A decade later the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia. Kalandra, who had so eloquently defended Surrealism’s compatibility with dialectical materialism fifteen years earlier, was among the defendants at the show trial of Milada Horáková, who was charged with Trotskyite conspiracy and a plot to destroy the Czechoslovak people’s democracy, restore capitalist exploitation and initiate a third world war. He gave an elaborate confession. After he was sentenced to death, Kalandra requested that he be allowed to say goodbye to his wife. Then he asked for cigarettes, soda water and some food. Breton and Max Ernst signed a telegram appealing to the Czechoslovak government to spare Kalandra’s life. Éluard refused to join them. Breton wrote to him, reminding them of the time they had spent with Kalandra in Prague fifteen years earlier: “How can you in your soul bear such a degradation of a human being, in the person of he who was your friend?” Éluard responded coldly: “I already have too much on my hands with the innocent who proclaim their innocence, to occupy myself with the guilty who Proclaim their guilt
"Plath’s early death tends to transforms everything Plathian into a past-tense memento mori – ‘remember, you will die’ becomes ‘remember, she did die’. Because of their indisputable excellence, her poems now have an independent life. They exist outside the biography, or comfortably alongside it." Mary Jo Bang • PN Review
PS: Koffee culture: wake up and smell the chatter
"Plath’s early death tends to transforms everything Plathian into a past-tense memento mori – ‘remember, you will die’ becomes ‘remember, she did die’. Because of their indisputable excellence, her poems now have an independent life. They exist outside the biography, or comfortably alongside it." Mary Jo Bang • PN Review
PS: Koffee culture: wake up and smell the chatter
