Spanish Pacifist and Soviet Civil War Prose

What is it about?

This article looks at responses to war in Spain during the Moroccan campaigns of the 1920s, comparing José Díaz Fernandez's El blocao to Isaac Babel's The Red Cavalry. While the two works share a similar structure and love of modernist prose, they different in an important regard. Babel's sensitive and sometimes humorous tales see the Civil War as a worthy if violent endeavor, while Díaz Fernández cannot support Spanish colonialism in North Africa, nor embrace violence even for a just political cause.

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Why is it important?

This article demonstrates connections between Soviet and Spanish literary trends in the 1920s and 1930s, and the importance of Russian literature for Spain at that time. It also clarifies Spain's adhesion to pacifism even in writers of the left like José Díaz Fernández and Ramón J. Sender, which differed from Soviet writers like Babel, Mikhail Sholokhov, or Vsevolod Ivanov. In regards to the issue of pacifism, Spanish writers of the Moroccan campaigns looked to German and French pacifist novelists following World War I.