Letters to Eugene

Herve Guibert's incandescent correspondence with Belgian poet Eugene Savitzkaya.

In 1977, Herve Guibert discovered the first novel written by Eugene Savitzkaya, Mentir, and sent him his La mort propagande, which had just been published. In the following years, they exchanged the books they had written, read each other, appreciated each other. They saw each other rarely, however: one lived in Liege, the other Paris.

A turning point occurred in 1982, when Herve published "Lettre a un frere d'ecriture," in which he declared to Eugene, "I love you through your writing." The tone had changed; Herve, obsessed by his correspondent, wrote him increasingly incandescent letters. 1984 would, however, see the sudden extinguishing of that passion. A deep friendship replaced it, which found itself with new areas to explore: the adventure of publishing L'Autre Journal and at the Villa Medicis, where they were both fellows. These nearly eighty letters, exchanged between 1977 and 1987, form a correspondence that is all the more unique because it was the only one whose publication was authorized by Guibert. A unique intersection of life and writing, self and other, reality and fiction, their release is a renewal of Guibert's oeuvre.