Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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Kaziin, Gastev, Sayanov, Viesimiensky, the name Mayakovsky would vanish from many radio waves.
For years, questions surrounding this meeting riddled Vallejo’s readers; however, thanks to Alexander Batrakov, director of the Centro Cultural Ruso in Lima, and the late Manuel Miguel de Priego, we know quite a bit about this meeting that, for Vallejo, proved quite important. It took place in the house of Sergei Adamovich Kolbasiev (1898–1937), a Russian writer on maritime topics and member of the literary group Ostrovityane (Islanders). In his autobiographical novels he recounts experiences of his service in the Red Fleet. He was the author of the poetry collection The Open Sea (1922) and numerous narratives: The Rules of Group Navigation (1935) and Tales of the Wartime Seascape (1936), inter alia. He was arrested in 1937 and died in jail that same year. Also at the meeting was Vissarion Mikhailovich Sayanov (1903–59), born in the village of Ivanushkinskaia, in modern-day Kirensk Raion, Irkutsk Oblast, author of the poetry collection Komsomol Poetry (1928), Contemporaries (1929), and The Golden Olyokma (1934), as well as the novels Heaven and Earth, I–IV (1935–54) and The Lena, I–II (1953–55). During World War II he was a frontline correspondent and wrote In the Battles for Leningrad (1943) and then The Nuremberg Diaries (1948).
In addition to Kolbasiev and Sayanov, the other writers at this meeting included Boris Viktorovich Lipatov, Wolf Yosifovich Ehrlich, and Ilya Ivanovich Sadofiev.33 Lipatov (1905–54), born in Yekaterinburg, participated in the civil war, and from 1926 he wrote for the stage and the screen. Among his screenplays is Tri Soldata, which he adapted with Aleksandr Ivanov from John Dos Passos’s realist novel Three Soldiers (1920). He also wrote the screenplay Treasure of the Wrecked Vessel (1935), inter alia. Ehrlich (1902–37) was a Russian-Jewish poet who authored the collection Wolf Song and others that glorify the revolutionary orthodoxy. For his part, Sadofiev (1889–1965) began to publish his poems in Pravda during the prerevolutionary period. Then in 1917 he became an activist in Protekult: in the second half of the 1920s he became the president of the Association of Leningrad Poets (a position he held when Vallejo was visiting). He’s the author of the poetry collections Dynamo Verses (1918) and Simpler Than Simplicity (1925), as well as the short story collection The Bloody Staircase (1925), which is saturated with heavy revolutionary dramatics.
From this meeting in Leningrad, Vallejo seems to have confirmed a suspicion he’d been contemplating in an array of magazine articles, namely, that the prevailing schools of poetry—such as dadaism, futurism, surrealism, ultraism, and creationism—all contained a similar, if not identical, contradiction. They wanted to patent a technique by which new art was to be created. Vallejo recognized the problematic of aesthetic secularism and exposed the sociopolitical underpinnings of those avant-garde platforms that, by dint of excluding themselves from the problems they were addressing, actually reinforced the kinds of divisions that writers like Kolbasiev, Sayanov, Lipatov, Ehrlich, and Sadofiev were fighting to destroy. In the Peruvian’s eyes, the European avant-garde appeared as a cult of decadence, the sign of decrepitude, whereas the Latin American avant-garde was imported posture, the sign of insincerity and self-deceit; and just like the romantics had surged out of the worn-out neoclassical mentality, so too did the moderns need to eschew the personally amusing fin de siècle parlor games and produce socially responsible art to get out from under the rubble left by decades of war. The Leningrad writers confirmed Vallejo’s hypothesis that, at a time when modernism was fully coming into itself, there was a viable alternative to the avant-garde.
