Blaise Cendrars was a great fabricator in front of the Lord. So we used to qualify as “invention” the text placed at the head of his bibliography: Novgorode legend. According to the Swiss writer, it was a matter of the translation in Russian of a disappeared French original, a long poem inspired in 1907 by the tragic death in Moscow of Hélène, a loved woman. All research undertaken to find one of the fourteen copies of the declared draw had remained in vain. Until today in 1995 when the ghost text was discovered by chance with a bookist from Sofia. The author of the find was another poet, Kiril Kadiiski, the most serious Bulgarian pretender at the Nobel Prize in literature.
As such, the best placed to assess the value of the treasure that fell into his hands: Novgorode legend did not just announce the great works to come as Trans -Siberian prosebut also received the explanation of the pseudonym chosen by the one who was born under the name of Frédéric Sauser.
Blaise Cendrars, the lover devastated under the embers and the ashes
The poem’s inspirer had disappeared in a fire, the devastated lover now placed his existence under the sign of the embers (Blaise) and the ashes (Cendrars). Birth of Blaise Cendrars. Newcomer to the world thus announced in the poem: “At midnight, we raised the bridges – stone doors to enter the sky or get out of hell … / But I did not trust who was entering or leaving / and my memory today is like the Nuit Blanche / because we removed my Hélène / and Troy is already reduced to ashes. »»
From controversy to diplomatic risk
All of this was very beautiful, was it not too beautiful? To start, if there was a man on earth capable of conceiving such a mystification, it was Kiril Kadiiski. Translator of Russian and French in Bulgarian, publisher, prolific poet, winner of the Max Jacob Prize, he appeared among all as the rare bird capable of imitating the voice of Cendrars. In the interview he gave us, Claude Leroy, grand master of Candrarsian studies, expressed serious doubts, wondering in particular if the case did not constitute a new Spiritual huntby reference to the pastiche of Rimbaud who abused some of the best specialists in his work-but not André Breton, who did not fail to overwhelm them in a text entitled Flagrant offense.
Some literary bloodhounds then looked into the poem and picked up various anachronisms, the most unfortunate of which concerned the police of the Cyrillic characters used in Novgorode legend And created in 1988. The tight examination of the brochure might have delivered other elements of appreciation, but it was sold to a collector… for false. Things were invented by a controversy between Kiril Kadiiski and the academic Oxana Khlopina, author of a thesis in which the proofs were accumulating against the authenticity of the miraculous text. Which did not mean that Kiril Kadiiski was the forger. And precisely, what was the attitude of the interested party while the scandal took unexpected proportions?
On the scene, she oscillated between simple denial (“It was not I who wrote Novgorode legendI have neither linguistic means nor technical means … ”) and threatens to transform controversy into a diplomatic crisis, the poet having become director of the Bulgarian cultural center in Paris. In the city, however, hovered a certain ambiguity, to say the least. Whenever we tackled the subject together, Kiril Kadiiski seemed to be as anxious to exonerate as proving that he would have been able to accomplish the literary feat in question. Our last conversation took place on the terrace of a Sofia coffee by a beautiful summer day. I asked him again if he was the author of the poem – he kept silent. How do you say “Who does not say word consents” in Bulgarian?
The legend of NovgorodBlaise Cendrars, Fata Morgana, 64 pages, 18 euros.
