Louis ARAGON (1897-1982). Autograph manuscript... Lot 327

Louis ARAGON (1897-1982). Autograph manuscript signed, Prendre son rêve où on le trouve, ou Les ennemis, [1962]; 20pages in-4, with erasures and corrections. Long article on the philosopher Nicolas Berdiaev (1874-1948), published in Les Lettres françaises (no. 956) of December 14, 1962, in connection with Lucienne Julien-Cain's book, Berdiaev en Russie, preceded by La Russie est sortie des ombres (Gallimard, 1962). "If someone had told me, a few years ago, that I would have read with a kind of passion a book devoted to the mystical Russian philosopher Nicolas Alexandrovitch Berdiaev, I can hear from here what I would have replied. Which just goes to show how little we know each other. Lucienne Julien-Cain's book appeared just as Aragon was completing his Histoire parallèle after "three years of thankless, relentless work. Perhaps it's what I've learned, writing it, that makes me more open to certain considerations, however incompatible they may seem with the ideas I'm known for, insofar as at least they necessarily appear to me to fit into a framework from which I cannot detach myself, this Russia before and after 1917, in the light of which the Berdiaev detail takes on a different value, the character of a commentary, becomes an element of comparison, plays the role of a trebuchet"... This book should be read "like a philosophical novel: the novel of a mind and an era"... Aragon outlines Berdiaev's destiny, before recounting what happened to the philosopher during the first years of the Revolution, and in particular with Dzerzhinsky... This is followed by a reflection on the re-establishment of Leninist norms, including in Soviet cultural life... "Not being afraid of the truth, finding pride in it, have always seemed to me the letters of nobility of writers who claim to transform the world through man. I can only welcome the fact that those who still claim to need prohibitions, which have above all served to mask a distortion of socialism, are now in the process of being defeated - and perhaps it won't be as simple as all that - as a great hope, not only for literature, but for humanity. [...] I am among those who affirm the necessary link between artistic creation and politics"...