Louis Aragon

Louis Aragon was born on October 3, 1897, in Paris, France. He graduated from Lycée Carnot, then studied medicine in Sorbonne and befriended a fellow medical student André Breton. In 1917 he was drafted in the First World War and served in a military hospital. There he met Guillaume Apollinaire and they became close friends. Together with Breton, Paul Éluard and Philippe Soupault Aragon continued development of ideas of Surrealism which were formulated by Guillaume Apollinaire. His evolution from Dada to Surrealism finalized with the publication of 'Manifeste du Surréalisme' in 1924. At that time he published 'Le Libertinage', a collection of short stories and episodes pieced together in a Surrealist collage. In 1927, after a two-year affair with flamboyant publisher Nancy Cunard, heiress to the Cunard shipping money, Aragon wrote what was later described by Albert Camus as "the best and most beautiful of erotic texts", and later refused to publish it under his name. Aragon was then at the peak of his radical opposition to old rules and joined the French Communist party. At the same time he met Elsa Triolet, sister of Russian actress Lilya Brik. In 1930 they traveled to the Soviet Union on the invitation from Maxim Gorky. There they took part in the 1st conference of Soviet writers. Under the influence of his wife and her friend Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aragon published "The Red Front", calling for a revolution in France, for which he received a five-year suspended sentence. At that time Aragon together with 'Andre Malraux' founded the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture. Aragon denounced the bourgeois culture and was a critical opponent of André Gide. During the Second World War Aragon wrote anti-fascist poetry under various pen-names for 'Les Editions de Minuit' and 'Lettres Francaise', and was active in the French Resistance. In 1955 Aragon published an essay on the Soviet literature in which he focused on non-Russian writers from ethnic republics of the USSR. In 1962 Aragon and André Maurois published their "Parallelled History" of the Soviet Union and the United States. His mild attitude to Socialist realism became more critical when Nikita Khrushchev was dismissed by Leonid Brezhnev. In 1971 he published a comprehensive biography of Henri Matisse. At that time, after the death of his wife, Aragon revealed his bisexuality and appeared at gay parades. He died on December 24, 1982, in Paris, France.