Upon his return to Paris, during this socialist shift that soon became evident in his writings circa 1928, Vallejo took special interest in the performing arts, first as critic and then as creator. His affinity for the stage and screen is unambiguous with just a glance at such articles as “Avant-Garde Religions,” “Contribution to Film Studies,” “Vanguard and Rearguard,” and of course his unforgettable homage to and defense of one of his major inspirations in the genre, “The Passion of Charles Chaplin.” This last article in particular was centered on The Gold Rush and explained how misunderstood the U.S. film pioneer was at that time. Russians exited cinemas teary-eyed with the belief that he was a realist; Germans considered him from an intellectual perspective; the English thought he was a clown; the French were sure he was a comedian; and, as for Chaplin’s compatriots,
[they have not] perceived, even at a distance, the profound and tacitly revolutionary spirit of The Gold Rush. I’m lying. In a subconscious way, perhaps, the gringos have teamed up with Lita Grey to stone Chaplin, just like the other Philistines stoned Our Lord, equally unconscious of the historical meaning of their hatred.34
Vallejo valued screen and stage performance for its effectiveness at transmitting to the masses the representation of human struggle and perseverance, shining the spotlight on social injustice and pressing a finger on an untreated wound so that even people who’d rather ignore it could no longer deny its existence. This was possible, according to the Peruvian, only in truly revolutionary works, since these don’t fall into the usual ideological traps of exploiting preestablished aesthetics and jumping on the bandwagon, which prohibits the production of sincere artistic expression. As an authentic visionary in an emerging field, Chaplin embodied the perfect revolutionary artist, because he didn’t require political propaganda to condemn systemic corruption, and the fact that he was wealthy and championed the poor proved that human solidarity could outrank class loyalty:
So it is, without a cheap protest against subprefects or ministers; without even uttering the words “bourgeois” or “exploitation”; without political adages or maxims; without childish messianics, Charles Chaplin, millionaire and gentleman, has created a marvelous work of revolution. This is the role of the creator.
Over time, unsuspected political platforms and economic doctrines will be yanked out of The Gold Rush. That will be the work of second-rate artists and imitators, propagandists, university professors, and candidates for the government of the people.35
The Peruvian’s first stabs at writing for the performing arts (stage plays written in French: Mampar, Les Toups, and Lock-Out) fell flat on their face and made clear that drama wasn’t going to come as easily to the natural-born poet as verse had, but this didn’t stop him from trying and, in the last months of his life, he achieved astounding success.
In late December, as 1928 was winding down, Armando Bazán, Juan Paiva, Eudocio Ravines, Jorge Seoane, Demetrio Tello, and César Vallejo formed a Peruvian Socialist Party cell in Paris and soon thereafter informed José Carlos Mariátegui, who had founded the Peruvian Socialist Party in Lima on October 7, 1928. It was also around that time that César reunited with Georgette, and in January 1929 the couple rented an apartment together at 11, avenue de l’Ópera, in Paris—a street not far from where Vallejo internalized massive Parisian traffic jams in rue de Rivoli, which he interpreted as “the picturesque and, at once, tragic peripeteia of the political scene of history,” since the chauffeurs defended their fare-paying passengers (the “higher-ups”) instead of the pedestrians (the “underdogs”), and the pedestrians berated the chauffeurs, who were underdogs without realizing it, instead of seeking solidarity with them. “These two errors,” he concludes, “are the blunders and irony inherent in the drama, and they make it all the more bloody and painful.”36
No matter how hard the left was that Vallejo took around 1928, it would be an error to dub him a “grammatical Marxist” and lay the issue to rest. A close reading of his articles and chronicles shows that he saw Marx’s ideas as essential developments in the transformation of philosophical thought, but that by no means did Marx represent a final solution to the problems that challenge humanity. Suffice a review of “The Lessons of Marxism” to drive this point home:
What a pitiful orgy of parroting eunuchs the traitors of Marxism get in on. Based on the conviction that Marx is the only philosopher of the past, present, and future, who has scientifically explained social motion and who, as a consequence, has once and for all hit the nail on the head of the laws governing the human spirit, their first vital disgrace consists of amputating their own creative possibilities at the root, relegating them to the condition of panegyrist parrots and parrots of Das Kapital.37
For