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| Le Grand Jeu | |
|---|---|
| Name | Le Grand Jeu |
| Formation | 1928 |
| Founders | René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger Vailland |
| Location | Paris |
| Dissolved | 1935 |
| Key people | André Rolland de Renéville, Radovan Ivšić, Antonin Artaud |
| Notable works | Le Grand Jeu (journal), Boule de Suif (not related), Le Contre-Ciel |
Le Grand Jeu was a short-lived but influential avant-garde literary and artistic movement centered in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Founded by a small coterie of writers and poets, it produced a journal and a series of texts that engaged with contemporary currents in Surrealism, Dada, Symbolism, and esoteric traditions. Although overshadowed by larger movements, the group's experiments influenced later figures in French literature, theatre, and poetry across Europe.
Le Grand Jeu emerged from bohemian circles in Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés against the backdrop of post-World War I cultural upheaval. Its founders, including René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, and Roger Vailland, reacted to the institutionalization of Surrealism under André Breton after the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. Meetings took place in cafés frequented by expatriate communities from Spain, Russia, and Italy, alongside émigrés from Central Europe such as Radovan Ivšić. The journal was launched as an explicit challenge to established periodicals like La Révolution surréaliste and magazines associated with Dada, Les Nabis, and the Symbolist revival.
Central figures included poets and essayists René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, and Roger Vailland, whose intellectual networks extended to playwrights and critics such as Antonin Artaud and publishers in Paris and Lyon. Collaborators and correspondents featured names like André Rolland de Renéville, the Croatian poet Radovan Ivšić, and artists from circles around Picasso-adjacent ateliers and galleries showing works by Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst. International contacts linked the group to writers in Spain like Federico García Lorca, surrealist sympathizers in Belgium such as Paul Nougé, and figures in Italy including Eugenio Montale. Photographers, painters, and musicians associated with the movement intersected with exhibitions at venues connected to Galerie Pierre and salons hosted by aristocrats with ties to La Revue blanche.
The movement articulated a syncretic doctrine blending mystical practices, occult studies, and radical aesthetic experimentation, drawing on sources ranging from Gnosticism-influenced essays to translations of Rainer Maria Rilke and readings of Arthur Rimbaud. It positioned itself against the institutionalized tenets of André Breton's Surrealism while sharing interests in dream imagery and automatism present in Sigmund Freud-inspired circles. Doctrinally, members engaged with esoteric currents associated with Theosophy and texts circulated by G.I. Gurdjieff adherents, and they maintained correspondences with critics and philosophers like Gaston Bachelard and Georges Bataille. The group emphasized initiation, inner experience, and what members described as a quest for an "absolute" achieved through poetic practice, theatrical experiment, and ritualized readings.
The primary organ was the journal Le Grand Jeu, which published manifestos, poems, plays, and criticism alongside visual work by contemporary painters and graphic artists. Contributors released pamphlets, small-run books, and collaborative texts: poetry collections by René Daumal, experimental plays influenced by Antonin Artaud's theories, and essays critiquing established journals such as Minotaure and Documents. Several texts circulated in limited editions through small presses connected with publishers in Montmartre and printer collectives allied with radical periodicals like Commune. Notable individual works associated with members include Daumal's later prose, Gilbert-Lecomte's poetry, and Vailland's early fiction, which later appeared in mainstream outlets such as Gallimard.
Contemporaneous reactions ranged from admiration in some avant-garde reviews to dismissal by mainstream critics at newspapers like Le Figaro and Le Temps. The group attracted polemical responses from leaders of Surrealism who accused it of mysticism and sectarianism, provoking disputes in periodicals and public forums alongside debates involving figures such as Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard. Intellectuals in academic and artistic institutions, including reviewers affiliated with Collège de France circles and critics writing for La Nouvelle Revue française, criticized the group's obscurantism, while right-leaning commentators in conservative papers framed their activities as decadent. Posthumous reassessments by historians of modernism and scholars at universities like Sorbonne and École normale supérieure re-evaluated their contributions within broader 20th-century currents.
Though its formal existence was brief, the movement's emphasis on inner experience and cross-disciplinary collaboration influenced later writers, dramatists, and poets across France, Yugoslavia, and Spain. Its rapprochement with theatrical experimentation fed into the work of Jean Genet and practitioners in the postwar Theatre of the Absurd alongside directors associated with Théâtre de l'Atelier. Scholars tracing the genealogy of European avant-garde movements cite Le Grand Jeu in studies linking Surrealism to postwar existentialist and post-structuralist currents involving names like Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault. Archives in city institutions in Paris and collections at libraries such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France hold extant issues and manuscripts, supporting ongoing research and exhibitions at museums that have featured related materials alongside works by Salvador Dalí and Man Ray.
Category:French literary movements