Nadja (novel)
Nadja is a novel by French writer André Breton. The text was written in 1928 and revised in 1962. The novel begins with the unexpected meeting of the author with a young woman, Nadja, which exerts a certain fascination for him.
Content
Nadja is a personality that seems to live outside of reality. She wanders aimlessly through the streets of Paris, her name is not even her real name. She explains that she had chosen the name himself, and that was in Russian Nadia the beginning of the word for hope. The author is quickly aware that Nadja surrounds a strange power of fascination that gives it its beauty. So in the eyes of Breton's Nadja is a kind of symbol for what he imagines as Surrealism, it is a symbol of love that crazy to love ( l' amour fou ) threatens to become. It is a symbol of the glorification of life, and see -driven equally owned abilities, such as a series of "objective chance " shows. This being, that seems to be supernatural, comes in a paradoxical situation. Just as it is a sign of love, Nadja is also lonely. In addition, it also indicates that they have prostituted themselves at the time of their arrival in Paris a few times. The " magical creature " is made from reality to a mentally ill, dismissed their visions as auditory and visual hallucinations. Last unit of the Surrealists the symbol of the glory of life crowned in a mental institution, an end that is in perfect contrast to the name she had given herself. André Breton remains throughout the book in his role as an observer, the opposite is Nadja and want to preserve its objectivity, also struggling not to fall even to madness, would like to Nadja pull them. He openly criticized psychiatry after the young woman was admitted there.
Nadja André Breton asked to dedicate her a book to help her trace remains, as if she'd had an idea of the tragic outcome of their lives. The book of Breton then written is very complex: The author saves intentionally with descriptive prose and instead inserts add pictures, show the places visited, taken or mentioned people, paintings or drawings of friendly Surrealists, of himself or of Nadja. They become a kind of parallel history which communicates with the text of the book, and sometimes lift the pictures some of the text sentences out ( the photographs are often subtitled by a literal text citation ).
The novel concludes with a definition of beauty that became famous: ". Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be "
Review
Nadja is considered one of the standard works of surrealism. According to Karl Heinz Bohrer, the novel is a "base font of classic modernism ".