Maria Teresa Leon

María Teresa León Goyri (Logroño, October 31, 1903-Majadahonda, December 13, 1988) was a Spanish writer integrated into the generation of 27. In addition, she was a feminist woman committed to the conflictive time in which he had to live, facing criticism and social conventions.

Biography

María Teresa León Goyri was born on October 31, 1903 in Logroño, the daughter of Ángel León, army colonel, and Oliva Goyri, niece of María Goyri (wife of Ramón Menéndez Pidal). María Teresa's childhood was spent between Madrid, Barcelona and Burgos, a city to which she would return on several occasions and to which she felt strongly attached. Her education was greatly influenced by her uncles and especially her aunt María de ella, who had been one of the first Spanish women to obtain a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters; and that she taught at the Spanish University, she studied at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and graduated in Philosophy and Letters. She was educated in a cultured and enlightened environment, which marked and defined her for the rest of her life.

María Teresa León had difficulties due to her interest in continuing her studies beyond the stipulated fourteen years. Thus, after her first clashes with her classmates because of her readings that were considered 'not very edifying' at the time, she was expelled from the nuns' school, among other rebellions, as she herself stated, for insisting on doing the baccalaureate: had She was gently expelled from the Colegio Sagrado Corazón de Leganitos, in Madrid, because she insisted on doing high school, because she cried at the wrong time, because she read forbidden books...

On August 24, 1919, and according to what María Cruz Ebro records in her Memoirs, he participated in the cast of the representation of the Burgos historical episode, The death of the seven infants of Lara , in the role of Salem.

María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti in Havana (1930)

She got married when she was very young, in 1920 (at the age of seventeen), with Gonzalo de Sebastián Alfaro, with whom she had two children, Gonzalo and Enrique. At this time, she published articles in the Diario de Burgos under the pseudonym Isabel Inghirami, the heroine of Gabriele D'Annunzio, and later under her own name. In 1928, she made a trip to Argentina and the following year she published her first works: Tales to Dream and La bella del mal amor .

In 1929, she divorced Gonzalo. She met Rafael Alberti and settled with him in Mallorca. In 1932 they married civilly. One of Alberti's first collaborations with María Teresa León are the illustrations for her third book, a collection of short stories called Rosa Fría. It is at this time when the Board for the Expansion of Studies gave María Teresa León a pension to study the European theatrical movement and they began to travel through Berlin, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands; so they began their European tour. These experiences allowed him to have a theme for his writings, which was later expanded with a dozen articles, published in El Heraldo de Madrid in 1933. Together with Rafael Alberti, he participated in the foundation of the magazine October, in which he published his work Huelga en el puerto (1933). In 1934 the couple returned to the Soviet Union where they attended the First Congress of Soviet Writers, there they met Máximo Gorki and André Malraux. With the outbreak of the Asturian Revolution of 1934, his political and social activity increased, traveling to the United States, to raise funds for the affected workers.

The coup d'état that started the Civil War surprised them in Ibiza, from where they managed to escape in the frustrated naval landing operation led by the captain of the Republican Navy Alberto Bayo. They returned to settle in Madrid during the war and León went on to hold the position of secretary of the Alliance of Antifascist Writers. They founded the magazine El Mono Azul. His experiences in warlike Madrid were later reflected with great intensity in two novels: Against Wind and Tide and Fair Play, the latter highly dramatic, raw and intense, with important autobiographical notes in which he narrates the daily life of a group of actors. León was deputy director of the Central Theater Council, and she set up, as an author, as an actress or as a director, important theater companies in Republican Spain. He carried out an intense activity of cultural and literary animation on the battlefronts and participated in the preparation of the Romancero de la Guerra Civil dedicated to Federico García Lorca, as well as in the creation, promoted by the Association of Anti-Fascist Writers, of an organization that was in charge of protecting the works of art in buildings seized by left-wing parties and organizations, after his own house was requisitioned by anarchists. As a result of these efforts, led by, according to María Teresa León, by José Bergamín, the Board for the Seizure and Protection of Artistic Heritage was created, which would be in charge of transferring the artistic collections of the Prado Museum and the El Escorial Monastery to Valencia. However, the first transfers, made outside the Junta, were to be personally commissioned, first by the communist deputy Florencio Sosa Acevedo, and then by María Teresa de León herself, whom he made responsible for selecting and sending the paintings an order from the Undersecretary of Public Instruction dated December 3, 1936, "to avoid delays and paperwork", since Sosa had only made one shipment throughout the month of November, with a total of 29 paintings, and those responsible for the museum made it difficult for the transfers that they understood to be motivated by political reasons. Between December 7 and 11, María Teresa León removed from the museum and sent to Valencia 64 paintings, among them Las meninas that left Madrid on the 9th, and 181 drawings, many of them without the proper packaging, which caused significant damage to the portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares on horseback, by Velázquez. The conditions in which Las Meninas and Carlos V in Titian's battle of Mühlberg crossed the Arganda bridge, suspended from the sides of the truck and outside the wheels, as the difficulty posed by the low height of the bridge had not been foreseen, they determined their dismissal, passing the responsibility to the Delegate Board of Madrid, whose members unanimously agreed not to allow new transfers under the conditions that had been made before.

