Black horses and creepy people pass through the deep roads of the guitar

In Spain, Generation 27 is reminiscent of the English Bloomsbury Group, the German Bauhaus and art movements of the time such as Dadaism. Some of them embraced futurism, celebrating progress and technology. Others nurtured ultraism with the aim of overcoming previous Spanish modernism, third symbolism, fourth surrealism aimed at liberating the subconscious and the irrational.

In the first half of the 20th century, Spain was the cradle of important avant-garde visual artists such as Pablo Picasso, Juan Miró, the surrealist Salvador Dali, and the film director Luis Buñuel. Lorca met Salvador Dalí in the spring of 1923 upon his return to Madrid after passing the law exam in Granada in January 1923. Dali moved into the "Student Residence" in 1922 after he enrolled at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid with a bachelor's degree. At the time, he was just under nineteen years old, he was athletically built, slim and his hair was growing. Six years older Lorca found him very attractive.

LORCA AND DALI

The two artists developed their own language using words, gestures and intonations understandable only to them.

Scanning the QR code leads to the documentary Lorca and Dali.

Salvador Dali later admitted: "Only Lorca impressed me. He embodied the phenomenon of poetry in all its fullness, in flesh and blood: vague and yet alive, earthly and yet sublime, shining with a thousand wandering flashes - like the original matter itself, shaped into specific but unique forms."

Lorca wrote a poem. Ode to Salvador Dali, published in 1926 in the magazine "Revista de Occidente", edited by the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.

O, Salvadore Dali, maslinastog glasa!
Ne hvalim tvoju nesavršenu adolescentsku četkicu
niti tvoje pigmente koji okružuju one tvojih godina,
pozdravljam tvoju čežnju za ograničenom večnošću.

Lorca also dabbled in the fine arts, which is what the paintings speak of a kiss (1927), which shows his face "intertwined" with Dali's, or the exhibition of his surrealist drawings in Barcelona in 1927 at the Catalan House.

Scanning the QR code leads to the documentary Lorca Great poet'with Artwork.

ANDALUSIAN DOG

But that unusually tender friendship had an unusual dynamic - both personal and artistic.

Surrealists shock, and Lorca summarizes the drama of life to the limit of metaphor. When asked if he is a Symbolist, Futurist, Surrealist or Ultrist, Lorca answered that he is also a vivist because he sings about life and death.

On June 6, 1929, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali presented their surrealist film at a private screening at the Ursuline Studio in Paris, attended by Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Georges Orique, Le Corbusier, André Breton and his admirers Andalusian dog (also known for the shocking image of the eye being cut open). The film was interpreted as an extravaganza in the "Dali style", and there were also psychoanalytical interpretations, which Dali and Buñuel made fun of, claiming that they were only following their subconscious and shocking the bourgeoisie.

Some contemporaries claimed that Federico García Lorca felt hurt because, as an Andalusian, he knew better than the Aragonese Buñuel and the Catalan Dali that the film's title Andalusian dog penetrated deeply into the "collective unconscious" of the Spanish nation and recalled the episode of the Spanish Reconquista - the "reconquest" of Moorish Spain, and the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, after which the Arabs and Islam were expelled from Castile, and Andalusia remained their only stronghold.

The impassable gorge in the Sierra Morena, the place where the Moors were defeated, is called "Despenaperos" ("The Precipice of the Dogs"). With that insulting term "dogs" the infidels were banished to the south in "Al-Andalus". They say that it was not rare for the residents of Madrid to call an Andalusian who came to study in the capital an "Andalusian dog", so the Aragonese Buñuel and the Catalan Dali may have called their Andalusian friend that, if only for the sake of a joke.

The insults directed at Lorca came primarily from Buñuel, who had something against his homosexuality. In his letter to Dali dated June 24, 1929, Bunel mentions Lorca, who was then in America: "Federico, that son of a bitch, did not come, but I got news from that fag..."

