Robert Desnos was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.
13 Facts About Robert Desnos
2.
Robert Desnos was born in Paris on 4 July 1900, the son of a licensed dealer in game and poultry at the Halles market.
3.
Robert Desnos worked as an amanuensis for journalist Jean de Bonnefon.
4.
The first poems by Robert Desnos to appear in print were published in 1917 in La Tribune des Jeunes and in 1919 in the avant-garde review Le Trait d'union, and the same year in the Dadaist magazine Litterature.
5.
Andre Breton included two photographs of Robert Desnos sleeping in his surrealist novel Nadja.
6.
Robert Desnos fell in love with Yvonne George, a singer whose obsessed fans made his love impossible.
7.
Robert Desnos wrote for many periodicals, including Litterature, La Revolution surrealiste and Varietes.
8.
For Reseau Agir, Robert Desnos provided information collected during his job at the journal Aujourd'hui and made false identity papers, and was arrested by the Gestapo on 22 February 1944.
9.
Robert Desnos was first deported to the German concentration camps of Auschwitz in occupied Poland, then Buchenwald, Flossenburg in Germany and finally to Terezin in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945.
10.
Robert Desnos died in Mala pevnost, which was an inner part of Terezin used only for political prisoners, from typhoid, a month after the camp's liberation.
11.
Improbable as it is, Odette explains, Robert Desnos reads the man's palm.
12.
Robert Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.
13.
Robert Desnos is buried at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.