leading up to and during the Spanish civil war.
One hundred years after Vallejo’s birth, his final letter was published in the magazine Oiga.78 It was addressed to Luis José de Orbegoso precisely one month before Vallejo passed away. It’s a heart-wrenching plea for funds to cover the cost of a lengthy medical treatment. It turns out that Orbegoso, the excellent friend that he was, did in fact reply on March 25, 1938, wishing Vallejo a quick and complete recovery and including a check for the one thousand francs he’d requested. But neither the letter nor the check arrived in time and, what’s worse, Georgette was unable to receive the funds, since they’d been returned to Lima by the time she tried to collect them.
We now turn to Tungsten, first published in March 1930 by Cenit in Madrid. It counts as Vallejo’s only full-length novel and one of the five monographs published in his lifetime. Demonstrative of his political commitment, as evinced in his articles and chronicles from this period, Tungsten reveals Vallejo submitting his literary writing to the service of ideological propaganda in support of the Communist Party. Since literature was one of the most efficient means of ideological dissemination in the heat of 1930, it is understandable that Vallejo’s Tungsten riffed on Feodor Gladkov’s hit novel, Cement, which had been translated to Castilian by José Viana and published by Cenit in two editions in 1928 and 1929.
In view of Vallejo’s financial hardship, it seems plausible to suppose that, in addition to his ideological motivations, he’s likely to have wanted to capitalize on the aura of Gladkov’s immensely popular novel by situating Tungsten in the same marketplace and targeting its impassioned Spanish readers. We cannot 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,
