Blaise Cendrars
Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1 September 1887 – 21 January 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars (lang), was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement.
Also recorded as Frederic Louis Sauser · Frédéric Sauser · Blaise Meliani
Blaise Cendrars

Le web pédagogique · Public domain
- Name
- Blaise Cendrars
- Birth Name
- Frédéric-Louis Sauser
- Born
- 1 September 1887
- Birthplace
- La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
- Died
- 21 January 1961
- Place of death
- Paris, France
- Occupation
- Novelist, poet
- Movement
- Modernism, Futurism
- Nationality
- Switzerland · France
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Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1 September 1887 – 21 January 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars (lang), was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement.
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gnd · 50673-4 · wikidata · Q123080 · wikipedia · Blaise Cendrars
In this article
Biography
Biography
Cendrars worked between 1887 and 1961 across war correspondent, journalist, poet, writer and novelist and 5 further recorded occupations. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.
Salut, Blaise!
Martin Greslou
Key facts
Key facts
• Name — Blaise Cendrars • Birth Name — Frédéric-Louis Sauser • Born — 1 September 1887 • Birthplace — La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland • Died — 21 January 1961 • Place of death — Paris, France • Occupation — Novelist, poet • Notable Works — Sutter's Gold (novel) Moravagine Lice (novel) • Movement — Modernism, Futurism
Early years and education
Early years and education
He was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, rue de la Paix 27, into a bourgeois francophone family, to a Swiss father and a Scottish mother. They sent young Frédéric to a German boarding school, but he ran away. At the Realschule in Basel in 1902 he met his lifelong friend the sculptor August Suter. Next they enrolled him in a school in Neuchâtel, but he had little enthusiasm for his studies. Finally, in 1904, he left school due to poor performance and began an apprenticeship with a Swiss watchmaker in Russia. While living in St. Petersburg, he began to write, thanks to the encouragement of R.R., a librarian at the National Library of Russia. There he wrote the poem, "The Legend of Novgorode" (La Légende de Novgorode), which R.R. translated into Russian. Supposedly fourteen copies were made, but Cendrars claimed to have no copies of it, and none could be located during his lifetime. In 1995, the Bulgarian poet Kiril Kadiiski claimed to have found one of the Russian translations in Sofia, but the authenticity of the document remains contested on the grounds of factual, typographic, orthographic, and stylistic analysis. In 1907, Sauser returned to Switzerland, where he studied medicine at the University of Berne. During this period, he wrote his first verified poems, Séquences, influenced by Remy de Gourmont's Le Latin mystique.
Literary career
Literary career
Cendrars was an early exponent of Modernism in European poetry with his works: The Legend of Novgorode (1907), Les Pâques à New York (1912), La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913), Séquences (1913), La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916), Le Panama ou les Aventures de mes sept oncles (1918), J'ai tué (1918), and Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (1919). In many ways, he was a direct heir of Rimbaud, a visionary rather than what the French call un homme de lettres ("a man of letters"), a term that for him was predicated on a separation of intellect and life. Like Rimbaud, who writes in "The Alchemy of the Word" in A Season in Hell, "I liked absurd paintings over door panels, stage sets, backdrops for acrobats, signs, popular engravings, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings," Cendrars similarly says of himself in Der Sturm (1913), "I like legends, dialects, mistakes of language, detective novels, the flesh of girls, the sun, the Eiffel Tower." Spontaneity, boundless curiosity, a craving for travel, and immersion in actualities were his hallmarks both in life and art. He was drawn to this same immersion in Balzac's flood of novels on 19th-century French society and in Casanova's travels and adventures through 18th-century Europe, which he set down in dozens of volumes of memoirs that Cendrars considered "the true Encyclopedia of the eighteenth century, filled with life as they are, unlike Diderot's, and the work of a single man, who was neither an ideologue nor a theoretician". Cendrars regarded the early modernist movement from roughly 1910 to the mid-1920s as a period of genuine discovery in the arts and in 1919 contrasted "theoretical cubism" with "the group's three antitheoreticians," Picasso, Braque, and Léger, whom he described as "three strongly personal painters who represent the three successive phases of cubism." • Illustration — Portrait bust of Blaise Cendrars by August Suter (Paris 1911) After a short stay in Paris, he traveled to New York, arriving on 11 December 1911. Between 6–8 April 1912, he wrote his long poem, Les Pâques à New York ("Easter in New York"), his first important contribution to modern literature. He signed it for the first time with the name Blaise Cendrars. In the summer of 1912, Cendrars returned to Paris, convinced that poetry was his vocation. With Emil Szittya, an anarchist writer, he started the journal Les hommes nouveaux, also the name of the press where he published Les Pâques à New York and Séquences. He became acquainted