of art“, which was becoming increasingly difficult with the world situation of the time.

The International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI) was a short-lived organization established in 1938 until 1939 on the initiative of Andre Breton and Diego Rivera following the publication in Partisan Review of their Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, which was signed by both individuals, based on their political and cultural rejection of the Communist International and what they viewed as growing trends toward state and bureaucratic control over art and literature across the world.  

It was co-authored by Leon Trotsky.

Above: André Breton and Leon Trotsky (1938)

On Breton’s return to France, he established the Federation, setting up branches in Paris, London and New York, as well as Mexico.

Breton successfully solicited supported for the project.

However, the Federation was beset with problems with the European branches receiving a lack of public interest due to the preoccupation with the threat of war. 

Only two editions of La Clé, the monthly bulletin of the Federation’s French section, were published before publication was ceased in February 1939 amid a deepening political crisis across Europe. 

In his last letter to Trotsky in June 1939, Breton wrote:

“Perhaps I am not very talented as an organizer, but at the same time it seems to me that I have run up against enormous obstacles.“

Breton was again in the medical corps of the French Army at the start of World War II.

The Anthology of Black Humor (French: Anthologie de l’humour noir) is an anthology of 45 writers edited by André Breton.

It was first published in 1940 in Paris by Éditions du Sagittaire and its distribution was immediately banned by the Vichy government.

It was reprinted in 1947 after Breton’s return from exile, with a few additions.

In 1966, Breton, “having resisted the temptation to add more names“, published the book again and called this edition “the definitive“.

The anthology not only introduced some until then almost unknown or forgotten writers, it also coined the term “black humor” (as Breton said, until then the term had meant nothing, unless someone imagined jokes about black people).

The term became globally used since then.

The choice of authors was done entirely by Breton and according to his taste – which he explains in the Foreword (called The Lightning Rod, a term suggested by Lichtenberg), a work of great depth (Breton was the main theoretician of the Surrealist movement) that starts with contemplating Rimbaud´s words “Emanations, explosions.” from Rimbaud’s last poem The barrack-room of night : Dream. 

The authors, each introduced by a preface by Breton and represented by a few pages from their writings, are sorted chronologically.

The book is still in print.

It was translated into several languages.

The Vichy government banned his writings as “the very negation of the national revolution“.

Above: Logo of the Vichy government (1940 – 1944)

Breton escaped, with the help of the American Varian Fry and Hiram “Harry” Bingham IV, to the United States and the Caribbean during 1941.

Above: American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV (1903 – 1988)

He emigrated to New York City and lived there for a few years. 

Above: New York City (1940s)

In 1942, Breton organized a groundbreaking surrealist exhibition at Yale University.

Above: Coat of arms, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA

In 1942, Breton collaborated with artist Wifredo Lam on the publication of Breton’s poem “Fata Morgana“, which was illustrated by Lam.

Above: Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam (1902 – 1982)

Breton got to know Martinican writers Suzanne Césaire and Aimé Césaire.

Above: Martinique writer Suzanne Césaire (1915 – 1966)

He later composed the introduction to the 1947 edition of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.

Above: Martinique writer Aimé Césaire (1913 – 2008)

During his exile in New York City he met Elisa Bindhoff, the Chilean woman who would become his third wife.

Above: French artist/writer Elisa Breton (1906 – 2000)

In 1944, he and Elisa traveled to the Gaspé Peninsula in Québec, where he wrote Arcane 17, a book which expresses his fears of World War II, describes the marvels of the Percé Rock and the extreme northeastern part of North America, and celebrates his new romance with Elisa.

Above: Gaspé Peninsula / Île d’Anticosti, Québec, Canada

Above: Percé Rock

During his visit to Haiti in 1945 – 1946, he sought to connect surrealist politics and automatist practices with the legacies of the Haitian Revolution and the ritual practices of Vodou possession.

Above: Flag of Haiti

Recent developments in Haitian painting were central to his efforts, as can be seen from a comment that Breton left in the visitors’ book at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince:

Above: Centre d’Art, Port au Prince, Haiti

Above: Port au Prince, Haiti

“Haitian painting will drink the blood of the phoenix.

And, with the epaulets of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, it will ventilate the world.”

Above: Haitian Emperor Jean Jacques Dessalines (1758 – 1806)

Breton was specifically referring to the work of painter and Vodou priest Hector Hyppolite, whom he identified as the first artist to directly depict Vodou scenes and the lwa (Vodou deities), as opposed to hiding them in chromolithographs of Catholic saints or invoking them through impermanent vevé (abstracted forms drawn with powder during rituals).

Breton’s writings on Hyppolite were undeniably central to the artist’s international status from the late 1940s on, but the surrealist readily admitted that his understanding of Hyppolite’s art was inhibited by their lack of a common language.

Returning to France with multiple paintings by Hyppolite, Breton integrated this artwork into the increased surrealist focus on the occult, myth and magic.

Above: Haitian painter Hector Hyppolite (1894 – 1948)

“Poetic thought is the enemy of patina and is perpetually on guard against anything that might burn to apprehend it:

This is how it distinguishes itself, in essence, from ordinary thought.

To remain what it must be, a conductor of mental electricity, it is above all necessary that it be charged in an isolated environment.

In the jungle of solitude, a beautiful gesture of a fan can make one believe in Paradise.

On an intellectual level, it was by letting myself sink into the depths of boredom that I came across unusual solutions, completely beyond research at that time, and some of which gave me reasons to live.

One must have gone to the depths of human pain, to have discovered its strange capacities, to be able to salute with the same limitless gift of oneself that which is worth living.

Man’s aspirations to freedom must be kept in a position to constantly recreate themselves.

This is why it must be conceived not as a state but as a 
living force leading to continual progression.“

André Breton, Arcane 17 (1945)

Breton’s sojourn in Haiti coincided with the overthrow of the country’s president, Élie Lescot, by a radical protest movement.

Breton’s visit was warmly received by La Ruche, a youth journal of revolutionary art and politics, which in January 1946 published a talk given by Breton alongside a commentary which Breton described as having “an insurrectional tone“.

The issue concerned was suppressed by the government, sparking a student strike, and two days later, a general strike:

Lescot was toppled a few days later.

In subsequent interviews Breton downplayed his personal role in the unrest, stressing that “the misery, and thus, the patience of the Haitian people, were at the breaking point” at the time and stating that “it would be absurd to say that I alone incited the fall of the government“. 

Above: Haitian President Élie Lescot (1883 – 1974)

Among the figures associated with both La Ruche and the instigation of the revolt were the painter and photographer Gérald Bloncourt and the writers René Depestre and Jacques Stephen Alexis.

Above: Haitian painter/photographer Gérald Bloncourt (1926 – 2018)

Above: Haitian French poet René Depestre

Michael Löwy has argued that the lectures that Breton gave during his time in Haiti resonated with the youth associated with La Ruche and the student movement, resulting in them “placing them as a banner on their journal” and “taking hold of them as they would a weapon“.

Löwy has identified three themes in Breton’s talks which he believes would have struck a particular chord with the audience, namely surrealism’s faith in youth, Haiti’s revolutionary heritage, and a quote from Jacques Roumain extolling the revolutionary potential of the Haitian masses.

Above: Brazilian French philosopher Michael Löwy

Breton returned to Paris in 1946, where he opposed French colonialism (for example as a signatory of the Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian War) and continued, until his death, to foster a second group of surrealists in the form of expositions or reviews (La Brèche, 1961 – 1965).

“Despite the efforts of some, still clinging to the ballast of the last train heading towards the industrialized countryside (or towards atomic disintegration), “modern” mythology shows itself to be so poor in art – as well as the specifically collective manifestations of the guiding phantasms of the unconscious – that one is justified in believing that myths can only live and spread a light that is at all exhilarating if they maintain close contact with the “repertoire” of nature, a repertoire that can only be leafed through (to quote Baudelaire again) by a winged and magical hand.”

André Breton, Works IV (1957)

André Breton died at the age of 70 in 1966.

He was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles in Paris.

Above: Entry to Batgnolles Cemetery

André Breton was more than a poet — he was the guiding force behind the surrealist movement.

With The Surrealist Manifesto (1924), he sought to unleash the unconscious mind, allowing dreams and automatic writing to break free from rational constraints.

Breton’s work insists that reality is not static.

It is fluid, bending to perception, memory and imagination.

His influence stretches beyond literature, seeping into art, cinema, and even political thought.

In a world often defined by rigid structures, surrealism reminds us that reality is, at its core, malleable.

