Robert Desnos

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Robert Desnos

Robert Desnos (4 July 1900-8 June 1945), was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the surrealistic movement of his day.

Biography

Robert Desnos was a son of a café owner. He was born in Paris on 4 July 1900. Desnos attended commercial college, and started work as a clerk. After that he worked as a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir
Paris-Soir

Paris-Soir was a large-circulation daily newspaper in Paris, France from 1923-1944.Its first issue came out in 4 October 1923. After June 11 1940, the same publisher, Jean Prouvost, continued its publication in Vichy France: Clermont-Ferrand, Lyon, Marseille, and Vichy while in military occupation Paris, it was published under German c...
.

The first poems by Desnos to appear in print were published in 1917 in La Tribune des Jeunes (Youth's Tribune) and in 1919 in the avant-garde

Avant-garde

Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English, to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
review, Le Trait d’union (The hyphen), and also the same year in the Dadaist magazine Littérature.

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Encyclopedia

Robert Desnos (4 July 1900-8 June 1945), was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the surrealistic movement of his day.

Biography

Robert Desnos was a son of a café owner. He was born in Paris on 4 July 1900. Desnos attended commercial college, and started work as a clerk. After that he worked as a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir
Paris-Soir

Paris-Soir was a large-circulation daily newspaper in Paris, France from 1923-1944.Its first issue came out in 4 October 1923. After June 11 1940, the same publisher, Jean Prouvost, continued its publication in Vichy France: Clermont-Ferrand, Lyon, Marseille, and Vichy while in military occupation Paris, it was published under German c...
.

The first poems by Desnos to appear in print were published in 1917 in La Tribune des Jeunes (Youth's Tribune) and in 1919 in the avant-garde

Avant-garde

Rrose Sélavy

Rrose S?lavy, or Rose S?lavy, was one of the pseudonyms of artist Marcel Duchamp. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase "Eros, c'est la vie", which translates to English as "eros, that's life"....
(based upon the name (pseudonym) of the popular French artist Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a France artist whose work is most often associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art....
).

In 1919, he met the poet Benjamin Péret

Benjamin Péret

Benjamin P?ret was a France poet and Surrealist.Benjamin P?ret was born in Rez? on 4 July 1899, and enlisted in the army to avoid being jailed....
who actually introduced him to the Paris Dada

Dada

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Z?rich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature?poetry, art manifestoes, aesthetics?theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art...
group and André Breton

André Breton

Andr? Breton was a French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist, and is best known as the main founder of surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism....
, with whom he soon became a friend. While working as a literary columnist for Paris-Soir, Desnos was an active member of the Surrealist group and developed a particular talent for "automatic writing

Automatic writing

Automatic writing is the process or production of writing material that does not come from the consciousness thoughts of the writer. Practitioners say that the writer's hand forms the message, with the person being unaware of what will be written....
". He, together with writers such as Louis Aragon

Louis Aragon

Louis Aragon in French) , French poet and novelist, a long-time political supporter of the French Communist Party and a member of the Acad?mie Goncourt....
and Paul Éluard

Paul Éluard

Paul ?luard was the pen name of Eug?ne ?mile Paul Grindel , a France poet who was one of the founders of the surrealism movement....
, would form the literary vanguard of surrealism. André Breton included two photographs of Desnos sleeping in his surrealist novel Nadja
Nadja (novel)

Nadja is an influential book written by the France Surrealism Andr? Breton in 1928. It starts with the question "Who am I?"It is based on Breton's interactions with an actual young woman over the course of 10 days, and is taken to be a semi-autobiographical description of his relationship with a mad patient of Pierre Janet....
. Although he was praised by Breton in his 1924 Manifeste du Surréalisme
Surrealist Manifesto

Two Surrealist Manifestos were issued by the Surrealism, in 1924 and 1929, respectively. The first was written by Andr? Breton, the second was supervised by him....
for being the movement's "prophet", Desnos disagreed with Surrealism's involvement in communist politics, which caused a rift between him and Breton. Desnos continued work as a columnist.

In 1926 he composed The Night of Loveless Nights, a lyric poem dealing with solitude

Solitude

Solitude is a state of seclusion or isolation, i.e. lack of contact with people or love. It may stem from bad relationships, deliberate choice, contagious disease, disfiguring features, repulsive personal habits, mental illness, or circumstances of employment or situation ....
curiously written in classic quatrain

Quatrain

A quatrain is a poem composed of two rhyming couplets, or a stanza within a poem, that consists always of four lines. The rhyming patterns include aabb, abab, abba, abcb, aaba, or aaaa ....
s, which makes it more like Baudelaire than Breton. Desnos fell in love with Yvonne George

Yvonne George

Yvonne de Knops , better known by her stage name Yvonne George, was a Belgian singer and feminist actor....
, a singer whose obsessed fans made his love impossible. He wrote several poems for her, as well as the surrealist novel La liberté ou l'amour! (1927).

