84 Facts About Tristan Tzara

Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea and painter Marcel Janco.

Tristan Tzara's work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.

Tristan Tzara was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against Andre Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco.

Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music.

Tristan Tzara was born in Moinesti, Bacau County, in the historical region of Western Moldavia.

Tristan Tzara's parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business.

Tristan Tzara moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school.

In October 1912, when Tristan Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul.

Tristan Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate.

Tristan Tzara was after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zurich and in the world", including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.

Tristan Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term.

Tristan Tzara is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault.

Tristan Tzara was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.

Tristan Tzara was in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy, and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine.

Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly calculated insolence".

In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Riviere in editing the Paris-based magazine Litterature.

Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tristan Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.

Tristan Tzara is often described as the main figure in the Litterature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada.

Tristan Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Eluard.

Richter believes that, ideologically, Tristan Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views, but that this implied a measure of sympathy for the working class.

Tristan Tzara was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status.

Peret immediately upset Picabia and Tristan Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed.

Tristan Tzara visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.

Tristan Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity".

Tristan Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it, responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists.

Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Eluard, the pro-Tristan Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray.

Picabia took Breton's side against Tristan Tzara, and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clement Pansaers and Ezra Pound.

Tristan Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater.

Tristan Tzara collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos.

In Romania, Tristan Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925.

Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tristan Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zurich, to build him a house in Paris.

The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art.

Tristan Tzara prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend Rene Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.

Tristan Tzara's wife was affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time.

At home, Tristan Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sasa Pana, who corresponded with him over several years.

Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tristan Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists.

Tristan Tzara had signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco.

Reportedly, Tristan Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.

Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tristan Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism.

At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tristan Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public.

Tristan Tzara was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe.

Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tristan Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis.

Tristan Tzara lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse.

In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tristan Tzara was stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights.

Tristan Tzara participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Eluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.

Tristan Tzara returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947, as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia.

Tristan Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture.

Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tristan Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin.

Tristan Tzara translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author Attila Jozsef.

In October 1956, Tristan Tzara visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union.

Tristan Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization, contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassak, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary".

Tristan Tzara was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet Francois Villon, and, like his fellow Surrealist Michel Leiris, to promoting primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years.

In early 1957, Tristan Tzara attended a Dada retrospective on the Rive Gauche, which ended in a riot caused by the rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, an outcome which reportedly pleased him.

In 1961, as recognition for his work as a poet, Tristan Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize.

Tristan Tzara died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the Cimetiere du Montparnasse.

Tristan Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances.

Tristan Tzara is known to have mixed elements of Romanian folklore, and to have sung the native suburban romanza La moara la Harta during at least one staging for Cabaret Voltaire.

Unlike Vinea and the Contimporanul group, Cernat proposes, Tristan Tzara stood for radicalism and insurgency, which would help explain their impossibility to communicate.

At home, Tristan Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime.

Tristan Tzara depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism".

Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tristan Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism.

Tristan Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free.

Tristan Tzara's literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:.

Traditionally, Tristan Tzara is seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.

Tristan Tzara's poems are like Nature [where] a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star.

Tristan Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created, had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.

La Revue Dada 2, which includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tristan Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves.

The Lettrist poet Isidore Isou included such pieces in a succession of experiments inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire with the "destruction of the anecdote for the form of the poem", a process which, with Tristan Tzara, became "destruction of the word for nothing".

The next stage in Tristan Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views.

Tristan Tzara was by then undertaking a hermeutic research into the work of Goliards and Francois Villon, whom he deeply admired.

Beside the many authors who were attracted into Dada through his promotional activities, Tristan Tzara was able to influence successive generations of writers.

One of the Romanian writers to claim inspiration from Tzara was Jacques G Costin, who nevertheless offered an equally good reception to both Dadaism and Futurism, while Ilarie Voronca's Zodiac cycle, first published in France, is traditionally seen as indebted to The Approximate Man.

Tristan Tzara's poetry influenced Samuel Beckett ; the Irish author's 1972 play Not I shares some elements with The Gas Heart.

Some credit Tristan Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk.

Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead, and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science.

An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinesti since 1998.

Rothenberg dedicated several of his poems to Tristan Tzara, as did the Neo-Dadaist Valery Oisteanu.

At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tristan Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.

Tristan Tzara's role was notably played by David Westhead in the 1993 British production, and by Tom Hewitt in the 2005 American version.

Alongside his collaborations with Dada artists on various pieces, Tristan Tzara himself was a subject for visual artists.

Years before their split, Francis Picabia used Tristan Tzara's calligraphed name in Moleculaire, a composition printed on the cover of 391.

Portraits of Tzara were made by Greta Knutson, Robert Delaunay, and the Cubist painters M H Maxy and Lajos Tihanyi.

Rumors in the literary community had it that Tristan Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world.

Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tristan Tzara is identifiable as "Dr Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.