Forgotten, Famous and Favourite Nobel Literature Prize Winners, Steinbeck & Sartre to Sachs & Asturias (1962-1967)
Sixties radicals or 20th century grief?
Popular history makes a myth of the 1960s. It is the decade of rock music, hippies, radicals, the emergence of modern liberated society, and the Vietnam War. Do we see this story in the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature between 1962 and 1967? Or do we see grief for the first half of the 20th century?
The seven winners included:
The great American novelist of the 1930s depression
Two Jewish writers on the Holocaust and Zionism, and
The once famous, now forgotten, French Marxist who refused the prize.
Since 1901, 120 writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Some are forgotten. Many remain famous. A few became notorious for reasons that might surprise you and change your understanding of modern history. Discover them all in the 120 Nobels Challenge and let me know your favourites.
This week, we read the winners from 1962 to 1967:
1962 John Steinbeck, USA
1963 Giorgos Seferis, Greece
1964 Jean-Paul Sartre, France
1965 Mikhail Sholokhov, Soviet Union
1966 (1 of 2) Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Israel
1966 (2 of 2) Nelly Sachs, Germany/Sweden
1967 Miguel Ángel Asturias, Guatemala
Voiceover is available if you want to listen on a walk.
Be sure to read to the end of this post where you will find bonus archival footage of the Nobel Laureates 1962 to 1967.
My next monthly Nobels workshop
My next workshop 120 Nobels 1930-1969 Surprises, Secrets and Statecraft will discuss the winners from 1930 (Sinclair Lewis) to 1969 (Samuel Beckett).
The live workshop will be on Tuesday 20 August 16:00 AEST, and the replay will be sent to able to watch the replay in the Wednesday 21 August post..
You can join the workshop or watch the replay by becoming a paid subscriber.
My first workshop was available for all subscribers. You can watch it here.
1962 John Steinbeck (1902–1968), USA
John Steinbeck was the best American novelist to win the Nobel Prize up to this point. He wrote direct novels of social realism, most famously the masterpiece of poor displaced agricultural workers in 1930s America, The Grapes of Wrath.
His family had an unusual connection to world events today. His German grandfather founded a messianic farming colony in Palestine. It disbanded quickly after Arab attackers killed and raped several colonists. The family left, moved to America, and changed their name from Großsteinbeck to Steinbeck.
Steinbeck grew up amid poor migrant families in California. His early attempts to publish his writing were unsuccessful, and it was not till the mid-1930s he broke through as a writer. Until then he worked many itinerant, low-skilled jobs, and endured himself the deprivations that were common during the American 1930s Depression. After his writing breakthrough, Steinbeck wrote journalism that documented the difficulties many groups of workers experienced in California, based on interviews with families, including the many migrant agricultural workers who roamed across the dust bowls in search of work.
Grapes of Wrath immortalised their suffering and quiet heroism. It described a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land by the dust storms of economic failure. Its title came from the first verse of the American anthem, the Battle Hymn of the Republic,
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;/ He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;/ He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:/ His truth is marching on.
The novel was hugely successful, winning awards and a Hollywood script. It rightly made Steinbeck’s reputation, but provoked a backlash from America’s deep-rooted anti-leftism. Steinbeck was accused of being a communist, and even received threats. The book was even banned in a county of California and burned in his hometown of Salinas. But the Rednecks lost. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt defended Steinbeck in her weekly column.
Steinbeck’s compassionate criticisms of the cruelty of American capitalism struck a nerve. He was certainly supportive of leftist causes during the 1930s and 1940s. Yet commercial success, the taste of Hollywood and the ideological mobilisations of the Cold War turned Steinbeck. By 1951, he offered his services to the CIA. He joined the long line of American writers who collaborated with the spies.
His collaborations in the Cold War did not taint his masterpieces. Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath are standard fare in school reading lists in the USA and around the world. I read Grapes of Wrath for my final year at school English exam. I have not read it for forty years, but the story of the Okies is still fresh in my mind.
And in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath
1963 Giorgos Seferis (1900–1971) Greece
Seferis was a Greek poet and distinguished diplomat. He joins the growing list of diplomats we have met through the Prize, including Alexis St. Léger, Ivo Andric, and, in a category of his own, Winston Churchill.
Seferis joined the diplomatic service in 1925 in the Kingdom of Greece. He ended his career as Ambassador to Britain in 1961, two years before his Nobel honour. He served till 1941 when Germany invaded, and Seferis then fled the country to serve in the government-in-exile, and later the restored Greek government. He worked as the Director of the Office of Information in the post-war period, before being posted in 1948 to Ankara.