By the way, in some 60 letters and postcards, Buñuel previously asked Lorca to write the script for his first film, but, as historian Leslie Stainton writes in her biography Lorca: Dream of life, Lorca did not answer. The offended Federico, after hearing rumors about the screening of the film in Paris, recalled in some letters that Salvador Dali himself claimed to be of Moorish origin and that he found his last name in his family tree with an Arab "de Ali".

It seemed that Lorca distanced himself from the surrealist Dali that year both in his understanding of art and personally. Some critics, including his friend Dali, called his work uneducated and accused him of being a popularizer.

Christopher Meuer (Maurer) from the University of Illinois writes that in 1927, Lorca, running away from his image as a gypsy poet, his myth of gypsyism, wrote: "I don't want to be classified, I feel that I am being tied down." Christopher Meuer states that a few months before going to Paris, reacting to Gypsy romancer, surrealist Salvador Dali wrote to Lorca:

"You are moving within accepted, anti-poetic notions - you talk about a rider and assume that he is riding a horse, and that the horse is galloping and that is already too much, because in reality it would be better to ask if he is really a rider on a horse; if the reins are not actually an organic extension of his arms; if, in reality, the small hairs on the rider's testicles are not much faster than the horse; and if the horse is not something immobile, attached to the ground by strong roots... We must free things. from the conventional ideas to which the intelligentsia has subjected them".

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When he arrived from Madrid to New York on June 26, 1929, Lorca was almost suicidal, writes the "New York Times" under the title "Poetic love affair with New York: for García Lorca, the city was a spiritual metaphor." Lonely, depressed, estranged from the huge modern city, tormented by his sexuality and misunderstanding with Dali and Buñuel - but also with the sculptor Emilio Alladren, whom the surrealist sculptor Maruha Mallo described as her ex-boyfriend (handsome, like a Greek ephebe), who first left with Federico, and then with the Englishwoman Eleonor Dav. There is a clue in a poem about three friends in which Lorca says:

Pretražili su kafane i groblja i crkve, otvorili su burad za vino i ormare, uništili su tri skeleta da bi im izvukli zlatne zube. I dalje nisu mogli da me kazne. Zar ne?

MY FRIEND LORCA

However, when, a decade later, in the tragic year of 1936, he heard that Lorca had been killed, Dalí reacted with the shout of greeting a bullfighter: "Ole!"

After the death of his friend, Dali shows his face in many paintings - unusual, martyred, a severed head on the beach, a figure in the reflection of an object...

When Dalí's wife and muse Elena Ivanovna Dyakonova - Gala died (1982), he mentally returned to his student days in Madrid when he first met Lorca and Buñuel in 1923. According to the nurse who took care of him, as reported by "Pais" on June 20, 2013, during all the time he refused to eat, which made him weigh a little more than 45 kilograms before his death, she understood only a few of his words: "My friend Lorca..."

LORCA IN NEW YORK

When he heard that his family friend, Professor Fernando de los Ríos, would be lecturing at Columbia that summer, García Lorca convinced his father to pay his expenses so that he could follow Los Ríos and study English during the summer semester at Columbia University. He did go, but he didn't study.

Arriving so depressed in New York during the Great Depression, he saw this city as a metaphor for his state of mind. In the song Zora (collection Poet in New York, Poet in New York) Lorca in New York sees "four columns of slime", "a storm of black pigeons spraying dead water" - and that "sometimes furious swarms of coins sting and devour abandoned children"...

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the struggle of skyscrapers with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain and fog highlight, wet or hide huge towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any game, cut the hairs of the rain and pierce the soft swan of the fog with three thousand swords..."

ODE TO THE BLACK KING OF HARLEM

In New York, however, Lorca also met Harlem during the Harlem revival, the jazz age, the "roaring 20s". They say that playing the piano at parties in Harlem, he attracted sympathy. "Pais" writes that Lorca realized at the Cotton Club in New York that jazz has a lot to do with flamenco, that duende and swing are connected: you either have it or you don't and you can't explain it.

