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Interview with Opera (Andre Parinaud)

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Manuscript

Author

Authors André Parinaud, André Breton
People cited Pierre Ayrault, Charles Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stéphane Mallarmé, Gérard de Nerval, Anna de Noailles, Arthur Rimbaud, Maurice Rostand, Maurice Rouault, Henri, dit le Douanier Rousseau, Maurice Utrillo, Honoré Daumier, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Georges Seurat

Description

A text written by André Breton based on questions asked by André Parinaud for the journal Opéra, published on 24 October 1951.

There are a few minor differences between this text and that published by André Parinaud in Opéra on 24 October 1951, and included in Entretiens 1913-1952 in the third volume of the Œuvres complètes. The subject is first of all the absence of an independent surrealist journal, then the question of freedom of expression. Breton was led to specify the feeling he had had since his return from the United States, of censorship exercised in particular by the Stalinists and, among them, by former surrealists. If he had already alluded to this in other interventions, he gives much more precise details here, making this text a valuable document about the intellectual atmosphere of the early 1950s. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Handwritten manuscript, [24] October 1951.
- 2 pages in-4° handwritten in black ink, dated and titled by Breton:
‘We are no longer at a time when the expense of launching such a journal can be assumed by its collaborators, each of them contributing according to what they can afford. This was the case for La Révolution surréaliste and Le Surréalisme ASDLR and it gave total independence at least. Today we have to get a publisher or be supported by a benefactor... They don’t want a new surrealist review, one that would be alive, even though we have had to decline the offer of a complete republication of the twelve issues of La Révolution surréaliste, which ceased to exist more than twenty years ago.’
Numerous erasures and corrections. [Sale catalogue, 2003]

*This entry was translated from the French by Michael Richardson.

Bibliography

André Breton (Édition de Marguerite Bonnet avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas, Étienne-Alain Hubert et José Pierre), « Deux interviews d'André Parinaud, 1. (Opéra, 24 octobre 1951) », Entretiens 1913-1952, Œuvres complètes, tome III, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 629-633, notes p. 1330-1331.