Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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underestimate the influence that social realism still had in 1930, and when we add to that the decade-long robust surge of Russian fiction in the era of the new political economy—The Naked Year (1922) by Boris Pasternak, Cities and Years (1924) by Konstantin Fedin, Red Cavalry (1926) by Isaac Babel, The Thief (1927) by Leonid Leonov, The Rout (1927) by Alexander Fadeyev, and We (1929) by Yevgeny Zamyatin—it’s no wonder why Vallejo allowed himself to commit what critical consensus calls a literary sin.79
Whereas Cement celebrates postwar reconstruction in Russia, Tungsten scandalizes collusion in the exploitation of Andean workers: the Peruvian denounces U.S. Mining Incorporated for exploiting the indigenous Soras, abusing the workers in the mines, and creating a system of forced labor for their own profits and as a contribution to the U.S. war effort in Europe. The other side of this critique satirizes the servility of Peruvian bourgeoisdom, which generously lends its hand to the wealthy Yanks with hopes of winning their favor. In this way, with a forehand Tungsten smacks down the foreign imperialists who greedily exploit the naive indigenous workers and with a backhand hits the self-serving Peruvian upstarts who remain indifferent to the consequence of their vertical social aspirations. Their ascent to high society comes at the cost of their compatriots’ descent into misery. Such is the case with the protagonist Leónides Benites: as long as he’s under the spell of capital, he’s self-absorbed, and only when faced with his own mortality does he realize that no individual is worth more than the collective, which leaves him no choice but to join the revolution.
Following up Tungsten chronologically and also in the narrative thread is a text written in 1931—though not published until 1951—called Paco Yunque, the only children’s story Vallejo wrote. Oddly enough, it’s also couched in political ideology. It appears to have been written upon request of the Spanish publisher Cenit, which had just published Tungsten, but the manuscript was rejected on account of the violence with which the characters (most of them children) treat one another. Paco Yunque is easily the most formulaic text out of all Vallejo’s writings.
Although this children’s story was judged too violent for Iberian tastes in the early 1930s and has been disregarded by many readers for ideological reasons, it has nonetheless formed part of the national curriculum in Peruvian public schools since the early 1970s, while Juan Francisco Velasco headed the military dictatorship in 1968–75, after the coup d’état against President Fernando Belaunde. Under Velasco, an education reform was launched that made Quechua an official language and aimed to provide bilingual education to the indigenous peoples of the Andes and the Amazon (nearly half of the country’s population at the time). Although the increasingly intolerant dictator had his censors exile all newspaper publishers in 1974, he incorporated into the national curriculum works that championed the peasants’ struggle, and, in a strange turn of events, Paco Yunque became a perfect match for the dictatorship’s ideology.
The story’s protagonist is a poor country boy named Paco Yunque, who lives with his mother in the home of the Grieves, wealthy English landowners, whose son Humberto abuses Paco at school while revealing his own stupidity. Since Paco Yunque is afraid to stand up to Humberto, Paco Fariña, another boy whom Yunque just met, intervenes in an act of solidarity. The characters are easily recognizable figures that Vallejo uses to prove the premise that the rich are the blight of the poor; the poor don’t stand up for themselves out of fear and ignorance; and this cycle can be broken only by people who have the courage to intervene.
This brings us to Russia in 1931: Reflections at the Foot of the Kremlin, which was composed in 1928–31 from materials Vallejo collected during his first two trips to the Soviet Union. This political report was published in 1931 by Ulises in Madrid and quickly became a best seller. Many sections of it had been placed in El Comercio in 1929 and then in Bolivar in 1930 as a series of ten chronicles that bore the headline “A Report on Russia.” The book was press-ready in the first quarter of 1931, which is when the phrase “Russia in 1931” was added to the title to give it a greater sense of currency. The lengthy sixteen chapters aimed to provide contemporary readers a demystified description of Soviet reality, without filtering the author’s perception through the tinted filters of a partisan newspaper or magazine. In this terrain Vallejo’s Russia in 1931 is a forerunner of A Russian Journal (1948) by John Steinbeck.
