Robert Desnos was a son of a café owner. He was born in
Paris on July 4, 1900. Desnos attended commercial college, and started work as a clerk. After that he worked as a literary columnist for the newspaper
Paris-Soir.
Desnos’ poems were first published in 1917 in
La Tribune des Jeunes (Youth's Tribune) and in 1919 in the
avant-garde review,
Le Trait d’union (Hyphenated), and also the same year in the Dadaist magazine
Littérature. In 1922 he published his first book, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms, with the title
Rrose Selavy (upon the name (pseudonym) of the popular French artist
Marcel Duchamp).
In 1919, he met the poet
Benjamin Péret who actually introduced him to the Paris
Dada group and
André Breton, with whom he soon became a friend. While working as a literary columnist for
Paris-Soir, Desnos was an active member of the Surrealist group and developed a particular talent for “
automatic writing”. He, together with writers such as
Louis Aragon and
Paul Eluard, would form the literary vanguard of surrealism. But although he was praised by Breton in his 1924
Manifeste du Surréalisme for being the movement’s "prophet", Desnos disagreed with Surrealism’s involvement in
communist politics, which caused a rift between him and Breton. Desnos continued work as a columnist.
In 1926 he composed
The Night of Loveless Nights, a lyric poem dealing with
solitude curiously written in classic
quatrains, which makes it more like
Baudelaire than Breton. Desnos fell in love with
Yvonne George, a singer whose obsessed fans made his love impossible. He wrote several poems for her including those in his collection
La liberté ou l'amour! (1927).
By 1929, Breton definitively condemned Desnos, who in turn joined
Georges Bataille and
Documents, as one of the authors to sign "Un Cadavre" (A cadaver) attacking “le boeuf Breton” (the ox Breton). He wrote articles on “Modern Imagery”, “Avant-garde Cinema” (1929, issue 7), “Pygmalion and the Sphinx” (1930, issue 1), and
Sergei M. Eisenstein, the
Soviet filmmaker, on his film titled
The General Line (1930, issue 4).
His career in radio began in 1932 with a show dedicated to
Fantomas. During this time, he became friends with
Picasso, Hemingway, Artaud and
John Dos Passos; published many critical reviews on
jazz and
cinema; and became increasingly involved in politics. He wrote for many periodicals, including
Littérature,
La Révolution surréaliste, and
Variétés. Besides his numerous collections of poems, he published three novels,
Deuil pour deuil (1924),
La Liberté ou l’amour! (1927), and
Le vin est tiré (1943).
During
World War II, Desnos was an active member of the
French Résistance, often publishing under pseudonyms, and was arrested by the
Gestapo on
February 22, 1944. He was first deported to the Nazi German concentration camps of
Auschwitz in occupied Poland, then
Buchenwald, Flossenburg in Germany and finally to
Térézin (
Theresienstadt) in occupied
Czechoslovakia in 1945, where he died from
typhoid, only weeks after the camp’s liberation. He wrote poems during his imprisonment which were accidentally destroyed following his death.
He was married to
Youki Desnos, formerly
Lucie Badoul, nicknamed "Youki" ("snow") by her lover
Tsuguharu Foujita before she left him for Desnos. Desnos wrote several poems about Youki. One of his most famous poems is "Letter to Youki," written after his arrest.
He is buried at the
Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.
Desnos's poetry has been set to music by a number of composers, including
Witold Lutosławski with
Les Espaces du Sommeil (1975) and
Chantefleurs et Chantefables (1991),
Francis Poulenc (
Dernier poème, 1956) and
Henri Dutilleux with
Le Temps l'Horloge (2007).
Carolyn Forché has translated his poetry and names Desnos as a significant influence on her own work.