He also participated in the II Congress of Revolutionary Writers in 1937, held in Madrid and Valencia. During the war, her work focused on the theater, holding the position of deputy director of the Central Theater Council, promoting various initiatives in this field, being responsible for & # 34; The Theater of Art and Propaganda & # 34; and later of "Las Guerrillas del Teatro". In the Army of the Center she launched various theatrical companies. She worked both as a playwright, as a stage director and even collaborated sporadically as an actress; she was co-director of Los Títeres de cachiporra by Federico García Lorca and The Green Cockatoo , by Arthur Schnitzler; She also directed The Optimistic Tragedy , by the Russian author Vsevolod Vichnievsky and also directed and participated as an actress in the version of Numancia , which Alberti himself was in charge of.. She also directed and participated in a work by Alberti: Cantata de los héroes y la fraternidad de las pueblos . Other of her contributions to the world of theater was the foundation of & # 34; El Cine, Teatro, Club de la Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas & # 34;.

With the end of the war and the Republican defeat, he had to go into exile, initially to Oran and then to France. He lived in Paris until the end of 1940, where he translated texts for the French radio station Paris-Mondial and worked as announcer for Latin American broadcasts.

León and Alberti moved to Argentina. They arrived in Buenos Aires on March 2, 1940, aboard the Mendoza ship, which had sailed from Marseille. They lived in Argentina for twenty-three years, and their daughter Aitana was born there. It is in America, according to some authors (such as Juan Carlos Estébanez), where he acquires the maturity of his prose, as the culmination of an evolution that begins with the first traditional stories in the twenties, going through an avant-garde stage, and continues with a socialist realism from the Republic.

In 1963 they returned to Europe. On May 28 of that year they settled in Rome (this is where his work Memory of Melancholy takes shape). The family traveled through Europe and also went to China (in 1958 the couple wrote the book Smile China).

With the advent of democracy, María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti returned to Spain on April 27, 1977, but she was already suffering from Alzheimer's disease, for which she was admitted to a sanatorium in Majadahonga, nearby from Madrid, where he remained for the last years of his life and where he died. Alberti, not accepting her illness, abandoned her to go to Rome. She died alone and forgotten, without really knowing where she was, on December 13, 1988.

She is buried in the Majadahonda cemetery, in a tomb where "flowers are never lacking" and where there is a verse by Alberti as an epitaph: "This morning, love, we are twenty years old".

Recognition of his work and labor

In 2003, the centenary of the writer's birth was celebrated, and 15 years after her death from Alzheimer's disease, institutions in Burgos (where she spent her adolescence and youth), organized the Círculo de Bellas Artes, from Madrid, the exhibition María Teresa León. Memory of a commitment; It contains unpublished texts on Federico García Lorca, Lope de Vega, Ramón Menéndez Pidal. This exhibition can be considered as a memory and recovery of the literary personality of the writer of the generation of '27, obscured by her long relationship with the poet Rafael Alberti.

Literary work

Theatre

• Strike in the port1933, Theatre
• Mercy; Theatre
• The Optimistic Tragedy1937, Theatre
• Freedom on the roof / Dream and Truth of Francisco de Goya, 2003, Theatre
• The story of my heart (facsimile edition of the original typewritten by Gabriele Morelli); Generation Cultural Center of 27, 2008, Theater

Novel

• Against wind and tideBuenos Aires, 1941, Novela
• The great love of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (a poor and passionate life); Losada S.A., Editorial, Buenos Aires, 1946, Novela
• Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, Cid Campeador; Peuser, Buenos Aires, 1954, Novela
• Clean game; Goyanarte, Buenos Aires, 1959, Novela
• Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar, great lady of all duties; Losada S.A., Editorial, Buenos Aires, 1960, Novela
• Menesteos, sailor of April; Era, Mexico, 1965, Novela
• Cervantes. The soldier who taught us to speak; Altalena, Madrid, 1978, Novela

Tales

• Tales to dream; Sons of Santiago Rodríguez, Burgos, 1928, Talents
• The beauty of evil love; Sons of Santiago Rodríguez, Burgos, 1930, Talents
• Pink-Fry, moon skater; Espasa Calpe, Madrid, 1934, Talents
• Current Spanish TalesDialectic, Mexico, 1935, Talents
• A red star; Help, Madrid, 1937, Talents
• You'll die away; Americalee, Buenos Aires, 1942, Talents
• The pilgrimages of Teresa; Botella al mar, Buenos Aires, 1950, Talents
• Fables of bitter time; Alejandro Finisterre, Mexico, 1962, Talents

Essay

• General Chronicle of the Civil War; Alliance de Intelectuales Antifranquistas, Madrid, 1939, Essayo.
• History has the word (notice on the salvage of the Artistic Treasure of Spain); Patronato Hispano-Argentino de Cultura, Buenos Aires, 1944, Essayo

Film scripts

• The most beautiful eyes of the world1943, Film script
• The mistress1945, Movie script.

Other

• Our daily home; Company Fabril Editora, Buenos Aires, 1958
• Chinese smile (with illustrations by Rafael Alberti, also co-author of the text), Jacobo Muchnik, 1958. Testimony of the couple, after a trip to China, of political, social and cultural changes with the new communist regime.
• Melancholy memory; Losada S.A., Editorial, Buenos Aires, 1970, Autobiography. Reissued by Renaissance in 2020.

Movie scripts

• The great love of Bécquer (1946)
• The duende lady (1945)
• The most beautiful eyes of the world (1943)

Awards in your name

• Award for Equality "Teresa León Goyri - City of Logroño" - Awarded on December 2022 by the City of Logroño to IES Cosme García and to the journalist and filmmaker Chelo Alvarez-Stehle.