with the international array of artists and writers in Paris, such as Chagall, Léger, Survage, Suter, Modigliani, Csaky, Archipenko, Jean Hugo and Robert Delaunay. Most notably, he encountered Guillaume Apollinaire. The two poets influenced each other's work. Cendrars's poem Les Pâques à New York influenced Apollinaire's poem Zone. Cendrars's style was based on photographic impressions, cinematic effects of montage and rapid changes of imagery, and scenes of great emotional force, often with the power of a hallucination. These qualities, which also inform his prose, are already evident in Easter in New York and in his best known and even longer poem The Transsiberian, with its scenes of revolution and the Far East in flames in the Russo-Japanese war ("The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion / tortured by a sadic hand / In the rips in the sky insane locomotives / Take flight / In the gaps / Whirling wheels mouths voices / And the dogs of disaster howling at our heels"). The published work was printed within washes of color by the painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk as a fold-out two meters in length, together with her design of brilliant colors down the left-hand side, a small map of the Transsiberian railway in the upper right corner, and a painted silhouette in orange of the Eiffel Tower in the lower left. Cendrars called the work the first "simultaneous poem". Soon after, it was exhibited as a work of art in its own right and continues to be shown at exhibitions to this day. This intertwining of poetry and painting was related to Robert Delaunay's and other artists' experiments in proto-expressionism. At the same time Gertrude Stein was beginning to write prose in the manner of Pablo Picasso's paintings. Cendrars liked to claim that his poem's first printing of one hundred fifty copies would, when unfolded, reach the height of the Eiffel Tower. Cendrars's relationship with painters such as Chagall and Léger led him to write a series of revolutionary abstract short poems, published in a collection in 1919 under the title Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques ("Nineteen Elastic Poems"). Some were tributes to his fellow artists. In 1954, a collaboration between Cendrars and Léger resulted in Paris, ma ville ("Paris, My City"), in which the poet and illustrator together expressed their love of the French capital. As Léger died in 1955, the book was not published until 1987.
The Left-Handed Poet
The Left-Handed Poet
His writing career was interrupted by World War I. When it began, he and the Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo appealed to other foreign artists to join the French army. He joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915, he was in the line at Frise (La Grenouillère and Bois de la Vache). He described this war experience in the books La Main coupée (Lice (novel)/The Bloddy Hand, litt. "The severed hand") and J'ai tué ("I have killed"), and it is the subject of his poem "Orion" in Travel Notes: "It is my star / It is in the shape of a hand / It is my hand gone up to the sky...". It was during the attacks in Champagne in September 1915 that Cendrars lost his right arm and was discharged from the army. Jean Cocteau introduced him to Eugenia Errázuriz, who proved a supportive, if at times possessive, patron. Around 1918 he visited her house and was so taken with the simplicity of the décor that he was inspired to write the poems published as De Outremer à indigo (From ultramarine to indigo). He stayed with Eugenia in her house in Biarritz, in a room decorated with murals by Picasso. At this time, he drove an old Alfa Romeo which had been colour-coordinated by Georges Braque. Cendrars became an important part of the artistic community in Montparnasse; his writings were considered a literary epic of the modern adventurer. He was a friend of the American writer Henry Miller, who called him his "great idol", a man he "really venerated as a writer". He knew many of the writers, painters, and sculptors living in Paris. In 1918, his friend Amedeo Modigliani painted his portrait. He was acquainted with Ernest Hemingway, who mentions having seen him "with his broken boxer's nose and his pinned-up empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand", at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris. He was also befriended by John Dos Passos, who was his closest American counterpart both as a world traveler (even more than Hemingway) and in his adaptation of Cendrars's cinematic uses of montage in writing, most notably in his great trilogy of the 1930s, U.S.A. One of the most gifted observers of the times, Dos Passos brought Cendrars to American readers in the 1920s and 30s by translating Cendrars's major long poems The Transsiberian and Le Panama ou les Aventures de mes sept oncles and in his 1926 prose-poetic essay "Homer of the Transsiberian," which was reprinted from The Saturday Review one year later in Orient Express. After the war, Cendrars became involved in the movie industry in Italy, France, and the United States. Cendrars's departure from poetry in the 1920s roughly coincided with his break from the world of the French intellectuals, summed up in his Farewell to Painters (1926) and the last section of L'homme foudroyé (1944), after which he began to make numerous trips to South America ("while others were going to Moscow", as he writes in that chapter). It was during this second half of his career that he began to concentrate on novels, short stories, and, near the end and just after World War II, on his magnificent poetic-autobiographical tetralogy, beginning with L'homme foudroyé.
