Spanish Reception of Russian Narratives, 1905-1939

This book examines Spain's reception of Russo-Soviet literature and its relationship with Nuevo Romanticismo through the lens of Bakhtin's theories on the novel.

Drawing upon theories on the novel in Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination, this book examines Nuevo Romanticismo through the lens of Russo-Soviet littérature engagée. The term Nuevo Romanticismo originated in José Díaz Fernández's eponymous essay and has been applied to a group of writers who exemplified a rehumanization of the field of Spanish cultural production. In contrast with the dehumanized tendencies noted by Ortega y Gasset, writers CésarArconada, Ramón J. Sender, and Lusia Carnés combined avant-garde aesthetics and a deep preoccupation with the human condition, creating a model of politically engaged art in part through transcultural dialogues with Russian literary models. This study explores the deep connection between Spanish and Russian narratives immediately before and during the Second Republic, as well as themes as relevant today as nearly a century ago: the ethics of war, the newwoman, and responses to machine culture in the modern age.

Lynn C. Purkey is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.