Above: André Breton

Kay Boyle (February 19, 1902 – December 27, 1992) was an American novelist, short story writer, educator, and political activist.

Boyle is best known for her fiction, which often explored the intersections of personal and political themes.

Her work contributed significantly to modernist literature, and she was an active participant in the expatriate literary scene in Paris during the 1920s. 

She was a Guggenheim Fellow and O. Henry Award winner.

Above: Kay Boyle

The granddaughter of a publisher, Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Above: St. Paul, Minnesota, USA

She grew up in several cities but principally in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Above: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

She had one sibling, an elder sister, Joan.

Their father, Howard Peterson Boyle, was a lawyer, and their mother was Katherine (Evans) Boyle, a literary and social activist who believed the wealthy had an obligation to help the financially less fortunate.

In later years, Kay Boyle championed integration and civil rights.

She advocated banning nuclear weapons and American withdrawal from the Vietnam War.

Boyle was educated at the exclusive Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, then studied architecture at the Ohio Mechanics Institute (1928 – 2009) in Cincinnati.

Interested in the arts, she studied violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before settling in New York City in 1922 where she found work as a writer/editor with a small magazine.

Above: On the lawn of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (1913)

In 1922, she met and married a French exchange student, Richard Brault.

They moved to France in 1923.

This resulted in her staying in Europe for the better part of the next 20 years.

Separated from her husband, she formed a relationship with magazine editor Ernest Walsh, with whom she had a daughter, Sharon, named for the Rose of Sharon, in March 1927, five months after Walsh’s death from tuberculosis in October 1926.

In 1928 she met Laurence Vail, who was then married to Peggy Guggenheim.

Boyle and Vail lived together between 1929 until 1932 when, following their divorces, they married.

With Vail, she had three more children – daughters Apple-Joan in 1929, Kathe in 1934, and Clover in 1939. 

During her years in France, Boyle was associated with several innovative literary magazines and made friends with many of the writers and artists living in Paris around Montparnasse.

Above: La Closerie des Lilas, Le Café de la Société Artistique et Littéraire Française et Etrangère, 171, Boulevard de Montparnasse, Paris, 1909.

Montparnasse cafés rented tables to poor artists for hours at a stretch.

Several, including La Closerie des Lilas, remain in business today.

Among her friends were Harry and Caresse Crosby who owned the Black Sun Press and published her first work of fiction, a collection titled Short Stories.

They became such good friends that in 1928 Harry Crosby cashed in some stock dividends to help Boyle pay for an abortion. 

Other friends included Eugene and Maria Jolas. Boyle also wrote for transition, one of the preeminent literary publications of the day.

A poet as well as a novelist, her early writings often reflected her lifelong search for true love as well as her interest in the power relationships between men and women.

Boyle’s short stories won two O. Henry Awards.

In 1936, she wrote a novel, Death of a Man, an attack on the growing threat of Nazism.

In 1943, following her divorce from Laurence Vail, she married Baron Joseph von Franckenstein, with whom she had two children – Faith in 1942 and Ian in 1943. 

After having lived in France, Austria, England, and in Germany after World War II, Boyle returned to the United States.

In the States, Boyle and her husband were victims of early 1950s McCarthyism.

Her husband was dismissed by Roy Cohn from his post in the Public Affairs Division of the United States Department of State.

Boyle lost her position as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, a post she had held for six years.

She was blacklisted by most of the major magazines.

During this period, her life and writing became increasingly political.

She and her husband were cleared by the United States Department of State in 1957.

In the early 1960s, Boyle and her husband lived in Rowayton, Connecticut, where he taught at a private girls’ school.

Above: Rowayton, Connecticut, USA

He was then rehired by the State Department and posted to Iran, but died shortly thereafter in 1963.

Above: Flag of Iran

Boyle was a writer in residence at the New York City Writer’s Conference at Wagner College in 1962.

In 1963, she accepted a creative writing position on the faculty of San Francisco State College, where she remained until 1979.

During this period she became heavily involved in political activism.

She traveled to Cambodia in 1966 as part of the “Americans Want to Know” fact-seeking mission.

Above: Flag of Cambodia

She participated in protests.

In 1967 was arrested twice and imprisoned.

In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. 

Above: Egyptian peasants seized for non-payment of taxes during the Old Kingdom (2686 – 2181 BC)

In her later years, she became an active supporter of Amnesty International and worked for the NAACP.

After retiring from San Francisco State College, Boyle briefly held writer-in-residence positions, including at Eastern Washington University in Cheney and the University of Oregon in Eugene.

She was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution. 

A world constitution is a proposed framework or document aimed at establishing a system of global governance.

It seeks to provide a set of principles, structures, and laws to govern the relationships between states and address global issues.

The concept of a world constitution reflects the aspiration for greater international cooperation, peace and the resolution of global challenges.

A world constitution serves as a blueprint for organizing and governing global affairs.

It typically outlines the powers, functions, and responsibilities of global institutions and establishes mechanisms for decision-making, conflict resolution, and the protection of human rights.

The aim is to create a framework that promotes unity, justice, and sustainability on a global scale.

World constitutions often encompass essential elements to ensure effective global governance:

• Global Legislative Body:

A world constitution typically envisions a representative global parliament or assembly to address global issues, enact laws, and promote international cooperation.

• Global Executive:

The constitution may propose the establishment of a global executive body responsible for implementing policies, coordinating international initiatives, and managing global affairs.

• Global Judiciary:

The inclusion of a global judicial system aims to settle disputes between nations, interpret international laws, and ensure the adherence to global standards.

• Protection of Human Rights:

World constitutions commonly emphasize the protection of fundamental human rights on a global scale, ensuring their recognition and enforcement across nations.

Proposals for a world constitution face several challenges and criticisms, including:

• Sovereignty concerns:

Critics argue that a world constitution may encroach on national sovereignty and limit the autonomy of individual nations.

• Practical implementation:

Establishing and implementing a global constitution on a meaningful scale presents significant practical challenges, including political, legal, and logistical complexities.

• Diverse perspectives:

Reconciling the diverse cultural, political, and legal perspectives of nations worldwide poses a considerable obstacle to the development of a universally accepted world constitution.

Above: The Earth seen from Apollo 17 – 7 December 1972

As a result, for the first time in history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

The World Constitutional Convention (WCC), also known as the World Constituent Assembly (WCA) or the First World Constituent Assembly, took place in Interlaken, Switzerland and Wolfach, Germany, 27 August – 12 September 1968. 

Above: Interlaken, Canton Bern, Switzerland

The Convention aimed to foster global cooperation and world peace through the development of a World Constitution and establishment of a democratic federal world government.

The initiative to convene the convention was led by World Constitution Coordinating Committee, who sought support from notable individuals around the world.

Above: City Hall, Wolfach, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

The “Call to all nations“, an appeal signed by prominent figures, urged countries to send delegates to Geneva for the historic World Constitutional Convention. 

Several Nobel laureates were among the notable signatories of the call. 

Other notable figures endorsed it as well.

Hundreds of participants from various countries attended the convention in 1968, where a proposed constitution was drafted. 

The World Committee for a World Constitutional Convention, subsequently renamed the World Constitution and Parliament Association, later organized a Second World Constituent Assembly in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1977. 

During the 1977 assembly, the delegates adopted the “Constitution for the Federation of Earth“.

Above: Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria

After its adoption, the WCPA issued a call for ratification, urging nations and peoples of Earth to endorse the Constitution and copies of the prepared Constitution were sent to various entities, including the United Nations, national governments, and universities, seeking their support and cooperation in the ratification process. 

The Constitution had not been ratified by any country as of 2025.

Boyle died at a retirement community in Mill Valley, California on December 27, 1992.

Above: Mill Valley, California

In her lifetime Kay Boyle published more than 40 books, including 14 novels, eight volumes of poetry, 11 collections of short fiction, three children’s books, and French to English translations and essays.

Most of her papers and manuscripts are in the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.

Morris Library has the Ruby Cohn Collection of Kay Boyle Letters and the Alice L. Kahler Collection of Kay Boyle Letters. 

A comprehensive assessment of Boyle’s life and work was published in 1986 titled Kay Boyle, Artist and Activist by Sandra Whipple Spanier.

In 1994 Joan Mellen published a voluminous biography of Kay Boyle, Kay Boyle: Author of Herself.

Kay Boyle was an American modernist who spent much of her career defying expectations.

A contemporary of Fitzgerald, she lived in Paris during the 1920s, immersed in the expatriate literary scene.