Seferis had in fact been born in Izmit, Turkey when it was known as the Greek city of Smyrna. His posting to Ankara therefore returned him to a great trauma in the history of Greece and Seferis’ own life. After the end of the First World War, Greece had occupied Smyrna from 15 May 1919 as a pre-emptive act in its conflict with the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. The new Republic of Turkey - or Türkiye as it is now known - reclaimed the city on September 9, 1922, and brought an end to the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). Four days later, a fire broke out in the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city. The death toll of the Great Fire of Smyrna is estimated between 10,000 to 100,000. Biographers of Seferis say the destruction of Smyrna was the determining historical event in Seferis’ life.
The image would haunt his poetic imagination, perhaps too his diplomatic career, just as the burning archive haunted mine. Seferis made a very wise observation late in life about the role of unconscious memory in poetry.
You know, the strange thing about imagery is that a great deal of it is subconscious, and sometimes it appears in a poem, and nobody knows where from this emerged. But it is rooted, I am certain, in the poet’s subconscious life, often of his childhood, and that’s why I think it is decisive for a poet: the childhood that he has lived.
I think there are two different things functioning: conscious and subconscious memory. I think the way of poetry is to draw from the subconscious. It is not the way you write your memoirs, let’s say, or the way you try to remember your past, your early life.
Paris Review interview 1970 (conducted in 1968)
Seferis sought to preserve an idea of Greek freedom, liberalism, and civilization against the flames of destruction, which he remembered in the history of Smyrna. He wrote powerful poems that were influenced by another Greek poet of the twentieth century, Cavafy.
Yet he suffered a heavy dose of Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence, both from Cavafy and Greece’s classical heritage. That anxiety comes through in the journal that Seferis kept for most of his life, but was tempered by the hardship of war. In his Poet’s Diary in March 1950, he wrote:
I passed through periods of great doubt concerning the value my works would have. I proceeded in life, all alone, without help (but who has help?), except for two men not connected with letters, and my own perseverance. As I look back on the past, I would call it the perseverance of a Negro. Until 1936 the years were very difficult…. But now—these days when I am fifty—I know what I am. I know who may accept me and who reject me…. It is not my work that interests me above all else; it is work, without a possessive pronoun, that must live, even if our personal contributions are consumed in it.
His poetry of the Second World War is widely praised. Oddly, this poetry is not commemorated like Rupert Brooke’s odes from the trenches of the Somme. Maybe that is because, as Adorno wrote gnomically, that after the Holocaust no one can write poetry. But Seferis and the 1967 Nobel Laureate, Nelly Sachs proved him wrong. Here is a brief passage from Seferis’ war poem, “Last Stop”.
Man is easily consoled in the midst of wars;
he is pliable, a sheaf of grass;
lips and fingers that ache for a white breast
eyes that half-close in the shimmering of the daylight
and legs that would run, however tired they may be
at the merest hint of profit.
Man is pliable and parched like grass,
insatiable like grass, his nerves like roots spread out;
when summer comes
they prefer to swing their scythes in another field;
when summer comes
some cry out to exorcise the evil spirit
others get enmeshed in their possessions, others make bar room speeches.
But it is as if the real incantations, possessions and speeches
are far away. What will you do?
Seferis’ search for a Greek identity in a fallen civilisation, in the post-1945 liberal world order, ended in tragedy. In 1967 there was a coup d'état in Greece. The regime of nationalist, authoritarian generals implemented censorship, political detentions, and torture, all while defending democracy as part of NATO. Seferis defied the regime. He broadcast on the BBC World Service, the plea: "This anomaly must end.”
Three years after his death Turkey invaded Cyprus, the Greek island Seferis has adopted as his spiritual home. By then the Greek regime had banned his poems. Yet like the Russians at Pasternak’s funeral in Moscow, they recited them at the funeral of their poet of a better Greece.
If you know Greek, you can listen to him on the BBC here.
1964 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) France
Jean-Paul Sartre was a philosopher who wrote some fiction and plays. His radical existentialist philosophy made him a dominant figure in post-1945 France. He became the model of the privileged Marxist intellectuals of the West, nauseated at the bourgeois life of his contemporaries. He even refused the Nobel Prize.
Nausea was the title of his 1938 novel. Its anti-hero, Roquentin, is disgusted at society’s falsity and his own failure to seize his inner freedom. His nausea fixates on the conventional social masks of bourgeois life: family, marriage, state, civil manners, religion, and clubs. They were all despicable lies and prisons. Roquentin was the outsider, and Sartre yearned for a total philosophy of revolt.
