Guillaume Apollinaire is a French poet, writer and publicist, an outstanding art theoretician, a great master of hoaxes, one of the most prominent figures of the European avant-garde of the beginning of the 20th century. It was he who invented and coined the term "surrealism", which means a new reality in art. The real name of the poet is Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Alexander Apollinar Vonzh-Kostrovitsky.
The birth of a poet
On the last day of hot August 1880, a stranger with a baby in her arms and two friends appeared in one of the police departments of Rome with a statement that she had found this child on the street and was ready to take him to her family. The boy was immediately baptized, he got the name of Giuliemo Alberto Dulchini, the woman began to prepare documents for adoption.
And on November 2 of the same year, a Polish aristocrat from an impoverished family, Angelika Kostrovitskaya, appeared in police and demanded that her son be returned to her. She could not explain how the child appeared on the street, but proved that she was his mother and named the exact date of the birth of the baby - August 25. This date became the official birthday of Wilhelm Vonzh-Kostrovitsky.
A family
William's genealogy is replete with conflicting facts. It is generally accepted that the poet’s grandfather was an activist of the famous Polish uprising of 1863, was arrested, exiled to Siberia, from where he fled and made his way to Italy. Mother, Angelica, had an extremely dissolute lifestyle and was extremely gambling, having let down all the inheritance on roulette.
The identity of Father William is a mystery covered in darkness. He himself liked to dissolve all kinds of, sometimes shocking rumors about daddy, calling even the Pope among the “candidates” for this “post”. It is generally accepted that the poet’s father is Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, an Italian military officer, but the windy Angelica never had a legal husband. Wilhelm had a younger brother named Albert, who repeated the fate of the elder - first his mother threw him to the door of a house, and after a while returned with a scandal.
Education
Guillaume spent all his childhood in Monaco. At first he gnawed at the granite of science at the Lyceum Saint-Charles, and upon graduation he entered Cannes College, from where he was soon expelled for the storage of literature of a very vulgar content. Seventeen-year-old Apollinaire moved with his mother to Nice and continued his education there, enrolling in rhetoric courses. Angelica played in the casino and earned the nickname "beautiful adventurer", and the future poet made friends with Ange Toussin-Luke and with it began to publish a magazine filled with poems, gossip and political articles.
