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**[If previous engagements deprive me...]**

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Nikita Khrouchtchev, Kossior, Bela Kun, Mikoyan, Joseph Staline, Léon Trotsky

Description

Signed manuscript by André Breton dated 2^nd March 1956.

Three years after the death of Stalin, the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the occasion for a first thorough review, one that would soon be followed by a diplomatic and miliary shutdown. In March, in this message addressed to the organisers of a meeting which he is unable to attend, Breton alludes to the hopes raised by the changes under way in Moscow in expressing his hope for a rehabilitation of some of the victims of the Moscow Trials, above all of Trotsky: we know that the poet had experienced the latter’s death in 1940 as a personal tragedy. Breton would express his views on this topic again at the start of April, in his close participation in the drafting of the surrealist tract Livrées sanglantes (‘Bloody Livery’) that evoked the “Stalinist poison” paralysing the working classes. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005] 

Signed handwritten manuscript by André Breton dated 2^nd March 1956. 
1/2 in-4° page manuscript, signed and dated by André Breton, with a few deletions and corrections, of a text relating to the Stalinist trials and the rehabilitation of Party apparatchiks following Nikita Khrushchev’s speech: 
‘You would need to have lived through the period of those trials to know the stupefaction that followed them and the mortal wound they inflicted. Every Inquisitorial procedure was revived against the very people whose task had been to ensure the triumph of the cause of human emancipation! … Let us salute the speech of the Party member who at last has broken open this pile of filth. The rehabilitation of Kossior and Oussenko, followed by that of Bela Kun and the Polish Communist Party of 1938 are instigating the most powerful draft of fresh air.” [Auction catalogue, 2003]