Vicente Blasco Ibanez

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (Valencia, January 29, 1867-Menton, January 28, 1928) was a Spanish republican writer, journalist and politician, promoter of naturalism and realism. Around him and the newspaper El Pueblo , founded and directed by him, a republican political movement known as Blasquismo developed in the city of Valencia.

Biography

Beginnings: revolutionary and republican writer

Plaque in the place where the author's home was in Valencia. It is currently Manuel Aguilar Muñoz (who was employed by Blasco Ibáñez in the Sempere publishing house).

Born in Valencia, he was the son of the merchant Gaspar Blasco and Ramona Ibáñez, both of Aragonese origin. According to his own testimony, one of the first memories of him was the barricade erected on his street by the insurgents during the cantonal rebellion when he was six years old, at the beginning of the First Spanish Republic (1873-1874). He also remembered having seen the heroes of the Canton, Cabalote and Enguerino. The first book he read was The History of the Girondins by Lamartine and then the works of Victor Hugo, especially Les Miserables. According to the historian Ramiro Reig, "from that moment on he was clear about what he was going to be: a revolutionary writer."

His political and literary training was influenced by the figure of Constantí Llombart, a radical writer of the Valencian Renaixença, in whose gatherings of republicans he slipped in and who made the young Blasco his literary heir.

At the age of sixteen he had already founded a weekly newspaper that, being a minor, he put in the name of a shoemaker friend of his. He wanted to be a sailor, but his difficulty in understanding mathematics led him to lean towards law. His great study capacity allowed him to prepare the subjects for a whole year fifteen days before the exams. He studied at the University of Valencia and during those years he belonged to the tuna. He graduated in 1888, although he practically did not practice law.

During his time as a student, he participated in various actions of a republican and anticlerical nature, such as bursting the rosaries of the dawn organized by the archdiocese. Although this has not been proven to date, it is said that he entered at the age of twenty of age in Freemasonry on February 6, 1887, adopting the symbolic name of Danton; he would have been part of the Unión Lodge no. 14 of Valencia and later of the Acacia Lodge no.

He began to get involved in the political life of Valencia by attending the meetings that the Federal Republican Party organized in the Juventudes Federales casino. In his first public appearances he discovers that he is endowed with tremendous powers of persuasion. If his pen is accurate, his oratory is no less accurate, capable of inflaming the audience and exciting the people by breathing great dreams into them.

It is not the so-called «social question» of class struggle, raised throughout the XIX century with the first outbreaks of active and revolutionary socialism, the fundamental problem for Blasco: rather he confronts the reality of the Valencia of those times, in which the illiteracy of the people was linked to precarious living conditions, and all of this linked to beliefs stagnant and enemies of all improvement. Blasco Ibáñez sees himself in the moral need to denounce the abuses and contribute to the progress of the people.

When the Marquis de Cerralbo, a Carlist leader, arrived in Valencia in 1890, Blasco appealed to the Republicans to boycott the visit from the newspaper La Bandera Federal, which he had just founded. Blasco himself distributes the whistles and the boycott is a success. He is accused of insulting public power and has to flee dressed as a fisherman. He hides in some towns, but finally reaches Paris, where he will spend the winter of 1890 to 1891. He writes chronicles of what he sees for some newspapers and begins his stage journalistic

Leader of republicanism in Valencia (1892-1905)

Presented as a candidate for deputy from his Parisian exile for the 1891 elections, he returned to Spain that same year taking advantage of a general amnesty. From his return until 1905 he dedicated himself entirely to politics, becoming in a short time the "political most popular in Valencia, and the most feared for its ability to drag people away."^{[citation required]} "In Valencia you cannot go out without the permission of Mr. Blasco Ibáñez and his friends", thunders a Carlist deputy...^{[citation needed]} One thing is certain: Blasco lives politics intensely, he kicks his neighborhoods of the city and the towns of the province giving rallies, writes daily in the newspaper, is elected deputy to Cortes in seven legislatures. "Until I got tired of being one," he explained. His first election as deputy for Valencia was on April 28, 1898, three days after war had been declared with the United States after the explosion of the Maine. Between the years 1898 and 1908, he held a seat in the Congress of Deputies representing the republican party called Unión Republicana, between unitary republicanism and federalism. Later, in 1909, an independent party was formed in Valencia under the name of Partido de Unión Republicana Autonomista (PURA).

