We present to our readers a book that includes works by the founders of Latin American modernism - the Argentinean Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938) and the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario (1867-1916). They met in Buenos Aires at the office of a local newspaper, and a friendship began between them that lasted until Dario's death.
The work of both was influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and as a result a new genre of literary work arose - the fantastic story. The collection you are holding in your hands presents the complete unadapted text of the stories of Lugones and Dario, equipped with detailed comments and a dictionary.
An incredible and sad story about the simple-minded Erendira and her cruel grandmother (collection)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Classic prose Missing No dataThe stories in this collection belong to the “mature” period of the great Latin American writer’s work, when he had already achieved perfection in the style of magical realism that glorified him and became his signature. Magic or the grotesque can be funny or frightening, plots can be fascinating or very conventional.
But the wonderful or monstrous invariably becomes part of reality - these are the rules of the game set by the writer, which the reader follows with pleasure.
Self-instruction manual of the Spanish language, 2nd ed., revised. and additional Training manual for open source software
Nadezhda Mikhailovna Shidlovskaya Educational literature Professional educationThe textbook is focused on developing communication skills in Spanish within the framework of the main lexical topics in the social and everyday sphere, acquiring grammatical and lexical knowledge necessary for successful communication. Texts selected from the works of Spanish and Latin American writers, dialogues compiled from radio broadcasts, and regional studies texts are accompanied by a dictionary of active vocabulary, lexical and grammatical commentary and reflect the current state of the Spanish language.
They will allow you to master reading techniques, practice grammatical forms, master basic stereotypical cues and develop speech reactions to certain life situations. The clear structure of the textbook and the system of exercises and test tests with keys developed by the authors will help in the development of basic linguistic competencies.
Exiles. Book to read in Spanish
Horacio Quiroga Stories Literatura classicaHoracio Quiroga (1878–1937) was a Uruguayan writer who lived in Argentina, one of the most prominent Latin American writers, and a master of the short story. We present to our readers the complete unadapted text of the stories with comments and a dictionary.
Partisan's daughter
Louis de Bernieres Modern romance novels AbsentLouis de Bernières, author of the bestselling book Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the Latin American magic trilogy and the epic novel The Wingless Birds, tells a poignant love story. He is forty, he is English, a traveling salesman against his will. His life passes under the news on the radio and the snoring of his wife and has imperceptibly turned into a swamp.
She's nineteen, Serbian, and a retired prostitute. Her life is full of events, but she is so tired of them that she wants to fall asleep and never wake up. She tells him stories - who knows how true they are? He saves money, hoping to buy it one day.
Shehryar and his Scheherazade. They seem to be in love with each other. They are for each other a rare chance to start over. But what is love? “I fell in love quite often,” he says, “but now I’m completely exhausted and I no longer understand what it means... Every time you fall in love a little differently.
And then, the word “love” itself became common. But it should be holy and hidden... Just now the thought came that love is something unnatural, which is learned through films, novels and songs. How to distinguish love from lust? Well, lust is still understandable. So, maybe love is a savage torture invented by lust? Perhaps the answer lies in the pages of a new book by Louis de Bernières, a writer who has an invaluable property: he is not like anyone else, and all his works are not alike.
The secret of the WH project
Alexey Rostovtsev Spy detectives Missing No dataAlexey Aleksandrovich Rostovtsev is a retired colonel who served in Soviet intelligence for a quarter of a century, sixteen of which were abroad; writer, author of many books and publications, member of the Russian Writers' Union. In one of the deep canyons of the Latin American country of Aurica, forgotten by God and people, the sworn enemies of humanity have built a top-secret facility where weapons are being developed, designed to provide their owners with dominance over the world.
A few hours before his failure, a Soviet intelligence officer manages to uncover the secret of the Double-U-H facility.
Orchid hunter. Book to read in Spanish
Roberto Arlt Stories Prosa modernaWe present to our readers a collection of stories by Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), an Argentine writer of the “second tier”. His name is almost unknown to the Russian reader. Three Latin American titans - Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel García Márquez - hid with their powerful shadows more than a dozen names of outstanding, sometimes brilliant, writers of South America.
Arlt in his work demonstratively breaks with the traditions of “good literature” of the middle classes. The genre of his works is grotesque and tragic farce. In the rough language of the proletarian outskirts, he describes the life of the city bottom. The book contains the complete unadapted text of the short stories, equipped with comments and a dictionary.
The book is intended for students of language universities and all lovers of the Spanish language and literature.
Antarctica
Jose Maria Villagra Contemporary foreign literature Absent"An inspired sermon on inhumanity." “The amazing ability to see what is not there.” Latin American critics greeted this book with these words. The Chilean writer Jose Maria Villagra is still quite young and probably deserves not only flattering words, but, one way or another, “Antarctica” is a story that made people talk about him.
"Antarctica" is a classic utopia. And, like any utopia, it is nightmarish. People are dying of happiness! What could be more hopeless? Heaven, in essence, is also the end of the world. In any case, it’s heaven on earth. This is a world where there is no evil, which means there is no good. And where love is indistinguishable from brutality.
However, is all this really so fantastic? Despite the futurological orientation, the main idea of this story continues the theme to which, in fact, the entire world culture is devoted: everything around is not what it seems. Everything around only seems to us. And what has been said applies to the real world to a much greater extent than to the fictional one.
The characters in this book ask themselves a question that has been driving people crazy since the times of Plato and Aristotle. Why does life only seem to us? The escape from the unreality of existence begins with this question.