Above: American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940)

Her stories and novels — often politically charged — spoke to themes of exile, resistance and moral responsibility.

During the McCarthy era, she was blacklisted for her outspoken beliefs.

Above: US Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908 – 1957)

Boyle’s work reminds us that literature is not only an art form but a tool for dissent, a way of preserving truth when reality is threatened by censorship or oppression.

“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind.

With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox.

It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth.

The emotion is Janus-faced:

We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.

As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.“

Carson McCullers, “Look Homeward, Americans“, in Vogue magazine (December 1940), collected in The Mortgaged Heart (1971)

Above: Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet.

Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States.

Her other novels have similar themes.

Most are set in the Deep South.

McCullers’s work is often described as Southern Gothic and indicative of her Southern roots.

Critics also describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope.

Her stories have been adapted to stage and film.

A stage adaptation of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), which captures a young girl’s feelings at her brother’s wedding, made a successful Broadway run in 1950 – 1951.

McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 to Lamar Smith, a jeweler, and Marguerite Waters.

She was named after her maternal grandmother, Lula Carson Waters.

She had a younger brother, Lamar Jr. and a younger sister, Marguerite. 

Her great grandfather on her mother’s side was a planter and Confederate soldier.

Her father was a watchmaker and jeweler of French Huguenot descent.

From the age of 10, she took piano lessons.

When she was 15, her father gave her a typewriter to encourage her story writing.

Smith graduated from Columbus High School.

McCullers’s childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, is now owned by Columbus State University and is the central location of the university’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians. 

The center is dedicated to:

• preserving the legacy of McCullers
• to nurturing American writers and musicians
• to educating young people
• to fostering the literary and musical life of Columbus, the state of Georgia, and the American South.

To that end, the Center operates a museum in the Smith–McCullers’ home, presents extensive educational and cultural programs for the community, maintains an ever-growing archive of materials related to the life and work of McCullers, and offers fellowships for writers and composers who live for periods of time in the Smith-McCullers home in Columbus.

While the center operates out of the Smith–McCullers house, the writer’s childhood home and museum is open to the public.

Above: Columbus, Georgia, USA

Above: Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Columbus, Georgia

In September 1934, at age 17, she left home on a steamship bound for New York City, planning to study piano at the Juilliard School of Music.

After losing the money she was going to use to study at Juilliard on the subway, she decided instead to work, take night classes, and write.

She worked several odd jobs, including as a waitress and a dog walker. 

After falling ill with rheumatic fever, she returned to Columbus to recuperate.

She changed her mind about studying music.

Returning to New York, she worked in menial jobs while pursuing a writing career.

She attended creative writing night classes at Columbia University and at Washington Square College of New York University.

Above: Coat of arms of Columbia University

In 1936, she published her first work, “Wunderkind“, an autobiographical piece that Bates admired, depicting a music prodigy’s adolescent insecurity and losses.

It first appeared in Story magazine and is collected in The Ballad of the Sad Café.

From 1935 to 1937, as her studies and health dictated, she divided her time between Columbus and New York.

In September 1937, aged 20, she married an ex-soldier and aspiring writer, Reeves McCullers.

A New Yorker profile described her husband as “a dreamer attracted to big, capable women“. 

They began their married life in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Reeves had found work as a credit salesman. 

The couple made a pact to take alternating turns as writer then breadwinner, starting with Reeves’s taking a salaried position while McCullers wrote.

Her eventual success as a writer precluded his literary ambitions.

Above: Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

Maxim Lieber was McCullers’s literary agent in 1938 and intermittently thereafter.

In 1940, at the age of 23, writing in the Southern (US) Gothic or perhaps Southern (US) realist traditions, McCullers completed her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

At the time the novel was thought to suggest an anti-Fascist message.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is the debut novel by the American author Carson McCullers.

She was 23 at the time of publication.

It is a Southern Gothic novel.

It is about a deaf man named John Singer and the people he encounters in a 1930s mill town in the US state of Georgia.

Above: State flag of Georgia, USA

Frederic I. Carpenter wrote in the English Journal that the novel “essentially described the struggle of all these lonely people to come to terms with their world, to become members of their society, to find human love—in short, to become mature.”

The title comes from the poem “The Lonely Hunter” by the Scottish poet William Sharp, who used the pseudonym “Fiona MacLeod“.

“Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,

But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.“

Above: Scottish writer William Sharp (1855 – 1905)

The book begins with a focus on the relationship between two close friends, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos, deaf people who have lived together for several years.

Antonapoulos becomes mentally ill, misbehaves, and, despite attempts at intervention from Singer, is eventually put into an insane asylum far away from town.

Now alone, Singer moves into a new room.

The remainder of the narrative centers on the struggles of four of John Singer’s acquaintances:

• Mick Kelly, a tomboy who loves music and dreams of buying a piano
• Jake Blount, an alcoholic labor agitator
• Biff Brannon, the observant owner of a diner
• Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, an idealistic physician.

Three times, Singer takes a long trip to visit Spiros in the asylum where he has been placed.

On the third trip he learns that Spiros had died.

No one had notified Singer.

After completing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1939 (then titled The Mute), McCullers and her husband moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where she completed Reflections in a Golden Eye (then titled Army Post) in the span of two months.

She sold the book to Harper’s Bazaar for $500 in August 1940.

It was published in two parts in the magazine in October and November.

“In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise.“

“I’m one who knows.

I’m a stranger in a strange land.“

“Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption.

This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss.

A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness.

Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear — and nobody seems to know.

Everybody is blind, dumb and blunt-headed — stupid and mean.“

“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”

“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud.

Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram full of people.

It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.“

“I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know.“

“It is far better for the profits of our purse to be taken from us than to be robbed of the riches of our minds and souls.“

“All we can do is go around telling the truth.“

“The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever.

And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.”

“The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.“

“The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.“

“And how can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?“

“I do not have any home.

So why should I be homesick?“

Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

She published eight books.

The best known are: 

• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
• Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)
• The Member of the Wedding (1946)

Above: Carson McCullers

Reflections in a Golden Eye is a 1941 novel by American author Carson McCullers.

It first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1940, serialized in the October – November issues.

The book was published on 14 February 1941 to mostly poor reviews.

The book was dedicated to the Swiss journalist, travel writer and novelist Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908 – 1942), whom McCullers had met and befriended in the summer of 1940 (after the book was finished).

Above: Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908 – 1942)

Annemarie Minna Renée Schwarzenbach was a Swiss writer, journalist and photographer.

Her bisexual mother brought her up in a masculine style, and her androgynous image suited the bohemian Berlin society of the time, in which she indulged enthusiastically.

Her anti-fascist campaigning forced her into exile, where she became close to the family of novelist Thomas Mann.

Above: German writer Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955)

She would live much of her life abroad as a photo-journalist, embarking on many lesbian relationships, and experiencing a growing morphine addiction.

In America, the young Carson McCullers was infatuated with Schwarzenbach, to whom she dedicated Reflections in a Golden Eye.

Schwarzenbach reported on the early events of World War II, but died of a head injury, following a fall.

Above: Annemarie Schwarzenbach

McCullers wrote the book in 1939, originally using the title “Army Post“.

She said the story had germinated when, as an adolescent, she had first stepped into the alien territory of Fort Benning in Georgia.

A more direct inspiration came from a chance remark which her husband Reeves (an ex-soldier) made to her about a voyeur who had been arrested at Fort Bragg.

Above: Fort Bragg, North Carolina

A young soldier had been caught peeping inside the married officers’ quarters.

McCullers wrote the novel while in Fayetteville, North Carolina, near Fort Bragg.

After two months of arduous writing, she finished her manuscript and put it away in a dresser.

She later said of it:

I am so immersed in my characters that their motives are my own.

When I write about a thief, I become one.

When I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man.

I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said:

‘Nothing human is alien to me.’

Above: Fayetteville, North Carolina

The novel takes place at an army base in the US state of Georgia.

Private Ellgee Williams, a solitary man full of secrets and desires, has served for two years and is assigned to stable duty.

After doing yard work at the home of Captain Penderton, he sees the captain’s wife nude and becomes obsessed with her.

Capt. Weldon Penderton and his wife Leonora, who grew up as an Army brat, have a fiery relationship, and she takes many lovers.

Leonora’s current lover, Major Morris Langdon, lives with his depressed wife Alison and her flamboyant houseboy Anacleto, near the Pendertons.

Captain Penderton, as a closeted homosexual, realizes that he is physically attracted to Pvt. Williams, but remains unaware of the private’s attraction to Leonora.