The American writer and critic Lee Siegel in "The New Yorker" under the title "The Spanish Prisoner" notes that the Andalusian-born poet, who proudly claimed to have both Gypsy and Jewish blood, developed an almost fanatical, occasionally comical, and sometimes arrogantly condescending attraction to Harlem and the cause of black liberation.

U Go to the black king. Lorca says:

Ah, Harlem, Harlem, Harlem
Nema muke kao što je tvoja crvena frustracija,
Krv koja ključa u tvom mračnom pomračenju,
Nasilje blistavo kao dragulj koje kriješ u senkama
Ti veliki kralju! obučen kao razvodnik.

In the biography Lorca: Dream of life Leslie Stainton writes: "Amazed by newspaper ads promoting black skin-lightening powders and black hair-straightening pomades, Lorca criticized those African-Americans who would deny their race and recklessly called for black violence to counter the cruelty of white America. One day, he wrote, black America will crush its oppressor, and blood will flow / on the roofs everywhere / and burn the chlorophyll of the blonde."

Biographers were confused by Lorkin Ode to Walt Whitman in which he saw a symbol of a purer, democratic America, opposed to the world of money and alienation, possessing "masculine beauty", with "thighs as virginal as Apollo's"...

But Lorca, who struggled with his own homosexuality at home in Catholic Spain, here writes a series of local derogatory or colloquial names for homosexuals: "Always against you, who give boys drops of dirty death with bitter poison. Always against you...", fairies (fairies the then English term for North American feminized homosexuals), paharosi (birds) from Havana, hotosi (jotos) from Mexico, sarase (you are scared) from Cadiz, apiosi (celery) from Seville, Kankosi (cancos) from Madrid, flora (floras) from Alicante, Adelaide (Adelaide)from Portugal, Marika (Marisas from all over the world... faggots of the whole world..) dove killers!

Leslie Stainton psychologically interprets these ugly lines as embodying Lorca's anxiety about her own feminization. American writer and critic Lee Siegel in "The New Yorker", under the title "The Spanish Prisoner", writes that "Lorca is indeed a poet of desire, but he is, in the end, a poet of intense longing to be freed from passion. His tragedies, although conventionally read as attacks on sexual repression, are genuine protests against sexual passion. Lorca was the last great Spanish Catholic poet, although his Catholicism was steeped in surrealism."

After New York, Lorca went to Cuba in 1930. "The only thing the United States has given the world is skyscrapers, jazz and cocktails. That's all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails..."

U Poems of Cuban blacks says: "When the full moon appears, I will go to Santiago, Cuba. Oh, Cuba! Oh, curve of sighs and mud! I will go to Santiago."

In a letter to his parents, he says: "If I disappear, look for me in Cuba..."

LA BARAKA IN THE SECOND SPANISH REPUBLIC

Despite the dark notes emphasized in his poems about New York, Lorca, according to Leslie Stainton, left the United States with a renewed faith in his work ... and a newfound enthusiasm for life.

Rising inflation, a financial crisis during the Great Depression, and the loss of military support forced Prima de Rivera to resign in 1930. He died shortly afterwards in Paris. Hope for a better future was awakened by the Second Spanish Republic proclaimed on April 14, 1931, when the unpopular King Alfonso XIII left the country after mass protests.

By scanning the QR code, you can listen to Fatma Said singing Lorca's song Sevillanas of the XNUMXth century.

After returning from the USA to Spain, with the support of the republican government, Lorca devotes himself to the theater and in 1932 forms the free traveling theater group La Baraka (La Barraca, Koliba) in which he was the organizer, but he also directed, chose the actors, performed the music, made the scenography and costumes and played certain roles.

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La Barca played adapted pieces from Spanish Golden Age classics for poor and less literate audiences, works by Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderon de la Barca. The troupe traveled around the villages and small towns in two trucks - one with stage equipment and the other with the troupe. They performed in squares, in schoolyards, in improvised spaces. Peasants, wage earners (day laborers) and workers, for whom this was often their first encounter with professional theater, reacted strongly and immediately.

