“No One Writes to the Writer”: César Vallejo´s Soviet Correspondence

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the history of the interaction of the Peruvian poet, writer, essayist and public figure César Vallejo with the Soviet Union, mainly after his three trips there in 1928, 1929 and 1931. Relying on the materials of the Russian archives RGALI and RGASPI, the creative and publishing plans of the writer are reconstructed. Vallejo repeatedly made attempts to return to the USSR, publish his reports and books in Russian, stage his plays Lock-out (1930) and Presidents of America (1934) on the Soviet stage. The correspondence with International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW) in 1933–1935 was not productive: Vallejo's Moscow correspondent F.V. Kelin did not answer the writer regularly and did not explain the reasons for his silence. The article contains fragments of diary entries by F.V. Kelin and his reports to the IURW, which indicate that the figure of Vallejo in the USSR was considered in the context of the author's social activities in Spain and work in the Union of Revolutionary Writers of Spain. Soviet literary functionaries tried to instruct the writer, expected active cooperation with the IURW, which for various reasons Vallejo could not carry out. Despite the irregular interaction, the Soviet episodes of the writer's work have become very important components of his creative biography, and his literary ties with Soviet Russia are a unique example of the cooperation of a Latin American poet with the literary institutions of the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s — at the stage of emergence and consolidation of contacts with writers of leftist views in Spain and Latin America. The appendix contains letters from C. Vallejo to F.V. Kelin, as well as a letter from the IURW to Vallejo (1931) and a memorandum from F. Kelin to the IURW (1931).