Spanish language. General course of grammar, vocabulary and conversation practice. Advanced Stage 2nd ed., IS
Marina Vladimirovna Larionova Educational literature Bachelor. Academic courseThe book is a continuation of the book “Esp@nol. hoy. Nivel B1. Spanish with elements of business communication for advanced students” by M. V. Larionova, N. I. Tsareva and A. Gonzalez-Fernandez. The textbook will help you understand the intricacies of using Spanish words, teach you how to use them correctly in various communication situations, introduce you to the peculiarities of the grammatical stylistics of the language, and also help you improve the art of speaking.
Diverse and fascinating texts will provide an opportunity to get in touch with modern Spanish and Latin American literature, which has given the world wonderful writers and poets. The textbook is the third of four books united under the title Esp@nol. hoy, and is addressed to students of linguistic and non-linguistic universities, foreign language courses, a wide range of people interested in the culture of Spanish-speaking countries and who have mastered the basics of normative grammar of the Spanish language.
About the literature and culture of the New World
Valery Zemskov Linguistics Russian PropylaeaThe book by the famous literary and cultural critic, professor, Doctor of Philology Valery Zemskov, founder of the Russian school of humanitarian interdisciplinary Latin American studies, publishes so far the only monographic essay in Russian literary studies on the work of the classic 20th century, Nobel Prize winner, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.
Next, the history of culture and literature of the “Other World” (Christopher Columbus’s expression) – Latin America from its origins – “Discovery” and “Conquest”, chronicles of the 16th century is recreated. , Creole Baroque of the 17th century. (Juana Ines de la Cruz and others) to Latin American literature of the 19th-21st centuries.
– Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Jose Hernandez, Jose Marti, Ruben Dario and the famous “new” Latin American novel (Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, etc.). The theoretical chapters explore the specifics of cultural genesis in Latin America, which took place on the basis of intercivilizational interaction, the originality of Latin American cultural creativity, the role in this process of the phenomenon of “holiday”, carnival, and a special type of Latin American creative personality.
As a result, it is shown that in Latin America, literature, endowed with a creative innovative role, created the cultural consciousness of a new civilizational and cultural community, its own special world. The book is intended for literary scholars, cultural experts, historians, philosophers, as well as the general reader.
He went towards the sea. The secret of the WH project
Alexey Rostovtsev Historical literature AbsentWe present to your attention an audiobook based on the works of Alexei Rostovtsev (1934–2013), a retired colonel who served in Soviet intelligence for a quarter of a century, sixteen years of which abroad, a writer, author of many books and publications, a member of the Russian Writers' Union.
“GONE TO THE SEA” On the night of August 31 to September 1, 1983, the death of a South Korean Boeing over the Sea of Japan brought the world to the brink of disaster. All Western newspapers shouted about the barbarity of the Russians who shot down a peaceful plane. For many years, French plane crash specialist Michel Brun conducted an independent investigation into the circumstances of the incident.
Alexey Rostovtsev based the sensational conclusions of this investigation and Brun's argumentation as the basis of his story. “THE SECRET OF PROJECT WH” In one of the deep canyons of the Latin American country of Aurica, forgotten by God and people, the sworn enemies of humanity have built a top-secret facility where weapons are being developed, designed to provide their owners with dominance over the world.
Most of the stories could grace any anthology; in the best, the writer reaches Faulknerian heights. Valery Dashevsky is published in the USA and Israel. Time will tell whether he will become a classic, but before us, undoubtedly, is a master of modern prose, writing in Russian.
Lecture No. 26
Literature of Latin America
Plan
1. Distinctive features of Latin American literature.
2. Magic realism in the works of G. G. Marquez:
a) magical realism in literature;
b) a brief overview of the writer’s life and creative path;
c) the ideological and artistic originality of the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
1. Distinctive features of Latin American literature
In the mid-twentieth century, the Latin American novel experienced a real boom. The works of Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Cuban Alejo Carpentier, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, and Peruvian prose writer Mario Vargas Lluos are becoming widely known not only outside their countries, but also outside the continent. Somewhat earlier, the Brazilian prose writer Jorge Amado and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda won world recognition. Interest in Latin American literature was not accidental: there was a discovery of the culture of a distant continent with its own customs and traditions, nature, history and culture. But the point is not only the educational value of the works of Latin American writers. The prose of South America has enriched world literature with masterpieces, the appearance of which is natural. Latin American prose of the 60s and 70s compensated for the lack of epic. The authors listed above spoke on behalf of the people, telling the world about the formation of new nations as a result of the European invasion of the continent inhabited by Indian tribes, reflected the presence in the subconscious of the people of ideas about the Universe that existed in the pre-Columbian era, revealed the formation of a mythopoetic vision of natural and social disasters in conditions of synthesis various international cultures. In addition, turning to the novel genre required Latin American writers to assimilate and adapt genre patterns to specific literature.
Success for Latin American writers came as a result of the fusion of history and myth, epic traditions and avant-garde quests, the sophisticated psychologism of realists and the variety of visual forms of the Spanish Baroque. In the diversity of talents of Latin American writers, there is something that unites them, most often expressed by the formula “magical realism,” which captures the organic unity of fact and myth.
2. Magic realism in the works of G. G. Marquez
A. Magical realism in literature
The term magical realism was introduced by the German critic F. Roch in his monograph “Post-Expressionism” (1925), where the establishment of magical realism as a new method in art was stated. The term magical realism was originally used by Franz Roch to describe a painting that depicted an altered reality.
Magic realism is one of the most radical methods of artistic modernism, based on the rejection of the ontologization of visual experience characteristic of classical realism. Elements of this trend can objectively be found in the majority of representatives of modernism (although not all of them state their adherence to this method).
The term magical realism in relation to literature was first coined by the French critic Edmond Jaloux in 1931. He wrote: “The role of magical realism is to find in reality what is strange, lyrical and even fantastic in it - those elements thanks to which everyday life becomes accessible to poetic, surreal and even symbolic transformations.”
