The Poetic and Real Worlds of César Vallejo (1892–1938)

A Struggle Between Art and Politics

The world-renowned Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892–1938) was also a journalist, essayist, novelist and would-be dramatist. A Struggle between Art and Politics reviews the evidence – literary and historical – now reliably to hand, and assesses the often conflicting body of opinion his work has generated. This new, comparative study maps his career onto the cultural, social, political and historical backdrop to his life in Peru, France, Spain and Russia, and analyses his writings in the light of his life circumstances. Vallejo’s journey from Peru, the cultural “periphery”, to the “centre” of interwar Paris, his experience of European capitalism during the Depression, and the confrontation of Communism and Fascism, ultimately played out in the Spanish Civil War, forced him to wage a personal struggle to reconcile art with life and politics.