TZARA (Tristan). - Lot 215

TZARA (Tristan). Born in Romania. 1896-1963. Writer and poet. One of the founders of the Dada movement. L.A.S. "Tristan Tzara" to "Cher Monsieur". Paris, March 21, 1947. 1 page in-4. BEAUTIFUL LETTER: After thanking his correspondent for his letter, he informs him that ...the tract on Indochina is edited by the Surrealists. He criticizes the Communist Party for not defending your country's independence. The denial of these allegations was given in the House, and how brilliantly!... I don't like the "prière d'insérer" of my Morceaux choisis either. My publisher, Bordas (...), will perhaps be able to give it to you... Political commitment, which a few years earlier had been considered by Tzara as "baseness", becomes more and more prevalent in the 1930s, even if Tzara's texts reject the idea of circumstantial poetry. However, Tzara's texts were also marked by a personal commitment to opposing fascism, bourgeois art conceived as an end in itself, colonialism, Francoism and so on. He noted that while social revolution was necessary for poetry, whose reign he wanted to see, "revolution does not need poetry": in this way, he opposed the Surrealists, with whom he broke off in an open letter in 1935. During the Second World War, having become a member of the Resistance, he went underground to organize the National Writers' Committee in the South-West.