The same term was later used by Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Petri to describe the works of some Latin American writers. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (a friend of Uslar-Petri) used the term lo real maravilloso (roughly translated - miraculous reality) in the preface to his story The Kingdom of the Earth (1949). Carpentier's idea was to describe a kind of heightened reality in which strange-looking elements of the miraculous could appear. Carpentier's works had a strong influence on the European boom of the genre, which began in the 60s of the 20th century.
Elements of magical realism:
B. Brief overview of the writer’s life and creative path
Gabriel Garcia Marquez(b. 1928) occupies a central place in the literature of the Latin American countries. Nobel Prize winner (1982). The Colombian writer, using specific historical material, was able to show the general patterns of the formation of civilization in South America. Combining the ancient pre-Columbian beliefs of the peoples who inhabited the distant continent with the traditions of European culture, revealing the originality of the national character of the Creoles and Indians, he, based on the material of the struggle for independence under the leadership of Simon Bolivar, who became the President of Colombia, created a heroic epic of his people. At the same time, based on reality, Márquez impressively revealed the tragic consequences of the civil wars that rocked Latin America over the past two centuries.
The future writer was born in the small town of Aracataca on the Atlantic coast into a family of hereditary military men. He studied at the Faculty of Law in Bogota and collaborated with the press. As a correspondent for one of the capital's newspapers, he visited Rome and Paris.
In 1957, during the World Festival of Youth and Students, he came to Moscow. Since the early 60s, Marquez has lived primarily in Mexico.
In the work, the action takes place in a provincial Colombian village. Somewhere nearby is the town of Macondo mentioned in the story, in which all the events of the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967) will be concentrated. But if in the story “Nobody Writes to the Colonel” the influence of E. Hemingway, who portrayed similar characters, is noticeable, then in the novel the tradition of W. Faulkner is noticeable, who thoroughly recreated a tiny world in which the laws of the universe are reflected.
In the works created after One Hundred Years of Solitude, the writer continues to develop similar motifs. He is still occupied with a topical problem for Latin American countries: “the tyrant and the people.” In the novel “The Autumn of the Patriarch” (1975), Marquez creates the most generalized image of the ruler of an unnamed country. By resorting to grotesque images, the author makes visible the relationship between the totalitarian ruler and the people, based on suppression and voluntary submission, characteristic of the political history of Latin American countries in the twentieth century.
V. Ideological and artistic originality of the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”
The novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was published in 1967 in Buenos Aires. The writer worked on this work for 20 years. The success was stunning. The circulation amounted to more than half a million copies in 3.5 years, which is sensational for Latin America. The world started talking about a new era in the history of the novel and realism. The term “magical realism” appeared on the pages of numerous works. This is how they defined the narrative style inherent in Marquez’s novel and the works of many Latin American writers.
“Magical realism” is characterized by unlimited freedom, with which Latin American writers compare the sphere of grounded everyday life and the sphere of the hidden depths of consciousness.
The town of Macondo, founded by the ancestor of the Buenia family clan, the inquisitive and naive José Arcadio, has remained the center of action for a hundred years. This is an iconic image in which the local flavor of a semi-rural village and the features of a city characteristic of modern civilization have merged together.
Using folklore and mythological motifs and parodying various artistic traditions, Marquez created a phantasmagoric world, the history of which, refracting the real historical features of Colombia and all of Latin America, is also interpreted as a metaphor for the development of humanity as a whole.
The eccentric José Arcadio Buendia, the founder of the extensive Buendia family, in the village of Macondo he founded, succumbed to the temptation of the gypsy Melquiades and believed in the miraculous power of alchemy.
The author introduces alchemy into the novel not only to show the eccentricities of José Arcadio Buendia, who was alternately interested in the magic of magnetism, magnifying glasses, and spyglasses. In fact, José Arcadio Buendía, “the most intelligent man in the village, ordered the houses to be placed in such a way that no one had to spend more effort than the rest in going to the river for water; he laid out the streets so wisely that during the hottest hours of the day each dwelling received an equal amount of sunlight.” Alchemy in the novel is a kind of refrain of loneliness, not eccentricity. The alchemist is as eccentric as he is lonely. And yet loneliness is primary. It is quite possible to say that alchemy is the lot of single eccentrics. In addition, alchemy is a type of adventure, and in the novel, almost all the men and women belonging to the Buendia family are adventurers.
Spanish researcher Sally Ortiz Aponte believes that “Latin American literature bears the stamp of esotericism.” The belief in miracles and witchcraft, especially characteristic of the European Middle Ages, came to Latin American soil and was enriched by Indian myths. Magic as an integral part of existence is present not only in the works of Marquez, but also in other major Latin American writers - the Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier. Fiction as a literary device is generally characteristic of Spanish-language literature.
Alchemists have been chasing the philosopher's stone for more than a millennium. After all, it was believed that the lucky person who possessed it would not only become fabulously rich, but also receive a panacea for all diseases and ailments of old age.
The hero of the novel needed a philosopher's stone, because he dreamed of gold: “Seduced by the simplicity of the formulas for doubling gold, José Arcadio Buendia courted Ursula for several weeks, luring her permission to take out ancient coins from the treasured chest and enlarge them as many times as possible. divide the mercury... José Arcadio Buendia threw thirty doubloons into a pan and melted them along with orpiment, copper shavings, mercury and lead. Then he poured it all into a kettle with castor oil and boiled it over high heat until a thick, foul syrup was obtained, reminiscent not of double gold, but of ordinary molasses. After desperate and risky attempts at distillation, melting with seven planetary metals, treatment with hermetic mercury and vitriol, repeated boiling in lard - for lack of rare oil - Ursula's precious inheritance turned into burnt cracklings that could not be torn from the bottom of the pot.
