Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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phenomenon of parallelism; to the gothic account “Individual and Society,” which resembles the tales of Poe; to the surrealist fragments in “Negations of Negations”; to the Kafkaesque “Reputation Theory” and the Borgesian “Masterful Demonstration of Public Health”; to the desperate romantic confessions in “Languidly His Liqueur” and even the Biblical parable in “Vocation of Death,” Against Professional Secrets takes us on an aesthetic journey through nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europe, only to reveal that the poetic vehicles that have transported us are as arbitrary as they are exploitative. These meditations are at once an attack on the European avant-garde and an appeal to Latin American writers to quit the practice of aesthetic importation. By moving art from the realm of aesthetics to that of ethics, passing through the political economy, Vallejo lays the foundation for a poetics of human solidarity.82
Our discussion on Vallejo’s books of thoughts has organically led us his notebooks, which contain entries from 1926 to 1938, with the author’s final dictation. According to Vallejo, many of the entries were supposed to be appended to Art and Revolution or Against Professional Secrets and, in some cases, to both. The notebooks cover a wide range of topics and rarely contain lyricism like that which we find in the poetry and sometimes the articles; instead, they are more of a meditative nature, more conceptual and fragmented, and many of these philosophical kernels emerge in subsequent magazine articles, reports, poems, and plays.
It’s fascinating to see how a simple concept from one entry—“The mercy and compassion of men for men. If at a man’s moment of death, all the mercy of all the men were mustered up to keep him from dying, that man wouldn’t die”—eventually grew into “Mass,” the crowning poem of Spain, Take This Cup from Me; or how notes on a film premiere in Moscow—“the foundation for a new aesthetic: the aesthetic of labor”—could give rise to such sizable endeavors as the plays Brothers Colacho and The Tired Stone; or how an ironic contradiction—“the revolutionary intellectual who, under a pseudonym, secretly contributes to reactionary magazines”—could transform into dialogue in the chapter “Workers Discuss Literature” from Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan.
This list could go on and on, but we’ll limit ourselves to these few examples, holding onto the belief that the pleasure of reading these fragments derives from discovering their permutations throughout the oeuvre. The intertextuality disclosed by the notebooks reveals a series of beginnings in Vallejo’s iterative writing process across the modalities of poetry, fiction, drama, reportage, and journalism. Although some entries are characterized by the cleverness of ludic puns and quips, which has led one translator to go so far as to publish them under the banner of “aphorisms,” the greater value seems to reside in their relation to the whole and in what can be learned about Vallejo’s writing process by patiently examining that relation.83
Now, we switch gears to briefly discuss what is arguably Vallejo’s most polished performance piece, The Final Judgment, a short one-scene play that the author extracted from Moscow vs. Moscow, which itself was an early draft of The River Flows between Two Shores. It was probably written in or around 1930 but not published until 1979.84 A review of the early drafts reveals that Vallejo first planned this scene as a prologue to the full-length play, but as he reworked the longer text (apparently to lock the characters into the conflict and give the tragedy a stronger foundation), the prologue seemed to hold up on its own. The scene acquires its dramatic strength through agony. Atovov lies on his deathbed and Father Rulak has come to hear his last confession: prior to the October Revolution, he killed Rada Pobadich, who was about to assassinate Lenin at a rally.
The priest is beside himself with rage. “So you saved the life of a man who brought misfortune to Russia and atheism to its souls? … You wretch! You heinous man! The true culprit of the Russian disaster!” Yet, Atovov, just before giving up the ghost, explains to his confessor that this same Pobadich had an affair with the priest’s concubine. Rulak is doubly destroyed and from this destruction his character transforms to offer the socialist message that Vallejo has planted from the beginning: “Lord God,” appeals the priest, “with the same mercy reap every soul, large or small, that has fallen into sin.” Thus, The Final Judgment is Vallejo’s most lucid stage script and demonstrates the form of self-implication he deemed necessary to engage the most complex socioeconomic problems of the era.
Much like in The Final Judgment, Vallejo drafted out his one-act tragedy Death in or around 1930 and extracted it from the full-length play called Moscow vs. Moscow, which, after rigorous rewrites, eventually became The River Flows between Two Shores. The script wasn’t published until 1979 in Teatro Completo, and the play was never staged in the author’s lifetime. Since Vallejo revised this text in Castilian and French, an update in one language doesn’t always appear in another. Such is the case with La Mort, originally written in French. Death is a well-crafted one-act tragedy set in the early days of Soviet Russia that examines the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in relation to the civil war and the ideological chasms it left between generations within a single family. In a sense, Death is the fall of the Polianovs, a once-wealthy royal family whose life has undergone a radical revision since the political tumult of the preceding years. Osip has abandoned the house and family, drowning his anguish in vodka and women, while Vara, his wife, suffers the loss of her husband and is destroyed by her children’s enthusiasm for the Bolsheviki and the ideals of the new society.
Against this backdrop of the Polianovs’s crisis, Vallejo stages a debate between Fathers Sakrov, Sovarch, and Rolanski, who agree that Osip’s soul is in peril but disagree on how it must be saved. Sakrov is convinced that his only hope for escape from moral and intellectual decadence is manual labor in the countryside with the workers. He thinks that Osip should once and for all leave his wife to go work on a kolkhoz outside Moscow. For a man of Osip’s stature, such a decision would be unprecedented, which is why Sakrov must insist, “history, my brothers, never repeats itself”—insistence that’s countered by Rolanski’s skeptical rebuttal: “But it spirals up, dear friend. Here’s the proof: we, here, in Soviet Russia, are already witnessing a similar revenge of human sentiment against Marxist rationalism.” Thus, Vallejo allows the dialectic to unfold, on the one side, with the forward-thinking Sakrov, who’s committed to collectively building the future in that land of hopes, and on the other side, with Rolinski, who’s wary of radical change and still clings on to a past he knows even if it no longer exists.
When the other priests go outside to beg, Sakrov stays behind, since begging isn’t in his nature (here again Vallejo accentuates his commitment to labor), thus allowing him to talk to Osip, who has entered the scene, on the verge of a breakdown, caused by the inner turmoil of his moral tailspin. “I have told you,” Sakrov says, that “it is given to man to rise up to God only if he leans on the shoulders of other men.” For Vallejo, an individual cannot achieve spiritual well-being without working to improve the well-being of society. The kolkhoz, the collective farm, perfectly embodies this image and is in keeping with his concentric relation of the individual and society—the self and the world. The isolation of medieval hermits no longer suits modern man, who knows that “God can be discovered only in the midst of the great human gatherings, amid the crowds. This is the religious statement of our times!” When the fate of Osip’s soul dangles on the question of whether or not to eschew individual love and embrace the collective, Vara suddenly enters the scene, and Osip’s dilemma acquires its full dramatic weight. The strength of his character is his moral weakness, and his tragedy stems from his inability to leave her, even though it’s evident to him, her, and everyone else that their relationship is doomed and that reuniting will end only in disgrace, misfortune, death.
With The Final Judgment and Death at arm’s reach, we turn our attention to The River Flows between Two Shores, first drafted in or around 1930 and edited as late as 1936. During the author’s lifetime, it was never staged, and the script never published.85 This was Vallejo’s first full-length play, a tragedy with a prologue, three acts, and five scenes—and it was work that did not come easily. He struggled with the title of the play and, over the course of multiple drafts, changed it from Vera Polianova to The Game of Love and Hatred, then to The Game of Love, Hatred, and Death,