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Abstract:

The article examines the poem by the famous Dadaist Tristan Tzara, written in the anti-fascist underground in early 1943, which gave the name to the poetry collection released in Toulouse in 1944, “Une Route Seul Soleil” (“One Way Only Sun”). This poem is a fairly typical and modest example of poetry “for the occasion”. In it, images associated with war (knives, crows, night, dark chestnut, etc.) and hope (spring, star, the words “with a mint heart”, the sun) appear in italics without punctuation and without pathos. The most interesting thing about it is the name, which is an acrostic that should be read as “USSR” (URSS). Tzara expresses his hope in the form of a cipher (albeit not very complex), instead of enjoying the “Soviet sound”, as Aragon did ten years before in the poem “Red Front” and the collection “Hurrah Ural!”, dogmatically singing Soviet abbreviations in different ways. Tzara, on the contrary, seems to hide the essence of his poem, thereby forcing the reader to look for inner content, inner music… According to archival research at RGALI, the poem turns out to be dedicated to a specific event — the victory of the Soviet people in the Battle of Stalingrad, as evidenced by a copy of the collection presented by the author to Vsevolod Vishnevsky on November 21, 1946 during a trip to Belgrade. The acrostic turns out to be a literal expression of both the personal and social content of the poem. Cryptography has always been more or less characteristic of Tzara’s work, and he devoted the last decade of his life to deciphering the anagrams of Francois Villon. The analysis of the poem and the collection of the same name is given in the context of the avant-garde creativity and socio-political activity of Tzara.

Keywords: Tristan Tzara, acrostic, Dadaism, avant-garde, Communism, the Great Patriotic War, underground poetry.