We don’t think that García Márquez deliberately contrasted chemistry with alchemy, but it turned out that adventurers and losers were associated with alchemy, and quite decent people were associated with chemistry. Latin American researcher Maria Eulalia Montener Ferrer reveals the etymology of the Buendia surname, which sounds like the usual greeting buen dia - good afternoon. It turns out that for a long time this word had another meaning: this was the name given to Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Old World - “losers and mediocre people.”
The novel continues throughout the 19th century. However, this time is conditional, since the author presents events as occurring in a given specific period of time and always. The contours of the dates are vague, which gives the impression that the Buendia family originated in archaic times.
One of the strange shocks in the novel is associated with the loss of memory of the old and young Buendia, and then all the inhabitants of Macondo. The loss of the past threatens the people with deprivation of self-worth and integrity. The function of historical memory is performed by the epic. In Colombia, as in other countries of this continent, there was no heroic epic. Marquez takes on an exceptional mission: to compensate for the lack of epic with his creativity. The author saturates the narrative with myths, legends, and beliefs that existed in Latin American society. All this gives the novel a folk flavor.
The heroic epics of different nations are dedicated to the formation of the clan, and then the family. The unification of individual clans into a single clan occurred as a result of wars that divided people into friends and foes. But Marquez is a writer of the twentieth century, therefore, while maintaining an ethically neutral manner of recreating battle events, he nevertheless convinces that war, and especially civil war, is the greatest disaster of modern civilization.
The novel traces the family chronicle of six generations of Buendia. Some relatives turn out to be temporary guests in the family and on earth, die young or leave their father's house. Others, like Big Mama, remain the guardians of the family hearth for a century. In the Buendia family there are forces of attraction and repulsion. Blood ties are indissoluble, but Amaranta’s hidden hatred for her brother’s wife pushes her to commit crimes. And a super-personal desire for family binds José Arcadio and Rebeca not only by family ties, but also by marriage. Both of them are adopted in the Buendia family and, by marrying, they cement their devotion to the family. All this happens not as a result of calculation, but on a subconscious intuitive level.
The role of the epic hero is played in the novel by Aureliano Buendia. What makes an amateur poet and a modest jeweler leave their craft, leave the workshop into the vast world to fight, having, in fact, no political ideals? In the novel there is only one explanation for this: it was written in his destiny. The epic hero guesses his mission and carries it out.
Aureliano Buendía proclaimed himself a civil and military ruler, and at the same time a colonel. He is not a real colonel; at first he has only twenty young thugs under his arms. Entering the sphere of politics and war, Marquez does not abandon grotesque and fantastic techniques of writing, but strives for authenticity in the depiction of political cataclysms.
The hero’s biography begins with the famous phrase: “Colonel Aureliano Buendia raised thirty-two armed uprisings and lost all thirty-two. He had seventeen male children by seventeen women, and all his sons were killed in one single night before the eldest of them was thirty-five years old.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendia appears in the narrative in various guises. His subordinates and those around him see him in the realm of a hero; his mother considers him the executioner of his own people and his family. Showing miracles of courage, he is invulnerable to bullets, poison and daggers, but because of his carelessly thrown word, all his sons die.
An idealist, he leads an army of liberals, but soon realizes that his comrades are no different from his enemies, since both are fighting for power and land ownership. Having gained power, Colonel Buendia is doomed to complete loneliness and personality degradation. Repeating in his dreams the exploits of Bolivar and anticipating the political slogans of Che Guevara, the colonel dreams of a revolution throughout Latin America. The writer limits revolutionary events to the framework of one town, where in the name of his own ideas, neighbor shoots neighbor, brother shoots brother. The civil war, as interpreted by Marquez, is a fratricidal war in the literal and figurative sense.
The Buendia family is destined to last a hundred years. The names of their parents and grandfathers will be repeated in their descendants, their destinies will vary, but everyone who at birth receives the names Aureliano or Jose Arcadio will inherit family oddities and eccentricities, excessive passions and loneliness.
Loneliness, inherent in all Marquez's characters, is a passion for self-affirmation through trampling on loved ones. Loneliness becomes especially obvious when Colonel Aureliano, at the zenith of his glory, orders a circle with a diameter of three meters to be drawn around him so that no one, not even his mother, dares to approach him.
Only the ancestress Ursula is devoid of selfish feelings. As it fades, the family also dies out. Buendia will touch the blessings of civilization, they will be affected by banking fever, some of them will get rich, some will go bankrupt. But the time for the establishment of bourgeois laws is not their time. They belong to the historical past and quietly leave Macondo one by one. The unrecognizably changed city founded by the first Buendia will be demolished by a hurricane.
The stylistic diversity of the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the complex relationship between fantasy (the most important constructive element of the writer’s artistic world) and reality, the mixture of prosaic tone, poetry, fantasy, and grotesqueness reflect, in the author’s opinion, the “fantastic Latin American reality” itself, incredible and ordinary at the same time, most clearly illustrating the method of “magical realism” declared by Latin American prose writers of the second half of the twentieth century.
1. Bylinkina, M. And again - “One Hundred Years of Solitude” / M. Bylinkina // Literary newspaper. - 1995. - No. 23. - P. 7. 2. Gusev, V. Marquez’s cruel fearlessness / V. Gusev // Memory and style. - M.: Sov. writer, 1981. - pp. 318-323.
3. Foreign literature of the twentieth century: textbook. for universities / L. G. Andreev [etc.]; edited by L. G. Andreeva. - 2nd ed. - M.: Higher. school; Ed. Center Academy, 2000. - pp. 518-554.
4. Foreign literature. XX century: textbook. for students / ed. N. P. Michalskaya [and others]; under general ed. N. P. Michalskaya. - M.: Bustard, 2003. - P. 429-443.
