Aragon, Elsa Triolet: Love and Politics in the Cold War

On October 13-14, 2000 at Columbia University's Maison Francaise an international and interdiciplinary conference was held on Aragon, Elsa Triolet: Love and Politics in the time of the Cold War. (1) Many conferences had been organized on Aragon and Triolet in Europe, particularly in recent years on the occasion of Aragon's anniversary. (2) However, the Columbia University conference was the first of its kind at an American university. In this way it was quite an unprecedented event. Yet the fact that it was so well attended, giving rise to lively debates among scholars of several different fields and successfully drawing audiences away from the bright sunshine of the New York Indian summer, was proof that it spoke to the public's concerns in a variety of ways. I wish to retrace briefly how this project came into being. Louis Aragon (1897-1982) was arguably one of the most important and influential French writers of the twentieth century. As a novelist, a poet, an art critic, a member of the French Resistance, and an active member of the Parti Communiste Francais, he was throughout his long life a major figure of the French cultural land scape. (3) In spite of his political, historical and cultural importance, Aragon remains insufficiently known in this country. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Aragon is known here chiefly for his early Surrealist works, and to a lesser extent as a poet of the Resistance. (4) Thus Aragon deserves to be better known; this is even more true of his wife, writer Elsa Triolet (1896-1970), born Elsa Kagan, to a wealthy and assimilated Jewish family of the Saint Petersburg intelligentsia. Elsa's sister Lili Brik had a long relationship with the poet Maiakovsky, and both eventually fell victim to the increasingly dictatorial Soviet regime. Elsa herself moved to France and later married Aragon, whom she helped turn away from Surrealism and into a staunch Communist militant. Elsa Triolet, who wrote most of her work in French, is becoming better known, and deservedly so, in part because her fiction (especially the later one) deals with modern feminist issues such as women's involvement in politics. (5) It is my hope that the New York conference, where several papers focused on her, will help build on this incipient interest. In addition, Elsa Triolet's work is historically, thematically and formally inseparable from Aragon's. "Le Couple" (as they were known to the press in the fifties and sixties, at the height of their celebrity) decided, when they entered old age, that they wanted their works to be interwoven in a manner that would reflect and render permanent the bond that united them in life. Triolet's novels and Aragon's novels entered into a dialogue which was eventually formalized by the joint publication of their complete fiction in the OEuvres romanesques croisees in which his and her works alternate and respond both thematically and structurally to one another, and where the original texts are accompanied by new prefaces and lavishly illustrated. (6) This innovative publication venture, in addition to promoting each other's works, was an attempt to rethink the individualistic notion of Author. Rather than on the celebrated Surrealist period, then, I thought it interesting to focus instead on a more recent, and politically much more problematic period of Aragon's long career. The succession of historical and political crises since World War II (the Cold War, the end of the Stalin era, the enduring Jewish question, just to name a few) was reflected in the Couple's personal and aesthetic crisis. It was also the time in which the project of interweaving their work began to take shape, in what would become the forty-two volumes of the OEuvres romanesques croisees. The extent to which their personal lives and their writing were inextricably bound up with the historical and political events was precisely the stuff of the New York meeting. Like other left-wing intellectuals, Aragon and Triolet were often led by their unconditional loyalty to the Communist Party to deny, misrepresent or even justify the repressive nature of the totalitarian regimes of the Eastern bloc. …