Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente

(vēthān`tā blä`skō ēbä`nyāth) 1867–1928, Spanish novelist and politician, b. Valencia. Outspoken against the monarchy, Blasco Ibáñez published a radical republican journal, El pueblo, and was imprisoned 30 times for political activism. His novels are primarily realistic in conception. The early ones, set in Valencia, include Flor de mayo (1895, tr. The Mayflower, 1921), La barraca [The Cabin] (1898), Cañas y barro (1902, tr. Reeds and Mud, 1928), and La catedral (1903, tr. The Shadow of the Cathedral, 1909). He traveled in South America, returning to Spain at the outbreak of World War I. He became a propagandist for the Allies, and his war novel, Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis (1916, tr. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1918), made him world famous. He died a voluntary political exile.

Bibliography

See study by A. G. Day and E. C. Knowlton (1972).

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente

Born Jan. 29,1867, in Valencia; died Jan. 28,1928, in Menton. Spanish writer. Leader of the leftist republican movement in Valencia; parliamentary deputy from the Republican Party (1898–1909).

Blasco Ibáftez was close to the socialists and then changed to a moderate liberal position. In 1894 he began to publish a series of Valencian novels and stories exposing the power of money (A Life Without a Sabbath, 1899), bourgeois parliamentarians (In the Orange Orchards, 1900), and social injustice in the countryside (La Barraca [The Hut], 1898, and the collection Valencian Stories, 1896). In the early novels the influence of naturalism is felt. Blasco Ibáĩez wrote the social novels Cathedral of Toledo (1903), The Uninvited Guest (1904), and The Wine Vault (1905). He wrote a cycle of philosophical-psychological novels, including The Naked Maja (1906), Blood and Sand (1908), and The Dead Command (1909), about the conflict of a gifted individual with a hostile society. A tendentious, sometimes chauvinistic view of World War I (1914–18) caused the failure of the novels The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916), Mare Nostrum (1918), and others. After the establishment of a military dictatorship in 1923, he emigrated to France, where he published the pamphlet Alfonso XIII Unmasked (1924). The novel In Search of the Great Khan (1928) was dedicated to Christopher Columbus.

WORKS

Obras completas, vols. 1–3. Madrid, 1958.
In Russian translation:
Poln. sobr. soch., vols. 1–16. Moscow, 1910–12.
Izbr. proizv., vols. 1–3. Introductory article by Z. I. Plavskin. Moscow-Leningrad, 1959.
Solntse mertvykh. Introductory article by N. Snetkova. [Moscow, 1965.]
Khutor. Krov’ i pesok. Leningrad, 1967.

REFERENCES

Khokhlov, Iu. M. “Blasko Iban’es: ispanskii pisatel’-demokrat.” Uch. zap. Leningradskogo pedagogicheskogo in-ta: Kafedra zarubezhnoi literatury, 1955, vol. 121.
Gascó Contell, E. Genio y figura de Blasco Ibáñez. Madrid [1957].
Leon Rosa, J. L. Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. [Valencia] 1967.