Арагон

In September of this year, the great French writer, publicist and critic Louis Aragon was awarded the title of Doctor of Philosophy Honoris Causa by Charles University in Prague. Aragon's speech, delivered during the solemn ceremony, is anything but a traditional speech-response in which the new doctor thanks for the honor bestowed upon him. As Aragon himself says, in Prague he did not want to deliver the usual academic speech, suitable for Paris or Oxford, but to share his thoughts on things that excite him. Aragon's speech is dedicated to the most vital problems of contemporary realistic art, to the Question of the Theory and Practice of Socialist Realism. "As you know," Aragon addresses his listeners, "I belong to that category of men and women who for a century have thought and acted in accordance with the principle of the inseparability of theory and practice." "This principle - the writer continues - so universally recognized in all fields of science, in the field of art for some reason has not yet taken deep enough roots. Here it is often believed that the leading role belongs to theory, that first the representatives of literary science establish the theoretical premises of the work, and then the writers take them into account. That is, that it is not the artistic work that is a phenomenon that theorists must take into account, but on the contrary, that in this field the phenomena, the works must obey the theories. As a result, critics have been given the freedom, when faced with a phenomenon, a book, to measure it with the measure previously established by theorists, as if the theory were a foot and the work a shoe."

Our time, along with the atom and space, despite automated production and despotic regimes, has imposed an indisputable cult: man. Renaissance humanism is an unparalleled pathetic glorification of the complete real man, universally and comprehensively developed", but it is inferior in depth to the analyses that contemporary art makes of man, who proved incapable of harmony in the bourgeois era. The interest in the intimate world of the individual, the awareness of the role of the subject, of his multifaceted, inexhaustible soulfulness, bring to literature a flow of lyricism that neither drama nor epic can resist. Although the novel - this "form of transcendental helplessness (G. Lukács), with its amorphousness and incompleteness, and drama - this ideally and existentially tense genre (E. Zeiger) with its pathetic or problematic conflict, have proven, according to most theorists, to be the most suitable for recreating the reality of modern man, the fate of the lyrical" does not cease to concern specialists and is intertwined with the practice of the "epic" and the "dramatic". The frequent observations that lyric poetry is the least popular today, that modern man and modern society are alien to the lyrical - are hasty and erroneous. Statistics show that in recent years interest in lyrical creativity has been resurging, and literary studies prove that it itself is undergoing significant evolution. In France, for example, last year there were from twenty to fifty thousand poets! (Nouvelle Critique magazine, No. 158/1964). A large number of youth poetry magazines are being published and are gaining popularity. Pocket editions began to publish Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Eluard, Aragon in mass circulation. In a short time, several poetic manifestos appeared: "Poetry to Live" by Jean Breton and Serge Brando, "The Manifesto" by Pierre Garnier, etc., which, together with "Word and Vertigo" by Alain Bosquet, the discussion of the magazine "Tel Kel" on poetry (No. 17), etc., testify to an effort to limit and explain the guiding principles of a "new" poetry.