Joaquin Arderius

Joaquín Arderíus y Sánchez-Fortún (Lorca, Murcia province, May 5, 1885 – Mexico, January 20, 1969) was a Spanish writer.

Biography

He was born into a wealthy family and studied at a religious school in Madrid. He went to Liège (Belgium) to study engineering, but abandoned it to devote himself entirely to politics and literature. An active participant in all the revolutionary movements during the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, he was imprisoned several times at that stage between 1923 and 1929. In prison he became friends with Marcelino Domingo and met Ramón María del Valle-Inclán. A left-wing political activist, he created the Oriente publishing house in 1927 together with José Díaz Fernández, José Antonio Balbontín, Díaz Caneja, Justino de Azcárate and Giménez Siles, among others, and he directed the magazine Nueva España with Antonio Espina and José Díaz Fernández. (1930-31). He also co-founded, on February 11, 1933, the Association of Friends of the Soviet Union at a time when the right held a condemnatory tone in relation to the stories about the conquests and the problems of socialism in the USSR. In 1930 he took part in the republican uprising of Fermín Galán and García Hernández and with the Radical-Socialist Party he contributed to the advent of the Republic. He later became even more radicalized and in 1929 he joined the Communist Party, in which he was a member until 1932 or 1933, when he joined the Republican Left. During the Spanish civil war, he was the president of the aid organization Socorro Rojo Internacional. In 1939 he went into exile, first to France until Hitler entered Paris, and then to Mexico, where he was a press attaché at the embassy of the republican government and later in a modest job at the Ministry of National Education. At this stage he stopped writing fiction and only wrote a life of Don Juan de Austria for a popular editorial and some collaborations in the press. He died in Mexico in 1969.

Work

His first works are protean, exalted, with surrealist traits, at the service of an anarchic nihilism and a fierce satire of the bourgeoisie (My beggars, 1915, Así me fertilizó Zarathustra, 1923, The Duchess of Night, 1926, The Spur, 1927, The Equal Princes, 1928; The Dining Room of Venice Guesthouse, 1930). He later adopted realistic techniques with clear social and political intentionality in better constructed novels, such as Peasants (1931) and Crime (1934). With José Díaz Fernández he wrote Life of Fermín Galán (1931).

Editions

• My beggars (1915)
• So Zaratustra fecunted me (1923)
• Me and three women (1924)
• The Brazilian eye (1925)
• The Duchess of Nit (1926)
• The sparse (1927)
• The bathroom of the dead (1928)
• The equal princes (1928)
• The Lovers of Manchess (1929)
• Just the Evangelical (1929)
• The dining room of the Venice pension (1930)
• Lumpenproletarian (1931)
• Peasants (1931)
• Life of Fermín Galán (1931), in collaboration with Díaz Fernández
• Crime (1934)