d’être—the agony commenced, there was some gasping, and the death knells tolled.
Also straddling poetic and critical modalities is another book of thoughts, composed in 1923–24 while Vallejo was taking his first steps in Paris, and then in 1928–29 when he took the hard left toward Marxism: Against Professional Secrets. In step with his poor publication record, this gem was released only in 1973 by Mosca Azul. Essential to this book is Vallejo’s reportage, which sent him interviewing scores of people across interwar Russia, attending theatrical and musical performances in Paris, looking at society as a complex conglomeration of sectors that are irremediably bound, and noticing the tendency of prevailing avant-garde writers to create innovative literature behind closed doors. Many of the texts in Against Professional Secrets were early drafts of longer pieces the author had placed in magazines.
The phrase “Contra el secreto professional” first appeared as the title of a 1927 magazine article that Vallejo published in Variedades and seems to be his way of rebuking the idea of sectarian literature, which he saw epitomized in Jean Cocteau’s Le secret professionnel (1922). In that article Vallejo levels an attack on avant-garde literature and enumerates several formulas that Latin American poets were appropriating from the European tradition. As an alternative to this, he invokes a new attitude, a “new sensibility,” one that denounces the gross plagiarists of literary trends, because “their plagiarism prevents them from expressing and realizing themselves humanly and highly” and because they imitate foreign aesthetics about which they gloat with insolent rhetoric that they create out of autochthonous inspiration. The closer we read this book, the more apparent it becomes that Vallejo modulates styles to demonstrate a chameleonic strategy that allows him to adopt romantic, symbolist, surrealist, socialist, realist, scientific, and even existentialist modalities. What makes this tactic so compelling is that, by emulating these literary tendencies, he implicates himself in his own critique, widens the scope of his project, and shapes a collaborative poetics instead of the usual oppositional polemics.
From “The Motion Inherent in Matter,” a scientific description of the 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,
