Louis ARAGON (1897-1982). Autograph manuscript signed, Aragon vous parle: De Stendhal et du vingtième siècle, [1959]; 4 pages in-4, with erasures and corrections. On Stendhal. Article published in France Nouvelle, weekly of the French Communist Party, October 29, 1959. Aragon celebrates the first anniversary of the journal Stendhal-Club, edited by the "eminent Stendhalian" V. del Litto. He reports on an article by Tania Kotchekova, a Russian Stendhalian, about a letter from Stendhal to Viazemski ... "What an empire if the bourgeoisie answered to the peasants! is the expression of a political reality admirably seen by Stendhal: that the democratic revolution could be achieved through union with the dispossessed peasants, and would lead to the creation of a state, an empire, unshakeable. Stendhal's lucidity is valid both for his time in Russia and for our own, where this empire has been created under new conditions. We can also, with the necessary transpositions, imagine, from a national point of view, in the France of 1959, the lesson in unity that Stendhal would give today to what we call the lefts, if they knew how to "respond" to the people"... Aragon tells the story of this Stendhalian from Riga, Tania Kotchetkova, before concluding: "The Stendhalian days are not over. If I listened to my heart, I'd say they're beginning. Ah, who will write our century, and in these times of abstract art will say what cold history does not say, will rediscover the true greatness of those who have not guarded themselves for the life of glory, the heroes of the lower classes (I'm thinking of the preface to The Abbess of Castro) who pass through this world, fugitive as light and wind?"