Nadja. Illustré de 44 photographies par Man Ray.

Nadja is Breton’s major work, the only one of his books to be so thoroughly revised and expanded for its second edition. The book is haunted by two women, each of whom shaped its composition in her own way.

The first is the woman whose name is forever inscribed at the pinnacle of Surrealism. Breton encountered her in the street one day in October 1926. After some ten almost daily meetings, a night spent together in a hotel in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and twenty-seven exchanged letters, Breton broke off relations with the young woman, erratic in behavior but who held him spellbound. Thus ended the story of Léona Delcourt, who had borrowed the nickname “Nadja” from a dancer. Five months later, Breton began writing his book without ever having seen her again — the woman who had plunged the herald of Surrealism into a profound existential crisis: “It may well be,” he would write, “that the allure surrounding Nadja constitutes the revenge of the mind over the defeat of the heart.”

The second woman is Lise Deharme, also known as Lise Meyer, whose appearance at the Bureau de recherches surréalistes two years earlier had so unsettled the poet that, upon beginning his book, he sought to grow closer to her. Once the first two parts of Nadja were finished, he wrote to her: “I am going to publish the story you know, accompanying it with some fifty photographs relating to all the elements it brings into play,” asking her permission to photograph the bronze glove and a reproduction of a painting kept at her Norman manor at Mordal, since “that would make for a much more disturbing book.”

By autumn 1927, Breton had already given the review Commerce the first part of the book, along with a fragment published in issue II of La Révolution surréaliste. He added a third part and a preamble in March 1928, which appeared in English in Eugène Jolas’s review Transition. Breton hoped for publication by Gallimard on April 1, which was ultimately postponed to May 25.

A perfect copy.