On May 31, 2022, Ph.D. Volpe M.L. presented report “Arthur Rimbaud and other Frenchmen in Ethiopia. The 1880s”.
The fate of this French poet is unique in the history of culture. Arthur Rimbaud wrote all of his few poems and two prose works in his early youth. He did nothing to achieve recognition, abandoned his literary career, became a businessman in the East, retired to the African outback, and paid for it with health and death at a young age. Despite the circumstances, he ended up on the Olympus of world literature. Interest in his work does not fade over time among readers in many countries, and his personality attracts the attention of more and more new generations of researchers.
After several years of wandering around Europe and working in a stone quarry and on a construction site in Cyprus, twenty-five-year-old Arthur Rimbaud went to Aden in search of a livelihood, where he got a job in the trading company Vianne, Bardet and Co., engaged in the export of mocha coffee. By this time, he had not written anything for a long time, trying to consign his turbulent youth to oblivion. He no longer thought about poetic creativity.
Rimbaud spent the next ten years in Aden and Harare, once making a long trading trip to the Ethiopian province of Shoa to the Negus Menelik and a short trip to Egypt. He returned to his homeland a terminally ill man and died in a hospital in Marseille a few months later at the age of 37.
The presentation of M. Volpe's book took place. Arthur Rimbaud. Life in your own words. Moscow: Galaktika, 2022 (in Russian).
