Guillaume Apollinaire is a French poet, writer and publicist, an outstanding art theorist, a great master of hoaxes, one of the most prominent figures in the European avant-garde of the early 20th century. It was he who invented and coined the term "surrealism", meaning a new reality in art. The real name of the poet is Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Alexander Apollinary Vong-Kostrovitsky.
The birth of a poet
On the last day of hot August 1880, a stranger with a baby in her arms and two friends appeared in one of the police stations in Rome with a statement that she had found this child on the street and was ready to accept him into her family. The boy was immediately baptized, he acquired the name Giullemo Alberto Dulcini, the woman began to prepare documents for adoption.
And on November 2 of the same year, a Polish aristocrat from an impoverished family, Angelica Kostrovitskaya, appeared in the police and demanded that her son be returned to her. She could not explain how the child ended up on the street, but she proved that she was his mother and named the exact date of the baby's birth - August 25. This date became the official birthday of Wilhelm Vonge-Kostrovitsky.
A family
Wilhelm's pedigree is replete with conflicting facts. It is believed that the poet's grandfather was an activist of the famous Polish uprising of 1863, was arrested, exiled to Siberia, from where he fled and made his way to Italy. Mother, Angelica, was distinguished by an extremely dissolute lifestyle and was extremely reckless, having lost all her inheritance on roulette.
Father Wilhelm's identity is a mystery shrouded in darkness. He himself liked to spread all sorts of, sometimes shocking rumors about his daddy, naming even the Pope among the “candidates” for this “position”. It is generally accepted that the poet's father is Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, an Italian military officer, but the windy Angelica never had a legal husband. Wilhelm had a younger brother named Albert, who repeated the fate of the elder - first, his mother threw him to the door of a house, and after a while returned him with a scandal.
Education
Guillaume spent all his childhood in Monaco. First, he gnawed the granite of science at the Lycée Saint-Charles, and after graduation he entered the College of Cannes, from where he was soon expelled for possessing literature of a very vulgar content. Seventeen-year-old Apollinaire moved with his mother to Nice and continued his education there, enrolling in rhetoric courses. Angelica played in casinos and earned the nickname "beautiful adventurer", and the future poet made friends with Ange Toussaint-Luca and together with him began to publish a magazine filled with poetry, gossip and political articles.
Creation
Italian roots gave him a proud profile, impulsive character and a sparkling sense of humor, and the Slavic ancestors endowed Wilhelm with a penchant for subtle lyrics and philosophical reasoning. Guillaume's first serious work appeared only in 1899, when he wrote the Stavlo cycle, falling in love with Marie Dubois, the daughter of a restaurant owner. In the same year, 1899, Guillaume with his mother and brother moved to Paris, leaving their first love behind because of Angelica's whim. Personal life and work were closely intertwined in the career of the poet. Another muse was the sister of a friend, 16-year-old Linda da Silva, but this hobby did not last long - until he met the artist Laurencin in 1907.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Apollinaire was actively involved in journalism, wrote and worked in various magazines and shocked the public with his hoaxes. So, in the magazines of 1909, publications began to appear of a certain Louise Lalanne, by the general opinion, a very outstanding woman, with a fine sense of art, and with an outstanding lyrical talent. As it turned out, it was just a prank by Guillaume, who worked on behalf of Louise.
By 1910, a circle of young artists had formed around Guillaume who called themselves Surrealists - a term coined by Apollinaire to denote new trends. In 1911, Apollinaire was imprisoned for almost a week on charges of trying to steal the painting "Mona Lisa" from the Louvre - and this also turned out to be another outrageous trick.
Apollinaire's prose and poetry bore the imprint of a carnival rally combined with melancholic lyrics. For many years his work determined the direction of the development of fine arts, music and literature in Europe.
At the front in the spring of 1916, Guillaume was wounded in the head and underwent a complex operation that seriously undermined his vitality. Two years later, an epidemic of the Spanish flu hit France, and one of its victims was Guillaume Apollinaire, who was buried by friends and grateful admirers in the Parisian cemetery of Pere Lachaise.
