A Russian Frenchman who became a Great Cuban

The Life and Work of Alejo Carpentier (1904—1980)

December 2024 marks the 120th anniversary of Alejo Carpentier’s birth. Writer and philosopher, political activist and diplomat, composer and ethnographer, journalist and scriptwriter, politician and statesman, winner of numerous awards and prizes, and creator of interesting concepts – his legacy is so vast that it is astonishing and inspiring.

In Soviet times, the circulation of his books reached one hundred thousand copies and virtually all of his literary heritage was published in the USSR, although now Alejo Carpentier is little known in Russia.

Even among specialists there are not many studies devoted to his work. In 1991 Galina Trofimova’s dissertation “Alejo Carpentier’s Afro-Cubanism (20s-40s)” was defended, in 1996 Andrei Podgurenko’s dissertation “Space and Time in Alejo Carpentier’s Work” was defended, and in 1998 Elena Ogneva’s dissertation “Alejo Carpentier’s Second Latin American Cycle, 70s” was defended. What followed was a lapse that has dragged on for more than a quarter of a century.

His full name is Alejo Carpentier and Valmont. Valmont is his mother’s maiden name and to be more accurate, it is a distortion of the original surname Balmont. Although there are different information where exactly she came from (Yuri Dashkevich noted that a native of Nizhny Novgorod Ekaterina Vladimirovna Valmont studied medicine in Switzerland, and Valery Zemskov that his mother was devoted to music and was a Russian native of Baku), researchers unequivocally state that she was the niece of the famous symbolist poet and one of the greatest representatives of Russian poetry of the Silver Age Konstantin Balmont. Alejo Carpentier’s mother was a foreign language teacher and her father was the French architect Georges Julien Carpentier (Spanish transcription: Jorge Julián Carpentier), who, however, separated from his wife and son after some time.

In the cycle “Visions of America” Alejo Carpentier tells a story indicating that his ancestors on the French line had already been to the Caribbean – “Alfred Clerec Carpentier, my amazing great-grandfather – the first of our family to settle in America – who explored these regions of Guiana in the middle of the last century and brought back from there as an innocent trophy the Guiana gold cufflinks that I am now wearing. A captain of the second rank, son of the commander of a ship that died a hero’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar, this ancestor of mine, a hereditary sailor, was already in his early youth enamored of the possibilities open to the explorer in some of the virgin regions of America.” As Carpentier writes, his great-grandfather designed a flat-bottomed vessel to navigate the Oiapoc River and with a crew he was able to cross the Atlantic from France to Guiana.

The future writer was born on December 26, 1904. And here too, different versions are documented. Some sources claim that his birthplace was in Havana on Maloja Street in the central part of the capital, although others indicate Swiss Lausanne. According to Cuban researcher Sergio Chapé, Alejo Carpentier was born in Lausanne, but he gave his birthplace in Havana when he applied to the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Havana, perhaps because of certain requirements, or perhaps because he wanted to emphasize his Cuban identity. Given his mother’s place of residence and the fact that his father had previously left France to protest the Dreyfus affair, Lausanne was most likely the birthplace of Alejo Carpentier.

Alejo spent his childhood in Cuba, where he lived on an estate on the outskirts of Havana. In 1910 he began his studies at Candler College, and in 1911 he transferred to Mimo College in Havana. Already from the age of seven he plays Chopin’s preludes on the piano. In 1913 he travels with his parents to Russia, France, Austria and Belgium. About Russia there are his memories of his stay in Baku, where it was already turbulent at that time. In Paris, he attends classes at the Lycée de Ceilly. He is not very flattering about this period. “… My father thought only of returning to Cuba. He did not like Paris… He wanted very much to escape from Europe. But the wait was forced. That’s why the idea of sending me to the Lycée Jeanson de Ceili, which was not far from my grandmother’s house. And I still remember with some horror the immensity – for me: immensity – of that huge gray building in which I got lost during my first days in the semi-basement. Since no one asked me anything or took any interest in me, I wandered from class to class without finding anyone who reciprocated me…”

