Short stories
Memoirs of a Secret Revolutionary
Faux passeports
Charles Plisnier · 1937
Synopsis
A former agitator, now out of the party, remembers five companions of the communist struggle of the interwar period. Pilar, an Andalusian bourgeoise, goes over to the side of the oppressed alongside an anarcho-syndicalist militant without being able to shed her class; Ditka, a Serbian militant, knows prison and torture; Carlotta is sent from Moscow to judge traitors; Corvelise watches the class struggle with fascination without managing to enter it; Yegor, a Russian cadre, serves Stalin's line without any illusions.
Context
The book appeared with Corrêa in 1937 under the subtitle “ou les Mémoires d'un agitateur”, and the author, expelled from the party nine years earlier, has his narrator say this sentence, about his life: “le Parti Communiste me l'a rendue”. A single witness links the five narratives. The Académie Goncourt, which had not crowned his novel of the previous year, awarded him its prize in December 1937 for both books at once; it was the first time the prize went to a writer who did not have French nationality.
Who it is for
Five short stories written in French, linked by the voice of one and the same witness; reissued in paperback with an afterword by Pierre Mertens.
Prizes and reception
Prix Goncourt 1937, shared with the previous novel; the first Goncourt awarded to a writer without French nationality.
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