Later years
Later years
Cendrars continued to be active in the Paris artistic community, encouraging younger artists and writing about them. For instance, he described the Hungarian photographer Ervin Marton as an "ace of white and black photography" in a preface to his exhibition catalogue. He was with the British Expeditionary Force in northern France at the beginning of the German invasion in 1940, and his book that immediately followed, Chez l'armée anglaise (With the English Army), was seized before publication by the Gestapo, which sought him out and sacked his library in his country home, while he fled into hiding in Aix-en-Provence. He comments on the trampling of his library and temporary "extinction of my personality" at the beginning of L'homme foudroyé (in the double sense of "the man who was blown away"). In Occupied France, the Gestapo listed Cendrars as a Jewish writer of "French expression", but he managed to survive. His youngest son was killed in an accident while escorting American planes in Morocco. Details of his time with the BEF and last meeting with his son appear in his work of 1949 Le Lotissement du ciel (translated simply as Sky). In 1950, Cendrars settled down in the rue Jean-Dolent in Paris, across from the La Santé Prison. There he collaborated frequently with Radiodiffusion Française. He finally published again in 1956. The novel, Emmène-moi au bout du monde!…, was his last work before he suffered a stroke in 1957. He died in 1961. His ashes are held at Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre.
Personal life
Personal life
In New York in 1911, Cendrars married his first wife, Féla Poznańska, who was Jewish and of Russo-Polish extraction. They had three children: Rémy (an airman killed in WW2), Odilon and Miriam Gilou-Cendrars who was active with the Free French in London during World War II. She was her father's first biographer and helped set up the Cendrars Archive in Berne. Cendrars converted to Catholicism on May 1, 1959, and married Raymone Duchâteau, a French actress.
Works
Works
• Illustration — Blaise Cendrars, circa 1907. Name of the work, year of first edition, publisher (in Paris if not otherwise noted) / kind of work / Known translations (year of first edition in that language) • Les Pâques à New York (1912, Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux) / Poem / Spanish (1975) • La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913, Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux) / Poem / Spanish (1975); Bengali (1981, Bish Sataker Pharasi Kabita, Alliance Française de Calcutta; 1997) • Selected Poems Blaise Cendrars (1979, Penguin Modern European Poets, /English tr. Pete Hoida) • Séquences (1913, Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux) • Rimsky-Korsakov et la nouvelle musique russe (1913) • La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916, D. Niestlé, editor) / Poem / Spanish (1975) • Profond aujourd'hui (1917, À la Belle Édition) • Le Panama ou les Aventures de mes sept oncles (1918, Éditions de la Sirène) / Poem / English (1931); Spanish (1975); Bengali (2009) • J'ai tué (1918, La Belle Édition) / Poetic essay / English (1992) • Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques - (1919, Au Sans Pareil) / Poems / Spanish (1975) • La Fin du monde filmée par l'Ange Notre-Dame - (1919, Éditions de la Sirène) / English (1992) • Anthologie nègre - (1921, Éditions de la Sirène) / African Folk Tales / Spanish (1930); English (1972) • Documentaires - (1924, with the title "Kodak", Librairie Stock) / Poems / Spanish (1975) • Feuilles de route - (1924, Au Sans Pareil) / Spanish (1975) • L'Or (1925, Grasset) / Novel / English (Sutter's Gold (novel), 1926, Harper & Bros.) / Spanish (1931) • Moravagine (1926, Grasset) / Novel / Spanish (1935); English (1968); Danish (2016, Basilisk) • L'ABC du cinéma (1926, Les Écrivains Réunis) / English (1992) • L'Eubage (1926, Au Sans Pareil) / English (1992) • Éloge de la vie dangereuse (1926, Les Écrivains Réunis) / Poetic essay / English (1992); Spanish (1994) • Le Plan de l'Aiguille (1927, Au Sans Pareil) / Novel / Spanish (1931); English (1987) • Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs (1928, Éditions de Portiques) / Portuguese (1989) • Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929, Au Sans Pareil) / Novel / Spanish (1930); English (1990) • Une nuit dans la forêt (1929, Lausanne, Éditions du Verseau) / Autobiographical essay • Comment les Blancs sont d'anciens Noirs - (1929, Au Sans Pareil) • Rhum: L'Aventure de Jean Galmot (1930, Grasset) / Novel / Spanish (1937) • Aujourd'hui (1931, Grasset) • Vol à voile (1932, Lausanne, Librairie Payot) • Panorama de la pègre (1935, Grenoble, Arthaud) / Journalism • Hollywood, La Mecque du cinéma (1936, Grasset) / Journalism • Histoires vraies (1937, Grasset) / Stories / Spanish (1938) • La Vie dangereuse (1938, Grasset) / Stories • D'Oultremer à Indigo (1940, Grasset) • Chez l'armée Anglaise (1940, Corrêa) / Journalism • Poésie complète (1944, Denoël), Complete poetic works / English (Complete Poems, tr. by Ron Padgett, Univ. of California Press, 1992) • L'Homme foudroyé (1945, Denoël) / Novel / English (1970); Spanish (1983) • La Main coupée (1946, Denoël) / Novel / (in French) / English (Lice (novel), 1973 / The Bloody Hand, 2014), Spanish (1980) • Bourlinguer (1948, Denoël) / Novel / English (1972); Spanish (2004) • Le Lotissement du ciel (1949, Denoël) / Novel / English (1992) • La Banlieue de Paris (1949, Lausanne, La Guilde du Livre) / Essay with photos by Robert Doisneau • Blaise Cendrars, vous parle... (1952, Denoël) / Interviews by Michel Manoll • Le Brésil, des Hommes sont venus (1952, Monaco, Les Documents d'Art) • Noël aux 4 coins du monde (1953, Robert Cayla) / Stories emitted by radio in 1951 / English (1994) • Emmène-moi au bout du monde!... (1956, Denoël) / Novel / Spanish (1982), English (To the End of the World, 1966, tr. by Alan Brown, Grove Press) • Du monde entier au cœur du monde (1957, Denoël) / • Trop c'est trop (1957, Denoël) • Films sans images (1959, Denoël) • Amours (1961) • Dites-nous Monsieur Blaise Cendrars (1969) • Paris ma ville. Illustrations de Fernand Léger. (1987, Bibliothèque des Arts) • Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs (1921, Editions Denoël)
Life and work
Life and work
Blaise Cendrars was born on 1 September 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Cendrars held the nationality of Switzerland and France. Married to: Raymone Duchâteau. Recorded child: Miriam Cendrars. Cendrars worked as war correspondent, journalist, poet and writer, and the authority record catalogues a further 6 occupations under the same name, among them novelist, travel writer, librettist, designer, French foreign legionnaire and adventurer. Cendrars worked in French. Cendrars died on 21 January 1961 in Paris. Cendrars is buried at Batignolles Cemetery.
Life and career
Dated record
Life and career
Explore 1887–1961
The full dated record · 4 entries
1887
Born at La Chaux-de-Fonds.
1958
Receives Commander of the Legion of Honour.
1961
Receives Grand Prix littéraire de la Ville de Paris.
1961
Dies at Paris.
Works, 1913–1948
Catalogued output
Works, 1913–1948
These are texts written by the subject, distinct both from writings about the subject and from printed editions of other people's work. 5 works carry dates between 1913 and 1948. The 1920s are the densest part of the run, with 2 titles, and that concentration is a fact about what the registers have catalogued rather than a judgement on the work itself. They belong to a run of 55 titles in all, from 1913 to 1948.