5. Zemskov, V. B. Gabriel Garcia Marquez / V. B. Zemskov. - M., 1986.
6. Kobo, H. Return of Gobo / H. Kobo // Literary newspaper. - 2002. - No. 22. - P. 13.
7. Kofman, A.F. Latin American artistic image of the world / A.F. Kofman. - M., 1997.
8. Kuteyshchikova, V. N. New Latin American novel / V. N. Kuteyshchikova, L. S. Ospovat. - M., 1983.
9. Mozheiko, M. A. Magical realism / M. A. Mozheiko // Encyclopedia of Postmodernism / A. A. Gritsanov. - M.: Book House, 2001.
10. Ospovat, L. Latin America is reckoning with the past: “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by G. G. Marquez / L. Ospovat. // Questions of literature. - 1976. - No. 10. - P. 91-121.
11. Stolbov, V. “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Novel-epic / V. Stolbov // Paths and Lives. - M., 1985.
12. Stolbov, V. Afterword / V. Stolbov // One Hundred Years of Solitude. Nobody writes to the Colonel // G. G. Marquez. - M.: Pravda., 1986. - P. 457-478.
13. Terteryan, I. Latin American novel and the development of realistic form / I. Terteryan // New artistic trends in the development of realism in the West. 70s - M., 1982.
14. Shablovskaya, I. V. History of foreign literature (twentieth century, first half) ∕ I. V. Shablovskaya. - Minsk: Publishing house. Economic Press Center, 1998. - pp. 323-330.
BBK 83.3(2 ros=rus)
Anastasia Mikhailovna Krasilnikova,
postgraduate student, St. Petersburg State University of Technology and Design (St. Petersburg, Russia), e-mail: [email protected]
Latin American literature in Russian book publishing
Latin American literature is popular all over the world, the history of its publication in Russia goes back 80 years, during which time a large amount of editorial experience has been accumulated, which needs to be analyzed. The work examines the reasons for the appearance of the first editions of Latin American literature in the USSR, changes in the choice of authors, circulation, preparation of the publishing apparatus in Soviet times and perestroika, as well as the state of publishing Latin American literature in modern Russia. The results of the work can be used in the preparation of new publications by Latin American authors, and can also become the basis for studying reader interest in Latin American literature in Russia. The paper concludes that readers have a strong interest in Latin American literature and suggests several ways in which its publication can develop.
Key words: Latin American literature, book publishing, publishing history, editing.
Anastasia Mikhailovna Krasilnikova,
Postgraduate Student, St. Petersburg State University of Technology and Design (St. Petersburg, Russia), e-mail: [email protected]
Latin American Literature in Russian Book Publishing
Latin American literature is popular all other the world, history of its publishing in Russia numbers 80 years, during this time the great experience of editing was accumulated, which is needed to be analyzed. The paper deals with the reasons for the appearance of the first publications of Latin American literature in the Soviet Union, changes in the selection of authors, number of printed copies and editing the secondary matter of publications in the Soviet period, as well as the state of publishing Latin American literature in modern Russia. The results of the research could be used in preparing new publications of Latin American authors as well as become a basis for research of the reader's interest in Latin American literature in Russia. The paper concludes that reader's interest in Latin American literature is strong and proposes several ways in which publishing of Latin American literature can develop.
Keywords: Latin American literature, book publishing, history of publishing, editing.
Latin American literature made itself known to the whole world in the middle of the 20th century. The reasons for the popularity of the “new” Latin American novel are many; In addition to cultural reasons, there were also economic reasons. Only in the 30s. last century, an extensive system of book publishing and, most importantly, book distribution began to emerge in Latin America. Until this moment, if something interesting could have appeared, no one would have known about it: the books were not published, let alone beyond the continent, beyond the borders of a single country.
However, over time, literary magazines and publishing houses began to appear. Thanks to the largest Argentine publishing house, Sudamericana, many authors have gained fame: for example, from this publishing house
The world fame of García Márquez began. One of the channels through which Latin American literature penetrated into Europe was, of course, Spain: “It is appropriate to emphasize here that at this time, despite the activities of the Sudamericana publishing house, it was Spain, or more precisely, Barcelona, that followed all the processes taking place in literature , and served as a showcase for the authors of the boom, most of whom were published by the Seik-Barral publishing house, which occupied a leading position in this sense. Some of the writers lived in this city for a long time: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Donoso, Edwards, Bruce Echenique, Benedetti and, finally, Onetti." The role of the Pre-mio Bibliotheca Brive award, established by this Barcelona publishing house, is also important: since in Spain
© A. M. Krasilnikova, 2012
No significant authors appeared at the institute; they tried to choose winners from Spanish-speaking countries (the winners of this prestigious prize were Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, Haroldo Conti, Carlos Fuentos). Many Latin American writers have traveled widely, some of them lived in Europe for quite a long time. So Julio Cortazar lived for 30 years in Paris, and the French publishing house Gallimard also contributed to the spread of Latin American literature.
If with Europe everything is more or less clear: once translated, a book became famous and was translated into other European languages, then with the penetration of Latin American literature into the USSR the situation is much more complicated. European recognition of this or that author was not authoritative for the Soviet Union; rather, on the contrary, approval by ideological enemies could hardly have a positive impact on the publishing fate of the writer in the USSR
However, this does not mean that Latinos were banned. The very first book edition appeared back in 1932 - it was Cesar Vallejo’s novel “Tungsten” - a work in the spirit of socialist realism. The October Revolution attracted the attention of Latin American writers to the Soviet Union: “In Latin America, left-wing communist movements formed independently, practically without emissaries of the USSR, and left-wing ideology took a particularly strong position among the creative intelligentsia.” Cesar Vallejo visited the USSR three times - in 1928, 1929 and 1931, and shared his impressions in Parisian newspapers: “Driven by passion, enthusiasm and sincerity, the poet defends the achievements of socialism with propaganda pressure and dogmatism, as if borrowed from the pages of the newspaper Pravda ".