In his political activity, characterized by his opposition to the monarchy and his republican ideals, the newspaper El Pueblo, which he founded in November 1894, was key. In it he wrote close to a thousand articles, and countless unsigned newsletters or chronicles. Its originality rested, in addition to its price (half that of the rest of the Valencian press), in its headlines, in the brochures that Blasco himself wrote in which the readers of the popular classes recognized themselves and who were confused with the political and social history that the newspaper recounted every day in a no less serialized way, and in "its casual style in which melodrama, comedy and pedagogy were mixed with skilful dosage".

At the same time, he organized and led a mass movement in Valencia, in the style of those that were beginning to establish themselves in Europe, whose bases were the new industrial proletariat and the old artisans —what were beginning to be called the classes workers. «At a time (that of the Restoration in Spain) in which the deputies were typecast by the Minister of the Interior and were elected without even being known to their voters, the cordial and close presence, to as incandescent as the great man, at rallies, in casinos and on the street, it meant a break in the way of doing politics».

The organizational base of the movement was made up of the network of seven republican casinos strategically distributed throughout the popular neighborhoods of the city of Valencia, in addition to the central casino, where a popular university operated. The casinos were meeting places and spaces for sociability for "people with advanced ideas, enemies of the priests and supporters of the social republic", which provided an individual and collective identity, at a time when many people defined themselves by ideology. that they professed and were proud of it ("I have been a lifelong Republican"). They were an instrument for rapid citizen mobilization, since in a few hours hundreds of people attended the meeting announced by the newspaper El Pueblo, either to greet Canalejas with cheers, or to demonstrate in favor of the schools secularists or to boycott a procession. In addition, the casinos displayed a highly varied and vital cultural activity, "with a special sensitivity to everything related to human rights".

Caricature of Blasco Ibáñez in the magazine Don Quixote (1902)

A political movement called blasquismo was configured around his figure, which advocated republicanism, anti-clericalism and economic reformism through the spread of property. One of the antecedents of which can be found in the sans-culottes of the French Revolution, defenders of the Roussonian principle that popular sovereignty is not delegated, but is exercised, hence the continuous mobilization of the blasters in the street. The movement was hegemonic in the city of Valencia and winner of all the elections between 1898 and 1933. Its strength, according to Ramiro Reig, “was in the assumption of popular culture and in its identification with republican culture. The use of the spontaneous language of the street and of torn and plebeian forms, of Mediterranean sociability and its fondness for tumult and noise, of neighborhood relations and parties, made republicanism not only the political expression of the popular classes, but of their way of being, speaking and imagining life. The problems of this populist approach are obvious: the derivation of emotional waste, to put it like Pareto, towards forms of irrational exaltation (anticlerical simplism, rude Valencianism, tribal partisanship)».

During this period he was persecuted by the courts on three occasions. The first, which cost him imprisonment, for an anticlerical riot against an expedition of pilgrims heading to Rome (in 1892 he had published a novel against the Jesuits entitled The Black Spider ).

The second time was in 1896 for inciting the masses against the war in Cuba, which forced him to flee to Italy. During his stay in Italy, the nostalgia for his land made him devote himself to incessant literary work. He thus emerged In the country of art , which would be one of the best guides in Italy. The splendor of the monuments and the grandeur of his story passed through the pen of one of the best descriptive writers of our time. All these chronicles were published in successive installments in his newspaper. Milan Cathedral, the Roman Forum, into which the artist's imagination evokes the victorious entry of the Roman legions, the Vatican, the works of Michelangelo and Raphael, the Sistine Chapel, Naples, Pompeii, Florence, Venice are described with an unusual mastery. Back in Valencia he was arrested and spent the winter of 1896 to 1897 in the San Gregorio prison. There he wrote The Awakening of Buddha , a story that tells the story of the great mystic Siddhartha Gautama when he flees from his father's palace to achieve enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.

The third time that Blasco had problems with the law was in 1898, when he led violent demonstrations against the monarchy that landed him in prison.

Retreated by Antonio Fillol Granell

«It is not contradictory that it was precisely during these years of political activism that he wrote his best novels, the Valencian ones (Arroz y tartana, 1894; Flor de Mayo, 1895; La barraca, 1898; Entre naranjos, 1900; Cañas y barro, 1902) and some of the social ones (The cathedral , 1903; The Intruder, 1904; The Cellar, 1905; The Horde, 1906). While in his works of fiction from his last period the text serves as an evasion of reality, the naturalistic novels confront it, assigning politics the role of transforming it. It could be said that the blasquista policy starts from the reality described in the novels and on it tries to build the true story.

