SERBIAN SURREALISM, THE IMAGINARY OF THE NIGHT, FROM NIGHT TO NIGHT, CHIAROSCURO, NOCTURNAL ART

par Raphaëlle Hérout

December 17, 2016

According to Paul Éluard's words in L'Évidence poétique, Sade and Lautréamont seized "the sad world that was imposed on them". Like Sade and Lautréamont, the surrealists seized the vast world to try to make it less sad.

Surrealism was born and grew up in Paris. However, to the Parisian group were linked numerous artists and writers from about fifteen countries. Some remained isolated in their country, for example Octavio Paz in Mexico, César Moro in Peru, Wifredo Lam in Cuba or Takiguchi in Japan. Others constituted national groups:

In Belgium, it is there after France that surrealism was most alive, activity starting roughly at the same time as in Paris. Note that the manifesto La Révolution d'abord et toujours, prompted by the Rif War and published in La Révolution surréaliste n° 5 of October 1925, is signed by two Belgians, Camille Goemans and Paul Nougé who had already created the Correspondance group with Clément Pansaers and Marcel Lecomte. Another branch is constituted around Magritte and Mesens. After the fusion, new recruits will appear: Scutenaire, Irène Hamoir, then Colinet, Marien... In the 1930s, another group is constituted in La Louvière around André Chavée. The history of surrealism in Belgium was not a long peaceful path. Sign of vigor of an activity that continues until the beginning of the 1980s, with along the way the emergence of revolutionary surrealism, links with Cobra then situationism.

In England, various experiments (like vorticism) and exhibitions had prepared the ground, the group was really constituted in 1935 with Roland Penrose, Eileen Agar, David Gascoyne and a few others. Later would come Maddox, Melville, Colquhoun... With ups and downs, activity would continue until the 1980s.

In Czechoslovakia, in Prague, a group had been constituted as early as 1924, Czech poetism, around Karel Teige and Viteslav Nezval. It will only be officially surrealist in 1935, with new contributions like the painters Styrsky and Toyen. With the arrival of new generations (Effenberber, Petr Kral...) a surrealist activity, sometimes clandestine, will persist until the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1968.

In the Canaries, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, surrealist activity was born in 1932 around the poet Eduardo Westerdahl and the magazine Gazeta de arte, then around the painter Oscar Dominguez. The Francoists will put an end to it in 1936.

In Romania, surrealism suffered from the often difficult relations between Breton and Tzara, the Romanian avant-gardists having taken Tzara's side. But when the latter rallies to Breton's group, surrealism makes a timid breakthrough through the unu magazine.

The Bucharest group was constituted only in 1940 after a stay in Paris by Gellu Naum and Gherasim Luca. Due to the war, its activity will only begin in 1945, but for very little time, having been unable to resist the assaults of socialist realism.

And in Serbia... Before presenting the Belgrade group, I would like to pause for a moment on the perception of this internationalization within the Parisian group. It is personal relations that prevail, in connection with the stays of numerous writers and artists in Paris, the city of light which then exerted a strong attraction. Writers and artists whose experiments and reflection on the links between poetry and politics join those of André Breton's group.

The internationalization of surrealism was therefore most often done spontaneously according to encounters and affinities. And this until 1935. At that time, the surrealist movement finds itself in a kind of impasse. The mode of exploration of the inner continent no longer renews itself, provoking a sensation of repetition. The break with the Communist Party accomplished, the will to transform the world remained intact, but without precise objective. At a time when totalitarianisms are settling in Europe, members of the group have the feeling of going in circles, of no longer finding in surrealism answers, watchwords, up to their expectations, up to the threat. Result: many leave the group definitively often for a purely political commitment.

The Parisian group dwindles while surrealism's audience grows throughout the world. Becoming aware of this phenomenon, surrealism through its leader André Breton will take advantage of it to bounce back and renew itself.

Thus we will seek to organize this internationalization of surrealism. Witness to this, in these years 1935-1936, the publication of the Bulletin internationale du surréalisme. Four issues that appear in turn in Prague, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Brussels and London, each time under the joint responsibility of the French group and the concerned counterpart.

Another attempt at gathering, this one largely exceeding the limits of surrealism, takes place two years later with the FIARI, International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, fruit of the meetings of Breton and Trotsky. Internal dissensions and the outbreak of war will quickly put an end to this enterprise, it will however have consolidated links with the Egyptian surrealist group "Art and Freedom", animated by Georges Henein.

To conclude, we must recognize that beyond concerted collaboration, the surrealist movement has spread in multiple directions in such a way that it has often escaped its founders.

Let's return to Serbia to introduce Marco Ristic, one of the leaders of a rather singular Serbian surrealist movement in its genesis — singular and autonomous:

Starting from the same will to break with a world that has failed and the same admiration for Lautréamont, Rimbaud or Apollinaire, Serbian surrealism and French surrealism have known parallel evolutions. From January 1922 to August 1924, the magazine Putevi [Paths] appears in Belgrade in which the main actors of future Serbian surrealism express themselves with experimental texts, humorous charges and punchy critiques, in a spirit quite close to that of Dadaist magazines, in particular Littérature published at the same time in Paris.

The meeting was inevitable, most Serbian poets and artists having stayed in Paris for some time during the 1920s. The first issue of La Révolution surréaliste in December 1924 invites to read the new Serbian magazine Svedocanstva [Testimonies]; which, for its part, reports on André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism and several other publications of French surrealists.