In 1915, at the age of eleven and at the decision of his father, who considered elementary education in Havana very similar to nineteenth-century Spanish education, he became manager of the El Lucero farm on the outskirts of the city. In 1916 he is introduced through his father to such classics of French literature as Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert. “My apprenticeship? It was strange and unusual. Because my father, a Frenchman of Breton descent, hated everything written in France since the eighteenth century. From the nineteenth century I was saved only by Balzac and Zola, but most of all by Flaubert, whose works he placed in my hands when I was twelve years old.”

In 1917 he entered the Institute of Secondary Education in Havana, where he studied music theory. Already at this time he performs his first prose works and writes short stories. In 1920, Carpentier’s father, due to the overgrowth of factories and buildings in Havana, decides to leave with his family to a small estate in Loma de Tierra, Cotorro (now the municipality of Cotorro, Alberro County, Havana Province). In 1921 he enrolls in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Havana, although he does not graduate.

In 1922, Carpentier begins his journalistic career in La Discusión with the article “The Passion and Death of Miguel Servetas. Pompeyo Hener,” opening the ‘Famous Works’ section, and also writes for other publications. It is significant that he signs his first literary works with the pseudonym Lina R. Valmont in honor of his mother, who instilled in him a love of Russian culture and literature.

In 1923 he joins the Minorist Group, which included the legendary Julio Antonio Mella, Rubén Martínez Villena and Juan Marinello. Collaborations with various magazines and newspapers continued.

In 1926, the writer Juan de Dios Bojorquez invites him to Mexico. He attends a writers’ convention, travels around the country and develops friendships with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. In 1944 he visits Mexico again and is commissioned by the Foundation for Economic Culture to write a book entitled Music in Cuba.

Together with Amadeo Roldán, he organizes concerts of new music. He presents for the first time in Cuba the works of Stravinsky, Malipiero, Ravol, Poulenc and Erik Satie.

In 1927 he is among the authors of the Minorist Manifesto, which was a criticism of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. Recalling it, he writes that “in the year 27 (…) we called for cooperation, alliance and mutual knowledge with other Latin American countries, we saw Latin America as a whole, we saw a kind of revolutionary internationalism among the countries of Latin America, we protested against the invasion of our lands by American capital.”

On July 9, 1927, he is imprisoned for seven months on charges of adherence to communist ideas. There, Carpentier writes the first version of a literary work, “Ekyu-Yamba-O!” (in Lukum language: God, it is good to have you!).

And in 1928, he does the plot for the ballet Rebambaramba, set to music by Amadeo Roldan. Later he would write librettos for two choreographed poems, Mata Crab and Sahar, as well as the libretto for the ballet The Miracle of Anaquille, set to music by Amadeo Roldan and the cantata Black Passion for the French composer Marius F. Gaillard, which was a great success in Paris. And in 1930 he wrote an opera-buff in one act and five scenes: “Manita on the Floor” to music by Alejandro Garcia Caturla. In the second half of the 30’s, while in Spain “…I wrote incidental music for ‘Cervantes’ Numancia”, staged by Jean Barrault at the Antoine Theater. This score brought me the praise of Darius Millau, which was no small thing for me. And today I can say that this score was written in advance for a large percussion apparatus and human voices (except for the ‘good’ string and woodwind instruments), as many people of the new generations do today.”

Persecuted by the authorities, in March 1928, on the papers of French surrealist poet Robert Desnos, he boards a ship and leaves Cuba for France. Then begins his equally intense life of wanderings, discoveries, encounters and achievements. In France he meets André Breton, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, Georges Sadoul, Benjamin Pere, as well as the artists Giorgio de Chirico, Ives Tanguy and Pablo Picasso. Although he would later sever relations with the Surrealists/Dadaists and speak out critically about them. The foundations of his literary style, which Carpentier would call “marvelous reality,” were probably laid while in Paris. But so far these were only seeds, destined to germinate later, after trips to Haiti and Venezuela.

