Apollinaire, who pioneered all new movements in his thirty-eight years of life, died of pneumonia in 1918.
(1880-1918) Polish-born French poet. He started writing by telling the Rhineland and medieval legends; Starting from the basic principles of Symbolism in poetry, he became the pioneer of Modernism, Cubism, and Dadaism.
He was born on 26 August 1880 in Rome, the illegitimate child of Polish Angelica de Kostrotvitsky. He died in Paris on November 9, 1918. The identity of his father remained a secret for the rest of his life, which Apollinaire took a secret delight to keep. According to some biographers, his father was an Italian officer, and according to others a Frenchman named Aiglon. According to the second claim, Apollinaire was being Napoleon's great-grandson. His close friend Picasso has at times hinted that Apollinaire's father was a high-ranking church official. Apollinaire neither denied nor confirmed these allusions. His registered name, as dictated by Angelica de Kostrowitsky, is Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrotvitsky.
He studied at Saint Charles High School in Monaco. He went to Paris in 1898 and published his first poems in the journals Revue Blanche and Plume. In addition to his poetry, he continued to be an art critic.
In the winter of 1902, at a café called the Closerie des Lilas, a group of writers and artists led by Moreas, Jarry, and Salmon were trying to determine the direction French poetry would take after Verlaine's death. Apollinaire joined them that same year. It is known that this new poet, who refrained from revealing where he was from, and where he came from, had a strange mother, who lived with him, nothing else was known. Later, a French writer named Marcel Adema, after long research, determined that Apollinaire's mother was Polish of Italian origin and that his family took refuge in Italy with the help of the Vatican to avoid being deported to Siberia during the uprising against the Russians. Apollinaire's mother, Angelica Alexandrine Kostrowitsky, disappeared with Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, a retired military officer. When she returned to Rome in 1880, her first son, Apollinaire, and two years later, her second son, Alberto, were born. His curiosity about fortune tellers, magicians, and monks left an indelible mark on Apollinaire, which he carried with him wherever he went, and which would appear in his poems later on. These influences are seen in his first novel, L'Enchanteurpourissant (The Decaying Wizard), written in the medieval style and influenced by Chretien de Troyes. This work is about the conversation between the magician Merlin and a fairy named Viviane. A year later, in 1910, L'Heresiarque et Cie, in which he collected his surrealistic and fantastic stories, is a combination of the same influences.
In 1901, while living with his mother in Paris and struggling to enter the literary circles in Germany, one year he received an offer from the widow of a wealthy German businessman to come with them to Germany and teach his young grandson. A year spent with this family in the North provided the material to transform a young boy who came to Germany with the desire to become a poet into poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
It was here that he developed his apprenticeship of transforming every day, the general, and the ordinary into a mystical, personal, and extraordinary quality. A year later, he went to Prague and Vienna, taking permission from the family he worked with. Impressions of this trip were published in La Revue Blanche in the story Le Passant de Prague (Prague's Traveler). In the same year, Apollinaire had his first great love. He fell in love with Annie Playden, the nanny and English teacher of Gabrielle, the daughter of Mme de Milhau, who brought him to Germany. But his intense sensitivity and jealousy frightened and kidnapped Annie Playden. Apollinaire described this love story in his famous poem "LaChanson du Mal-Aime" (The Song of the Unloved).
When he returned to Paris in 1903, at the age of twenty-one, he began to attend the meetings at the Soleil d'Or cafe and the literary nights traditionalized by the magazine La Plume, which has been going on since Zola, Mallarme, Verlaine. It was at this time that the magazine La Revue Blanche, which had become a symbol of Symbolist poetry, went bankrupt. Young French poets, including Apollinaire, saw this as a unique opportunity to transcend Symbolism and began publishing their own journal, Le Festin d'Esope. The magazine could only be published in nine issues, but these nine issues were enough to reflect the understanding of the poetry of the Apollinaire generation. Technology and technology products could not be ignored, as the symbolists had done in the new understanding of beauty. Telephones, automobiles, and cameras were now a part of life and they were the first indicators of a future where science will dominate. Le Festin was following such a scientific futurism (Futurism) line.
Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso were the greatest influences on Apollinaire's poetry. The close friendship established between these three in 1904 opened new horizons for Apollinaire. Watching Picasso, observing and understanding his form experiments led Apollinaire to become an art critic, it was during the "Harlequin" and subsequent "Pink" periods when Picasso met Apollinaire.
A turning point in Apollinaire's poetry is his imprisonment for allegedly stealing two sculptures from the Louvre Museum. In reality, Apollinaire had not stolen these two statuettes. His friend Pieret had done this and entrusted the statuettes to Apollinaire to prove how easily antiquities could be stolen from the Louvre. On August 22, 1911, after the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, the statues were found in Apollinaire as a result of the census and research, and during his trial, Apollinaire experienced the pain of being both a Jew and a foreigner. He was arrested, although it was clear that he did not commit the theft.
His time in prison did not exceed six days, but Apollinaire reflected in his novel Le Poete assassine (1916), both his abandonment by Marie, his trial, and the alienation announced by his prison life. This crisis of alienation led Apollinaire to enlist in the French army to join the war in order to become a French citizen. In March 1917, he was taken to the hospital with a head wound at the front. Contrary to expectations, he was released from the hospital in August after brain surgery. In these years, Cubism in Paris was no longer the leading movement.