He forged that philosophy at the feet of the enigmatic figure we met in discussing François Mauriac (1952 Nobel Laureate), Alexandre Kojève. Sartre attended Kojève’s lectures, but turned the slave-master dialectic in defiance of Mauriac’s Christian, nationalist France. He created a philosophy of radical defiance, which spurned France’s Catholic intellectuals, like Mauriac and Jacques Maritian, and embraced Marxism, revolution, dialectical reason, and contempt for a France that had failed.
In 1940 the failure of the French elite became acute. They capitulated to the German army. The historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous meditation on that failure, The Strange Defeat, which explored deep historical themes. Bloch wrote, “Our leaders...were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war.” But Sartre’s response was more visceral.
In 1939, Sartre was drafted into the French Army, where he served as a weatherman. He was captured in the strange defeat of 1940, and spent nine months as a prisoner of war. Sartre was released due to poor health in April 1941. He returned to Paris where he was nauseated by the falsity of French bourgeois life under occupation. He did little practical to support the Resistance, but he wrote novels, philosophy and radical dissent.
The experiences informed his trilogy of novels, The Roads to Freedom, which comprised The Age of Reason, The Reprieve and Troubled Sleep. During the war, Sartre began adapting the teaching of Kojève, Husserl and Heidegger into his own philosophy of Marxist existentialism. In 1943 he wrote Being and Nothingness, which was a response to Heidegger’s Being and Time. In 1945 he gave a famous lecture, “Existentialism and Humanism.” It defied humanism. Such limp sentiments belonged to defeated, collaborationist France. Sartre despised them and praised stringent revolutionary freedom in absurdity. One year later, Heidegger wrote from his Black Forest home, where he hid in collaborationist shame, a Letter on Humanism that corrected Sartre on his misunderstandings of the mysteries of Being.
Roger Scruton in the exquisitely written and surprisingly generous Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left summarised these works of Sartre.
“In an extraordinary combination of philosophical argument, psychological observation and lyrical evocation, Sartre sets out to describe the ordeal and the task of consciousness, in a world that has no meaning other than the meaning that I, through my freedom, can impress upon it.”
But it is not a celebration of freedom so much as a tortured vision of a prisoner of being. His philosophy is existentialist. The way people are - their Being - is not determined by conditions. Everyone creates their own existence. They carry that cross. They cannot escape the choices of freedom. They are, in Sartre’s paradoxical phrase, "condemned to be free".
At the end of Being and Nothingness Sartre presents an image of slime as a metaphor for shallow bourgeois existence.
[Slime] draws me to it as the bottom of a precipice might draw me… In one sense it is like the supreme docility of the possessed, the fidelity of a dog who gives himself even when one doesn’t want him any longer, and in another sense there is underneath this docility a surreptitious appropriation of the possessor by the possessed.
Being and Nothingness pp. 606-11
It is a disposition expressed in Sartre’s best-known dramatic line:
L'enfer, c'est les autres [Hell is other people].
No Exit (1944).
I cannot gauge his philosophical argument. I would encourage readers to read Roger Scruton’s fine portrait of Sartre and other figures of the post-war French left in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. I can only respond to his prose and character. The prose can be brilliant. It can be mind-numbing.
And his character? In my observation of intellectual circles over the last fifty years, Sartre’s philosophy contorted generations of Western progressives, even up to my own youth. It bred contempt for the simple dilemmas of ordinary life. Sartre’s insufferable dialectical prose arguably inspired several generations of Western leftist intellectuals to be unhappy, difficult people to endure.
Sartre’s life of open breach of social conventions also inspired many. He conducted a famous open relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher and feminist who wrote The Second Sex. He refused, at least for appearances, to “become an institution.” He ultimately refused the Nobel Prize. He opposed French Vichy collaborationists, anti-Semitism, American imperialism, French colonialism, and complacent bourgeois liberalism.
But his political choices were those of a philosopher in a comfortable, bourgeois Parisian apartment. He bore no responsibility for real action. He protested, but took no proactive action to make life better for anyone. He embraced Stalinist communism, while making a pose of being outside institutions. He could be relied upon to take the hardest line. Even to the point of criticising Khrushchev’s 1956 speech on the Stalin cult and decades of the abuse of power. Sartre argued “the masses were not ready to receive the truth.”