Above: Scene from Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)

Carson and Reeves McCullers divorced in 1941.

After separating from Reeves she moved to New York to live with George Davis, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar.

She became a member of February House (1940 – 1941), an art commune in Brooklyn. 

Among her friends were W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee and the writer couple Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles.

Above: English poet W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

Above: English composer Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976)

Above: American stripper/writer Gypsy Rose Lee (1911 – 1970)

Above: American composer Paul Bowles (1910 – 1999)

Above: American writer Jane Bowles (1917 – 1973)

After World War II McCullers lived mostly in Paris.

Her close friends during these years included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

Above: American writer Truman Capote (1924 – 1984)

Above: American playwright Tennessee Williams (1911 – 1983)

During this period of separation, Reeves had a relationship with the composer David Diamond.

Above: American composer David Diamond (1915- 2005)

The two lived together in Rochester, New York.

Above: Rochester, New York

The Member of the Wedding is a 1946 novel which took McCullers five years to complete, although she interrupted the work for a few months to write the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café.

In a letter to her husband Reeves McCullers, she explained that the novel was “one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done.

For like a poem there is not much excuse for it otherwise“.

She originally planned to write a story about a girl who is in love with her piano teacher, but she had what she called “a divine spark:

“Suddenly I said:

Frankie is in love with her brother and the bride.

The illumination focused the whole book.“

The novel takes place over a few days in late August.

It tells the story of 12-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams, who feels disconnected from the world.

In her words, an “unjoined person“.

Frankie’s mother died when she was born.

Her father is a distant uncomprehending figure.

Her closest companions are the family’s African American maid, Berenice Sadie Brown, and her six-year-old cousin, John Henry West.

She has no friends in her small Southern town and dreams of going away with her brother and his bride-to-be on their honeymoon in the Alaskan wilderness.

“This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member.

She belonged to no club.

She was a member of nothing in the world.

Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in the doorways.

She was afraid.“

Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (1946)

The novel explores the psychology of the three main characters and is more concerned with evocative settings than with incident.

Frankie does, however, have a brief and troubling encounter with a soldier.

Her hopes of going away are disappointed and, her fantasy destroyed, a short coda reveals how her personality has changed.

It also recounts the fate of John Henry West, and Berenice Sadie Brown’s future plans.

In 1945, Carson and Reeves McCullers remarried.

Three years later, while severely depressed, she attempted suicide.

In 1953, Reeves tried to persuade her to commit suicide with him, but she fled.

Reeves killed himself in their Paris hotel with an overdose of sleeping pills.

Her bittersweet play The Square Root of Wonderful (1957) drew upon these traumatic experiences.

The novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love.

At the time of its writing, McCullers was a resident at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.

The Ballad of the Sad Café, first published in 1951, is a book by Carson McCullers comprising a novella of the same title along with six short stories:

• “Wunderkind“
• “The Jockey“
• “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland“
• “The Sojourner“
• “A Domestic Dilemma“
• “A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud“

“The Ballad of the Sad Café” opens in a small, isolated town in the Southern United States.

The story introduces Miss Amelia Evans, strong in both body and mind, who is approached by a hunchbacked man with only a suitcase in hand who claims to be her kin.

When Miss Amelia, whom the townspeople see as a calculating woman who never acts without reason, takes the stranger into her home, rumors begin to circulate that Miss Amelia has done so in order to take what the hunchback has in his suitcase.

When the rumors hit their peak, a group of eight men come to her store, sitting outside on the steps for the day and waiting to see if something will happen.

Finally, they enter the store all at once and are stunned to see that the hunchback is alive and well.

With everyone gathered inside, Miss Amelia brings out some liquor and crackers, which further shocks the men, as they have never witnessed Miss Amelia be hospitable enough to allow drinking inside her home.

This is the beginning of the café.

Miss Amelia and the hunchback, Cousin Lymon, unintentionally create a new tradition for the town, and the people gather inside the café on Sunday evenings, often until midnight.

It is apparent, though surprising, to the townspeople that Miss Amelia has fallen in love with Cousin Lymon, and has begun to change slightly.

When the townspeople see this, they relate it to another odd incident in which Miss Amelia was also involved:

The issue of her ten-day marriage.

Miss Amelia had been married to a man named Marvin Macy, who was a vicious and cruel character before he fell in love with her.

He changed his ways and became good-natured, but reverted to his old self when his love was rejected after a failed ten-day marriage in which he gave up everything he possessed.

He broke out into a rage, committing a string of felonies before being caught and locked up in the state penitentiary.

When he is released, Marvin Macy returns to the town and begins to take advantage of Cousin Lymon’s admiration for him, using him to crush Miss Amelia’s heart.

Macy and Miss Amelia engage in a physical fight.

Just as Miss Amelia is about to take the upper hand, Lymon jumps her from behind, allowing Macy to prevail.

Macy and Cousin Lymon ransack the café, break the still, steal Miss Amelia’s curios and money, and disappear from town, leaving Miss Amelia alone.

The novella ends with “The Twelve Mortal Men“, a brief passage about 12 men in a chain gang, whose actions outline what happened in the town.

“If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do.“

“Love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.

There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.

Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto.“

“The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.

The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons.

For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.

The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.“

Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)

Many know her works largely by their film adaptations, neither of which she lived to see. 

American film maker John Huston (1906 – 1987), in his autobiography, An Open Book (1980), wrote of her:

I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York.

Above: American actress Paulette Goddard (1910 – 1990)

Above: American actor Burgess Meredith (1907 – 1997)

Carson lived nearby, and one day when Buzz and I were out for a walk she hailed us from her doorway.

She was then in her early 20s, and had already suffered the first of a series of strokes.

I remember her as a fragile thing with great shining eyes, and a tremor in her hand as she placed it in mine.

It wasn’t palsy, rather a quiver of animal timidity.

But there was nothing timid or frail about the manner in which Carson McCullers faced life.

And as her afflictions multiplied, she only grew stronger.”

Richard Wright, the author of Black Boy, reviewed her first novel, published in 1940 when she was 23, and said she was the first white writer to create fully human black characters.

Above: American writer Richard Wright (1908 – 1960)

In his review ‘Hugo: Secrets of the Inner Landscape‘, he stated:

To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.

This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically.

It seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.”

McCullers fell in love with a number of women and pursued them sexually with great determination.

Love letters written to McCullers from Annemarie Schwarzenbach are at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Her most documented and extended love obsession was with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, of whom she once wrote:

“She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life.”

In her autobiography, McCullers reports that the two shared one kiss.

McCullers’s passion, however, was not reciprocated.

The two remained friends with McCullers dedicating her next novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, to her. 

Sarah Schulman writes:

There is the infamous obsession with Katherine Anne Porter and a much-implied ongoing “friendship” with Gypsy Rose Lee.

Above: American writer Katherine Anne Porter (1890 – 1980)

But if Carson ever actually had sex with a woman, even Tennessee Williams didn’t hear of it.

According to McCullers’s brilliant biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, Carson did brag to her male cousin that she’d had sex with Gypsy once.

But if that was the case, she never mentioned it to any of her gay friends.

In the absence of reciprocated lesbian love and the inability to consummate lesbian sex, McCullers still wore a lesbian persona in literature and in life.

She clearly wrote against the grain of heterosexual convention, wore men’s clothes, was outrageously aggressive in her consistently failed search for sex and love with another woman, and formed primary friendships with other gay people.”

In the 1950s, McCullers was in therapy for a variety of reasons, and discussed with her therapist, Dr. Mary A. Mercer, the possibility of being a lesbian.

Clock Without Hands is American author Carson McCullers’ final novel.

It was published on 18 September 1961.

Set in small-town Georgia in 1953 on the eve of court-ordered racial integration, four men consider their lives:

• 39-year-old pharmacist J. T. Malone discovers that he has leukemia and has only months to live.

• Judge Clane, the town’s leading citizen and former Congressman, longs for the old ways of the South, but also mourns the loss of his wife and son, the latter who committed suicide.

• Sherman Pew is a talented black foundling (left on a pew) with blue eyes, who is employed by Judge Clane to be his amenuensis.

• Jester is Judge Clane’s grandson and is learning to fly and studying law.

Jester is strangely drawn to Sherman, but is growing to despise his grandfather’s beliefs.

McCullers dictated her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare (1999), during the final months of her life.

McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses and from alcoholism.

At the age of 15, she contracted rheumatic fever, which resulted in rheumatic heart disease. 

