ILLYÉS VERSUS ÉLUARD
ILLYÉS VERSUS ÉLUARD

Summary/Abstract: In September 1948 the famous poet Paul Éluard, perhaps the brightest star among the French Communist Party intellectuals, toured Central Europe. He visited Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where I met him when he visited the class in which we were familiarising ourselves with the secrets of the French language. Éluard was a handsome, tall man with grey hair, and he began by distributing sweets among the children. We knew by then that you should never accept sweets from strangers, but our schoolmistress explained to us who the visitor was. Éluard was not a stranger, he was a good man. In Prague – as we found out much later from a novel by Milan Kundera – he was not too shy to join a circle dance of enthusiastic young Czechs on Wenceslas Square, and he danced with them happily. He did this, Kundera adds wickedly, while the Parisian ex-surrealist’s Czech surrealist friends were being hanged by the poet’s new comrades.

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