The run opens with La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France and closes with Bourlinguer
La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France
1913
L'Or
1925
Moravagine
1926
The Severed Hand
1946
Bourlinguer
1948
Works without a settled date
Catalogued output
Works without a settled date
50 further works are catalogued under Cendrars's name without a date the collections agree on, which is why they are set apart from the dated run rather than placed in it. A selection is set out below and the complete run may be opened beneath it. Pâques à New York, H. 30 — 3 catalogued parts.
Emmène-moi au bout du monde
L'Or: Chapitre I-2
L'Or: Chapitre II-7
L'Or: Chapitre IV-13
L'Or: Chapitre XI-39
L'Or: Chapitre XI-41
L'Or: Chapitre I-4
L'Or: Chapitre III-11
L'Or: Chapitre III-10
L'Or: Chapitre VI-20
L'Or: Chapitre VI-23
L'Or: Chapitre X-32
The complete catalogue · 48
Emmène-moi au bout du monde
L'Or: Chapitre I-2
L'Or: Chapitre II-7
L'Or: Chapitre IV-13
L'Or: Chapitre XI-39
L'Or: Chapitre XI-41
L'Or: Chapitre I-4
L'Or: Chapitre III-11
L'Or: Chapitre III-10
L'Or: Chapitre VI-20
L'Or: Chapitre VI-23
L'Or: Chapitre X-32
Escale à Bahia
L'Or: Chapitre III-9
L'Or: Chapitre V-18
L'Or: Chapitre IX-31
L'Or: Chapitre IV-14
L'Or: Chapitre XII-43
L'Or: Chapitre X-35
L'Or: Chapitre I-1
L'Or: Chapitre VI-24
L'Or: Chapitre VI-25
L'Or: Chapitre VII-26
L'Or: Chapitre IV-15
L'Or: Chapitre III-12
Tu es plus belle que le ciel et la mer
L'Or: Chapitre X-37
L'Or: Chapitre II-6
L'Or: Chapitre I-3
L'Or: Chapitre XI-42
L'Or: Chapitre V-17
L'Or: Chapitre VIII-28
L'Or: Chapitre III-8
L'Or: Chapitre IX-30
L'Or: Chapitre X-36
L'Or: Chapitre VI-22
L'Or: Chapitre VII-27
L'Or: Chapitre VI-21
L'Or: Chapitre II-5
L'Or: Chapitre XII-45
L'Or: Chapitre XII-44
Hommage à Erik Satie
L'Or: Chapitre VI-19
L'Or: Chapitre X-34
L'Or: Chapitre XI-38
L'Or: Chapitre V-16
L'Or: Chapitre X-33
L'Or: Chapitre VIII-29
Books and published writings, 1913–1989
Catalogued output
Books and published writings, 1913–1989
These are catalogued publications carrying the name — editions and printings, distinct from the works they contain and from writing about the subject. The 1980s are the densest part of the run, with 19 titles, and that concentration is a fact about what the registers have catalogued rather than a judgement on the work itself. They belong to a run of 159 titles in all, from 1913 to 2017.