Even in his personal life, the cruelty of a philosophy of “hell is other people” shows. That famous open relationship between Sartre and de Beauvoir was also a machine of sexual abuse. In 1993 Bianca Lamblin recalled in her Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée (published in English under the title A Disgraceful Affair) her sexual exploitation by Sartre and de Beauvoir. She was one of many young students de Beauvoir seduced and passed on to Sartre to serve his nauseating pleasures.
I recall watching news reports of Sartre’s funeral in 1980. The grief went for days and engaged millions. It reflected his creation of a model of radical public intellectual for the Left around the world. But the Saint died and the Left has never been the same since. I wonder if he is a forgotten name for younger readers.
I won’t be rereading Sartre soon. The Nobel Committee made the right decision to accept Sartre’s refusal of the Prize. After all, in 1964 Sartre himself renounced literature in his autobiography, Les Mots (The Words). Literature was a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. He despised the bourgeois dreamer, Marcel Proust, and preferred the engaged immoralist, André Gide. Perhaps that should not surprise us. Sartre and de Beauvoir made life hell for other people.
1965 Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984) Soviet Union/Russia
Sholokhov was a great novelist of the Soviet Union and Russia.
In contrast to previous Russian Laureates, Bunin (1933) and Pasternak (1956), Sholokhov was unequivocally loyal to the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. He was favoured by Stalin and held prestigious positions in the Communist Party. He fought as a teenager for the Reds during the Russian Civil War.
The Nobel Committee’s decision suggested a change in European diplomacy towards the Soviet Union, twenty years into the Anglo-American driven Cold War. In mid 1960s Western Europe, communist parties were strong and political leaders wanted to get along with their neighbour as well as their great and powerful friend from the far shores of the Atlantic Ocean. The French leader, whom Sartre despised, Charles de Gaulle called for détente, entente and cordiale. He even expelled NATO HQ from Paris. German leaders pursued Ostpolitik to normalise and improve relations with the West. Nominally neutral Sweden’s Academy showed again its attunement to the changing tides of global politics. It finally gave the prize, without equivocation, to a celebrated author of the Soviet Union, nearly five decades after the Revolution. The cultural diplomacy of Kruschev’s ‘peaceful coexistence’ broke the Cold War shackles.
Sholokhov wrote one of the most celebrated works of Soviet fiction, And Quiet Flows the Don. He wrote it from his own experience of the society of Southern Russia on the steppe watered by the great Don River. This society was shaped by the Cossacks, who had been a feature of Russian life since the fifteenth century. Their outlaw life and culture of martial independence has been much mythologised, including during the Ukraine war.
However, Sholokhov’s family were not Don Cossacks. They were inogorodnye ("outlanders"). The Cossacks, outsiders who had become insiders, looked down on these outlanders. It was the disparaging term used by the Don Cossacks for outsiders who settled in their territory by the banks of the Don.
The novel deals with the experiences of the Cossacks before and during World War I, the Russian Revolutions and the Russian Civil War. Sholokhov had himself fought on the side of the Reds (Bolsheviks) during the Civil War, joining as a 13-year-old. These events make remarkable history, and the long novel is renowned as a humane and social realist depiction of these extraordinary dramas.
Sholokhov laboured for fourteen years to write And Quiet Flows the Don. It became the most-read work of Soviet historical fiction. It won the 1941 State Stalin Prize, in the year Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union and over the steppe through which flowed the Don.
Over the years, people have tried to discredit his authorship, claiming the real author was a White, anti-Soviet writer. The memory is still fought over. It is enabled by the fact that Sholokhov’s archive was bombed and destroyed during the Second World War. However, a number of meticulous studies have crushed the doubts spread by anti–Soviet conspiracy theorists.
The story is powerful. Gorky compared it to War and Peace, the conventional Russian standard of a masterpiece. Vasily Grossman’s different but magisterial Life and Fate was similarly compared to War and Peace, and later in the 1990s more favoured in the West.
Its spare, simple prose, written for a newly educated mass audience in the Soviet Union, bears comparison with Hemingway. It is best grasped in the stories and the compassion, rather than individual quotations. You can read And Quietly Flows the Don here. I have not read the whole novel. I may add it to my list for next year.
1966 Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888–1970) Israel
Agnon was an Austro-Hungarian-born Israeli novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature. In Hebrew, he is known by the acronym Shai Agnon (ש"י עגנון).
