| 1:13p |
Harlequin at the Chessboard
At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was also frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Richter himself recorded the incidental proximity of Lenin's lodging to the Dadaist milieu, no record exists of an actual conversation between the two figures. Andrei Codrescu believes that Lenin and Tzara did play against each other, noting that an image of their encounter would be "the proper icon of the beginning of [modern] times." This meeting is mentioned as a fact in Harlequin at the Chessboard, a poem by Tzara's acquaintance Kurt Schwitters. German playwright and novelist PeterWeiss, who has introduced Tzara as a character in his 1969 play about Leon Trotsky (Trotzki im Exil), recreated the scene in his 1975–1981 cycle The Aesthetics of Resistance. The imagined episode also inspired much of Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties, which also depicts conversations between Tzara, Lenin, and the Irish modernist author James Joyce (who is also known to have resided in Zürich after 1915). /wiki |