Blasco Ibáñez in his possession of the Malvarrosa (The chart, 1904)

During those years, he also began publishing, founding Prometeo publishing house with his friend Francisco Sempere, which publishes at affordable prices not only his works, but also those of classic and contemporary authors such as Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Quevedo, Maupassant, Zola, Gorki, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dumas, Hugo, Poe, London, Conan Doyle, Voltaire, Kropotkin, Nietzsche, Darwin or Marx.

During his stays in Madrid when he was elected deputy between 1898 and 1905, he wrote chronicles for El Pueblo describing the city, as he did in Paris and Italy. In Villa y Corte he lived at the end of Paseo de la Castellana. In the capital, he visits his Valencian friends, the Benlliure brothers: Mariano, the famous sculptor who would later sculpt a statue of the novelist, and Juan Antonio, the painter. His studio, says Blasco, is the temple of artistic camaraderie.^{[citation needed]} He also frequents Fernando Fe's bookstore, where he interacts with the intellectuals of his time, Luis Morote, Santiago Rusiñol and Emilia Pardo Bazán. He also meets Rodrigo Soriano, a journalist for El Imparcial , who will first become a great friend and, later, his worst enemy.

Caricature of June 1903 representing the conflict between Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (left) and Rodrigo Soriano (right)

In effect, in 1903 Blasquismo suffered the «Sorianista» split, as a consequence of the ruthless attack made public by Soriano, «number two» of the movement, against Blasco Ibáñez, aspiring to occupy his place as leader. Soriano created another party and unleashed a "fratricidal war between Blasco's unconditional fanatics and the inevitable battalion of resentful and disillusioned people who followed Soriano", which inflamed the political climate in the city of Valencia (there was a shooting on their way back from a rally). Thus, Blasco, after the 1905 elections, in which he was again elected as a deputy, decided to move to Madrid to get away from the "passions that his person aroused in Valencia." He was still forced by his co-religionists to stand in the 1907 elections, getting elected again, but in November 1908 he resigned his seat and abandoned active political life, which he would not resume until the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, to the who fought from his exile.

From Madrid to Argentina (1905-1914)

Blasco Ibáñez in a republican rally in the central frontón of Madrid in May 1905, photographed by Campúa.

From his abandonment of political life and his departure to Madrid, Blasco dedicated himself solely to literature and to promoting his works and those of the publishing house run in Valencia by his friend and partner Sempere. During his stay in the capital he discovers the mundane life of social gatherings, salons, gallant nights, the opera and the theater. She goes to the Colombine salon, pseudonym of Carmen de Burgos, feminist and republican, where on Wednesdays she received "what she told" in the literary and artistic world. And he meets the wife of the Chilean ambassador, with whom he will have a long love affair. With her he makes a trip to the East, whose chronicles he sells to newspapers in Madrid, Buenos Aires and Mexico. In 1908 he published Blood and Sand, one of his most internationally successful novels, despite the fact that Blasco hated bullfighting and had repeatedly ridiculed it in his articles in El Pueblo.. There are those who believe that "in the novel everything is brass band and tambourine, so it is not strange that it was enchanted in Hollywood".

One of the portraits that Joaquín Sorolla made of the novelist, entitled Spanish Knight (1906), was acquired by The Hispanic Society of America in New York. Shortly after it is he himself who travels to the new continent.

In 1909 he traveled to Argentina, hired for a lecture tour. In his debut in Buenos Aires he alternates stage with Anatole France. He is very successful and earns a lot of money, which he does not shy away from airing.

Photograph by Blasco Ibáñez in the Saltacan Chaco, published in his book Argentina and its great1910.

In the conferences in Argentina he deals with the most varied topics: Napoleon, Wagner, Renaissance painters, the French Revolution, Cervantes, philosophy, cooking, etc. Of Buenos Aires he says that he is a Paris that speaks Spanish and in the Spanish Club of said city he speaks of the language as a great bond of union and of Cervantes as a king whom no one would dethrone. Only the Atlantic separates us from Spain —he says— and the seas are nothing and belong to no one. After passing through Chile, where he gave lectures in Santiago, Talca and Concepción, he returned to Madrid to write Argentina y sus grandesas , which has not been published since the first edition ran out. After uninterrupted work of twelve and fourteen hours a day for five months, this work comes to light in which he recounts everything he has seen. Fired by an insatiable curiosity, Blasco did not rest until he went through everything to leave a living impression of it in his book.

