Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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Eurasian tour is the guide, a man named Yerko, the “servant”—a delicate term that Vallejo has us understand in the widest of senses, from the porter, to the waiter, to a political official. Obedience is the universal code here, and everyone obeys everyone else. Therefore, when Vallejo asks, “Has the revolution wiped out the servants?” the only possible response is “yes and no.” In Russia everyone is a servant, or no one is a servant to anyone. On their tour Vallejo and Yerko are accompanied by an anonymous Austrian Social Democrat, whose antisocialist perspective produces the conflicts necessary for lively dialectical debate.
Gathered in the Workers’ Club, Yerko and other comrades attend a night of the arts. A choir sings the “Internationale,” applauds the classical dances of an artist from the Moscow Opera, listens to musical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Liszt on the balalaika and piano, ballads played by Red Army veterans and a scene from another play by Kirshon. The discussion then turns to the topic of an article in Izvestia by the former commissioner of enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, which gives rise to a debate about the newly formed French literary school, populism, and how it may or may not be relevant to current affairs in Russia.
As proof of Vallejo’s attempt at writing unbiased accounts of the socialist experiment, the chapter “Accidents on a Socialist Job” exposes some of the shortcomings of Soviet modernization. Among a group of trudging workers, Vallejo and his travel companion cross the bridge over the Dnieper, and when they reach the other shore, they find a woman unconscious on the ground. It’s unclear whether she’s dead or alive, and the other workers pass by without even noticing her, let alone stopping to see if she needs help. That same day the Peruvian sees a giant steel plate fall not far from him and flatten two workers. The delayed response to the accidents reveals the lack of infrastructure and the emotional detachment of the workers.
From climactic changes to the notion of comfort; from fashion to family life; from cuisine to social gatherings; from the role of passions to the role of reason; from religion to architecture; from hygiene to locomotion and sports, in Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan Vallejo reports on the quality of life and the progress of social organization during the early Stalin years. Rather than withdrawing from the less-than-perfect outcome of the revolution, falling into dissolution and then further dissolution, as a bitter anarchist might, Vallejo saw Russians in the early 1930s as the pioneers of a world they were making with their own hands.80
In addition to his formal reportage, Vallejo wrote a book of thoughts in 1926–32, Art and Revolution, and, like so many of his works, it was published only posthumously, in 1973 by Mosca Azul Editores in Lima. Some of these texts, however, were published in newspapers and magazines as early as 1926. In this book we see Vallejo reconcile his literary aspirations with his commitment to the socialist revolution. He explores the revolutionary writer’s role in and to the benefit of society, and he decides that this writer is no longer the romantic poet worn out from heartfelt sighs in the privacy of his study; nor is he the lackadaisical bohemian dreamer ignorant to the consequence of his apathy; nor is he the avant-garde sectarian who seeks the “New” by exclusion and change by opposition. The revolutionary writer is open to all sectors of life and to these he goes boldly in search of concrete contact with social reality.
Given their thematic concerns and the context of their composition, the texts of Art and Revolution deliberately or coincidentally evoke certain essays of Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933). For example, when we read through such texts by the Russian as “Taneyev and Scriabin” (1925), “Chernyshevsky’s Ethics and Aesthetics” (1928), or “Theses on the Problem of Marxist Criticism” (1928), we get the sense that Vallejo is emulating his contemporary while exposing the political underpinnings of the aesthetics of prevailing writers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. If Lunacharsky’s Revolutionary Silhouettes (1923) reflects on the collective efforts of individuals who gave rise to the October Revolution, Vallejo’s Art and Revolution attacks intellectual puppets for declaring that artistic innovation comes from fixed doctrine rather than perpetual transformation.
In “Tell Me How You Write and I’ll Tell You What You Write,” Vallejo clarifies that artistic technique must be used not as a disguise but as an instrument of transparency. The technical problem that he locates in the schools of dadaism, futurism, surrealism, and populism is rooted to their attempt to critique the traditional (romantic, realist, symbolist) methodology of artistic production by opposing it with doctrine written as a bellicose manifesto established by an exclusive tribe of specialists. Vallejo doesn’t necessarily disagree with the vanguards in their social or aesthetic critiques, but in their approach toward developing on the flaws they found. He foresees the pitfalls of oppositional doctrine and demands self-inclusive solutions. In this sense, César Vallejo is far too cosmic to be considered avant-garde and proves to be an alternative to it.
Perhaps the two most disconcerting texts from Art and Revolution are “The Mayakovsky Case” and “Autopsy of Surrealism.” In the former Vallejo relates one of the interactions he had in Leningrad with Kolbasiev, who claims that Mayakovsky isn’t the best, but merely the most published, Soviet poet. Vallejo had already taken the same position as Kolbasiev in 1927, but now he enters precarious territory and offers an explanation of the Russian’s suicide: the result of a tragic disagreement between what he was saying in his poetry and what he was truly feeling and thinking.81 Mayakovsky was a highly skilled poet, who suffered not from an inability to craft good poetry but from denying himself the opportunity to do so with sincerity.
“Autopsy of Surrealism,” in turn, follows the debate between André Breton, specifically in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, who’d published a polemical pamphlet titled A Corpse that included essays by Desnos, Queneau, Leiris, Carpentier, Baron, Prévert, Vitrac, Morise, and Boiffard countering Breton’s initial attacks. In his Autopsy Vallejo describes how that movement’s critical and revolutionary spirit transitioned to anarchism and then, once the surrealists noticed that Marxian methodology seemed as interesting as that crisis of consciousness they’d been promoting, they went out, bought new clothes, and became communists. It was surrealism’s feigned adoption of Marxism that led to the movement’s atrophy and eventual demise. It realized that it couldn’t embody the truly revolutionary spirit of the age and, once it had lost its social prestige—its only raison d’être—the agony commenced, there was some gasping, and the death knells tolled.
Also straddling poetic and critical modalities is another book of thoughts, composed in 1923–24 while Vallejo was taking his first steps in Paris, and then in 1928–29 when he took the hard left toward Marxism: Against Professional Secrets. In step with his poor publication record, this gem was released only in 1973 by Mosca Azul. Essential to this book is Vallejo’s reportage, which sent him interviewing scores of people across interwar Russia, attending theatrical and musical performances in Paris, looking at society as a complex conglomeration of sectors that are irremediably bound, and noticing the tendency of prevailing avant-garde writers to create innovative literature behind closed doors. Many of the texts in Against Professional Secrets were early drafts of longer pieces the author had placed in magazines.
The phrase “Contra el secreto professional” first appeared as the title of a 1927 magazine article that Vallejo published in Variedades and seems to be his way of rebuking the idea of sectarian literature, which he saw epitomized in Jean Cocteau’s Le secret professionnel (1922). In that article Vallejo levels an attack on avant-garde literature and enumerates several formulas that Latin American poets were appropriating from the European tradition. As an alternative to this, he invokes a new attitude, a “new sensibility,” one that denounces the gross plagiarists of literary trends, because “their plagiarism prevents them from expressing and realizing themselves humanly and highly” and because they imitate foreign aesthetics about which they gloat with insolent rhetoric that they create out of autochthonous inspiration. The closer we read this book, the more apparent it becomes that Vallejo modulates styles to demonstrate a chameleonic strategy that allows him to adopt romantic, symbolist, surrealist, socialist, realist, scientific, and even existentialist modalities. What makes this tactic so compelling is that, by emulating these literary tendencies, he implicates himself in his own critique, widens the scope of his project, and shapes a collaborative poetics