Chapter 8 recounts Vallejo’s meeting in Leningrad with a group of Bolshevik writers: Sergei Adamovich Kolbasiev, Vissarion Mikhailovich Sayanov, Boris Viktorovich Lipatov, Wolf Yosifovich Ehrlich, and Ilya Ivanovich Sadofiev, inter alia. In chapter 9 he follows a stonemason around for a day only to end up at a theater, where he sees Kirshon’s play The Rails Are Humming. Vallejo marvels at the scenery with those larger-than-life sprockets and gears of a half-built locomotive, the socially diverse audience, and the revolutionary resolutions: A disenchanted worker is about to commit suicide, but “he’s still fighting. It’s time to sweat blood and ‘take this cup from me.’ As he lifts up the jar, a small hand suddenly stops him. It’s the hand of his son, who wasn’t sleeping. The boy’s action is of far-reaching historical significance.” The awakening son as hero crystallizes the revolutionary premise that the new generation will be the savior of the old. Finally, in the no less remarkable chapter 14, which is centered on film, Vallejo extols the achievements of Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line, in whose collaged scenes of exploitation, labor, and mechanized agriculture he perceives the future of revolutionary art in Russia as well as his own growing oeuvre.
Not long after finishing Russia in 1931, Vallejo began work on Russia Facing the Second Five-Year Plan, which was composed in 1931–32, though not published until as late as 1965 by Gráfica Labor in Lima. In a sense, it can be read as a sequel to Russia in 1931 with regard to its thematic concerns and methodology, but only to the extent that the first report focuses on Russian social organization during the socialist experiment, whereas the second studies the lifestyle such organization could afford. Vallejo divided this book of thoughts into two large sections, the first, consisting of thirty-two chapters, and the second, twenty-seven, all of which run considerably shorter than those from the first report.
The narrative device of this interwar 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.