As he writes: “I lived in France from 1928 to 1939, but by the time I arrived in Paris I was already an educated man and had received some higher education at the University of Havana. That is why, when Robert Desnos brought me to France “as a sort of native of the New World,” as he put it, I already had a general idea of what I have today. However, I recognize that I owe a lot to surrealism because it taught me to discover the realities behind other realities.”

There he also met Ernest Hemingway, with whom he would maintain a friendship, and about whom he would tell many years later: “I visited Hemingway a lot, I knew him very well; I am a spiritual son of the neighborhood where Hemingway lived in Cuba; El Cotorro and Loma de Tierra. In the evenings he would go horseback riding. He had a second wife at the time. She always went in short “shorts,” and that was certainly unusual for that Cuban era … He had a magnificent collection: a masterpiece by Miró, “The Farm”, two paintings by Paul Klee (…). We got along well. Hemingway didn’t talk about literature.”

In 1936 he returns briefly to Havana, and in 1937 he travels to Spain and, together with Juan Marinello, Nicolás Guillén, Félix Pita Rodríguez and Leonardo Fernández Sánchez, represents Cuba in the II International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture, held in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. A series of articles by Carpentier entitled “Spain under the Bombs” is published.

In them we can find both the depth and the constant musicality that characterizes all his works, whether a journalistic essay or a solid novel. “But the infernal rumble of four hundred shells falling on the city will not erase from memory the soul-stirring sound of a poor, wounded piano from the Argüelles quarter, whose song in the key of G became for me a symbol of the resisting Madrid” – so ends the cycle of these essays. In general, all of Carpentier’s artistic work is permeated with musicality and a special rhythm. The novels “Lost Traces” and “Sacred Spring”, are in one way or another connected with music. In the first, the main character goes on an expedition to get rare Indian musical instruments, but for a long time remains in this world, where he gets inspiration and begins to write music. In the story “The Chase” about the attempt of a failed revolutionary to hide from his former comrades in arms, the very structure of the work is built in the likeness of a musical piece. And it begins at the entrance to the theater, where the protagonist goes and tries to find refuge. In fact, this is the denouement, so the piece ends in the same place. But in between are inserted the preceding events, which with their detective and fatalism give an unusual rhythm. Since the action takes place in Havana and many of the places described are easily recognizable, one can even make up routes along which the driven revolutionary student from the province moved. And in the novel “Sacred Spring” after the fifth chapter there is a part called an interlude. Although, of course, one of Carpentier’s works was devoted directly to the history of music in Cuba.

In 1939 he returned to Cuba, where he wrote, produced and hosted radio programs until 1945, at which time Carpentier taught a course in music history at the National Conservatory of Music and produced the radio play El Quixote with Ángel Lazaro. In 1941, Carpentier marries Lilia Esteban in Santa Maria del Rosario. From February 17 to May 5, he teaches a music history course at the Conservatorio Nacional de Musica Hubert de Blanc from February 17 to May 5. In 1942, Carpentier organizes the first exhibition of Pablo Picasso in Latin America with works that had not previously been exhibited in Europe or the Americas. They were exhibited at the Liceum Lawn Tennis Club from June 18 to July 4.

In 1943, he traveled to Haiti with his wife. He describes this trip as follows. “In 1943, the great French artist, the great French actor and director Louis Jouvet came to Havana. We knew each other from Paris. It’s useless to say that we saw each other daily. And one day Louis Jouvet says to me, “I’ve been invited to tour theater productions in Haiti. If you want to come with me, I invite you.” I immediately agreed. I found the idea delightful, above all because Louis Jouvet’s troupe had actors and actresses of exceptional intellectual quality. And I went with them to Haiti.” The work “Earthly Kingdom” is dedicated to the first revolution in the New World, which took place in Haiti. Although this theme is also raised in the novel “Age of Enlightenment.”