As early as August 1927, Vallejo had revealed the method of the survey abroad employed by French journalists. Large-scale Parisian newspapers and magazines used to send their most famous journalists to foreign countries to report on events and interview officials, but well before they arrived those reporters already knew what they wanted to find; it was just a matter of locating the right person to prove their hypothesis. Vallejo’s objective was different, since he wasn’t interested in simply regurgitating more propaganda or even going to Moscow to smoke cigarettes with Anatoly Lunacharsky. He wanted to provide a technical interpretation of social organization in Soviet Russia by stripping his accounts of bias so that he could transparently record whom and what he saw and then carry out a nonpartisan analysis. Whether he achieved this or not is another question, but this was his agenda, as he laid it out in the introduction. The Russia Vallejo saw still lay under the rubble left by the October Revolution, which had been described by another best-selling American author of the same genre, John Reed, in his book Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). But whereas Reed narrated the destructive period of social upheaval during the end of the tzarist regime, Vallejo optimistically studied the peaceful construction of a new society at the beginning of the socialist experiment.
The Peruvian’s approach to evaluating the state of Russian social organization was the cross-sector interview, in which he recorded accounts of people from as many sectors of society as possible with the aim of achieving a sample representative of the whole. This method led him to speak with Boris Pessis, secretary of VOKS; Maria Schlossberg, a candy factory worker on the outskirts of Moscow; a German worker from Bremen, who showed him that no worker in Russia could be considered a foreigner; the director of the Commercial Textile Union, who explained defects, setbacks, and gaps in Russian technology; Aleksei Gastev, director and founder of the Central Institute of Labor (CIT); Valerian Muraviev, editor of the organization’s journal; a professor of the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow, who explained the system of salaries; and then with the director of a metallurgic facility, who put the Peruvian in contact with workers. After only the first five chapters, Vallejo crosses from the economic plane to infrastructure, production, labor, until finally reaching morality, and there he lingers for the remainder of the book.
Chapter 8 recounts Vallejo’s meeting in Leningrad with a group of Bolshevik writers: Sergei Adamovich Kolbasiev, Vissarion Mikhailovich Sayanov, Boris Viktorovich Lipatov, Wolf Yosifovich Ehrlich, and Ilya Ivanovich Sadofiev, inter alia. In chapter 9 he follows a stonemason around for a day only to end up at a theater, where he sees Kirshon’s play The Rails Are Humming. Vallejo marvels at the scenery with those larger-than-life sprockets and gears of a half-built locomotive, the socially diverse audience, and the revolutionary resolutions: A disenchanted worker is about to commit suicide, but “he’s still fighting. It’s time to sweat blood and ‘take this cup from me.’ As he lifts up the jar, a small hand suddenly stops him. It’s the hand of his son, who wasn’t sleeping. The boy’s action is of far-reaching historical significance.” The awakening son as hero crystallizes the revolutionary premise that the new generation will be the savior of the old. Finally, in the no less remarkable chapter 14, which is centered on film, Vallejo extols the achievements of Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line, in whose collaged scenes of exploitation, labor, and mechanized agriculture he perceives the future of revolutionary art in Russia as well as his own growing oeuvre.
Not long after finishing Russia in 1931, Vallejo began work on Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan, which was composed in 1931–32, though not published until as late as 1965 by Gráfica Labor in Lima. In a sense, it can be read as a sequel to Russia in 1931 with regard to its thematic concerns and methodology, but only to the extent that the first report focuses on Russian social organization during the socialist experiment, whereas the second studies the lifestyle such organization could afford. Vallejo divided this book of thoughts into two large sections, the first, consisting of thirty-two chapters, and the second, twenty-seven, all of which run considerably