Bücher von Volodia Teitelboim

The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) is one of the most important figures in 20th-century Hispanic poetry and, with César Vallejo, one of the pioneering avant-gardists in Spanish. Originally from an upper-class Santiago family, Huidobro was fortunate to have the means to support himself and his family while he found his artistic way. After an early phase writing in a quasi-symbolist style in his native city, he moved to Paris and threw himself into the local artistic milieu with a passion, quickly publishing two full-sized collections and four chapbooks in 1917-18, and then a French-language selected poems in 1921. Influenced initially by Apollinaire, Huidobro befriended forward-looking French writers such as Reverdy, Cocteau and Radiguet, as well as the Spanish expatriate artists, including Picasso and Juan Gris.He was to reach his artistic maturity in 1931 with the publication of two masterpieces: the long poem, Altazor, and the book-length prose-poem Temblor de cielo (Skyquake). Two further original collections and an extensive Selected followed during his lifetime, all published in Santiago. While he also published successful novels and plays, it is for his poetry that he is best remembered today.Volodia Teitelboim's impressionistic biography of Huidobro was first published to coincide with the poet's centenary in 1993, and has the advantage of being written by someone who actually knew him, and many of the other significant figures in Chilean poetry of the 1930s and later. As the author relates in the course of the book, he started out as, and remained, a fan of the poet's work, but he is commendably clear about Huidobro's many personal faults - and about the causes of the breakdown in his own relationship with him.

1000 Days of Revolution contains nine chapters, each one written by a prominent Chilean communist as part of their party’s attempt to self-critically analyse the reasons for the defeat of President Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government from 1970-1973. The Chilean experience was a sustained attempt to advance to socialism through a non-armed revolutionary strategy based on a constitutionally elected government.The conclusions reached in this volume reject both these extremes. Specifically, they stress the confirmation of two fundamental insights of Marxism. First, that the left cannot simply take over the existing machinery of government and the state from the existing ruling class and use it for different ends. Second that no successful revolutionary movement can succeed unless it can consolidate and maintain a political majority in society. Key economic changes by Popular Unity, above all the nationalisation of the copper industry, sent shockwaves to Wall Street and the White House, where they feared that the Chilean experiment would be repeated elsewhere unless it was stopped – at any cost.Starting with just 36% of the vote in the 1970 presidential elections, Popular Unity faced constant challenges to create and sustain a political majority and at the same time overcome the resistance from within the army, political elite and big business. It also faced the economic and political sabotage by the United States, leading to the coup on 11 September 1973, that cost Allende and thousands of his supporters their lives. 

A biography of the noted Chilean poet.