Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
music, food, living quarters, and so on. Without any other recording devices than his notebook, Vallejo annotated his travels and registered as many conversations as he could in preparation for his next book on Russia.
Back in 1928, and then again in 1931, César visited numerous Russian prisons and, after that three-year lapse, he confirmed an astounding decrease in criminality: a 70 percent drop according to his figures. He was also fascinated by Zernograd (literally, City of Grain), a then entirely socialist population of ten thousand inhabitants, covering an area of 463 square miles. There, mechanized agriculture had taken hold in 1929 and, as Priego explains, in this process Vallejo had great dreams of a massive population where hunger would no longer exist:
In terms of the rise of production, Vallejo’s dreams, incarnated in his lyric poetry, rest on this: the mechanization of agriculture and, consequently, socialist rationalization, which could end up flooding the universe with wheat in only a few years; yet, unfortunately, this did not happen, because that most powerful country of hopes ended up purchasing almost all the wheat it needed from abroad.”45
So, as 1931 was nearing its end, there was César Vallejo, standing in the Soviet countryside, fathoming the future of many cities of grain and marveling at the feats of modern agriculture. Filled perhaps with the optimism that this very kind of collective labor would soon spread throughout the world or perhaps with a memory of the poverty he’d seen in his own highland region of the Andes in what must’ve seemed like another lifetime—and without the historical vantage point from which he might glimpse the imminent failure of the socialist experiment and Stalin’s heinous purges—there he stood, gazing into the vast fertile landscape between the Black and Caspian Seas, as he took inventory of livestock and, with notebook in hand, carefully counted out those “225 oxen, 325 cows, 220 calves, 2000 rams, and 4000 hogs, raised to feed the population.”46
* * *
Vallejo’s return from the Soviet Union placed him back in Spain, where he began writing his second book of reports, Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan, which unfortunately wasn’t published until more than thirty years later. Yet, in addition to his reportage and with still kindled admiration for his Soviet heroes—Eisenstein on-screen and Kirshon onstage—Vallejo further developed his dramatic writing and actively tried to stage his plays. In January 1932 Federico García Lorca took him to see Camila Quiroga about staging Moscow vs. Moscow, but she turned it down. Lorca insisted that heavy editing would be in order before they could offer it elsewhere, in response to which Vallejo agreed and complained that he lacked the skills to edit his work to suit the taste of the general public.47
On January 25, 1932, when Georgette returned to Paris to arrange for César’s return, she discovered that her apartment had been sacked by the police.48 The Peruvian stayed in Madrid until February 12, when he crossed the border illegally and reunited with her in Paris. He was told that they could stay in France as long as he refrained from participating in political activities and reported to the prefecture on a monthly basis. Despite showing up at the prefecture only a couple of times, he regained legal status in France in August 1933, but his political activity didn’t wane. For example, just the following year, on February 6, 1934, he attended a leftist demonstration against Croix de Feux in Paris.49 This antifascist thread became increasingly pronounced in the later years of the author’s life when the theme of social justice saturated all his poems and plays.
In 1934 César and Georgette got married in Paris, eight years after they first met. This was also the year that he went back to Tungsten and adapted that novel into a full-length farce, Brothers Colacho, which he continued to edit through 1936. The drastic changes that occurred through three versions attest to Vallejo’s struggle with playwriting, but also to his perseverance, since the last (so as not to call it the final) version indeed contains outstanding improvements that produce striking social and ethical critiques through the mode of farce. In addition to the play, he also worked on the poems that eventually were collected in Human Poems.50
For the first few years of his marriage to Georgette (1934–36), César scaled back his journalistic contributions and communicated less frequently with his faraway friends, or at least that’s what his surviving writings lead us to believe. Of those that have been preserved, less than ten letters were written in this three-year lapse. He wrote no articles in 1934 and, in 1935–36, he wrote only five. Yet, curiously, in these few articles we observe the resurgence of Vallejo’s interest in Peruvian politics, society, history, and, especially, the prehistory of Latin America. For sure, he was distancing himself from the world of journalism and reportage, giving priority to his growing body of poetry, of which he was trying to publish a third volume. On Christmas Day of 1935, he wrote to Larrea and, among other things, asked him whether José Bergamín had received, via Rafael Alberti, poems that he wanted him to publish—likely some of the undated prose pieces that found their way into Human Poems.
In Spain of 1936, political tensions were reaching their boiling point. On July 12 Falange members murdered Lt. José Castillo of the Assault Guards Police Force and Socialist Party. The following day leading Spanish monarchist and prominent parliament member José Calvo Sotelo was arrested by the Assault Guards and shot without a trial. Five days later uprisings rocked Spanish Morocco and, soon thereafter, reached mainland Spain. Before the planned coup of 1936 had even been completed, the Popular Front, the National Confederation of Labor, and the International Workers Association armed the people. The Spanish civil war had broken out.
Over the next months, through a series of letters and telegrams with Juan Larrea and Juan Luis Velázquez, a deeply troubled Vallejo, who was by no means well off, discussed the ethical complexity of being so committed to Republican Spain from the comfort of his Parisian armchair: “Never have I measured my human smallness as I do now. Never have I been so aware of how little an individual can do alone. This crushes me.” Having witnessed the aftermath of the October Revolution and the Russian civil war, it was evident to Vallejo that “at moments like this, each person has his role, no matter how humble, and our gears must shift and submit to the collective cog.”51
Presumably it was for that reason that Vallejo left Paris on December 15, 1936, to visit Barcelona and Madrid, and why, while in Madrid, he reached the frontlines of the war, where he interviewed volunteers for the Republic. As a staunch supporter of the Republicans, Vallejo was interested in publicizing their heroic feats; but to his surprise, one volunteer explained in good socialist fashion that “no one knows the names of the heroes” and, more important, “no one cares too much about them.” Each volunteer of the Republic “does what he can, without concern for glory … in the army of the people. Either they’re all heroes, or there are no heroes left.”52 This notion that no individual can be more valuable than the whole pervades Vallejo’s writings across genres and modalities and was accentuated in the poetry he started writing upon his return to Paris, on December 31, which crowned his poetic corpus with Spain, Take This Cup from Me, composed in an astonishing sermonic lyrical mode, as we see in “Hymn to the Volunteers for the Republic,” which carries all the weight of his poetic maturity:
The same shoes will fit whoever climbs
without trails to his body
and whoever descends to the form of his soul!
Entwining each other the mutes will speak, the paralyzed will walk!
The blind, now returning, will see
and throbbing the deaf will hear!
The ignorant will know, the wise will not!
Kisses will be given that you could not give!
Only death will die! The ant
will bring morsels of bread to the elephant chained
to his brutal gentleness; aborted children
will be born again perfect, spatial
and all men will work,
all men will beget,
all men will understand!
Just over three decades after it had begun, Vallejo’s