By 1929, Breton definitively condemned Desnos, who in turn joined Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille was a French people writer. Although subsequent philosophers have been significantly influenced by his thought, Bataille tended not to refer to himself as a philosophy....
and Documents, as one of the authors to sign "Un Cadavre" (A cadaver) attacking "le boeuf Breton" (the ox Breton). He wrote articles on "Modern Imagery", "Avant-garde Cinema" (1929, issue 7), "Pygmalion and the Sphinx" (1930, issue 1), and Sergei M. Eisenstein, the Soviet filmmaker, on his film titled The General Line
The General Line

The General Line aka Old and New is a 1929 in film Soviet film directed by Sergei Eisenstein.The General Line was begun in 1927 as a celebration of the collectivization of agriculture, as championed by old-line Bolshevik Leon Trotsky....
(1930, issue 4).

His career in radio began in 1932 with a show dedicated to Fantomas

Fantômas

File:Fantomas early film poster.jpgFant?mas is a fictional character created by French writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre .One of the most popular characters in the history of French crime fiction, Fant?mas was created in 1911 and appeared in a total of 32 volumes written by the two collaborators, then a subsequent 11 volumes writ...
. During that time, he became friends with Picasso, Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short story author, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, France, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation"....
, Artaud and John Dos Passos

John Dos Passos

John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist....
; published many critical reviews on jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a primarily American musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions....
and cinema

Film

Film encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the film industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects....
; and became increasingly involved in politics. He wrote for many periodicals, including Littérature, La Révolution surréaliste, and Variétés. Besides his numerous collections of poems, he published three novels, Deuil pour deuil (1924), La Liberté ou l’amour! (1927), and Le vin est tiré (1943); a play La Place De La' Etoile, (1928; revised 1944) and a film script, L' Etoile de mer (1928), which was directed by Man Ray

Man Ray

Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky , was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealism movements, although his ties to each were informal....
that same year.

During World War II, Desnos was an active member of the French Résistance

French Resistance

File:Croix de Lorraine2.svgThe French Resistance is the collective name used for the French resistance movements which fought against the Nazi Germany German occupation of France in World War II and the collaborationist Vichy Regime during World War II....
, often publishing under pseudonyms, and was arrested by the Gestapo

Gestapo

The was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Under the overall administration of the Schutzstaffel , it was administered by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and was considered a dual organization of the Sicherheitsdienst and also a suboffice of the Sicherheitspolizei ....
on 22 February 1944. He was first deported to the Nazi German concentration camps of Auschwitz in occupied Poland, then Buchenwald, Flossenburg in Germany and finally to Terezín

Terezín

Terez?n is the name of a former military fortress and garrison town in the ?st? nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic....
(Theresienstadt) in occupied Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe that existed from October 1918 until 1992 . On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia....
in 1945, where he died from typhoid, only weeks after the camp's liberation. He wrote poems during his imprisonment which were accidentally destroyed following his death.

He was married to Youki Desnos, formerly Lucie Badoud, nicknamed "Youki" ("snow") by her lover Tsuguharu Foujita

Tsuguharu Foujita

Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita was a painter and printmaker born in Tokyo, Japan who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western style paintings....
before she left him for Desnos. Desnos wrote several poems about her. One of his most famous poems is "Letter to Youki", written after his arrest.

He is buried at the Montparnasse cemetery

Montparnasse Cemetery

Montparnasse Cemetery is a List of cemeteries in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, part of the city's 14th arrondissement of Paris.Created from three farms in 1824, the cemetery at Montparnasse was originally known as Le Cimeti?re du Sud....
in Paris.

Desnos's poetry has been set to music by a number of composers, including Witold Lutoslawski

Witold Lutoslawski

Witold Lutoslawski was one of the major European composers of the 20th century, and one of the pre-eminent Poland musicians during his last three decades....
with Les Espaces du Sommeil (1975) and Chantefleurs et Chantefables (1991), Francis Poulenc

Francis Poulenc

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a France composer and a member of the French group Les Six. He composed music in all major genres, including art song, chamber music, oratorio, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music....
(Dernier poème, 1956) and Henri Dutilleux

Henri Dutilleux

Henri Dutilleux is one of the most important French composers of the second half of the 20th century, producing work in the tradition of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Albert Roussel, but in a style distinctly his own....
with Le Temps l'Horloge (2007). Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forch? is an United States poet, Editing, and human rights advocate....
has translated his poetry and names Desnos as a significant influence on her own work.

Works include

Deuil pour deuil (1924) /Grief for Grief/
La Liberté ou l’amour! (1927) /Liberty or Love/
Corps et biens (1930) /Body's fine/
État de veille (1943) /Waking/
Le vin est tiré (1943) /The wine is drawn/
"Le dernier poème" (1945?) /The last poem
"The Poets Great days"
"Mobius strip"

Film

L'Étoile de mer
L'Étoile de mer

L'?toile de Mer is a 1928 in film film directed by Man Ray. The film is based on a script by Robert Desnos and depicts a couple acting through scenes that are shot out of focus....
(1928) /The Starfish/ in collaboration with Man Ray
Man Ray

Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky , was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealism movements, although his ties to each were informal....

External links

Works by Robert Desnos (public domain in Canada)