As a result of the heart damage sustained, McCullers suffered from strokes that began in her youth.

In 1962, she had a breast cancer surgery and mastectomy. 

She lived the last twenty years of her life in South Nyack, New York, where she died on 29 September 1967, at the age of 50, after a brain hemorrhage.

Her home from 1945 to 1967 in South Nyack, New York, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.

Above: Carson McCullers House, South Nyack, New York

Charles Bukowski wrote a poem about Carson McCullers.

Above: German American writer Charles Bukowski (1920 – 1994)

Carson McCullers

she died of alcoholism
wrapped in a blanket
on a deck chair
on an ocean
steamer.

all her books of
terrified loneliness

all her books about
the cruelty
of loveless love

were all that was left
of her

as the strolling vacationer
discovered her body

notified the captain

and she was quickly dispatched
to somewhere else
on the ship

as everything
continued just
as
she had written it

Carson McCullers wrote of loneliness, outsiders and the fragile human heart.

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and The Member of the Wedding (1946), she captured the struggles of marginalized individuals — whether through race, disability or gender — in the American South.

Her work is haunting, filled with characters longing for connection yet trapped by societal expectations.

McCullers’ writing preserves an America, a reality, that many would rather forget, ensuring that the voices of the overlooked remain heard.

Above: Carson McCullers

Jaan Kross (19 February 1920 – 27 December 2007) was an Estonian writer.

He won the 1995 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Above: Jaan Kross

Born in Tallinn, Estonia, son of a skilled metal worker, Jaan Kross studied at Jakob Westholm Gymnasium.

Above: Tallinn, Estonia

He attended the University of Tartu (1938 – 1945) and graduated from its School of Law. 

He taught there as a lecturer until 1946, and again as professor of Artes Liberales in 1998.

In 1940, when Kross was 20, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied the three Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, imprisoning and executing most of their governments.

Above: Flag of the Soviet Union (1922 – 1991)

In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded and took over the country.

Above: Flag of Nazi Germany (1935 – 1945)

Kross was first arrested by the Germans for six months in 1944 during the German occupation of Estonia (1941 – 1944), suspected of what was termed “nationalism” – that is, promoting Estonian independence.

Above: Flag of Estonia

Then, on 5 January 1946, when Estonia had been reconquered by the Soviet Union, he was arrested by the Soviet occupation authorities, who kept him a short while in the cellar of the local NKVD headquarters, then kept him in prison in Tallinn, finally in October 1947, deporting him to a Gulag camp in Vorkuta, Russia.

Above: Vorkuta Gulag, Vorkuta, Russia

He spent a total of eight years in this part of North Russia, six working in the mines at the Minlag labor camp in Inta, then doing easier jobs, plus two years still living as a deportee, but not in a labor camp. 

Upon his return to Estonia in 1954 he became a professional writer, not least because his law studies during Estonian independence were now of no value whatsoever, as Soviet law held sway.

At first, Kross wrote poetry, alluding to a number of contemporary phenomena under the guise of writing about historical figures.

But he soon moved to writing prose, a genre that was to become his principal one.

Kross was by far the most translated and nationally and internationally best-known Estonian writer.

He received the honorary title of People’s Writer of the Estonian SSR (1985) and the State Prize of the Estonian SSR (1977).

He also held several honorary doctorates and international decorations, including the highest Estonian order and one of the highest German orders.

In 1999 he was awarded the Baltic Assembly Prize for Literature.

In 1990 Kross won the Amnesty International Golden Flame Prize. 

He won the 1995 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

He was reportedly nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature during the early 1990s.

Above: (ın dark green) Estonia

Because of Kross’ status and visibility as a leading Estonian author, his works have been translated into many languages, but mostly into Finnish, Swedish, Russian, German, and Latvian. 

Above: Flag of Finland

This is on account of geographical proximity but also a common history (for example, Estonia was a Swedish colony in the 17th century and German was the language of the upper échelons of Estonian society for hundreds of years).

Above: Flag of Sweden

As can be seen from the list below by the year 2015 five books of Kross’ works have been published in English translation with publishing houses in the United States and UK. 

But a number of shorter novels, novellas, and short stories were published during Soviet rule (i.e. 1944 – 1991) in English translation and published in the Soviet Union.

Nowadays, Kross’ works are translated into English either directly from the Estonian, or via the Finnish version.

Above: Flag of England

Translations have mostly been from the Estonian original.

Above: Coat of arms of Estonia

Sometimes translations were however done, during Soviet times by first being translated into Russian and then from Russian into English, not infrequently by native speakers of Russian or Estonian.

Above: Flag of Russia

Kross knew German from quite an early age because friends of the family spoke it as their native language, and Kross’ mother had a good command of it.

Above: Flag of Germany

His Russian, however, was mainly learned while working as a slave laborer in the Gulag.

He also had some knowledge of Swedish and translated a crime novel by Christian Steen (a pseudonym of the exile Estonian novelist Karl Ristikivi) from Swedish.

Above: Karl Ristikivi (1912 – 1977) plaque, Tartu, Estonia

He also translated works by: 

• Pierre-Jean de Béranger

Above: French poet Pierre Jean Béranger (1780 – 1857)

• Honoré de Balzac

Above: French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850)

• Paul Éluard 

Above: French poet Paul Éluard (1895 – 1952)

• Bertolt Brecht 

Above: German writer Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956)

• Rolf Hochhuth  

Above: German writer Rolf Hochhuth (1931 – 2020)

• Ivan Goncharov 

Above: Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov (1812 – 1891)

• David Samoilov  

Above: Russian poet David Samoilov (1920 – 1990)

• Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland 

Above: English mathematician/writer Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898)

• William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Othello 

Above: English playwright/poet William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

Kross’ novels and short stories are almost universally historical.

Indeed, he is often credited with a significant rejuvenation of the genre of the historical novel.

Most of his works take place in Estonia and deal, usually, with the relationship of Estonians and Baltic Germans and Russians.

Very often, Kross’ description of the historical struggle of the Estonians against the Baltic Germans is a metaphor for the contemporary struggle against the Soviet occupation.

However, Kross’ acclaim internationally (and nationally even after the regaining of Estonian independence) shows that his novels also deal with topics beyond such concerns.

Rather, they deal with questions of mixed identities, loyalty, and belonging.

Above: Jaan Kross

Generally, The Czar’s Madman has been considered Kross’ best novel; it is also the most translated one.

Above: The Czar’s Madman

Also well-translated is Professor Martens’ Departure, which because of its subject matter (academics, expertise, and national loyalty) is very popular in academia and an important “professorial novel“.

The later novel Excavations, set in the mid-1950s, deals with the thaw period after Stalin’s death as well as with the Danish conquest of Estonia in the Middle Ages, and today considered by several critics as his finest, has not been translated into English yet.

It is however available in German.

Above: Excavations

Within the framework of the historical novel, Kross’ novels can be divided up into two types:

• truly historical ones

• more contemporary narratives with an element of autobiography

In the list below, the historical ones, often set in previous centuries, include:

• the Between Three Plagues tetralogy, set in the 16th century 

• A Rakvere Novel / Romance set in the 18th (the title is ambiguous) 

Above: A Rakvere Novel

• The Czar’s Madman set in the 19th century

• Professor Martens’ Departure set at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries 

• Elusiveness / Evasion set around 1918

Above: Elusiveness / Evasion

The semi-autobiographical novels include:

• Kross’ novel about the ultimate fates of his schoolmates, i.e. The Wikman Boys (Wikman being based on his alma mater the Westholm Grammar School – both names are of Swedish origin)

Above: The Wikman Boys

• a similar sort of novel about his university chums Mesmer’s Circle / Ring

Above: Mesmer’s Circle

• the novel Excavations which describes Kross’ alter ego Peeter Mirk and his adventures with archaeology, conformism, revolt, compromise and skulduggery after he has returned from the Siberian labour camps and internal exile out there.

Above: Excavations

• the novel, that has appeared in English translation, Treading Air

Most of his short stories belong to this subgenre.

A stylistic leitmotif in Kross’ novels is the use of the internal (or inner) monologue, usually when the protagonist is trying to think his way out of a thorny problem.

The reader will note that every protagonist or narrator, from Timotheus von Bock in The Czar’s Madman to Kross’ two alter egos, Jaak Sirkel and Peeter Mirk in the semi-autobiographical novels, indulges in this.

And especially Bernhard Schmidt, the luckless telescope inventor, in the novel that appeared in English as Sailing Against the Wind (2012).