96 editions carry dates between 1913 and 1989
The run opens with La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France and closes with Madame Therese
The entries follow Open Library
Séquences
1913
J'ai tué
1919
Du monde entier
1919
Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques
1919
La fin du monde, filme e par l'Ange N.-D. Roman
1919
La fin du monde, filmée par l'Agne N.-D
1919
Anthologie nègre
1921
Feuilles de route
1924
Kodak (documentaire)
1924
The complete catalogue · 60
96 editions carry dates between 1913 and 1989
The run opens with La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France and closes with Madame Therese
The entries follow Open Library
Séquences
1913
J'ai tué
1919
Du monde entier
1919
Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques
1919
La fin du monde, filme e par l'Ange N.-D. Roman
1919
La fin du monde, filmée par l'Agne N.-D
1919
Anthologie nègre
1921
Feuilles de route
1924
Kodak (documentaire)
1924
L'ABC du cinéma, dated 1926. Éloge de la vie dangereuse
1926
L'eubage aux antipodes de l'unité
1926
Sutter's gold
1926
Le plan de l'aiguille. Dated 1927
Une nuit dans la forêt
1929
Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs
1929
Little black stories for little white children
1929
Feu le lieutenant Bringolf
1930
L'étrange aventure du Lieutenant Bringolf
1930
Little black stories
1931
Vol à voiles
1932
La vie secrète de Jean Galmot
1934
Panorama de la pègre
1935
Histoires vraies. Dated 1938
Dan-Yack
1946
La main coupée
1946
Poésies complètes
1947
L' home foudroyé
1947
Antarctic fugue
1948
Blaise Cendrars [par] Jacques Henry Lévesque, avec une anthologie des plus belles pages de l'oeuvre de B. Cendrars, une bibliographie complète et 6 planches en hors-texte
1948
Bourlinger
1948
La banlieue de Paris
1949
Noël aux quatre coins du monde
1953
La fin du monde
1956
Roman
1956
Du monde entier au coeur du monde
1957
Films sans images [par] Blaise Cendrars avec la collaboration de Nino Frank
1959
L'homme foudroyé
1960
Dan Yack (Le plan de l'aiguille), dated 1960. [Oeuvres
1960
Vol à voile (and) Une nuit dans la forêt
1960
Wind der Welt =
1960
Petits contes nègres
1960
Amours
1961
La perle fiévreuse
1962
Gold
1963
Rażony gromem
1964
La peinture sous le signe de Blaise Cendrars
1965
Du Monde Entier Poesies Completes / 1912 1924
1966
Maravagine
1966
Poésies complètes, 1912-1924
1967
Du Monde Entier/Poesies Completes 1912-24
1967
Au coeur du monde
1968
Au coeur du monde, précédé de Feuilles de route, Sudaméricaines, Poıemes divers
1968
Au cœur du monde
1968
The Astonished Man
1970
Emmene Moi Au Bout De Monde
1972
L' Or. [Suivi de] Hollywood
1973
Po vsemu miru i vglubʹ mira
1974
A further 26 recorded entries stand behind this article and are held on the record.
Books and published writings, 1990–2017
Catalogued output
Books and published writings, 1990–2017
The 1990s are the densest part of the run, with 25 titles, and that concentration is a fact about what the registers have catalogued rather than a judgement on the work itself.
60 editions carry dates between 1990 and 2017
The run opens with Confessions of Dan Yack and closes with Œuvres romanesques
Confessions of Dan Yack
1990
Ecrivez-moi."
1991
Paris Ma Ville (Collection Paris)
1991
Complete poems
1992
Al cuore del mondo
1992
Jéroboam et La Sirène
1992
Modernities and other writings
1992
Contos negrospara os filhos dos brancos
1993
Le Serpent à plumes
8, [Francographes]
1993
The complete catalogue · 58
60 editions carry dates between 1990 and 2017
The run opens with Confessions of Dan Yack and closes with Œuvres romanesques
Confessions of Dan Yack
1990
Ecrivez-moi."
1991
Paris Ma Ville (Collection Paris)
1991
Complete poems
1992
Al cuore del mondo
1992
Jéroboam et La Sirène
1992
Modernities and other writings
1992
Contos negrospara os filhos dos brancos
1993
Le Serpent à plumes
8, [Francographes]
1993
Christmas at the four corners of the earth
1994
Rhum
1995
Petits Contes Negres pour les Enfants
1995
Correspondance, 1934-1979
1995
La vie et la mort du soldat inconnu
1995
L' eubage
1995
Morabaz'in
1996
Blaise Cendrars, La Carissima
1996
La légende de Novgorode
1997
Madame mon copain
1997
Histoires de new york
1998
D'oultremer à Indigo
1998
Brésil
1998
Hollywood La Meca del Cine, dated 1998. Ha-Prozah shel ha-Ṭrans-Siberit ṿe-shirim aḥerim
1999
Altin
2000
Hollywood, volume 3: La Mecque du cinéma, suivi de: L'ABC du cinéma et de
2001
Les armoires chinoises
2001
L' or, la merveilleuse histoire du Général Johann August Suter; Rhum, la vie secrète de Jean Galmot; suivie de l'Argent
2001
L'Or, suivi de "Rhum" et de "L'Argent"
2001
La Main coupée, suivi de