Another supporter of the Soviet Union was Pablo Neruda, about whom translator Ella Braginskaya said: “Neruda is one of those great dramatic figures of the 20th century.<...>, who became ideological friends of the USSR and in some incomprehensible, fatal way were happy to be deceived, like many of their peers in our country, and saw with us what they dreamed of seeing.” Neruda's books were actively published in the USSR from 1939 to 1989.
sideways, as a rule, they could not be identified with exemplary works of socialist realism, however, the political views of their authors made it possible for translators and editors to publish such works. The memoirs of L. Ospovat, who wrote the first book in Russian about Neruda’s work, are very indicative in this regard: “When asked whether he could be called a socialist realist, the Chilean poet grinned and said understandingly: “If you really need it, then you can.”
If in the 30s and 40s only a few publications appeared, then in the 50s more than 10 books by Latin American writers were published, and then this number increased.
Most of the publications that were prepared in Soviet times are distinguished by high-quality preparation. In relation to Latin American literature, this is important in two aspects. Firstly, Latin American realities, unknown and therefore incomprehensible to the Soviet reader, require commentary. And secondly, Latin American culture as a whole is characterized by the concept of “transculturation”, proposed by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, “... which does not mean the assimilation of one culture by another or the introduction of foreign elements of another into one of them, but the emergence as a result of cultural interaction of a new culture". In practice, this means that any Latin American author turns in his work to the world cultural heritage: the work of European writers and philosophers, the world epic, religious dogmas, reinterprets it and creates his own world. These references to a variety of works require intertextual commentary.
If intertextual commentary is important in scientific publications, then real commentary is an urgent need for any mass publication. These do not necessarily have to be notes; an introductory article can also prepare readers for getting to know the work.
Soviet publications can be accused of being too ideological, but they were produced very professionally. Famous translators and literary scholars participated in the preparation of the books, who were passionate about what they did, so most of the translations made in Soviet times, although imperfect, are in many ways superior to later ones. The same applies to
comments. Such famous translators as E. Braginskaya, M. Bylinka, B. Dubin, V. Stolbov, I. Terteryan, V. Kuteyshchikova, L. Sinyanskaya and others worked on the publications of Latin American authors.
The works of more than thirty Latin American writers have been translated into Russian and published in separate editions. Most of the authors are represented by two or three books, for example, Augusto Roa Bastos, the author of the famous anti-dictatorship novel “I, Supreme,” published only two books in the Soviet Union: “Son of Man” (M., 1967) and “ I, the Supreme" (M., 1980). However, there are authors who continue to be published today, for example, Jorge Amado's first book was published in 1951, and the last in 2011. His works have been published for sixty years without any significant interruptions. But there are few such authors: Miguel Angel Asturias was published in the USSR and Russia in 1958-2003, Mario Vargas Llosa in 1965-2011, Alejo Carpentier in 1968-2000, Gabriel García Márquez in 1971-2012, Julio Cortazar in 1971-2011, Carlos Fuentes in 1974-2011, Jorge Luis Borges in 1984-2011, Bioy Casares in 1987-2010.
The principles for selecting authors often remain unclear. First of all, of course, the writers of the “boom” were published, but not all of their works, and even not all of their authors, have yet been translated. Thus, the book by Lewis Harss “On the crest of a wave” (Luis Harss Into the mainstream; conversations with Latin-American writers), which is considered to be the first work that shaped the very concept of the “boom” of Latin American literature, includes ten authors. Nine of them have been translated into Russian and published, but the works of João Guimarães Rosa remain untranslated into Russian.
The “boom” itself took place in the 60s, but publications by Latin American writers in the USSR, as already mentioned, began to appear much earlier. The “new” novel was preceded by a long development. Already in the first half of the 20th century. Such venerable writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Jorge Amado worked, anticipating the “boom.” More writers, of course, are published in the 20th century, but not only. Thus, in 1964, poems by the Brazilian poet of the 18th century were translated and published into Russian. Thomas Antonio Gonzaga.
ny prizes awarded to him. Latin American writers include six Nobel Prize winners: Gabriela Mistral (1945), Miguel Angel Asturias Rosales (1967), Pablo Neruda (1971), Gabriel García Márquez (1982), Octavio Paz (1990), Mario Vargas Llosa (2010). All of them have been translated into Russian. However, the work of Gabriela Mistral is represented by only two books; Octavio Paz published four of them. This can be explained, first of all, by the fact that Spanish-language poetry is generally less popular in Russia than prose.
In the 80s, hitherto banned authors who did not share communist views began to appear. In 1984, the first edition by Jorge Luis Borges appeared.
If until the 90s the number of publications by Latin American writers grew steadily (more than 50 books were published in the 80s), then in the 90s there was a noticeable decline in everything: the number of publications sharply decreased, circulation fell, and the printing performance of books deteriorated. In the first half of the 90s, the usual for the USSR circulations of 50, 100 thousand were still possible, but in the second half the circulations were five, ten thousand and remain so to this day.
In the 90s There is a sharp reassessment of values: there are only a few authors left who continue to be published very actively. Collected works of Marquez, Cortazar, and Borges appear. The first collected works of Borges, published in 1994 (Riga: Polaris), are distinguished by a fairly high level of preparation: it included all the works translated at that time, accompanied by a detailed commentary.
During the period from 1991 to 1998, only 19 books were published, and the same number were published in 1999 alone. 1999 was a harbinger of the 2000s, when there was an unprecedented increase in the number of publications: in the period from 2000 to 2009. Over two hundred books by Latin American authors have been published. However, the total circulation was incomparably less than in the 80s, since the average circulation in the 2000s was five thousand copies.
