Readings from the work of Radovan Ivšić. Design: Clément Peretjatko. With: Thomas Fitterer and Clément Peretjatko. Thanks to: Annie Le Brun

In partnership with the CHRD of the City of Lyon as part of the Télérama Museums weekend.

TAKE EVERYTHING FROM ME BUT DREAMS, I DON'T GIVE THEM TO YOU

Radovan Ivšić (1921-2009) was not, strictly speaking, involved in the Yugoslav resistance, although the theatre group, The Young Company, which he and Vlado Habunek founded in 1939 in Zagreb, subsequently served as a cover for a number of clandestine actions during the German Occupation.

However, as early as 1942, his poem Narcissus, published outside of trade, was seized upon as a symbol of decadent art by the Ustasha regime then ruling Croatia. A few years later, after the liberation of Yugoslavia and this time under Tito's communist regime, but ultimately, for the same reasons, his theatre and poetry, deemed not to conform to the injunctions of socialist realism, were censored or systematically hidden. While he left Yugoslavia for good in 1956, it was only around the 1970s that younger generations began to rediscover his work.

" Take everything from me, but dreams, I won't give them to you ." This verse from the late 1940s illuminates the attitude of Radovan Ivšić, " free and solitary but connected to others by the strength and fullness of his language ," as Jean-Paul Goujon emphasizes in the preface to his play. Deeply convinced that the treatment of language is linked to that which power reserves for human beings, he never ceased, in his life as in his work, to rely on the libertarian essence of poetry, illustrating the words of Saint-John Perse: " The poet is the bad conscience of the world ."

Annie Le Brun

Participation in the literary program Drugi Format on Radovan Ivšić (in Croatian) alongside Saedeta Midzic, Croatian general commissioner of the year of Croatia in France.