La Tête d’Obsidienne
One of the copies stamped as a review copy.
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Maurice Genevoix, avec l'amical souvenir, pour Madame Maurice Genevoix, avec les respectueux hommages d'André Malraux, et pour la charmante petite voisine du dîner de Ludmilla Tcherina.”
In 1973, at the invitation of the painter’s widow, Jacqueline Picasso, André Malraux traveled to Mougins and then to Vauvenargues to select canvases for a donation to the State. This journey through the late painter’s studio, as well as through the corridors of the newly founded Fondation Maeght, gave rise to the reflections recorded in La Tête d’obsidienne, later incorporated, in reduced form, into the late composition of Le Miroir des limbes.
“Any man who writes, and writes well, serves France,” General de Gaulle once told André Malraux. Maurice Genevoix thus served his country twice over, in body and in spirit. Severely wounded in fighting at Rupt-en-Woëvre near the hill of Les Éparges in 1915, he lost the use of his left arm and was discharged with 70% disability. His first war narrative, Sous Verdun, published in 1916, was partly censored. In 1949, three years after his election to the Académie française, he published Ceux de 14, which established his reputation as a tragic storyteller — a reputation Malraux, the unforgettable orator at the transfer of Jean Moulin’s ashes to the Panthéon on 19 December 1964, would surely not have disowned. Genevoix himself joined the Panthéon fifty-six years later, on 11 November 2020.
Malraux’s dedication recalls a dinner at the home of Ludmilla Tcherina: dancer, actress, painter and sculptor, and future patron of the 1981 exhibition Félines dedicated to André Malraux, with whom she shared a passion for cats. The “charming neighbor” is probably Sylvie, the daughter of Maurice and Madame Genevoix, who had just completed her studies in Classics in Paris and would later become a major figure in contemporary publishing.
As it happens, Ludmilla Tcherina is indirectly well known to bibliophiles: she was the daughter of Stéphane and Avenir Tchemerzine, authors of the celebrated bibliography of first editions of French poetry from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. She inherited from her parents an important collection of rare books.
From the library of Maurice Genevoix (inscription and bookplate).