Since 1945 Carpentier has lived in exile in Venezuela. There he travels through the Great Savannah, the headwaters of the Orinoco and the Amazon. He managed to visit the lands of the Guajibo Indians. Impressions from this trip will be included in the novel “Lost Traces”, which was published in 1954.

After the victory of the revolution in 1959, Carpentier returned to Cuba from Venezuela and held various high positions, including vice president of the National Council of Culture, vice president of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and president of the National Publishing House of Cuba (from 1963 to 1968), and at the end of his life he was appointed cultural adviser to the Cuban Embassy in France.

Alejo Carpentier died in Paris on April 24, 1980. His ashes are buried in the Colon Cemetery in Havana.

Let us now turn to a consideration of the great writer’s ideas, expressed both in his works of fiction and in his journalism.

One of the interesting concepts of Alejo Carpentier is baroque. By it he understood “a way of reincarnating matter and its forms, a way of ordering by creating disorder, a way of recreating matter.” It is more than an architectural style or music defined as the Baroque era. Alejo Carpentier concluded that “Latin America is baroque, and it was so even before it became ‘Latin,’ as we are convinced by the ornamentalism of the Mixtec and Mayan Indians. But in Cuba Baroque is not frozen in stone, and became the essence of everyday life, embodied in dance, in the shouts of street vendors, in the singularity of confectionery art, in the very human silhouette …” … It’s hard to disagree with Carpentier. If you walk along the streets of Havana away from the tourist old city, even now you can hear the shouts of food peddlers, see a variety of architectural styles from Fahtverk to Gothic (especially characteristic of Vedado), see mulattoes in their brightly colored clothes and government employees in certain uniforms, notice on the roads retro cars, Russian minibuses “Gazelle” and the latest foreign cars. As Carpentier wrote many years ago, “all of this constitutes a single fusion of the Cuban ubiquitous baroque – living and speaking – perhaps the only one of its kind on the entire continent.”

In the rhythm of time, baroque is most active “in some climactic period of development of any civilization or when a new social order is born.” Thus, the poetry and performances of Vladimir Mayakovsky on the eve of the revolution in Russia were characterized by Carpentier in the Baroque vein. But also “St. Basil’s Cathedral is one of the most outstanding examples of Russian Baroque.” Considering that it was built by decree of Ivan the Terrible in honor of the capture of Kazan, it was indeed one of the high points of Russian history.

At the same time, Carpentier directly linked Baroque to his second concept, the marvelous reality. In a lecture given at the Central University of Caracas in May 1975, he said that Latin American baroque was strengthened by Creoleism, and “with this diversity of ethnic elements, each of which brings something different, is connected directly to what I have called ‘marvelous reality. Carpentier frankly says that beauty is not necessarily the criterion of the marvelous. The scary, the ugly, the horrible can also be miraculous. “Everything extraordinary is marvelous.”

Carpentier denies any connection between miraculous reality and “magical realism,” which he says is nothing more than something in between expressionism and surrealism. And the marvelous reality is everyday; it is found “in its pristine, pulsating, omnipresent form throughout Latin American reality.”

That said, references to this can be found in earlier works as well. For example, in May 1944, in a note on Cuban folklore in the Havana newspaper Información, Carpentier writes about symbols and geometric signs, the representation of the sun and stars, and trees in Afro-Cuban culture, nudging the reader toward a marvelous reality that he or she may not notice because of the general spirit of modernity and bourgeoisie. Even today one can meet a white-skinned (!) woman with the symbols of the Santeria cult on the streets of Havana, or see unusual rituals or their consequences somewhere in the center of the capital. You just have to be able to see all this, and then the many nuances of Cuban culture and life, which are part of everyday life, will be revealed.