Dusan Matic is the first Serb to participate in the meetings of the Parisian group which were then held at the Café Cyrano. He is one of the signatories of the manifesto we have already mentioned, La Révolution d'abord et toujours, with Monny de Boully, another Belgrade native who came to Paris. The latter, unlike other Serbian poets, will write in French: it is he who will play the role of correspondent and translate Serbian authors for La Révolution surréaliste, this until his break with Breton and his participation in the activity of Le Grand Jeu.

Although not among the signatories of this manifesto, in the same n° 5 of La Révolution surréaliste, Marko Ristic published his poem Se tuer, where the theme of the night already emerges:

It is not the royal grandeur
That will go away with the rivers
I am invaded by this loyal purple
Of time where all nights drink

In 1925, Milan Dedinac publishes his collection of poems, Javna Ptica [The Public Bird], and Ristic, in 1928, on his return from Paris, his "anti-novel", Bez mere [Without Measure]: these are the first important works of Serbian surrealism. However, it is only in 1929 that Serbian writers and painters, those who have been called "the Thirteen of Belgrade", constitute an organized group, a surrealist central, like their French counterparts, and they make themselves known with manifestos.

The following year, the Surrealist Editions of Belgrade — distributed in Paris by José Corti — publish the almanac Nemogucé [The Impossible], which brings together all the members of the group but also, in their language, several French surrealists: Aragon, Breton, Char, Éluard, Péret... Like their French counterparts, Serbian surrealists proclaim themselves Marxists and revolutionaries, which is not without danger in Yugoslavia of the time. Courageously, they affirm their positions in a manifesto that the new organ of the Parisian group, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, reproduces in its n° 3 under the title "Belgrade, December 23, 1930". A violent text with revolutionary accents:

"... Claiming the Marquis de Sade, Hegel and Lautréamont [...] Being possessed without respite by the logic of freedom, frenzy, infinity, and remembering: 'no smoking', 'do not lean outside', 'keep to the right', 'no entry'. Advocating voluntary scandal, provocation, demoralization and demanding the gravity and rigorous, elementary honesty of every word and every act. Beat R. Drainatz and watch over the heart of the dream, be in the real of the dream. Reject all these filthy and beautiful belles-lettres and write poems. Not being able to tear oneself away from the unique darkness of the Total Problem, and humor, this humor forged on the anvil of pessimism. Live the irremediable despair and the bitter hope of social determination. All that. And all the rest."

This beautiful program ending with a call to revolt had the misfortune to displease the authorities who prohibited its distribution. Nevertheless, for another two years the Serbian surrealists managed to express themselves and, in 1931, they launched a new magazine, Nadrealizam danas i ovde [Surrealism Today and Here], which again brought together French and Serbian surrealists. The following year, the Belgrade natives signed the French petition in favor of Aragon, indicted after publishing the poem Front rouge. Surrealist activity was then becoming increasingly political in a revolutionary sense, affirming communist positions and contesting the dictatorial regime of King Alexander I. The latter responded with repression.

Dusan Matic gives this summary of events: "Things accelerated: in 1932, several arrests and two convictions to forced labor, from five to three years, by the State Defense Tribunal."

The persecuted Serbian surrealists, their French friends protest vigorously; in Le SASDLR, René Crevel denounces "white terror against friends of France" in an article entitled: "Yugoslav surrealists are in the bagne". Some will remain in prison, others will be prevented from expressing themselves publicly. Until the Second World War, surrealist activity will only continue clandestinely.

After the Liberation of the country by Tito's partisans, Yugoslavia having engaged in the path of communism for which the surrealists had worked, some of them will be found in official functions – Marko Ristic for his part will be appointed ambassador to Paris.

It is to this Ristic, one of the main animators and theorists of the Belgrade surrealist group, that we will be interested through a very beautiful text dating from 1939, De nuit en nuit, which Jelena Novakovic presents to us

Michel Carassou February 11, 2023

De nuit en nuit fragments du manuscrit en PDF

The Imaginary of the Night in Surrealism by Jelena Novaković

Communication of February 11, 2023 at the Halle Saint-Pierre by Jelena Novaković on "The Imaginary of the Night in Surrealism" and Serbian surrealism.

"THE INEXPLICABLE MIRACLE OF THE NIGHT 1"

An aspect of the surrealist imaginary 2

INTRODUCTION

Belgrade surrealism, which is part of the great surrealist international, had the closest relations with Parisian surrealism. These relations were based not only on personal contacts that date from the stay of Serbian writers and intellectuals in France, after the exodus of the Serbian army evacuated from Albania during the First World War, but also on common tendencies of the two groups penetrated by the same spirit of insubmission and revolt, in the spiritual crisis provoked by the war. These tendencies manifest themselves through common themes and concepts through which […] read more

1 "The inexplicable miracle of the night" is a verse from the poem "The Purple Flames" by Marko Ristić (Knjiga poezije, Beograd, Nolit, 1984, p. 97). Unless otherwise indicated, it is we who translate.

2 This text comes from an intervention at the La Halle-Saint-Pierre auditorium, which took place on February 11, 2023.

"From Night to Night"

As well as Jelena Novaković's communication on Marko Ristić's book "From Night to Night" which took place on the same day, February 11, 2023 at the Halle Saint-Pierre.

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The Powers of Nocturnal Art, Journey into Chiaroscuro by Jean-Yves Samacher

(Around the publication of Marko Ristić's book, From Night to Night)

Communication of February 11, 2023 at the HSP as part of the study day on Serbian surrealism. Texts and presentations enriched and improved.

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Marko Ristic, Chiaroscuro and the Powers of Nocturnal Art by Jean-Yves Samacher

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