On April 14, the Peruvian writer and politician Mario Vargas Llos died in Lima. He was 89 years old. In the 1960s, Lesser, along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Hulio Cortasar, became one of the most read Latin American authors in the USSR, and in 2010 became the first and today the only writer from Peru, who received the Nobel Prize in literature. Literary critic Alex Mesropov tells about the amazing life of Llos, the most important topics of his novels and the place of the writer in the history of literature. “A sentimental person, inclined to barriers, to uncontrolled passions and intrigus,” so once Mario Vargas Llos described himself. What will you argue with? He lived for 89 years, and it was a contradictory life worthy of cinema, which I am sure, sooner or later will appear. Rod from Peru, Vargas Lesser managed to live in Paris, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Berlin, New York, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. For the first time, he married, which was ten years older than him, and with his second wife he lived for more than half a century, until at the age of 79 he left her for the sake of Roman with a socialite Isabel Preisler. In his youth he sympathized with Marxism, after Soviet tanks in Prague he joined the liberal democrats, and in old age he even became an open supporter of the right -wing populists, from Brazilian Zhair Bolsonaru to the Argentinean Havier Miley. In addition to all this, Llos once managed to throw Gabriel Garcia Marquez (they did not communicate for thirty years after that), during the post of President Peru, Western countries to impose economic and political sanctions on their native country, which many compatriots have not forgiven him, and their name in the Panaman documents as a shareholder of offshore company. And also – yes, because we are talking about the writer – to receive in 2010 the Nobel Prize in literature “For a detailed description of the structure of power and for the bright image of the rebel, fighting and victim of a person”. The Non -Belian committee successfully described the work of Vargas Llos: he was really interested in literature and political power. It is logical that one of his favorite novels in Russian literature was the “demons” of Fedor Dostoevsky – a bloody story about terror in the underground circle of Russian socialists. The maids of Vargas Llos were also dedicated to the struggle for power and how it affects the human personality: mostly, as a rule, negatively. His early books – the debut “City and the Dogs” (1963) or “Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969) – describe the tragic consequences for the “little man” when the Peruvian troops or politicians enjoyed unlimited state power in their own interests. In the following big novels – “War of the End of the World” (1981), “The Cossack Festival” (2000) or “Celt’s Dream” (2010) – he describes the political, religious or anti -colonial struggle on the examples of the Brazil, the Dominican Republic and the British Empire. Switching from the history of Peru to other countries, Vargas Lesser has become popular all over the world. There was something in Hemingeevsky: wherever he lived, he felt at home, and they read him everywhere. This was reflected in books: the novels of Vargas Llos, as critics often noted, are universal in spirit. This is what makes him one of the first authors. You can transfer his losers or villains to any European or American scenery – and get the same reliable story about the complex relations of the individual and power. “If the literature is not universal,” Vargas Llos once said, “this is not literature, but folklore.” Perhaps for this reason he was always so popular in Russia. They began to translate it into Russian in the 1960s and continue to this day. The City and the Dogs reached the USSR in 1963-without notifying the author and, of course, with censorship edits, which, however, concerned not political, but sexual scenes. Upon learning of this, Vargas Llos asked from the Soviet Union of writers explanations and a fee for his novel. In response, he was invited to the USSR to pick up money, which the writer used. For the first time he visited Russia in 1968, for the last time-in 2017, when he became the laureate of the Literary Prize “Yasnaya Polyana” in the nomination “Foreign Literature” for the novel “Modest Hero”. If on the first visit, our modest hero made friends with the Soviet intelligentsia, then in the latter-gave an interview to Vladimir Pozner. In the 1970s, Vargas Llos, Marquez and Hulio Cortasar were the trinity of the most read Latin American authors-and not only in the USSR, where each of them was translated and published, but throughout the world. For the company with the rest of Llos, they ranked magical realists – like, probably, any writer from Latin America since the publication of “A hundred years of loneliness”. But he himself has repeatedly emphasized that he does not identify himself with this literary direction, but prefers to be called simply realist. Unlike the builder of the national myths of Marquez or the virtuoso experimenter of Cortasar – and even more so the fantasier of Carlos Fuentes or the avant -garde of Horhe Luis Borges – he was the most balanced writer of Latin American boom. He often repeated in an interview and an essay that he had a huge impact on him as a writer. Lesser even devoted a book to the Frenchman entitled “Eternal Orgy: Flobert and Madame Bovary.” By the way, another famous Fleberian, the Englishman Julian Barnes, wrote that the study of Vargas Lesser is “the best of all known to him.” The possession of Flaubert – the founder of modern realism and impeccable stylist – is felt primarily in the literary technology of Vargas Llos. He could write a humorous romance, a historical novel, a political thriller, a novel, consisting only of dialogues, even a novel about LGBTK politicians-but his style has always remained balanced and disciplined, because the main thing in his books was always reality, political problems of reality and how the writer will recreate this complex reality-speaking differently as he selects words. The grief of this world, ”said Albert Camus. Under these words, the late Mario Vargas Lesser could subscribe to the deceased. (Tagstotranslate) News
