5 - Pacifist and War Prose

Summary

In Chapters 2 and 3 of this book, the relationship between Nuevo Romanticismo and the two main archetypes of Socialist Realism, Gorky's Mother and Gladkov's Cement, was established. From an aesthetic standpoint it was noted that Mother differed radically from Spain's avant-garde social narratives of the 1920s and 1930s, while the earliest version of Cement displayed some Modernist tendencies, and a greater attention to language and style, although it was not perhaps the exquisite prose of the avant-garde. This chapter will examine another important area of dialogue between Hispanic and Russian letters: narratives of the Spanish military campaigns in North Africa and the Civil War in post-Revolutionary Russia, which more clearly mirror their aesthetic preferences. It will also map out the reception of Soviet Civil War prose in Spain and analyze the structure, themes and ideological orientations of two representative narratives which demonstrate a compelling case of confluence: José Díaz Fernàndez's El blocao and Isaac Babel's La caballería roja. These texts permit a close examination of aesthetic convergences and divergences between Soviet and Spanish literary responses to war during the 1920s and 1930s.

In El nuevo romanticismo [The New Romanticism] Díaz Fernàndez stated that the true literatura de avanzada [avant-garde literature] should follow the model of the Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky. More important for considering Díaz Fernàndez's narratives, however, was Isaac Babel, as the Spaniard's response to war bears a striking resemblance to the chronicler of Budenny's Cossacks.