Another common feature of Kross’s novels is a comparison, sometimes overt but usually covert, between various historical epochs and the present day, which for much of Kross’ writing life consisted of Soviet reality, including censorship, an inability to travel freely abroad, a dearth of consumer goods, the ever-watchful eye of the KGB and informers, etc.

Kross was always very skilful at always remaining just within the bounds of what the Soviet authorities could accept.

Kross also enjoyed playing with the identities of people who have the same, or nearly the same, name.

Above: Jaan Kross

This occurs in Professor Martens’ Departure where two different Martens figures are discussed, legal experts who lived several decades apart, and in Sailing Against the Wind where in one dream sequence the protagonist Bernhard Schmidt meets a number of others named Schmidt.

Above: Professor Marten’s Departure

Above: Sailing Against the Wind

When Kross was already in his late 70s he gave a series of lectures at Tartu University explaining certain aspects of his novels, not least the roman à clef dimension, given the fact that quite a few of his characters are based on real-life people, both in the truly historical novels and the semi-autobiographical ones.

These lectures are collected in a book entitled Omaeluloolisus ja alltekst (Autobiographism and Subtext) which appeared in 2003.

During the last 20 years of his life, Jaan Kross occupied some of his time with writing his memoirs (entitled Kallid kaasteelised) (Dear Co-Travelers) – this translation of the title avoids the unfortunate connotation of the expression fellow travellers).

These two volumes ended up with a total of 1,200 pages, including quite a few photographs from his life.

His life started quietly enough, but after describing quite innocuous things such as the summer house during his childhood and his schooldays, Kross moves on to the first Soviet occupation of Estonia, his successful attempt to avoid being drafted for the Waffen-SS during the Nazi German occupation, and a long section covering his experiences of prison and the labor camps.

The last part describes his return from the camps and his attempts at authorship.

The second volume continues from when he moved into the flat in central Tallinn where he lived for the rest of his life, plus his growing success as a writer.

There is also a section covering his one-year term as a Member of Parliament after renewed independence, and his trips abroad with his wife.

Above: Dear Co-Travelers

Six books by Jaan Kross have been published in English translation, five novels and one collection of stories:

The English translations appeared in the following order: 

• The Czar’s Madman (1992) 

• Professor Martens’ Departure (1994) 

• The Conspiracy and Other Stories (1995) 

• Treading Air (2003) 

• Sailing Against the Wind (2012)

• Between Three Plagues (2018)

Descriptions of the above books can also be found on various websites and online bookshops.

The protagonists of several of the books listed here are based on real-life figures.

• The Czar’s Madman (Estonian: Keisri hull) (1978):

This tragic novel is based on the life of a Baltic-German nobleman, Timotheus von Bock, who was an adjutant to the relatively liberal Czar of Russia, Alexander I.

Above: Russian Emperor Alexander I (1777 – 1825)

Von Bock wishes to interest the Czar in the idea of liberating the serfs, i.e. the peasant classes, people who were bought and sold almost like slaves by rich landowners.

But this is too much for the Czar and in 1818 von Bock is arrested and kept, at the Czar’s pleasure, in a prison in Shlisselburg.

Above: Shlisselburg Fortress, Russia

Von Bock is released when the next Czar ascends the throne, but by that time he is having mental problems during his last years under house arrest.

Above: Timotheus von Bock (1787–1836)

This is regarded as Kross’s most accomplished novel, along with the Between Three Plagues tetralogy.

• Professor Martens’ Departure: (Estonian: Professor Martensi ärasõit) (1984):

In early June 1909, the ethnic Estonian professor, Friedrich Fromhold Martens gets on the train in Pärnu heading for the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Empire in the capital, Saint Petersburg.

Above: Pärnu, Estonia

During the journey, he thinks back over the events and episodes of his life.

Above: St. Petersburg, Russia

Should he have made a career working for the Russian administration as a compiler of treaties at the expense of his Estonian identity?

He also muses on his namesake, a man who worked on a similar project in earlier decades.

Above: Estonian Professor Friedrich Fromhold Martens (1845 – 1909)

A novel that examines the compromises involved when making a career in an Empire when coming from a humble background.

• Sailing Against the Wind (Estonian: Vastutuulelaev) (1987):

This novel is about the ethnic Estonian Bernhard Schmidt from the island of Naissaar who loses his right hand in a firework accident during his teenage years.

Above: Lighthouse, Naissaar Island, Estonia

He nevertheless uses his remaining hand to work wonders when polishing high-quality lenses and mirrors for astronomical telescopes.

Above: Estonian optician Bernhard Schmidt (1879 – 1935)

Later on, when living in what had become Nazi Germany, he himself invents large stellar telescopes that are still to be found at, for instance, the Mount Palomar Observatory in California and on the island of Mallorca.

Above: Mount Palomar Observatory, California

Schmidt has to wrestle with his conscience when living in Germany as the country is re-arming and telescopes could be put to military use.

But because Germany was the leading technical nation at the time, he feels reasonably comfortable there, first in the run-down small town of Mittweida, then at the main Bergedorf Observatory just outside Hamburg.

Above: Mittweida, Saxony, Germany

But the rise of the Nazis is literally driving him mad.

Above: Bergedorf Observatory, Hamburg, Germany

The Conspiracy and Other Stories (Estonian: Silmade avamise päev) (1988):

This collection contains six semi-autobiographical stories mostly dealing with Jaan Kross’ life during the Nazi-German and Soviet-Russian occupations of Estonia, and his own imprisonment during those two epochs.

The stories, some of which have appeared elsewhere in this translation, are: 

• The Wound
• Lead Piping
• The Stahl Grammar
• The Conspiracy
• The Ashtray
• The Day Eyes Were Opened.

In all of them, there is a tragi-comic aspect.

• Treading Air (Estonian: Paigallend) (1998)

The protagonist of this novel is Ullo Paerand, a restless young man of many talents.

He attends a prestigious private school, but when his speculator father abandons him and his mother the money runs out.

He then helps his mother run a laundry to make ends meet.

He works his way up, ultimately becoming a messenger boy for the Estonian Prime Minister’s office.

He is even offered a chance to escape abroad by going to study at the Vatican, but stays in Estonia.

This semi-autobiographical novel is set against the background of a very stormy epoch in the history of Estonia, from when the Soviets occupy the country in 1940, the German occupation the next year, the notorious bombing of central Tallinn by the Soviet Air Force on 9 March 1944, and a further 30 years of life in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.

• Between Three Plagues (Kolme katku vahel) (1980)

This is Kross’ first major work and his largest in volume.

The idea started out as a film script, which was shelved, then became a TV serial, and finally the four-volume suite of novels which is one of Kross’ most famous works. 

It is set in the 16th century, especially the middle, before and during the Livonian War (1558 – 1583). 

Above: Siege of Narva by the Russians in 1558

Livonia included parts of what are now Estonia and Latvia, and was by the 1550s split up into several parts ruled by Denmark, Sweden, Russia and Poland-Lithuania.

The protagonist is, as is often the case with Kross, a real-life figure called Balthasar Russow (1536 – 1600), who wrote the Livonian Chronicle.

The Chronicle describes the political horse-trading between the various countries and churches of the day.

Above: The Chronicle of Livonia by Balthasar Russow (1578)

The Estonians, mostly of peasant stock in those days, always ended up as piggies in the middle.

There were also three outbreaks of the bubonic plague to contend with.

Russow was the humble son of a peasant, but became a German-speaking clergyman, which was a big step up in society.

The fact that he could read, let alone write a Chronicle, was unusual.

The tetralogy starts with a famous scene where the then-ten-year-old Balthasar watches some tightrope walkers in Tallinn, a metaphor for his own diplomatic tightrope walking later in life.

He appears as something of a rough diamond throughout the books.

The entire tetralogy has been translated into Dutch, Finnish, German, Latvian, Russian, and English.

The majority of Kross’s novels remain untranslated into English.

These are as follows:

Under Clio’s Gaze (Klio silma all) (1972):

Above: Clio, the Greek Muse of history

This slim volume contains four novellas.

• Four Monologues on the Subject of Saint George deals with Michael Sittow, a painter who has been working at the court of Spain but now wants to join the painters’ guild in Tallinn which is as good as a closed shop.

Above: Statue of George of Lydda (d. 303)

• Michelson’s Matriculation tells of an ethnic Estonian Michelson who will now be knighted by the Czar as he has been instrumental in putting down a rebellion in Russia.

This is the story of his pangs of conscience, but also how he brings his peasant parents to the ceremony to show his origins.

