Jean-Richard BLOCH (1884-1947). - Lot 183

Lot 183
Go to lot
Estimation :
3000 - 4000 EUR
Jean-Richard BLOCH (1884-1947). - Lot 183
Jean-Richard BLOCH (1884-1947). 33 L.A.S. to Antonina Vallentin (1893-1957), and to her husband Julien Luchaire [29 to Valentina, 2 to Julien, and 2 addressed to both]. Meudon, Leipzig, Paris, Belgrade and "at the Mérigote" [her property-refuge near Poitiers], 1927-1947. Numerous envelopes. One written on a card representing the Mérigote. 74 pp. in-4 (mostly) and in-8. Beautiful and very interesting intimate and intellectual correspondence, mainly addressed to Antonina known as "Tosia", journalist, painter, writer, co-editor of the magazine Nord und Süd; she held one of the most important Berlin salons in the 1920s, and was a friend of Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig. In 1929 she married Julien Luchaire, director of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, and lived in Paris. Their intimate relationship took shape during Bloch's trip to Germany and on the train home he wrote these words. "I could not respond freely to the sweetness of your voice and the tenderness of your farewell. This visit, which I was able to make to you this morning, this short appearance of you during these few minutes, after the great disappointment of yesterday, have filled me with a strange and melancholy gladness. I cannot believe that you will not be on the platform where I am getting off, and that I will not find you at the bend in my path, now that I have resumed my wandering life. A few hours of solitude together in a small German town in this lovely season - was that too ambitious a dream? My God, how far away Cologne is, and how noisy these banks of the Rhine! There are stopovers between Vienna and Paris! That you were yourself, this morning, -(I think). I carry you in the palm of my hand, in the fold of my eyelids, in the shadow of my lashes. How singular is your power! Tosha, enigmatic Tosha, East and West mixed, sagacity and madness, coldness and enthusiasm, skill and clumsiness, strength and weakness, woman-man and woman-child, pride and humility, fury and sweetness, that you please me in your complexity, for me alone, perhaps, easily decipherable. You are so much like me, my sister of race, free and primitive even in this decor of refinement, where you show yourself with the grace proper to those who are not prisoners of it [] ". He evokes his visit to Stefan Zweig in Salzburg, the performance of the Kurdish Night in Geneva, and recounts his dreams. "I dreamed of you, on Saturday night, with an obstinacy, an insistence that successive awakenings could not discourage. I was feverish. You were desperate. I did not manage to relieve your grief which was sobbing and infinite, yet manly, and all the more moving. I also dreamed that instead of the elm tree on Wichmannstrasse, there were two. We were these two abalone trees, our feet held under the asphalt, our heads beaten by the wind, last survivors of the great primeval forest, monstrous specimens of a free race, in the middle of this cage of bricks, cement, steel and slaves. We desolate one beside the other, without a complaint [] ". The correspondence goes on like this, from the passion of the first months to a conversation about his life, his work, his stays in Merigot, his travels, the political events, their common friends. "R. Rolland and Gandhi? The thing is, I haven't written to Rolland in quarters any more than I've written to anyone else. I have read letters from him, in L'Humanité, which show him unreservedly rallying to Leninist politics (end of non-violence, armed insurrection, etc.) []". He also mentions the Merigot. "I am exhausted. Paris [], the events of these last days, public and private, made me find the luminous calm and the aromatic serenity of my valley even more adorable than usual [] ". The correspondence is interrupted during the war years, to resume in '45: resumption of the writing of Ce Soir, health problems, and the desolation at La Merigote: "I had to come to our looted, soiled shack, with broken windows, to try to overcome this acute crisis of overwork which had put me on the ground []". The last letter is dated March 6, 1947, 9 days before his death. It concludes as follows: "I will leave to rest in the south. Order of my Party. Say again that it is not a nice Party!
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue