Blaise Cendrars
| Blaise Cendrars | |
|---|---|
Cendrars posing in the uniform of the Légion étrangère in 1916, a few months after the amputation of his right arm.
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| Born |
1 September 1887 La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland |
| Died | 21 January 1961 (aged 73) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet |
| Literary movement | Modernism, Futurism |
Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1 September 1887 – 21 January 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement.
He was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, rue de la Paix 27, to a bourgeois francophone family. They sent young Frédéric to a German boarding school, but he ran away. At the Realschule in Basel in 1902 he met his lifelong friend the sculptor August Suter. Next they enrolled him in a school in Neuchâtel, but he had little enthusiasm for his studies. Finally, in 1904, he left school due to poor performance and began an apprenticeship with a Swiss watchmaker in Russia.
While living in St. Petersburg, he began to write, thanks to the encouragement of R.R., a librarian at the National Library of Russia. There he wrote the poem, "La Légende de Novgorode", which R.R. translated into Russian. Supposedly fourteen copies were made, but Cendrars claimed to have no copies of it, and none could be located during his lifetime. In 1995, the Bulgarian poet Kiril Kadiiski claimed to have found one of the Russian translations in Sofia, but the authenticity of the document remains contested on the grounds of factual, typographic, orthographic and stylistic analysis.
In 1907, Sauser returned to Switzerland, where he studied medicine at the University of Berne. During this period, he wrote his first verified poems, Séquences, influenced by Remy de Gourmont's Le Latin mystique.
Cendrars was the first exponent of Modernism in European poetry with his works: The Legend of Novgorode (1907), Les Pâques à New York (1912), La Prose du Transsibérien et la Petite Jehanne de France (1913), Séquences (1913), La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916), Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles (1918), J'ai tué (1918), and Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (1919). He was the first modernist poet, not only in terms of expressing the fundamental values of Modernism but also in terms of creating its first solid poetical synthesis, although this achievement did not grow out of a literary project or any theoretical considerations but from Cendrars' instinctive attraction to all that was new in the age and equally alive for him in literature of the past.
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