of perpetual transformation, a concept visible in the Peruvian’s writings not only on a theoretical register, as is laid out in his articles and chronicles, but also in praxis throughout the pages of his poetry, fiction, and plays. For example, Vallejo satirizes this error of imposing a finalist nature on Marx’s transformative function of thought in act 1, scene 3, of The River Flows between Two Shores, where the young revolutionary, Ilitch, challenges his older conservative brother, Vladimir, to a reading duel, in which the former recites passages from his Marxist reader at the top of his lungs while the latter tries to drown him out by reading passages from one of his mother’s religious books.
In February 1929, at the age of thirty-seven, Vallejo started writing articles for El Comercio of Lima. Certain that he wanted to visit the Soviet Union again after he’d returned to Paris in mid-November 1928, Vallejo kept in contact with the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), and thanks to this organization he was able to organize a second trip in the fall of 1929. This time, he and Georgette traveled together, planning a sort of Europe-by-rail tour that had the following itinerary: Paris–Berlin–Moscow–Leningrad–Prague–Cologne–Vienna–Budapest–Trieste–Venice–Florence–Rome–Pisa–Genoa–Nice–Paris. Despite the apparent grandeur of this journey, it lasted only slightly longer than the first.
Akin to his first trip to Russia, on this tour, short as it was, Vallejo obtained a wealth of information and interviewed many people, this time in factories, on farms, at industrial centers, in laboratories, on the street, in their homes—we’re talking about hundreds of people! The direct observations, the in situ reflections, and a great majority of the material he recorded ended up receiving concrete expression in magazine articles and the report Russia in 1931—a best seller in Spain and the most successful publication in the author’s lifetime.
One sequence of interviews occurred while Vallejo recorded a day in the life of a stonemason, observing the man’s family, workmates, workplace, his eating habits, his research at the Workers’ Club, and his view on sports. The Peruvian even joined him at a theater where the large diverse audience admired and was moved by the conflict in Vladimir Kirshon’s play The Rails Are Humming. With the objective voice of a journalist, Vallejo vividly recounted the experience in chapter 9 of that report as well as in an article called “New Russian Theater.”
Another momentous meeting transpired when the father of Russian futurism, Vladimir Mayakovsky, introduced César Vallejo to Sergei Eisenstein at a preliminary screening of The General Line. In that film, Eisenstein’s radical celebration of collective labor and mechanized agriculture along with the dramatization of the exploitation suffered by prerevolutionary workers was light-years ahead of what passed as cutting edge in Parisian cinemas. Next to Conrad and Chaplin, Russian film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein undoubtedly stands as one of Vallejo’s great contemporary inspirations, and his films received rigorous treatment by the enthused Peruvian in chapter 4, “Russia Inaugurates a New Era on the Silver Screen,” in Russia in 1931. “Labor is the father of human society,” he proclaims, after viewing The General Line, and he can’t help recognize “how far we are here from Hollywood and all its schmaltzy, decadent dressing rooms!”38
Soon after César and Georgette had left Moscow, not without first visiting Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, Abril started placing Vallejo’s new chronicles in his biweekly review called Bolivar. The column was titled “A Report from Russia” and essentially constituted early iterations of chapters that later became Russia in 1931. In addition to his reportage and with the generous logistical support of Gerardo Diego, the second edition of Trilce was published on April 9, 1930, by José Bergamín, who wrote an insightful prologue at the author’s request. A letter from Vallejo to Diego (January 6, 1930) informs us that Peruvian placed his complete trust in the sensibility and skill of his Spanish colleagues and didn’t directly take the manuscript to press for the second edition.
The month after Trilce came out, César and Georgette traveled from Paris to Spain. We know that while they were there, Vallejo met with Gerardo Diego, Rafael Alberti, and Pedro Salinas in Café de Recoletos and also that he received 15,000 pesos in front-end royalties for the second edition of Trilce. It was also during this excursion that the Peruvian went to Salamanca with Domingo Córdoba to meet with Miguel de Unamuno, but the interview never happened. No matter what the reason may have been, it’s hard not to think that Vallejo must’ve seen this absence, at least in part, as confirmation of the harsh evaluation he’d dealt the Spaniard four years prior: it was just further “proof of his mediocrity.”39
After a few weeks in Spain, César and Georgette returned to France, where they stayed until the end of the year, when they were hit with a disturbing surprise. On December 2, 1930, Vallejo received notification that he was being expulsed from France for his political activities and had until January 29 of the following year to leave the country. He and Georgette were out of France by December 29 and on their way back to Madrid. They arrived on New Year’s Eve and stayed at a modest home on Calle del Acuerdo. “When he left Paris,” Meneses explains, “despite the curse that city had cast on him, he seems to have shown optimism toward his future”—optimism that surpassed the realm of literature:
The possibilities of publishing in Spain and finding work with a fair wage became strong incentives. But four months later, the fundamental reason for residing in the Spanish capital had other motives. The monarchy had fallen and the Republic had been established. Vallejo began to see this new chapter in the pages of Spanish history as the Castilian translation of the rise of the Soviet Union.40
Without the stigma of exile, Vallejo moved to Madrid and kept the company of Spanish intellectuals and artists, like Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Fernando Ibáñez, Damaso Alonso, Pedro Salinas, Leopoldo Panero, Corpus Barga, José Bergamín, and Gerardo Diego. He joined the Spanish Communist Party and began teaching in clandestine cells. He also started writing for La Voz and was commissioned to translate two novels from French to Castilian, one by Henri Barbusse, which he titled Elevación, and the other by Marcel Aymé, which he titled La calle sin nombre.41 Since these works have been disregarded because they were carried out pro panis lucrando and because of their sensitive political thematics, Vallejo’s translation methodology has virtually gone unstudied, which is an oversight that must be addressed because an analysis of this modality, among other things, could reconcile the contradiction that arises out of his own translations and the contentious position he took against the practice of literary translation just two years earlier.42
On March 7, 1931, Vallejo’s social realist novel Tungsten was published by Editorial Cenit in Madrid just over a month before King Alfonso XIII abdicated and the Spanish Republicans came to power. According to Georgette, César said to her that a revolution that spills no blood isn’t a real revolution.43 In July 1931 Vallejo’s report Russia in 1931 was published by Ulises in Madrid, and despite being reprinted twice in four months and attaining best-seller status, the author didn’t see much of the revenue it brought in, although it was enough to mobilize again, and again he returned to Eastern Europe.
Vallejo took his third trip to Russia in the autumn of 1931. He departed from Madrid on October 11 and, after crossing Europe by rail, reached the Polish-Russian border five days later. Starting from Moscow, he began an impressive southbound journey, through present-day Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, with the following itinerary: Tula–Kiev–Kharkov–Dnieprostroi–Donetsk–Rostov–Tiflis–Elista–Volgograd–Voronezh. The delegation he was with continued toward the Caucasus region, but Vallejo split off and returned to Moscow on the twenty-seventh and to Madrid at the beginning of November.
During this third and final trip to the Soviet Union, Vallejo was pleased to find that the infrastructural development he’d witnessed two years earlier had already made significant progress. The social organization of the Soviet seemed to be on the upswing, and what progress he saw was aggrandized
