As with Robert Musil or Stefan Zweig, Guillaume Apollinaire’s work entered the public domain in 2013. This is why Flammarion has been able to enrich still further the catalogue of its excellent GF pocket collection, which succeeded the yellow-covered Classiques Garnier that began to appear at the end of the 19th century. Flammarion is publishing two collections of poetry by the author of the Mamelles de Tirésias that first appeared in 1913 and 1918: Alcools and Calligrammes. Gérald Purnelle, a researcher at the University of Liège, is president of the International Association of the Friends of Guillaume Apollinaire.

Wilhelm de Kostrowitzky was born in 1880 in Rome.  His mother, Angelica de Kostrowcki (sic), the descendant of a well-to-do Russified Polish family. Wilhelm did not know who his father was. Along with his brother Albert, two years younger, he experienced a chaotic childhood, being dragged around from Italy to Monaco to Nice, where he flunked out of secondary school, although he had already begun to write poems under the name of Apollinaire, which was his grandfather’s first name. His grandfather had been a lieutenant in the artillery in the armies of the Tsar. In the summer of 1899, the two brothers were living in a rooming house in Stavelot while their mother and Jules Weil, the man she was living with, and whom she had met a few years earlier, gambled at the casino in Spa. After a short time the couple returned to Paris, but the boys did not rejoin them until the beginning of October. They had to sneak out of the rooming house in Stavelot without paying their bill. During this time, Guillaume became enamoured of a young girl from the region named Maria Dubois, and he wrote some poems for her.

Apollinaire’s stay in the area was brief, but it has been remembered: in 1953 in Stavelot the International Association of the Friends of Guillaume Apollinaire was founded by Armand Huysmans, an architect and painter, originally from Brussels, who went to live in Stavelot after World War II, and by Camille Deleclos, a writer and journalist from Stavelot. “A few Belgian poets – Marcel Thiry, Robert Vivier – were interested”, writes current president Gérald Purnelle. “But it was Christian Fettweis from Verviers who first wrote a little book about him, Apollinaire et l’Ardenne. The association was founded in collaboration with students from Paris who were studying Apollinaire, especially Michel Decaudin”. Beside the porch of the Hôtel du Mal Aimé, a commemorative plaque was put up as a remembrance of the three months the 19-year-old poet spent there, and the Abbey has a little museum devoted to him. At one time, in another museum, the bed he was supposed to have slept in was placed on exhibit. “This period of time strongly marked his sensitivity. Elements of the landscape and local customs show up later in his poetry. For example, in a poem in Calligrammes, “La petite auto”, he talks about the moment he learned that war had been declared, and he mentions Francorchamps and the pouhons” (natural springs with high iron content).

Two years after returning to France, Apollinaire went to Germany with the widow of a French viscount who had an eight-year-old daughter. Apollinaire was her tutor. He fell in love with a young governess named Annie Playden. Although this relationship was not a happy one, it inspired several poems, including La Chanson du Mal Aimé (1905). As Apollinaire wanted to devote himself completely to literature, he began to publish stories in newspapers. He discovered two movements in art that fascinated him, Fauvism and Cubism. He became friends with the most innovative artists of his time. He fell in love with a young female painter named Marie Laurencin while he was reviewing novels for the neo-symbolist magazine, La Phalange.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools et Calligrammes, GF Flammarion, 233 and 315 pages.
Introduction, notes and presentation of the text by Gérald Purnelle.