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Jean Cocteau - Opium: The Diary of a Cure
Jean Cocteau - Opium: The Diary of a Cure
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Jean Cocteau, brilliant artist and leading figure of the French avant-garde of the twenties and thirties, is well known for the grand vision, extravagant fantasies, myths, and "sacred monsters" that characterized his art. During his most productive years, Cocteau took up the use of opium, to which he eventually became addicted. These pages record Cocteau's experiences while taking this drug and while undergoing the arduous cure for opium poisoning. In this personal odyssey, which he illustrated with 43 of his drawings, Cocteau includes the history of an era: the recollection of his many friends and associates, including Nijinsky and Proust; the story of how he came to write his famous novel, Les Enfants Terribles; and the mysterious circumstances sur- rounding the writing and production of Orphée. Writ- ten with great insight, intensity of feeling, and the wit and sense of paradox for which he was famous, Opium: The Diary of a Cure was considered by Cocteau to be his most important work. Indeed, it is a dramatic account of one man's fascination with an expansive, but ultimately crippling, experience, and of an artist struggling with the enormous demands of his own imagination.
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