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.
Z. I. PLAVSKIN