Above: Estonian soldier Johann von Michelson (1740 – 1807)

• Two Lost Sheets of Paper is set in around 1824, about the collator of Estonian folk literature Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald who, after passing his exams, does not want to become a theologian but wants to study military medicine in Saint Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire.

Above: Estonian writer Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803 – 1882)

Meanwhile, he meets a peasant who can tell him about the Estonian epic hero Kalev, here of the epic Kalevipoeg.

Above: Kalev on an eagle, Oskar Kallis (1916)

• A While in a Swivel Chair is set in the 1860s, when a national consciousness was awakening in Estonia and the newspaper editor Johann Voldemar Jannsen starts an Estonian-language newspaper with his daughter Lydia Koidula and founds the Estonian Song Festival.

Above: Estonian writer Johann Voldemar Jannsen (1819 – 1890)

Above: Estonian poet Lydia Koidula (1843 – 1886)

Above: Estonian Song Festival

• The Third Range of Hills (Kolmandad mäed) (1974)

This short novel tells the story of the ethnic Estonian painter Johann Köler (1826 – 1899) who had become a famous portrait painter at the Russian court in Saint Petersburg.

Above: Estonian painter Johann Köler

He is now, in 1879, painting a fresco for a church in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.

As a model for his Christ, he picks out an Estonian peasant from the island of Hiiumaa.

Above: Köpu Lighthouse, Hiiumaa Island, Estonia

Later it transpires that the man he used as a model was a sadistic criminal, and this is held against Köler by his Baltic-German overlords.

Above: Under Clio’s Gaze

• A Rakvere Novel (Rakvere romaan) (1982)

Above: Rakvere, Estonia

The novel is set in the year 1764.

The young Berend Falck is taken on by the Baroness Gertrude von Tisenhausen.

Falck is an ethnic Estonian, von Tisenhausen a Baltic-German. 

Rakvere (Wesenberg, in German) is an Estonian provincial town and in those days the baroness dominated.

Falck soon gets involved in the struggle between the townspeople and the Baroness.

And as he has been employed by her, he is initially obliged to take her side.

But as she begins to confiscate land, he grows disillusioned with her.

The townspeople, for their part, attempt to reclaim the rights that they had had earlier under Swedish colonial rule, decades before.

Sweden lost Estonia to Russia around 1710, so in the epoch in which this novel is set, Rakvere and indeed Estonia are part of the Russian Empire, despite the fact that this local dispute is between the German-speaking baronial classes and Estonian-speaking peasants.

A panoramic novel of divided loyalties and corruption.

• The Wikman Boys (Wikmani poisid) (1988)

Jaan Kross’ alter ego Jaak Sirkel will soon matriculate from school in the mid-1930s.

Young people eagerly go to the cinema in their free time.

At school, they have the usual sprinkling of eccentric teachers.

Europe is gradually moving towards war.

This overshadows the lives of the young people.

After the war has reached Estonia, some of Sirkel’s schoolmates end up in the Soviet Army, and others fighting in the Nazi German military – the tragedy of a small country fought over by two superpowers.

Above: Images of Estonia in World War II (1939 – 1945)

In the devastating Battle of Velikiye Luki, not far from the Russian-Estonian border, Estonians fight on both sides.

Above: War memorial, Velikiye Luki, Russia

• Excavations (Väljakaevamised) (1990)

This novel first appeared in Finnish as the political situation in Estonia was very unclear owing to the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union.

It tells the story of Peeter Mirk (another of Kross’ alter egos) who has just returned from eight years of labor camp and internal exile in Siberia and is looking for work, in order to avoid being sent back, labelled as a “parasite to Soviet society“.

And he needs the money to live on.

It is now 1954, Stalin is dead.

Above: Russian dictator Joseph Stalin (1878 – 1953)

There is a slight political thaw.

He finds a job on an archaeological dig near the main bastion in central Tallinn.

There he finds a manuscript written in the 13th century by a leprous clergyman, a document which could overturn some of the assumptions about the history of Estonia that the Soviet occupier has.

The novel also gives portraits of several luckless individuals who have been caught up in the paradoxes of German and Russian occupations.

• Elusiveness (Tabamatus) (1993)

In 1941, a young Estonian law student is a fugitive from the occupying German Nazis, as he is suspected of being a resistance fighter.

He is accused of writing certain things during the one-year Soviet occupation the previous year.

But what the German occupiers dislike especially is that this young law student is writing a work about the Estonian politician and freedom fighter Jüri Vilms who was obliged to flee from the Germans back in 1918 (during another period of Estonia’s tangled history) and was shot by firing squad when he had just reached Helsinki, around the time that Estonia became independent of Russia.

Above: Estonian Deputy Prime Minister Jüri Vilms (1889 – 1918)

• Mesmer’s Circle (Mesmeri ring) (1995)

Another novel involving Kross’ alter ego, Jaak Sirkel, who is by now a first-year student at Tartu University.

One of his fellow students Indrek Tarna has been sent to Siberia by the Reds, when the Soviets occupied Estonia in 1940.

Indrek’s father performs a strange ritual with several people standing around the dining table and holding hands – as Franz Mesmer did with his patients.

Above: German physician Franz Mesmer (1734 – 1815)

This ritual is meant to give his boy strength by way of prayer.

Others react in a more conventional way to the tensions of 1939.

This is also where the reader first meets the fellow student who will become the protagonist in Kross’ novel Treading Air.

The novel is partly a love story, where Sirkel, a friend of Tarna’s is in love with his girlfriend Riina.

And Tarna is in Siberia…

Conflicting loyalties.

When the Germans invade Estonia, Tarna can return to Estonia.

The Riina problem gets more tangled.

• Tahtamaa (2001)

Tahtamaa is a plot of land by the sea.

This novel is described by Rutt Hinrikus of the Estonian Literary Museum in a short review article on the Internet. 

Above: Estonian Library Museum, Tallinn, Estonia

It is a novel about the differences in mentality between the Estonians who lived in the Soviet Union, and those that escaped abroad, and their descendants.

It is also a novel about greed and covetousness and ownership.

It is even a love story between older people.

This is Kross’ last novel and is set in the 1990s, after Estonia regained its independence.

Jaan Kross died in Tallinn, at the age of 87, on 27 December 2007.

He was survived by his wife, children’s author and poet Ellen Niit, and four children.

Above: Bust of Estonian poet Ellen Niit (1928 – 2016)

The President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, praised Kross “as a preserver of the Estonian language and culture“.

Above: Estonian President ToomasHendrik Ilives (r. 2006 – 2016)

Kross is buried at Rahumäe Cemetery in Tallinn.

Above: Entry to Rahumäe Cemetery, Tallinn, Estonia

Jaan Kross dedicated his life to keeping Estonia’s history alive.

Under Soviet occupation, Kross used historical fiction as a means of resistance, weaving together past and present to explore themes of identity, freedom, and perseverance.

The Czar’s Madman (1978) and Professor Martens’ Departure (1984) speak to the tension between individual integrity and political oppression.

For Kross, literature was a way to reclaim history, to reclaim reality, from those who sought to erase it.

Above: Jaan Kross

From surrealism to historical fiction, from Southern Gothic to modernist resistance, these writers remind us that literature is a living, breathing force.

It does not merely document reality, it reimagines, critiques, and preserves it.

On this day, we celebrate their voices, knowing that through their works, reality is both questioned and affirmed, reshaped and remembered.

What stories will we write that continue this legacy?

In many ways, Canada Slim already exists as a persona — my voice, my worldview, my storytelling style.

But the question is:

Do you want to refine and fully inhabit this persona, the way Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain?

Above: US writer Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) (1835 – 1910)

Why do writers create personas?

• Freedom of Expression

A persona allows a writer to explore ideas more freely.

Twain used his persona to be sharper, wittier, and more subversive than Clemens could have been in his time.

Above: English writer Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) (1903 – 1950)

• Branding and identity

A strong persona makes a writer more memorable.

Canada Slim is already a distinct name.

It conjures images of travel, reflection, and an old-school, boots-on-the-ground approach to storytelling.

Above: Flag of Canada

• Perspective and distance

A persona can create a layer between the writer and the work, allowing for a unique lens through which reality is filtered.

Think of Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms, or how Hunter S. Thompson blurred the line between journalist and mythmaker.

Above: Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)

Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935) was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator and publisher.

He has been described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.

He also wrote in and translated from English and French.

Pessoa was a prolific writer both in his own name and approximately seventy-five other names, of which three stand out: 

• Alberto Caeiro
• Álvaro de Campos
• Ricardo Reis.

