22 Facts About Blaise Cendrars

1.

Frederic-Louis Sauser, better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916.

2.

Blaise Cendrars was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement.

3.

Blaise Cendrars was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchatel, Switzerland, rue de la Paix 27, into a bourgeois francophone family, to a Swiss father and a Scottish mother.

4.

Supposedly fourteen copies were made, but Cendrars claimed to have no copies of it, and none could be located during his lifetime.

5.

Blaise Cendrars was an early exponent of Modernism in European poetry with his works: The Legend of Novgorode, Les Paques a New York, La Prose du Transsiberien et la Petite Jehanne de France, Sequences, La Guerre au Luxembourg, Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles, J'ai tue, and Dix-neuf poemes elastiques.

6.

Blaise Cendrars was drawn to this same immersion in Balzac's flood of novels on 19th-century French society and in Casanova's travels and adventures through 18th-century Europe, which he set down in dozens of volumes of memoirs that Cendrars considered "the true Encyclopedia of the eighteenth century, filled with life as they are, unlike Diderot's, and the work of a single man, who was neither an ideologue nor a theoretician".

7.

Blaise Cendrars signed it for the first time with the name Blaise Cendrars.

8.

Blaise Cendrars became acquainted with the international array of artists and writers in Paris, such as Chagall, Leger, Survage, Suter, Modigliani, Csaky, Archipenko, Jean Hugo and Robert Delaunay.

9.

Blaise Cendrars' style was based on photographic impressions, cinematic effects of montage and rapid changes of imagery, and scenes of great emotional force, often with the power of a hallucination.

10.

Blaise Cendrars liked to claim that his poem's first printing of one hundred fifty copies would, when unfolded, reach the height of the Eiffel Tower.

11.

Blaise Cendrars's writing career was interrupted by World War I When it began, he and the Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo appealed to other foreign artists to join the French army.

12.

Blaise Cendrars was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915, he was in the line at Frise.

13.

Blaise Cendrars stayed with Eugenia in her house in Biarritz, in a room decorated with murals by Picasso.

14.

Blaise Cendrars became an important part of the artistic community in Montparnasse; his writings were considered a literary epic of the modern adventurer.

15.

Blaise Cendrars was a friend of the American writer Henry Miller, who called him his "great idol", a man he "really venerated as a writer".

16.

Blaise Cendrars knew many of the writers, painters, and sculptors living in Paris.

17.

Blaise Cendrars was acquainted with Ernest Hemingway, who mentions having seen him "with his broken boxer's nose and his pinned-up empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand", at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris.

18.

Blaise Cendrars continued to be active in the Paris artistic community, encouraging younger artists and writing about them.

19.

Blaise Cendrars was with the British Expeditionary Force in northern France at the beginning of the German invasion in 1940, and his book that immediately followed, Chez l'armee anglaise, was seized before publication by the Gestapo, which sought him out and sacked his library in his country home, while he fled into hiding in Aix-en-Provence.

20.

In 1950, Blaise Cendrars settled down in the rue Jean-Dolent in Paris, across from the La Sante Prison.

21.

Blaise Cendrars married Fela Poznanska, who was Jewish and of Russo-Polish extraction.

22.

Blaise Cendrars was her father's first biographer and helped set up the Cendrars Archive in Berne.