Lothreamon

Youth

Ducasse was born in Montevideo , Uruguay , in the family of Francois Ducasse, a French consular worker and his wife, Jacquette-Celestine Davzac. Little is known about Isidore's childhood: that he was baptized on November 16, 1847 in a cathedral in Montevideo, and that shortly afterwards his mother died (probably during an epidemic). In 1851, when he was five years old, he survived the end of the eight-year siege of Montevideo during the Argentine-Uruguay War. Ducasse spoke three languages: French, Spanish and English.

In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, Isidore's father sent him to school in France. Ducasse received a classical French education at the Imperial Lyceum in Tarbes . In 1863 he entered the Lyceum, now named after Louis Barthe , in the city of Pau, where he studied rhetoric and philosophy. It is known that he excelled in arithmetic and drawing, showing the extravagance of his style and thinking.

Isidore liked to read Edgar Allan Poe , Shelley , Byron , as well as Adam Miscavige , Milton , Robert Southey , Alfred de Musset , and Baudelaire . At school, he was fascinated by the blinding scene in the tragedy of Oedipus by Sophocles . According to his school friend Paul Lespez: "His exuberant imagination found his best reflection in an essay in French, which allowed Ducasse, with an amazing abundance of detail, to sketch the most terrible pictures of death." ^[1] After graduation, he decided to become a writer; lived in Tarbe, was friends with Georges Dase - the son of his guardian.

Years in Paris

After a short stay with his father in Montevideo, Ducasse settled in Paris at the end of 1867, where he began his studies at the Polytechnic School, which he dropped out a year later. The constant financial assistance of his father allowed Ducasse to devote himself completely to creativity. He lived in the Intellectual Quarter, a hotel on Notre Dame de Victoire, where he worked intensively on the first song from the Songs of Maldoror . It is possible that he began this work before moving to Montevideo, and then only continued it.

Ducasse was a frequent visitor to local libraries, where he read romantic literature, scholarly works, and encyclopedias. Publisher Leon Gononso described it like this: “A big dark young man, beardless, agile, neat and hardworking” and added that Ducasse writes “only at night, sitting at the piano, wildly recites, rings his keys, minting new texts to these sounds.”

At the end of 1868, Ducasse anonymously and at his own expense published the first song from “Songs of Maldoror”: a booklet of 32 pages.

On November 10, 1868, Isidore sent a letter to writer Victor Hugo with two copies of the first song, and asked for recommendations for further publication. A new edition of the first song appeared at the end of January 1869 in the collection “Parfums De L'Ame” in Bordeaux. Here Ducasse used his pseudonym "Lothreamon" for the first time. The name chosen was the name of the character “Latréaumont” from the popular French Gothic novel Eugene Sue , who was an arrogant and blasphemous anti-hero, similar in a sense to Isidorowski Maldoror.

The name was probably rephrased as L'Autre Amon (another Amon), although it could also be interpreted as "L'Autre Amont" (the other side of the river).

All six songs were supposed to be published at the end of 1869 by Albert Lacroix in Brussels, which at one time published the author Eugene Sue. When the book was already printed, Lacroix refused to distribute it to bookstores because he feared prosecution for blasphemy and obscene behavior. Ducasse decided that this was because “life in the songs is too harsh” (letter to the banker Darasse of March 12, 1870).

Death

In the spring of 1869, Ducasse often changed his address - from 32 Fobourg Montmartre Street to 15 Vivienne Street, and then back to Fobourg Montmartre Street, where he lived in a hotel in room 7. Waiting for the distribution of his book, Ducasse worked on a new text supplementing his “phenomenological description of evil,” in which he wanted to describe good. Two works, according to his plan, form a single whole, the dichotomy of good and evil. The work, however, remained unfinished.

In April and June 1870, Ducasse published the first two parts, which were obviously intended to be the foreword to the work “Chants of Good” in two small pamphlets, Poems I and II. This time he published his real name, dropping the pseudonym. He distinguished two parts of his work: philosophical and poetic, announcing that he had begun the fight against evil (which was a complete change of his previous works):

I replace melancholy with courage, doubt with confidence, despair with hope, bitterness with kindness, moaning with a sense of duty, skepticism with faith, sophism with cold calm and pride with modesty. ^[2]

Ducasse died at the age of 24 on November 24, 1870 at 8:00 in the morning at his hotel. His death certificate no longer contained any additional information. Since many were afraid of epidemics, and besides, while Paris was under siege, Ducasse was buried the day after serving in Notre Dame de Laura in a temporary grave in the northern cemetery. In January 1871, his body was reburied somewhere else.

In his "Poems" Lothreamon declared: "I will not leave memories", and therefore the details of the life of the author of "Songs of Maldoror" remain largely unknown.

The main work that brought him fame was “ Songs of Maldoror ” ( French Les Chants de Maldoror , 1869 ). This is a bizarre and bewitching work, shocking the reader with "folly" and "blasphemy"; verses alternate with rhythmic prose depicting a surreal world populated by demonic characters; monologues of the lyrical hero are characterized by nihilism and black humor . During his lifetime, the author was unable to publish the work.

The manuscript “Songs” was found several years after the author’s death in a desk drawer by the publisher’s editor, who refused to print it. Nevertheless, being published, the Songs immediately won an army of admirers and had a huge impact on the French Symbolists. The similarity of his creative manner with that of Arthur Rimbaud is noted.

In Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, Lautreamon was not as popular as the leading French Symbolists, but his first translations appeared at this time. The full Russian translation of “Songs of Maldoror” ( N. Mavlevich ) appeared only in the 1990s .

• Kozovoi, Vadim Markovich
• Mavlevich, Natalia Samoilovna
• Strizhevskaya, Natalya Iosifovna

• The poetry of French symbolism. Lothreamon. Songs of Maldoror / Compilation, general edition and introductory article by G.K. Kosikova, M., Moscow State University Publishing House, 1993, Translation N. Mavlevich, ISBN 5-211-01758-7
• Lothreamon. Songs of Maldoror. Poems. Lotreamon after Lotreamon / Compilation, general edition and introductory article by G.K. Kosikova, M., Ad Marginem, 1998, Translation N. Mavlevich, ISBN 5-88059-034-8
• Lothreamon, Songs of Maldoror, M., Provocateurs Club, 2012, Translation N. Mavlevich, ISBN 978-5-9903349-1-5
• Lothreamon, Songs of Maldoror, M., AST: (Book non grata), 2015, N. Mavlevich, ISBN 978-5-17-087265-7

Texts of the Count de Lotreamon

• “Songs of Maldoror” (Translations by N. Mavlevich, V. Kozovoy and N. Strizhevskaya)
• “Poems” (Translation by M. Golovanivskaya)

Reception and literary criticism

• Evgeny Golovin Count Lottreamon - winged octopuses of consciousness - text, Radio performance of Alexander Dugin from the FINIS MUNDI cycle by Evgeny Golovin
• G.K. Kosikov Two Ways of French Postromantism: Symbolists and Lothreamon (1993)
• G.K. Kosikov “The Infernal Machine” by Lotreamon (1998)

• Lothreamon: Russian site