Paul ELUARD. Hugo as seen by Russian authors. [February 1952 - Lot 27

Paul ELUARD. Hugo as seen by Russian authors. [February 1952]. Autograph handwritten notes for speeches on Victor HUGO and corrected typescript speeches, entitled Hugo, poète vulgaire and Victor Hugo. [February 1952]. 4 pages (handwritten) in-4 (21 x 26.8 cm) and 6 pp. and 3 half-pages (typed) (21 x 31 cm), with erasures and corrections. Nice set of notes and fragments of speeches for the celebrations in Moscow marking the 150th anniversary of Victor Hugo's birth in February-March 1952. The notes deal with Hugo as seen by Russians: Pushkin, who loved Hernani; Herzen, who asked him to speak about the Polish uprising of 1863; Dostoyevsky, who felt that Les Misérables was superior to Crime and Punishment; the Russian ambassador in Paris, "by order of the Czar", was forbidden to attend Victor Hugo's funeral... The main points of these remarks appear in the speeches given on February 25 and 26, 1952 at the Gorky Institute and the Salle des Colonnes, and on March 1 at the N 607 boys' school (OEuvres complètes, Pléiade, t. II, p. 920 ff). These notes are accompanied by a typescript bearing the title Victor Hugo, written in blue pen. This typescript is annotated (upper margin) and corrected. The fragment, whose pages are numbered 2 and 3 (upper right-hand corner), is extensively crossed out and corrected. These notes accompany the corrected typed speech entitled Hugo, poète vulgaire. The speech was delivered at the Gorky Institute, and includes an unretained paragraph: "Hugo sang of heaven and earth, peak and abyss, past and future, animal and human. He sang of love of country and freedom. He sang, better than anyone else, of the wretched, the humble, with sparkling words that are usually reserved for those who make the law in order to profit from it. Of course his love of nature and mankind, and his emotion, and all his imagination, were vulgar, because he was just a collective being named Hugo. On the other hand, those who speak only for themselves call him a "person". Hugo's dreams are the dreams of the men of his time, but his reality is that of tomorrow's conscience, sublimating and fighting against the 19th century, but in order to elevate the 20th. Eugène Grindel, known as Paul Eluard (1895-1952), was a French poet from the working-class Parisian suburbs of the early 20th century. A Dadaist who questioned the world through absurdity, humor and nonsense, Paul Eluard became one of the pillars of Surrealism, paving the way for artistic action that was politically committed to the Communist Party.