Marquez and Cortazar are the constant favorites. The work that has been published in Russia more than any other work by a Latin American author is undoubtedly “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Borges and Vargas Llosa continue to publish quite actively. Popularity by
The latter was facilitated by receiving the Nobel Prize in 2010: in 2011, 5 of his books were immediately published.
Publications of the early 21st century. distinguished by a minimum of preparation: as a rule, there are no introductory articles or comments in books - publishers prefer to publish a “bare” text, devoid of any accompanying apparatus. This is due to the desire to reduce the cost of the publication and reduce the time of its preparation. Another innovation is the publication of the same books in different designs - in different series. As a result, an illusion of choice appears: on the shelf in a bookstore there are several editions of “The Hopscotch Game,” but in reality it turns out that they are the same translation, the same text without an introductory article and without comments. It can be said that large publishing houses (AST, Eksmo) use names and titles known to readers as brands and do not care about wider familiarity of readers with the literature of Latin America.
Another topic that needs to be addressed is the lag of several years in the publication of works. Initially, many writers began to be published in the USSR when they had already become world famous. So “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was published in Argentina in 1967, in the USSR in 1971, and this was Marquez’s first book in Russia. Such a lag is typical for all Latin American publications, but for the USSR this was normal and was explained by the complex organization of book publishing. However, much later, even when the writers were well known in Russia and created new works, the delay in publication remained: Cortazar’s last novel, “Farewell Robinson,” was written in 1995, but it was published in Russia only in 2001.
At the same time, Marquez’s last novel, “Remembering My Sad Whores,” published in Spanish in 2004, was published in Russia a year later - in 2005. The same thing happened with Vargas Llosa’s novel “Adventures of a Bad Girl,” completed in 2006 . and published in Russia already in 2007. However, the novel by the same author “Paradise on the Other Corner”, written in 2003, was never translated. The interest of publishers in works imbued with eroticism is explained by an attempt to add scandal to the work of writers and to attract the attention of unprepared readers. Often this approach leads to a simplification of problems and incorrect presentation of works.
The fact that interest in Latin American literature continues even without artificial heating from publishers is evidenced by the appearance of books by authors who were not published in the USSR. This is, for example, a writer of the early 20th century. Leopoldo Lugones; two authors who anticipated the emergence of the “new” Latin American novel - Juan José Arreola and Juan Rulfo; poet Octavio Paz and prose writer Ernesto Sabato - authors of the mid-20th century. These books were published both in publishing houses that periodically published Latin American literature (“Amphora”, “ABC”, “Symposium”, “Terra-Book Club”), and in those that had never previously been interested in Latin American writers (“Swallowtail” , “Don Quixote”, “Ivan Limbach Publishing House”).
Today, Latin American literature is represented in Russia by the works of prose writers (Mario Vargas Llosa, Ernesto Sabato, Juan Rulfo), poets (Gabriela Mistral, Octavio Paz, Leopoldo Lugones), playwrights (Emilio Carballido, Julio Cortazar). The vast majority are Spanish-language authors. The only actively published Portuguese-language author is Jorge Amado.
The first publications of Latin American authors in the USSR were caused by ideological reasons - the writers’ loyalty to the communist government, but thanks to this, Soviet readers discovered the world of Latin American literature and fell in love with it, which is confirmed by the fact that Latin Americans continue to be actively published in modern Russia.
During the Soviet years, the best translations and commentaries of Latin American works were created; with perestroika, much less attention was paid to the preparation of publications. Publishing houses were faced with a new problem for them in making money, and therefore the approach to book publishing completely changed, including changes in the publishing of Latin American literature: preference began to be given to mass publications with a minimum of preparation.
Today, print publications compete with the increasingly popular e-books. The text of almost any published work can be downloaded for free from the Internet, so it is unlikely that publishers will be able to exist without changing their strategy in preparing books. One of the ways is to improve printing performance and release expensive exclusive publications. So,
for example, the Vita Nova publishing house released in 2011 a luxurious leather-bound gift edition of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Marquez. Another way is to release high-quality publications with detailed, conveniently structured
Foreign literature of the twentieth century. 1940–1990: textbook Loshakov Alexander Gennadievich
The phenomenon of “new” Latin American prose
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Latin America was perceived by Europeans as a “continent of poetry.” It was known as the homeland of the brilliant and innovative Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario (1867–1916), the outstanding Chilean poets Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), the Cuban Nicholas Guillen (1902–1989), and others.
Unlike poetry, the prose of Latin America did not attract the attention of foreign readers for a long time; and although an original Latin American novel had already emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, it did not immediately gain worldwide fame. The writers who created the first novel system in Latin American literature focused their attention on social conflicts and problems of local, narrow national significance, and exposed social evil and social injustice. “The growth of industrial centers and class contradictions in them contributed to the “politicization” of literature, its turn to acute social problems of national existence and the emergence of such genres unknown in Latin American literature of the 19th century as the miner’s novel (and short story), the proletarian novel, the social and urban novel.” [Mamontov 1983: 22]. Social, political issues have become decisive for the work of many major prose writers. Among them are Roberto Jorge Pairo (1867–1928), who stands at the origins of modern Argentine literature; Chileans Joaquín Edwards Bello (1888–1969) and Manuel Rojas (1896–1973), who wrote about the fate of their disadvantaged compatriots; Bolivian Jaime Mendoza (1874–1938), who created the first examples of the so-called miner's literature, very characteristic of subsequent Andean prose, and others.