2002
L'Homme foudroyé, suivi de Le Sans-Nom
2002
Prose of the Trans-Siberian & of the Little Jeanne De France
2002
Confessions of Dan Yack (Peter Owen Modern Classic)
2003
Dan Yack (Peter Owen Modern Classic)
2003
Zabierz mnie na koniec świata!. Dated 2004
O Fim do Mundo Filmado pelo Anjo N.-D. (Portuguese Edition)
2004
Mon voyage en Amérique
2004
Trotamundear
2004
Hollywood
2005
El Oro/the Gold
2006
Films Without Images
2007
La prose du Transsibérien et la petite Jehanne de France
2008
Venise, Naples, Bordeaux, Anvers
2009
Hollywood Sinemanin Kabesi
2009
Partir
2011
Yolculuk Notlari
2011
Blaise Cendrars-Henry Miller, correspondance 1934-1959
2013
Les grandes heures
2013
Blaise Cendrars-Robert Guiette, lettres 1920-1959
2013
La Main coupée et autres récits de guerre, dated 2013. Œuvres autobiographiques complètes
2013
Blaise Cendrars, Henry Poulaille
2014
Prose of the Trans-siberian & of the little Jeannie de France
2014
L'amiral
2014
Blaise Cendrars-Raymone Duchâteau
2015
Mon voyage en Amérique/Le retour
2015
Blaise Cendrars-Jacques-Henry Lévesque, dated 2017. Œuvres romanesques
2017
Books and published writings without a settled date
Catalogued output
Books and published writings without a settled date
3 further editions are catalogued under Cendrars's name without a date the collections agree on, which is why they are set apart from the dated run rather than placed in it.
Lor La Merveilleuse Histoire Du General
Moravagine (Peter Owen Modern Classic)
Legacy and honors
• In 1960, André Malraux, the Minister of Culture, awarded him the title of Commander of the Légion d'honneur for his wartime service. • 1961, Cendrars was awarded the Paris Grand Prix for literature. • His literary estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern. • The Centre d'Études Blaise Cendrars (CEBC) has been established at the University of Berne in his honor and for the study of his work. • The French-language Association internationale Blaise Cendrars was established to study and preserve his works. • The Lycée Blaise-Cendrars in La Chaux-de-Fonds and the Collège Blaise Cendrars in Boissy-Saint-Léger were named in his honor. • In 2023 Cendrars was the subject of an exhibition, Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961): Poetry Is Everything, at the Morgan Library & Museum.
Primary material
Documents and archives
authority file
- Gemeinsame Normdatei 50673-4, Association internationale Blaise Cendrars.
Unverified · Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
reference work
- “Blaise Cendrars”, English Wikipedia, consulted as further reading
Reputable secondary · Wikipedia
authority record
- Wikidata, structured authority record Q123080: Blaise Cendrars
Unverified · Wikidata
Where the work is held
Honours and awards
They run from 1958 to 1961.
4 honours stand against the name
Croix de guerre 1914–1918
Commander of the Legion of Honour
1958
Grand Prix littéraire de la Ville de Paris
1961
Literature
Further cited scholarship
4 scholarly and reference publications are cited here, each one identified by title and by the publication, publisher or institution that carried it, with its year where the register states one. The cited literature runs from 2003 to 2023, which is a measure of how long Cendrars has been a subject of scholarship rather than of how much has been written. The publications represented include French Studies, Blaise Cendrars et l’homme foudroyé, Twentieth-Century Literature and Twentieth Century Literature. The Encyclopedia cites this literature and does not summarise the arguments of works it has not read in full.
The Invention of Life
Reaktion Books, 2022. Pp. Ill, French Studies, 2023
La lecture impossible, Blaise Cendrars et l’homme foudroyé, 2019
Authority records
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
authority file
Gemeinsame Normdatei 50673-4, Association internationale Blaise Cendrars.Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Partially resolvedreference work
Partially resolvedauthority record
Unverified
A further 1 witness is held back from this article because the person or object named in it is not yet resolved to this record. They are kept, not discarded, and return once the identity is established.
People, houses and institutions
Knowledge graph
People, houses and institutions
Teachers, collaborators, publishers and institutions recorded against this person, each on a stated basis.
Died at
1- ParisPlace
Established from a fact already recorded on a verified source.
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 14 August 2026.
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