Blaise Cendrars

Swiss Modernist novelist, amputee left-handed poet, adventurer, soldier, failed film director and an anarchist fellow-traveller who never fully committed himself to the movement, born. A poor student, he left school early and in 1904 was apprenticed to a Swiss watchmaker in Moscow, where he frequented Russian anarchist circles and was present during the 1905 Revolution. In 1912, he and the anarchist writer Emil Szittya, who owned a clandestine printing press, started the journal 'Les Hommes Nouveaux' (also the name of his press where he published his early poems). In the same year Cendrars held a conference a few days after the death of Jules Bonnot on the theme 'La Beauté Devant l'Anarchisme', proclaiming "La vie est anarchisme. La Vie est beauté. La beauté est anarchisme. L'anarchisme est la vie." (Life is anarchism. Life is beauty. Beauty is anarchism. Anarchism is life.) Amongst those who attended was Kibaltchie, aka Victor Serge, who translated Cendrars' first novel, 'L'Or' (1925; published in English as 'Sutter's Gold'), into Russian.

His masterpiece is generally held to be the barely disguised autobiographical second novel 'Moravagine' (1926), which features the eponymous patient number 1731 at the Waldensee Sanatorium, a mental institution near Berne, Switzerland, who is last descendant of a degenerate East European noble lineage. The narrator, Dr. Raymond la Science, a young, brilliant, newly-graduated psychologist, who becomes his analyst, is fascinated by the personality of this "grand fauve humain" (great human beast) and subsequently engineers his patient's escape, accompanying him as he rampages around the world.

As with a significant number of foreign artists living in France and of anarchists who chose to fight in WWI, Cendrars joined the Foreign Legion and fought on the Western Front, which is where he lost his right arm in the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915, which in turn led to him having to learn to type left-handed.

"It is an outrage towards the masses.. ..It’s wanting to treat them as though they’re incapable of raising themselves up to this new realism (promoted by Léger and Le Corbusier) which is that of their area, which they’ve made with their hands.. ..To want to say to these men ‘the modern is not for you it’s an art for the rich bourgeoisie.." (attack on the notion of a social realist art, c. 1949)