He was born into a part of the world that many nations claim and that has long dispossessed the Jewish people. His hometown was Buczacz which was in Galicia, sometimes Austria-Hungary, sometimes in Poland, sometimes in the Soviet Union, and nowadays in Ukraine. It was one of the towns that Nazi Germans and their Ukrainian nationalist collaborators, such as Stephan Bandera, declared judenfrei. Over the course of the war these Ukrainian heroes reduced Buczacz’s Jewish population from 10,000 to 800.
But fortunately Agnon had left by then. Indeed, he left before World War One, as part of the early Zionist settlements of Palestine. The stories and legends of that experience of emigration, settlement, exile, and disappointment form the core of his great novel Only Yesterday.
It tells the story of the first settlers of Israel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Zionist movement began in Odessa, then in the Russian Empire, and now in Ukraine. Many of the mistreated Jews of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire dreamed of a better home.
The novel focuses on Isaac, a Galician Jew who travels from Eastern Europe to Palestine on the power of the Zionist dream. He discovers many trials and difficulties along the way. He had been an impoverished shopkeeper in Austria-Hungary (Poland) and dreamt of all the opportunities before him. But the Zionist dreams of intellectuals from Odessa became seductive slogans that led Isaac to hardship.
He moved between unskilled jobs. He struggled to make Israel his home. He encountered the extremes of the new societies. Some cults advocated liberation through sexual freedom. Some advocated salvation through ultra-orthodox religious practice. Many of Isaac’s fellow emigrants succeeded. But Isaac always encountered a gap between ideal and reality. He picked up a stray dog that he painted with the words ‘crazy dog.’ It became the symbol of his own exile, his derangement by ideas, his trials and adventure in a world of deceptive destiny.
The novel reflected on the death of God, a world of ideologies and shattered traditions, in a mental world defined by Schopenhauer, Freud, Spengler and Lenin, in a society of austerity, emboldened by a fossilised, ancient myth.
In the prologue to Only Yesterday, SY Agnon wrote:
“But events are one thing and imagination is another. By the time the imagination spun its imaginings, the people he was with descended with that woman into a small boat and Isaac remained orphaned many times over.” p. 35
The same may be said of many of us.
1966 Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) Germany/Sweden
Nelly Sachs was a German-Swedish Jewish poet who wrote of the Holocaust.
She was a close friend of another German-Jewish poet , Paul Celan. But I found her poetry more approachable, and more communicative. She was also befriended by the first woman to win the Nobel prize, Selma Lagerlöf.
Sachs grew up in Germany as an extreme introvert. She reached out, however, to penfriends, Selma Lagerlöf and Hilde Domin, the German poet. When the Nazis took power, fear turned introversion to terrified silence. She would later write in a poem: "When the great terror came/I fell dumb."
In 1940 Sachs fled Germany with her aged mother to Sweden. Her penfriend and true literary hero, Lagerlöf made it possible. Ill and near death, Lagerlöf intervened with the Swedish royal family to secure the release of the Sachs from Germany. They took the last flight from Germany to Sweden. One week later, Sachs would have been sent to a concentration camp.
Nelly Sachs settled in Sweden and became a citizen in 1952. After the traumas of the Shoah and her personal suffering, Sachs endured many years of mental illness. She had psychotic episodes and terrors. She was hospitalised several times in the years when mental health care had no medications. The survival of her poetry and the recovery of her spirit are beautiful miracles.
Her poetry, which I read in Selected Poems (1967) is extraordinary. It includes titles such as “In the habitations of death”, “O the chimneys”, “And No One Knows How to Go On”:, “Death Still Celebrates Life”; “Glowing Enigmas”, and “Eli: A mystery play of the sufferings of Israel”.
I had never read it before this challenge. Please seek it out in a good library. It is a richer experience than a thousand Hollywood films on the Holocaust. Only a little is online at sites such as here. Let me share just one poem. Not the darkest. But one that speaks to the Burning Archive.
The archive unfolded before me
The archive unfolded before me
In the steps of the marble stairs
The alphabet outlined
In the gills of age-old water marvels
Breath that was petrified
And now as on lightning with feet
Trampled down by us
Who are burdened
And unknowingly cause
Many minutes death—
And then disclosed in the Bible
Prophesying the soul’s wandering secret
And always pointing as with fingers from graves
Into the next dawn—
1967 Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974) Guatemala
Asturias was a Guatemalan poet, diplomat, novelist, playwright and journalist.
He is widely considered the major precursor of the Latin American boom of the 1960s and 1970s, the magical realism of Latin America. His novels integrate indigenous Central and South American cultures and express assertively the power of “Third World culture”.
