Nadja (novel)
Nadja is a novel by the French surrealist André Breton . The text was written in 1928 and came out again in 1962 in a revised version. The novel begins with the author's unexpected encounter with a young woman who calls herself Nadja and who exerts a certain fascination on him. In fact, in October 1927, Breton was together with Léona Delcourt in ten “surrealist” days for him and received a number of letters and drawings from her over the next four months.
content
Nadja is a personality who seems to live outside of reality. She wanders the streets of Paris without a destination , her name isn't even her real name. She explains that she decided on the name herself and that in Russian Nadja is the beginning of the word for hope. The author quickly realizes that Nadja is surrounded by a strange power of fascination that gives her her beauty. In the eyes of Breton, Nadja becomes a kind of symbol for what he imagines as surrealism , she is a symbol of love that threatens to become crazy love (l'amour fou). She is a symbol of the glorification of life and equally possesses visionary abilities, as a series of "objective coincidences" shows. This being, who seems to be supernatural, gets into a paradoxical situation. Just as she is a sign of love, Nadja is lonely too. She also implies that she had prostituted a few times when she arrived in Paris . The “magical creature” is turned into a mentally ill person by reality, its visions dismissed as auditory and visual hallucinations. Finally, the Surrealists' symbol of the glory of life ends up in a psychiatric institution , an end that is in complete contrast to the name she gave herself. André Breton remains throughout the book in his role as an observer who faces Nadja and wants to maintain his objectivity, and also fights not to fall into the madness into which Nadja would like to drag him. He openly criticizes psychiatry after the young woman is admitted there.
Nadja asks André Breton to dedicate a book to her so that a trace of her remains, as if she had an inkling of the tragic end of her life. The book that Breton then wrote is very complex: the author deliberately saves on descriptive prose and instead adds images that show places visited, people met or mentioned, paintings or drawings by surrealists friends, himself or those of Nadja. They become a kind of parallel story that communicates with the text of the book, and sometimes the images highlight certain sentences of the text (the photographs are often subtitled by a verbatim text quote).
The novel closes with a definition of the beauty that became famous: "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or it will not be."
Illustrations
The book contains 48 illustrations: photos of the places of the event, for which Breton commissioned the photographer Jacques-André Boiffard , some portraits of Man Ray , the glove photo of Lise Deharme , as well as reproductions of drawings Breton had received from Nadja.
reception
Nadja is counted among the standard works of surrealism . According to Karl Heinz Bohrer , the novel is a “basic font of classical modernism”.
expenditure
- André Breton: Nadja . Gallimard, Paris 1928
- André Breton: Nadja , in: Œuvres complètes . Gallimard, La Pléiade , Paris 1988
- André Breton: Nadja . Translation and epilogue by Max Hölzer . Neske, Pfullingen 1960 (Volume 406 of the Suhrkamp Library , 1974, ISBN 3-518-01406-4 ).
literature
- Wolfgang Asholt: An anti-romanesque novel? "Nadja" by André Breton 1928. In: Ders. (Ed.): Interpretations. French Literature, 20th Century: Novel. Stauffenburg, Tübingen 2007 ISBN 9783860579091
- Rita Bischof: Nadja Revisited . Berlin: Brinkman and Bose 2013
- Lemma Nadja , in: Henri Béhar (Ed.): Dictionnaire André Breton . Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012
- Mark Polizzotti : Revolution of the Spirit: The Life of André Breton . From the American. by Jörg Trobitius. Munich: Hanser 1996 (first English 1995)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mark Polizzotti: Revolution des Geistes , 1996, p. 415 f