He did not define these as pseudonyms because he felt that this did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms, a term he invented. 

These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views.

Above: Fernando Pessoa

Above: American writer Hunter S. Thompson (1937 – 2005)

Hunter Stockton Thompson (1937 – 2005) was an American journalist and author, regarded as one of the principal pioneers of New Journalism.

He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell’s Angels (1967), a book for which he spent a year living with the Hells Angels motorcycle club to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences.

In 1970, he wrote an unconventional article titled “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” for Scanlan’s Monthly, which further raised his profile as a countercultural figure.

Above: Kentucky Derby, Louisville, Kentucky

It also set him on the path to establishing his own subgenre of New Journalism that he called “Gonzo“, a journalistic style in which the writer becomes a central figure and participant in the events of the narrative.

Thompson remains best known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), a book first serialized in Rolling Stone in which he grapples with the implications of what he considered the failure of the 1960s counterculture movement.

It was adapted for film twice, loosely in 1980 in Where the Buffalo Roam and explicitly in 1998 in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Thompson was known for his lifelong use of alcohol and illegal drugs, his love of firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authority.

He often remarked: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.“

Thompson died by suicide at the age of 67, following a series of health problems. 

Hari Kunzru wrote:

“The true voice of Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist – one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.“

Above: British writer Hari Kunzru

Thompson often used a blend of fiction and fact when portraying himself in his writing, too, sometimes using the name Raoul Duke as an author surrogate, whom he generally described as a callous, erratic, self-destructive journalist, constantly drinking and taking hallucinogens.

In the early 1980s, Wenner spoke with Thompson about his alcoholism and addiction to cocaine, and offered to pay for drug treatment.

“Hunter was polite and firm.”, Wenner wrote in 2022.

“He had thought about it and didn’t feel he could or would change.

He felt that his drug abuse was a key to his talent.

He said that if he didn’t do drugs, he would have the mind of an accountant.

The abuse was already taking a toll on his gifts.

It was just too late, and he knew it.”

Above: American businessman Jann Werner

In the late 1960s, Thompson acquired the title of “Doctor” from the Church of the New Truth.

A number of critics have commented that as he grew older, the line that distinguished Thompson from his literary self became increasingly blurred. 

Thompson admitted during a 1978 BBC interview that he sometimes felt pressured to live up to the fictional self that he had created, adding:

“I’m never sure which one people expect me to be.

Very often, they conflict — most often, as a matter of fact. 

I’m leading a normal life and right alongside me there is this myth, and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more and more warped.

When I get invited to, say, speak at universities, I’m not sure if they are inviting Duke or Thompson.

I’m not sure who to be.“

Thompson’s writing style and eccentric persona gave him a cult following in both literary and drug circles, and his cult status expanded into broader areas after being portrayed three times in major motion pictures.

Hence, both his writing style and persona have been widely imitated, and his likeness has even become a popular costume choice for Halloween.

Above: Hunter S. Thompson

Who Is Canada Slim?

If I were to fully embrace Canada Slim as my literary persona, what would that mean?

Am I:

• A wandering storyteller with a sharp wit and an old soul?
• A reflective, world-weary observer who sees both the absurdity and beauty in life?
• A Canadian abroad, bridging cultures through narrative?

Above: Your humble blogger

How can I develop the Canada Slim persona further?

• Refine the voice.

Does Canada Slim have a particular way of speaking or writing?

More poetic, more biting, more nostalgic?

• Lean into the myth.

Perhaps my persona could have a slightly larger-than-life quality.

Perhaps Canada Slim isn’t just a traveler but a man who has seen too much, walked too far, and can’t help but tell the tales.

• Use the persona consistently.

If you commit to Canada Slim, I could write under that name exclusively.

Sign off blog posts and articles with it.

A persona, once embraced, can be a powerful tool.

But the key is to make sure it feels authentic.

Should Canada Slim step fully into the limelight?

Canada Slim can be the voice that says what Adam Kerr might hesitate to say, the storyteller who moves with more freedom than the man behind him.

If Canada Slim is to be fully realized, then he should have his own rhythm, his own lens through which he views the world — a sharper wit, a deeper melancholy, a more poetic soul, or even a greater recklessness in pursuit of truth.

He is not just Adam Kerr with a pen name.

He is a crafted persona, a myth made real through words.

Who Is Canada Slim?

• A traveler, but not merely in geography

He journeys through history, memory, and the spaces between reality and imagination.

• A seeker of lost stories

He gives voice to the forgotten, the strange, and the significant.

• A man out of time

He is rooted in the past but always walking toward the unknown.

• A writer

He is unafraid to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

How do I make him real?

• Write as Canada Slim.

Not just a pseudonym, but a perspective.

How does Canada Slim see the world?

What does he dwell on that Adam might not?

• Let him take risks.

Maybe Adam Kerr is bound by responsibility, but Canada Slim can push boundaries in storytelling, tone and topic.

• Give him a signature style

A certain cadence, a distinct phrase, a way of weaving thought that makes his voice unmistakable.

• Live through him

Would Canada Slim sign blog posts?

Would he be the byline on published works?

Would he have his own introduction in your books?

If Canada Slim is the writer I am not, then perhaps he is also the writer I wish to be.

And that is where the magic begins.

I want to be a writer who matters — one whose words linger in the minds of readers long after they’ve put your work down.

The kind of writer I want to be is:

• A storyteller with depth

Don’t just recount events.

Search for meaning in them.

Whether it’s a forgotten moment in history, a personal journey, or the essence of a place, I want to capture something deeper than facts — I want to evoke feeling, thought, and reflection.

• A literary traveler

The world fascinates me.

I have walked its roads, crossed its borders, and I want to take readers with me — not just physically, but through time, history and human experience.

I want to show them things they might never have considered before.

• A thoughtful observer

I see the world in layers.

A beggar on the street isn’t just a beggar.

He is a symbol, a moment of self-reflection, a ripple in the vast ocean of human existence.

I want to write in a way that makes readers stop and see these layers too.

• A writer who balances beauty and truth

I love language, the rhythm of words, the poetry of well-crafted prose.

But I also don’t shy away from hard truths — whether about history, relationships, or the human condition.

I want my writing to be beautiful, but never at the cost of honesty.

I read your book
And I find it strange
That I know that girl and I know her world
A little too well

And I didn’t know
By giving my hand
That I would be written down, sliced around, passed down
Among stranger’s hands

Three days in Rome
Where do we go?
I’ll always remember
Three days in Rome

And never again
Would I see your face
You carry a pen and a paper
And no time and no words you waste

Oh, you’re a voyeur
The worst kind of thief
To take what happened to us
To write down everything that went on between you and me

Oh, three days in Rome
And I stand alone
I’ll always remember, mmm
Three days in Rome

And what do I get?
Do I get revenge
While you let all out
Without any doubt
Of how this would end?

Sometimes it goes
Sometimes we come
To learn by mistake that the love you once made
Can’t be undone

Oh, but three days in Rome
I laid my heart out, I laid my soul down alone
I’ll always remember
Three days in Rome

Above: American musician Sheryl Crow

• A legacy builder

I don’t just want to write for today.

I want my work to be something that people look back on, that holds up over time.

I don’t seek fame, but I seek significance — to know that my words will outlive me.

How does Canada Slim fit into this?

Canada Slim allows me to push these ideas further — to write with a sharper edge, to take risks, to be the storyteller who isn’t afraid to wander through history, to stand in the rain of human experience and let it soak into my bones.

Perhaps to shape my own reality.

Out in the shiny night, the rain was softly falling
Tracks that ran down the boulevard had all been washed away
Out of the silver light, the past came softly calling
And I remember the times we spent inside the Sad Café

Oh, it seemed like a holy place, protected by amazing grace
And we would sing right out loud, the things we could not say
We thought we could change this world with words like love and freedom
We were part of the lonely crowd inside the Sad Café

Oh, expecting to fly
We would meet on that beautiful shore in the sweet by and by

Some of their dreams came true, some just passed away
And some of them stayed behind, inside the Sad Café

The clouds rolled in and hid that shore
Now that Glory Train, it don’t stop here no more
Now I look at the years gone by and wonder at the powers that be
I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free

Maybe the time has drawn the faces I recall
But things in this life change very slowly if they ever change at all
No use in asking why, it just turned out that way
So meet me at midnight baby inside the Sad Café
Why don’t you meet me at midnight, baby, inside the Sad Café