Jacques Vaché . Outstanding French writer. Considered by André Breton as the initiator of surrealism .
Summary
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- 1 Biographical synthesis
- 1 Literary career
- 2 Death
- 2 Works
- 3 Sources
Biographical synthesis
He was born in Lorient , France , on September 7 , 1895 .
Literary career
He showed proof of his literary talent in 1913 with the publication of a magazine entitled ” En route, mauvaise troupe. Journal du lycée ” ( Lycée newspaper), published in the company of other friends and where his subversive and pacifist character shows an independence and critical freedom, not exempt from contempt for the bourgeoisie and which led to its exclusion from the elites.
Between 1912 and 1914 , together with three classmates from the Lycée de Nantes, he formed a group that published protest newspapers. In one of them, “Canard sauvage”, he published his first texts showing signs of symbolist influence. It was mobilized in late 1914.
In 1915 he was interned as a result of a wound in the First World War in the Nantes Military Hospital , there he met Breton to whom he later wrote his “Lettres de guerre” (Letters of war) from the front. In them he expresses his absolute rejection of war and a desire to demystify, through humor, all established values, including literature and art . After the war he returned to Nantes, France.
In 1917 , dressed in a British army uniform and wielding a pistol, he broke into the theater where the play “Las boobs de Tiresias” by French Guillaume Apollinaire was being performed , threatening to shoot at the public in protest against what « excessively literary ‘of the piece. André Breton manages to calm him down.
Death
The 6 of January of 1919 was found dead in a hotel room in Nantes with a friend, probably from an overdose of opium .
Plays
He bequeathed his letters and drawings addressed to Louis Aragon, Théodore Fraenkel and, above all, to André Breton during the First World War , and of which he published a postmortem selection, together with a preface, entitled “Letters of war” in 1919 , reissued in Paris in 2001 . Other texts are:
- “Les solennels” (The solemn ones), Dilecta Editions, Paris, 2007 .
- “En route, mauvaise troupe. Journal du lycée” (On the road, bad troop. Lyceum newspaper), Editions “Le Chien Rouge”, 2007.