"Federico, don't you think that with your blue overalls (the workers' overalls worn by members of the La Baraka troupe) and our blue shirts (the kind worn by the Falangists) you could make a better Spain?" That was the text of the message allegedly signed by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the dictator's son and founder of the Falange (at the Comedy Theater on October 29, 1933), and addressed to Federico García Lorca on some occasion.

Further events followed a course that precluded such a discreet coexistence of irreconcilable parties. The plot of a Spanish drama that approached classical antiquity exodus (final act).

It was a period of awakened hopes, but also of prolongation of the crisis and very pronounced instability. Between 1931 and 1936, the government in Spain changed 16 times. There were two attempts to overthrow the Republic: a failed military uprising in August 1932, and in October 1934 the army suppressed a workers' uprising in the mining region of Asturias.

The new government amnestied those who participated in the 1934 uprising and brought to justice the officers who suppressed it. Land was confiscated from large landowners without compensation, but the distribution of land to peasants was chaotic. Strikes engulfed businesses, and the state forced entrepreneurs to comply with workers' demands, causing them to withdraw capital from Spain.

ANDALUSIAN TRILOGY

Conservative circles attacked the La Baraka troupe as part of republican, secular politics and considered the state-funded theater to serve political propaganda. Lorca answered the critics: "Our first purpose was to act only in university environments. Then we went to the countryside and there we found so much warmth and understanding... Maybe even more than in the capitals. All this despite the vulnerable accusations of those who wanted to see a political purpose in our theater. No, there is no politics. Theater and nothing more than theater."

As a playwright, Lorca made his debut in the spring of 1921 in Madrid in the Student Residence with the play The magic of butterflies, which proved unsuccessful, but reached its zenith with the three tragedies of the Andalusian Trilogy - Bloody wedding, Jerma i Home of Bernarda Alba.

Bloody wedding (Bodas de sangre, 1933) was created immediately after the founding of the La Baraka troupe, but it was not played in it - it was premiered on the professional stage in Madrid. In it, the bride runs away from the wedding with her lover, whose family owes the groom's house a blood debt. With their songs, like a chorus in a Greek drama, the wedding party organizes the chase, the role of the gods from the ancient drama is taken over by the personifications of the natural forces of the moon and death, the groom and the lover die, and the unfortunate bride returns to mourn the dead with her grieving mother - in front of the door of her unsuspecting house. Some estheticians are Bloody wedding even proclaimed the beginning of the most brilliant era of Spanish theater since the Spanish Golden Age in the 16th century (Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderona de la Barca, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Luis de Gongora)

Scanning the QR code takes you to the show Blood Wedding.

In Argentina, Lorca was received as the "Spanish Homer". He arrived in Buenos Aires on October 13, 1933 after the Prime Minister Blood weddings in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. By March 1934, he was giving lectures, including one on Ruben Dario, the Nicaraguan poet who created modernism in the Hispanic cultural circle, along with Pablo Neruda. They kept him talking simultaneously from different parts of the hall - the sentence of one would be continued by the other...

Lorca brought the motifs and structures of ancient tragedy into tragedy Jerma (yerma) in which the tragic heroine is faced with forces she cannot overcome, a woman whose desire for motherhood collides with the honor of the patriarchal world. On December 29, 1934, the drama was a success in Madrid's Teatro Español, however, the Catholic right-wing newspaper "Debate" described it as immoral and blasphemous, and the ultra-conservative newspaper "Gracia y Justicia" even claimed that a decent woman should not watch this public scandal.

To be continued in the next issue:

- Clash of two fronts, People's and National

– Support for the Popular Front and Andre Marlow

- In court because of Romance of the Spanish Gendarmerie

– To Mexico, not Granada

- Difficult times await us

– A journey into the land of civics

– Famous author Blood weddings intends to stay with the family for a short time