Modern Language Review

La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France by Blaise Cendrars, illustrated by Sonia Delaunay-Terk (1913), is without any doubt one of the most beautiful examples of artistic collaboration. As Eric Robertson writes in his wide-ranging and detailed study of Cendrars’s life and work, the poem was billed as the first ‘livre simultané’: ‘not only is it intended to be read and viewed simultaneously, but indeed the text itself is built upon a series of spatial, temporal and stylistic juxapositions’ (p. 35). Cendrars was the first to see its power: ‘Mme Delauney a fait un si beau livre de couleurs, que mon poème est plus trempé de lumière que ma vie’ (p. 35). This is really a telling statement from a writer whose life reads as an extraordinary adventure story. For Robertson, Cendrars is ‘a visionary, in the tradition of Coleridge or Rimbaud, a free spirit, a global traveller and a dowser of life’s secrets in their messy multiform reality’ (p. 7). Deftly interweaving biography and analyses of Cendrars’s œuvre, Robertson has a clear goal: to explore the complex relationship between life and art.

The book consists of an Introduction, ten chapters, and a Conclusion. Each of the chapters discusses specific works, such as Les Pâques à New York, L’Homme Foudroyé, or Moravagine. The last of these is particularly interesting from the perspective of self and other since Cendrars creates an eponymous anti-hero as ‘a negative double of himself’ (p. 147). Drawing upon the author’s real-life experiences and acquaintances, as well as literary and cinematic influences, the murderous Moravagine is one of literature’s most troubling characters, and one who haunted Cendrars for many years. Robertson writes that ‘over time, this Other named Moravagine had begun to inhabit the writer’s psyche so profoundly that Cendrars could no longer separate himself from his creation’ (p. 160). This relationship between self and Other, in all its forms, is at the heart of Cendrars’s explorations and, for the author, all great books are autobiographical: ‘C’est pourquoi il n’y a qu’un seul sujet littéraire: l’homme. C’est pourquoi il n’y a qu’une littérature: celle de cet homme, de cet Autre, l’homme qui écrit’ (p. 169). [End Page 386]

Robertson’s text is interspersed with illustrations and photographs, which vividly evoke both Cendrars’s art and his life. While the colour reproductions of works such as the American edition of Panama; or, The Adventures of my Seven Uncles (1931) are worth noting for their modernist aesthetics, the photographs by Doisneau in Chapter 10, which formed the basis of the collaborative text La Banlieue de Paris (1949), are particularly interesting in their portrayal of a desolate post-war Paris. For Robertson, Cendrars’s discussion of the image of a little boy walking along a muddy road in Aubervilliers is striking: ‘Cendrars’s choice of this photograph expresses hope for the resilience of humans, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust, but it is also a fitting image in light of the author’s own identity: not only the solitary boy, but the tyre tracks on the road to which Cendrars draws the reader’s attention, embody the free spirit of the bourlingueur and the insatiable desire to explore the world, even if that is fundamentally hostile’ (p. 280). This subtle and thoughtful analysis offers a sample of the incisive, imaginative, and sophisticated readings that characterize this fascinating study, which itself effortlessly glides between life, art, history, and criticism.