Surrealism's sleeping prophet — the movement's greatest trance-poet, then a radio voice, an anti-fascist journalist, and a Resistance man who died at Terezín days after its liberation.
Robert Desnos was Surrealism's natural wonder: in the movement's early 'sleeping fits' he could drop into trance and produce poems on demand, and Breton crowned him its prophet — before the inevitable excommunication, after which Desnos simply kept writing, better than most of the faithful. The thirties made him a public voice in the most literal way: radio work that carried his poems and slogans into ordinary French homes, alongside journalism that put him, pen-first, against the fascist drift of the decade — including public collision with Céline over the political pamphlets of the late thirties.
The war made the commitments literal. Desnos joined the Resistance, working under cover of his newspaper job until his arrest in February 1944; deported through the camps, he died of typhus at Terezín on June 8, 1945 — weeks after the liberation, with the war in Europe already over. The poems survived everything, including the legend of a last one found on him; his standing has only risen since: the Surrealist who proved that the movement's love of freedom could be spent on something.
Clashed with
Adversaries in print, never companions: Desnos' militant anti-fascism put him publicly against Céline's political pamphlets of the late thirties — one of the era's starkest collisions between a writer and his critics. Desnos died at Terezín in 1945; the argument outlived them both.
Art & literary movement · 1924–1966
The movement's natural wonder: in the sleeping fits he dropped into trance and produced poems on demand, and Breton crowned him Surrealism's prophet — before the Second Manifesto's excommunication, which he outwrote.
Clashed with
Adversaries in print, never companions: Desnos' militant anti-fascism put him publicly against Céline's political pamphlets of the late thirties — one of the era's starkest collisions between a writer and his critics. Desnos died at Terezín in 1945; the argument outlived them both.
Associated with · 1922–1929
The movement's natural wonder: in the sleeping fits he dropped into trance and produced poems on demand, and Breton crowned him Surrealism's prophet — before the Second Manifesto's excommunication, which he outwrote.