Russian origin probably also influenced the writer’s worldview. After all, “the Slavic soul, tormented and unstable, always vacillating between the garden of Eden and the underworld” – as he wrote in his novel “The Vicissitudes of Method” – is always looking for depth and sees the miracle in small daily events.

From his pen came essays dedicated to Igor Stravinsky and ballerina Anna Pavlova, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Leo Tolstoy, and, of course, childhood memories, which also surely planted in the soul of little Alejo grains of both the miraculous and the baroque. “In the dining car I learned the taste of borscht, then I became acquainted with colorful bars of rahat-lukum covered with the finest sugar pollen….. Women with their faces covered, wearing shoes whose flat soles clattered on the stones of the sidewalk…. ritual redemptive processions of fanatics beating themselves with chains, marching after the flag bearers (apparently it was one of the Shiite holidays – author’s note)… and mounted Cossacks patrolling the streets…. But then came the days of Easter and miracles began to happen…” – he wrote in an article devoted to his childhood trip to Baku. According to Carpentier’s memories, he liked to visit Orthodox churches, but also Jewish and Muslim cemeteries, and he even witnessed one feud when there were crowds of people in the streets and a bomb went off. Wasn’t it a marvelous reality that was revealed to the little Carpentier, which he later experienced on another continent and described in his novels and novellas?

Although the twentieth century is the triumph of technology and materialism, Carpentier seems to reject this progress, blaming the West for the spiritual desolation that comes with the material benefits of “advanced civilization.”

In the novel Lost Traces, Carpentier puts into the mouth of the hero reflections on the different paths of the West and the rest of the world. At the same time, he himself is a native of the Western world who finds himself in the wilds of a Latin American country by force of coincidence. Carpentier obviously condemns the West when his character states that “I could never have imagined to what depths of degradation and abomination the man of the West could reach if I had not seen with my own eyes what is imprinted here in the ruins of this building of nightmares.” Like other critics of the Western world wherever they have been (the Russian Eurasians in the early twentieth century, the Iranian philosopher Jalal Ale-Ahmad’s idea of westoxication (poisoning by the West), the Chinese theory of a century of humiliation from the West, etc.), Carpentier makes a sharp distinction between the beating genuine element of life in the wilds of Latin America and the hypocritical West, where fear lies behind outward conformity and conventional sociality.

“The selva, with its determined people and unintentional encounters, the selva on the threshold of its history, has taught me – in the very essence of the art I practice, the deep meaning of the books I read, and many things whose greatness I had not previously noticed – taught me much more than the many books that, now dead to me forever, rested in my library. Looking at Adelantado, I realized that the greatest thing that has fallen to the lot of a human being is to know one’s own destiny. For here, in the crowd that surrounded me and ran past me, unrestrained and yet pressed, I saw many faces, but no destinies. For every deep desire, every protest, every urge that arose behind the expression painted on those faces was always crossed by fear. Fear of catching up, of time, of news and of crowding, where every new person is another slave; fear of one’s own body and of the pointing finger of the public; fear of being called to account, of the womb taking seed; fear of fruit and water, of dates, of laws and slogans, of mistakes, of the sealed envelope, and of what might happen at all.”

We can find something similar in the novel Sacred Spring, where one of the episodes takes place in the United States, where the Cuban bourgeoisie of the time often flew to. “New York knocked out of the rut, pardon the hackneyed expression; I wondered how people can live a normal life in this city, have breakfast, read, love, because everything here disconnects man with himself: huge clusters of diverse buildings, houses without style, houses that are a mixture of all styles, arranged as they are, streets where the pedestrian dissolves, deprived of individuality, in the running, embraced by the mad rush of the crowd …. New York is the embodiment of chaos, confusion, mishmash, everything is upside down, upside down … Mighty New York, but trouble shines through its power.”

A Russian Frenchman who became a Great Cuban