During his stay in Argentina he made a trip to Patagonia and decided to carry out a great colonization work there and in the Paraná River region. He dedicated himself to buying land that he planned to cultivate by bringing farmers from Valencia who would lease it for ten years and then they could buy it with the benefits they obtained. After a trip to Valencia to get farmers who wanted to join the project, during the next three years, from 1911 to 1913, he dedicated himself entirely to starting up the colonies that he baptized with the name of Nueva Valencia and Cervantes. But the project will end in a resounding failure. "I let myself be carried away by the chimera," he confessed. Blasco returned to Spain almost completely broke. A good part of the Valencian colonists stayed in Argentina, establishing themselves on their own. Today, Corrientes and Nueva Valencia are the rice granary of Argentina thanks to the irrigation procedures established by Blasco Ibáñez and the work of those Valencian workers. The colony of Cervantes became the town of Cervantes, in the province of Río Negro, which currently has more than 12,000 inhabitants.

Internationally successful writer (1914-1923)

Mexican militarism. Journalistic work of 1920. Portadilla.

Film poster The Four Horsemen of Revelation 1921.

Struck by a lack of money, he decided to become an international best-selling writer and for that he went to Paris, the cultural capital of the world at that time, together with his partner Elena Ortúzar. In the summer of 1914, the First World War broke out and Blasco saw the opportunity to place great reports in the press. He also began to publish in his Valencian publishing house a History of the European War in fascicles. For his reports and fascicles he visits the fronts and the rear, adopting a point of view favorable to the allies. At the same time he begins to write the novel that will make him famous throughout the world and definitely rich: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . It would be followed by the novel about the war at sea, Mare Nostrum (1918), and another about the rearguard, The enemies of women (1919), which would complete the trilogy. about the "Great War". According to some versions,^{[citation needed]} the novel was a personal commission from French President Raymond Poincaré to Blasco to write a novel about the war.

In Europe the novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse went unnoticed, displaced by All Quiet on the Front, by Erich María Remarque, but in the United States it was enormously successful, with more than two hundred thousand copies sold in just one year. Not since Uncle Tom's Cabin had such a phenomenon been known. They sold ashtrays, ties, paperweights, with motifs alluding to the novel, and everyone wanted to meet the author." It was the best-selling book in the United States in 1919, according to Publishers Weekly , until the point that in 1921 the film version starring a novel Rodolfo Valentino was made. The photographs of the oil portrait that Sorolla made of him appear in all the newspapers. It is the most read book after the Bible^{[citation needed]}. Cigarettes, toys, soaps, carry the image of the four horsemen. Mister Ibanyés becomes the most popular man in America. He again travels to the great continent and speaks in Catholic, Protestant, Masonic churches, synagogues. They all listen to him.

Photograph by Blasco Ibáñez appeared in Life magazine in 1920.

The North American tour is organized by a Mr. Pond, whose grandfather had organized the Charles Dickens tour of the United States that made him rich. Blasco Ibáñez travels throughout the country and receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Washington. He earns a lot of money from conferences and a press chain hires him for a thousand dollars an article, a figure never paid until then - when he returns he will buy a Rolls Royce car. In Hollywood, he signs the contract for the film versions of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Blood and Sand , which will star Rudolfo Valentino. He then visits Mexico invited by President Carranza. In 1921 he returned to Spain on his way to the Costa Azul, where he bought a villa which he named Fontana Rosa, an evocation of the Malvarrosa villa, where he would spend the rest of his days. He passes through Valencia where popular enthusiasm overflows, his co-religionists offer him a spectacular tribute and the City Council dedicates the street where he was born and organizes a parade with allegorical floats that reproduce scenes from his novels. «Blasco addresses the masses that, like twenty years before, occupy the streets cheering for the republic and freedom. The political leader has returned to his home haloed with international triumphs, turned into a myth. In Valencia no public figure has had the drag that Blasco had, no one has been able to supplant him in popular memory».

In his country estate on the Côte d'Azur, he writes novels to order —a publisher even advances him $50,000 for one dealing with the discovery— and suddenly decides to take a trip around the world, from which he also extracts large profits by writing chronicles journalistic stories about the exotic places that he is visiting that he will later compile in a book entitled A Novelist's Around the World, which will be published in three volumes between 1924 and 1925.

Against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1928)

Shortly before starting the world tour, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera had been established in Spain and when asked by a journalist about the military pronouncement, Blasco Ibáñez replied that he was far from politics and that he was not going to abandon his project —an attitude that was harshly criticized by Manuel Azaña in an article. But when he returns he is determined to fight the dictatorship and declares: "I have enough energy to fight again." This change seems to have been influenced by the contacts he had with the exiled liberal politician Santiago Alba, who explained to him what was happening in Spain, referring especially to the confinement that Miguel de Unamuno had suffered in Fuerteventura and the role that he was playing in opposition to the Dictatorship from Paris. He carefully prepares his return to political life, including leaks to the press about his intentions, and he chooses the tribute to Émile Zola that was held every year before his grave in Paris. There he pronounced a few words that will be collected by the newspapers of Europe and America:

He was born in a time when freedom and truth must be defended, and he defended them by offering well-being, fame and life... No man who can have an echo in Spain and in the whole world is lawful to shut up right now.