In the 1920s Asturias absorbed influences from the French surrealists and studied ethnology or anthropology in Paris. He developed both academic and local knowledge of the indigenous cultures of Guatemala, including the historical civilizations of the Maya, which figured prominently in his writing.
His writing and political activities converged with the decolonisation of the post-war period. He suffered from the USA’s resistance to decolonisation, especially in its hegemonic region of the Americas under the Monroe Doctrine.
Asturias had returned from his studies in Paris to Guatemala in 1933. He opposed the authoritarian dictators who ruled his country in support of USA interests, including the United Fruit company that dominated the banana trade. In 1944 this regime was overthrown in the Guatemalan Revolution, which introduced democracy and agrarian reform to the country. Asturias threw his support behind the new revolution that has become known as “Ten Years of Spring”. Two democratically elected Presidents governed Guatemala in this spring decade, Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz.
But their democratic government for Guatemalan people did not suit the neocolonial interests of the arsenal of democracy, the USA. In particular, the USA opposed any restrictions on the United Fruit company’s commercial exploitation in the area ruled by the Monroe Doctrine. So, in 1954 the USA government, through the CIA, overthrew democracy in Guatemala.
Asturias was expelled from the country by the new pro-USA regime. He was stripped of his citizenship and went into exile in Europe. Only in 1966 did a new democratically elected President of Guatemala restore Asturias’ citizenship. They also appointed Asturias as ambassador to France. In recognition of this setback to American Cold War democratic diplomacy, the Soviet Union awarded Asturias the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966. The next year he won the Nobel Prize.
The book that critics describe as his masterpiece, is Men of Maize. It defends Mayan culture and customs. I have only sampled it. The introduction to Men of Maize describes this work and Asturias’ mode of writing:
“As Asturias himself once said of Men of Maize, ‘I am not a creator, but the medium, the vehicle through which things are said.’ Nothing in this novel is merely gratuitous, inspirational, invented. Indeed, Men of Maize must be counted one of the most comprehensively ‘informed’ and certainly one of the most completely ‘structured’ novels ever written in the Spanish language. Asturias has used his force of imagination, profoundly educated by reading and experiences, to weave together an extraordinary plurality of sources into a unified anthropological – one might almost say cosmic – vision whose organizing principle is not, after all, myth, but history.
‘Introduction’ Men of Maize (p. xvi)
The story is set in the mountain forests of Guatemala, where a community of Indigenous Mayans—the "men of maize"—serves as stewards to sacred corn crops. Profiteering outsiders encroach on their territory and begin to abuse the land. The men of maize fight back. They struggle to protect their way of life. In the novel, history and mythology merge in the way of ‘magical realism’. But this novel also celebrates indigenous knowledge and castigates the environmental destruction of the American colonial, capitalist oppressors.
A short passage from near the end of the novel gives you a sense of his style and substance.
For a moment, Señor Nicho heard his voice drowning in the ruminant swaying of the gulf; but the curer’s words took him back to the reality of the ridge as he replied that in that stone was hidden the soul of Maria the Rain.
“Maria the Rain, she will rise on high in the time that is to come!”
The curer opened his arms to touch the stone, returned the human figure he saw in it, he who was also human, before dissolving in the silence forever.
Asturias Men of Maize, (p. 327)
There are no free open-source versions of his work, but a Penguin Classics edition of Asturias, Men of Maize is available here.
Please share the Burning Archive with a friend on readers in your network.
Bonus archival footage of the Nobel Laureates 1962 to 1967
I have produced a YouTube version of this piece with bonus visuals of the authors, including archival footage (minus the sound). You can check it out on my YouTube channel from Sunday 20:15 pm AEST.
Links to the archival footage if you want to explore on your own are here:
I read Sholokhov's book's when very young and fairly innocent. I should reread him soon.
I was very moved by Nelly Sach's poems, on the Poetry Foundation site, but especially the poem in the text, "The Archive unfolded before me". I shall hunt for more of her poems and read them in memory of my lost family.
Sholokhov has been my great, personal literary find of the last half of my 60s. The Don books, including their extension to cover the chaotic period of forced collectivization and the consolidation of Stalin's rule, are amazing triumphs of the novelist's art. Reading them, it shocked me how realistically they portrayed the upheavals of war and revolution as they affected people of all sorts. I highly recommend you finish your reading.
Sholokhov's novels & short stories can be brutal in their violence, tender in their depiction of flawed humanity, unbending in their portrayal of an implacable fate. He was a master of the quick personality sketch, while also a poet of nature. The great canvas of Russia opens up to the reader like no other author since Tolstoy.