A special kind of genre has also been formed, such as the “novel of the earth”, in which, according to generally accepted opinion, the artistic originality of Latin American prose was most clearly revealed. The nature of the action here “was entirely determined by the dominance of the natural environment in which the events took place: the tropical jungle, plantations, llanos, pampas, mines, mountain villages. The natural element became the center of the artistic universe, and this led to the “aesthetic negation” of man<…>. The world of the pampa and selva was closed: the laws of its life had almost no correlation with the universal laws of human life; time in these works remained purely “local”, not associated with the historical movement of the entire era. The inviolability of evil seemed absolute, life - static. Thus, the very nature of the artistic world created by the writer implied the helplessness of man in the face of natural and social forces. Man was forced out of the center of the artistic universe to its periphery” [Kuteyshchikova 1974: 75].
An important point in the literature of this period is the attitude of writers towards Indian and African folklore as an original element of the national culture of the vast majority of Latin American countries. Authors of novels often turned to folklore in connection with the formulation of social problems. For example, I. Terteryan notes: “... Brazilian realist writers of the 30s, and especially Jose Lins do Rego, in five novels of the Sugar Cane Cycle, spoke about many beliefs of Brazilian blacks, described their holidays, macumba rituals. For Lins before Rego, the beliefs and customs of blacks are one of the aspects of social reality (along with labor, relations between masters and farmhands, etc.), which he observes and explores” [Terteryan 2004: 4]. For some prose writers, folklore, on the contrary, was exclusively the realm of exoticism and magic, a special world, distanced from modern life with its problems.
The authors of the “old novel” were never able to approach universal humanistic issues. By the middle of the century it became obvious that the existing art system required updating. Gabriel García Márquez would later say of the novelists of this generation: “They plowed the ground well so that those who came later could sow.”
The renewal of Latin American prose begins in the late 1940s. The “starting points” of this process are considered to be the novels of the Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias (“Señor President,” 1946) and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier (“The Kingdom of the Earth,” 1949). Asturias and Carpentier, earlier than other writers, introduced a folklore-fantasy element into the narrative, began to freely handle narrative time, and tried to comprehend the fate of their own peoples, correlating the national with the global, the present with the past. They are considered the founders of “magical realism” - “an original movement, which, from the point of view of content and artistic form, is a certain way of seeing the world, based on folk mythological ideas. This is a kind of organic alloy of the real and the fictional, the everyday and the fabulous, the prosaic and the miraculous, the book and the folklore” [Mamontov 1983: 28].
At the same time, the works of such authoritative researchers of Latin American literature as I. Terteryan, E. Belyakova, E. Gavron substantiate the thesis that the priority in creating “magical realism” and revealing Latin American “mythological consciousness” belongs to Jorge Amadou, who already in his early works, in the novels of the first Bayan cycle - “Jubiaba” (1935), “Dead Sea” (1936), “Captains of the Sand” (1937), and later in the book “Luis Carlos Prestes” (1951) - he combined folklore and everyday life, the past and present of Brazil, transferred the legend to the streets of a modern city, heard it in the hum of everyday life, boldly used folklore to reveal the spiritual powers of the modern Brazilian, resorted to the synthesis of such heterogeneous principles as documentary and mythological, individual and popular consciousness [Terteryan 1983 ; Gavron 1982: 68; Belyakova 2005].
In the preface to the novel “The Earthly Kingdom,” Carpentier, outlining his concept of “wonderful reality,” wrote that the multicolored reality of Latin America is a “real world of the wonderful” and one only needs to be able to display it in artistic words. Wonderful, according to Carpentier, are “the virginity of the nature of Latin America, the peculiarities of the historical process, the specificity of existence, the Faustian element in the person of the Negro and the Indian, the very discovery of this continent, which is essentially recent and turned out to be not just a discovery, but a revelation, the fruitful mixing of races that became possible only on this earth" [Carpentier 1988: 35].
“Magical realism,” which made it possible to radically update Latin American prose, contributed to the flourishing of the novel genre. Carpentier saw the main task of the “new novelist” as creating an epic image of Latin America, which would combine “all the contexts of reality”: “political, social, racial and ethnic, folklore and rituals, architecture and light, the specifics of space and time.” . “To cement and hold together all these contexts,” Carpentier wrote in the article “Problematics of the Contemporary Latin American Novel,” “the seething human plasma,” and therefore history, people’s existence, will help.” Twenty years later, a similar formula for a “total”, “integrating” novel, which “concludes an agreement not with any one side of reality, but with reality as a whole,” was proposed by Marquez. He brilliantly implemented the “real-miraculous” program in his main book, the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967).
Thus, the fundamental principles of the aesthetics of the Latin American novel at the new stage of its development are the polyphony of perception of reality, the rejection of a dogmatized picture of the world. It is also significant that the “new” novelists, unlike their predecessors, are interested in psychology, internal conflicts, and the individual fate of the individual, which has now moved to the center of the artistic universe. In general, new Latin American prose “is an example of a combination of a wide variety of elements, artistic traditions and methods. In it, myth and reality, factual reliability and fantasy, social and philosophical aspects, political and lyrical principles, “private” and “general” - all this merged into one organic whole” [Belyakova 2005].
In the 1950s-1970s, new trends in Latin American prose were further developed in the works of such major writers as the Brazilian Jorge Amado, the Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, the Venezuelan Miguel Otera Silva, and the Peruvian Mario Vargas. Llosa, Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti and many others. Thanks to this galaxy of writers, who are called the creators of the “new Latin American novel,” the prose of Latin America quickly became widely known throughout the world. The aesthetic discoveries made by Latin American prose writers influenced the Western European novel, which was going through times of crisis and by the time of the Latin American boom that began in the 1960s, was, according to many writers and critics, on the verge of “death.”
Latin American literature continues to develop successfully to this day. The Nobel Prize was awarded to G. Mistral (1945), Miguel Asturias (1967), P. Neruda (1971), G. García Márquez (1982), poet and philosopher Octavio Paz (1990), and prose writer Jose Saramago (1998).
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