LINK: This is the kind of lit criticism I love.
"Breton had been the first French writer of note to denounce the infamous trials engineered by Stalin; Mandelstam had gone further to assert truth in the face of totalitarian lies. There was even a strange coincidence between the lives of Breton and Mandelstam, of the kind the surrealists would have loved, had it been less grim. Breton was famous for the time he slapped the Russian Stalinist writer Ilya Ehrenburg, on the streets of Paris in 1935, after Ehrenburg had described the surrealists as drug addicts and pederasts. Mandelstam, the year before, had similarly slapped the Stalinist author Alexei Tolstoy. Did Breton know of Mandelstam's act? Probably not, and Breton's slap lacked the genuinely suicidal quality of Mandelstam's, which marked the beginning of the end for the Russian genius."
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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