Nadja
One of 20 hors commerce copies on superfine colored Guérimand paper, reserved for the author; this copy on green paper, unnumbered.
“Who am I?” From its opening line, Nadja turns encounter into a means of self-knowledge. Published in 1928, four years after the Manifeste du surréalisme, the book takes as its starting point Breton’s meeting with Léona Delcourt, who called herself Nadja, on 4 October 1926, in Paris. As the two wander through the city, streets, objects and chance words become signs of a reality that reason alone can no longer grasp. The young woman’s unsettling freedom, and then her internment, place at the heart of the narrative the fragile border between poetic experience and madness.
A dialogue between text and photographic document makes Nadja one of the major books of Surrealism, one in which the marvelous is discovered at the heart of everyday life.
Thirty-five years after the first edition, Breton returned to his text. In the “Avant-dire,” dated Christmas 1962, he presents his revisions as refinements made in the interest of “mieux-dire.” Nearly three hundred variants, together with changes to the iconography, distinguish this version from that of 1928 and make it an essential second state of the text.