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Louis Aragon (French pronunciation: [lwi aʁaˈɡɔ̃], born Louis Andrieux (October 3, 1897 – December 24, 1982), was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.
av.
The portrait of Louis Aragon
rv. The inscription in French
diameter – 68 mm (ca 2⅝“)
weight – 151.10 gr,
(5.33 oz)
metal – bronze, beautiful patina
Louis Aragon was born and died in Paris. He was
raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, believing them to be his sister
and foster mother, respectively. His biological father, Louis Andrieux, a
former senator for Forcalquier, was married and thirty years older than
Having been involved in Dadaism from 1919 to
1924, he became a founding member of Surrealism
in 1924, with André Breton and Philippe
Soupault under the pen-name "
Nevertheless Aragon was also critical of the USSR, particularly after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1956) during which Joseph Stalin's personality cult was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev.
Apart from working as a journalist
for L'Humanité, Louis Aragon also became, along with Paul Nizan,
editor secretary of the journal Commune,
published by the Association des
Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (Association of Revolutionary
Writers and Artists), which aimed at gathering intellectuals
and artists in a common front against
fascism.
In March 1937,
In 1939 he married Russian-born author Elsa
Triolet, the sister of Lilya Brik, a mistress and common-law wife of Russian
poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. He had met her in
1928, and she became his muse starting in the 1940s.
During the war,
Along with Paul Éluard, Pierre
Seghers or René Char,
The theme of the poem was the Red
Poster affair, mainly the last letter that Missak
Manouchian, an Armenian-French poet and Resistant, wrote to his wife
Mélinée before his execution on 21 February 1944 This poem was then set to
music by Léo Ferré.
At the Liberation,
Sponsored by Thorez,
In the days following the disappearance of Ce soir,
in March 1953,
In 1956, Aragon supported the Budapest insurrection, provoking the dissolution
of the Comité national des écrivains, which Vercors
quit. The same year, he was nevertheless granted the Lenin
Peace Prize. He now harshly condemned Soviet totalitarianism, opened his
magazines to dissidents, and condemned show trials
against intellectuals (in particular the 1966 Sinyavsky-Daniel trial). He strongly
supported the student movement of May '68,
although the PCF was skeptical about it. The crushing of the Prague
Spring in 1968 led him to a critical preface published in a translation of
one of Milan Kundera's books (La Plaisanterie).
Despite his criticisms, Aragon remained an official member of the PCF's central
committee until his death.
Beside his journalistic activities, Louis Aragon was also
CEO of the Editeurs
français réunis (EFR) publishing house, heir of two publishing
houses founded by the Resistance, La Bibliothèque française and Hier
et Aujourd'hui. He directed the EFR along with Madeleine
Braun, and in the 1950s published French and Soviet writers commonly
related to the "Socialist Realism" current. Among other
works, the EFR published André Stil's Premier choc, which owed to the
future Goncourt Academician the Stalin
Prize in 1953. But they also published other writers, such as Julius
Fučík, Vítězslav Nezval, Rafael
Alberti, Yánnis Rítsos or Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the beginning of the
1960s, the EFR brought to public knowledge the works of non-Russian Sovietic
writers, such as Tchinguiz Aïtmatov, or Russian writers belong to
the Khrushchev Thaw, such as Galina
Nicolaëva, Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Babi Iar in 1967,
etc. The EFR also published the first novel of Christa
Wolf in 1964, and launched the poetic collection Petite sirène,
which collected works by Pablo Neruda, Eugène Guillevic, Nicolas
Guillen, but also less known poets such as Dominique
Grandmont, Alain
Lance or Jean Ristat.
Free from both his marital and editorial responsibilities
(having ended publication of Les Lettres Françaises — L'Humanité
's literary supplement — in 1972), Aragon was free to return to his surrealist
roots. During the last ten years of his life, he published at least two further
novels: Henri
Matisse Roman and Les Adieux.
Louis Aragon died on 24 December 1982, his friend Jean Ristat
sitting up with him. He was buried in the parc of Moulin
de Villeneuve, in his property of Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, along his wife
Elsa Triolet.
Various poems by Aragon have been sung by Lino
Léonardi, Hélène
Martin, Léo Ferré, Jean Ferrat,
Georges
Brassens, Alain Barrière, Isabelle
Aubret, Nicole Rieu, Monique
Morelli, Marc
Ogeret, et al. Many of his poems put into music by Jean Ferrat have
been translated into German by Didier Caesar (alias Dieter Kaiser) and are sung
by his Duo.
Aragon's poetry is diverse and varied. He favoured equally poetic prose
and fixed-form verse, to which he brought a renewed sensibility. After a very
free early period, marked by surrealism and its subversive language, Aragon returned
to more classical forms (measured verse; rhyme, even). He felt that this was
more in keeping with the national emergency during World War II. After the war,
the political side of his poetry gave way more and more to lyricism for its own
sake. He never went back on that embrace of classicism. He did however
integrate a certain formal freedom with it, sometimes recalling the surrealism
of his early days.
Countless poems by Aragon have been set to music and
become popular as songs.
As a novelist he encompasses the whole ethos of the Twentieth
century: surrealist novel, socialist
realism, realism, nouveau
roman. Indeed he was one of the founding personalities of the novel of his
time.
In 2010, La Poste (French Post Office) issued 3 stamps
honoring Louis Aragon.