![]() |
[eng] Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault and Vadim Klimov This is a hybrid of relict surrealism and contemporary absurdism. The Publishing Company “Devastator” represents its third book: Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault and Vadim Klimov "Les Champs magnetiques" and "Free Meals at Railway Stations" [series dead text / prose]. The old, half-dead and battered thing is over the new, half-alive and bright one. It’s upside-down, to be more precise. Vadim Klimov (born in 1982) is an editor of the Russian version of the modernist magazine "Le devastateur", absurdist fiction writer, experimental cinema director. He works as a cook in Moscow. The micro-novel “Free Meals at Railway Stations”, which is his initial experience in novelry, was first published in the second issue of Opustoshitel (The Devastator) magazine in October 2010. The narration focuses on the lives of the personnel of “Butterbread’s”, unpretentious cafe in the city outskirts. There are the host of the caff Miserel; his mother madam Marisolle lodged at the under-the ceiling storage bin with her legs being sawn-off; waitresses pani Tortoise, missis Flattened, madam Cachalot and senhora Gooditte, along with their assistant dwarf Mario. Altogether eight characters are scurrying around through thirty-seven chapters, and after that the novel starts at the second time. At the back side the book opens in a completely different way. Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault, the founders of French surrealism, need no representation, so they won’t be represented. Let’s concentrate on their works. The book includes the joint writings of Breton and Soupalt: the poem “Les Champs magnetiques” (translated by Elena Galtsova) and the play “S'il Vous Plait” (translated by Vasily Kondratiev). As the harbingers of surrealism using the pioneering technique of automatic writing, these two texts are like return to the womb, like the glasses being found by chance, like a balm to the slightly rotten soul of our contemporaries. Surrealism was and remains the major aesthetic trend, the guide for strays. This book is a brilliant palindrome, as a connoisseur of the avant-garde Kirill Zakharov put it, though on the different occasion.![]() |