Thus, he published in Paris in 1924 A kidnapped nation (The militaristic terror in Spain), a pamphlet that was followed the following year What will be the Spanish Republic (To the country and the army) and For Spain and against the king (Alfonso XIII unmasked). In them, in addition to denouncing the Primorriverista dictatorship and the king who supports it, he explains that he, like Victor Hugo before Napoleon III, continues to be the incorruptible republican he has always been. A kidnapped nation, "a full-fledged libel" according to Ramiro Reig, had an enormous impact and Primo de Rivera made the mistake of filing legal proceedings for insults against Alfonso XIII before the French courts, which amplified the scandal and provoked the solidarity of the government and the Assembly Nacional, which recalled the support that Blasco had given France during the First World War. The Spanish government ended up withdrawing the lawsuit.

In addition to publishing these pamphlets, Blasco creates and finances the magazine España con honra, the organ of the exiled opposition to the Dictatorship. Likewise, he renounces his candidacy for admission to the Royal Spanish Academy. In reaction to Blasco's opposition to the dictatorship, the Spanish press launched a denigrating campaign against him and the Valencia City Council, from which his supporters have been excluded, ripped off the plaque with his name on the street he had dedicated in the city.

Sarcophagus designed by Benlliure to welcome the remains of the writer, which is located in the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia, Centro del Carmen

When he was starting a new novel that was to be the story of his life and which would be entitled The Youth of the World, he died at his Fontana Rosa residence in Menton (France) on January 28 in 1928, one day before his sixty-first birthday, due to complications from pneumonia.

His remains were transferred to Valencia after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, thus fulfilling a wish expressed in 1921 on his last visit to his city: «I want to rest in the most modest Valencian cemetery, next to the Mare Nostrum that filled of idea my spirit». On October 29, 1933, the republican people of Valencia took to the streets to receive the coffin of Blasco Ibáñez in a civic procession led by the government of the Republic, which was carried on the shoulders of the fishermen from Grao. «Thousands of people, all his characters, occupied the sidewalks to say goodbye. On the lid of the coffin, designed by Mariano Benlliure, an open book had been carved and the legend The dead rule , the title of one of his books ».

Private life

He divided his life between politics, journalism, literature and love for women, of whom he was a profound admirer, both for their physical beauty and their psychological characteristics. He defined himself as a man of action, before as a writer. He wrote with unusual speed. He was an enthusiast of Miguel de Cervantes and of Spanish history and literature.

He loved music as much or more than literature. He was passionate about Wagner, his tremendous music exalted his vivid imagination and he dreamed of the Nordic gods and mythological heroes like Siegfried, a name he would later give to one of his four sons. In his work Entre naranjos , he delights us with the symbolism of the famous composer's operas. In a typical meeting of the time, in which young people met to talk about music and literature and recited poetry, he met the woman who would be his wife and mother of his children, María Blasco del Cacho.

He married María Blasco in 1891. Despite having the same last name, they were not related. They had four children: Mario, Julio César (died at twenty-four years of age), Siegfried and Libertad. His wife died in 1925 in Valencia, while he lived in exile in Menton. He married his second nuptials in 1925 with Elena Ortuzar, a Chilean national.

Despite his wanderings around the world, he kept a villa on Malvarrosa Beach in Valencia, where he debated with the intellectuals and friends of his time. This currently restored villa is the Vicente Blasco Ibáñez House-Museum.

Works

The first edition of his Complete Works (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946, 3 vols.) is, despite what he claims, very incomplete and unsatisfactory. Although he spoke Valencian, he wrote his works almost entirely in Spanish with only slight touches of Valencian in them, although he also wrote some short stories in Valencian for the almanac of the Lo Rat Penat society. He fundamentally cultivated narrative and also worked as a historian, traveler and essayist.

Cover of Volume II (1893) The black spider.

Although some critics have included him among the writers of the generation of '98, the truth is that his contemporaries did not admit him among them and he was seen more as a naturalist, especially for his novels about the Valencian land. Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was a lucky man in all aspects of life and he also became rich with literature, something that none of them had achieved. In addition, his overwhelming, impetuous, vital personality attracted him the antipathy of some. However, despite this, the Levantine Azorín himself, one of his detractors, has written extraordinary pages in which he expresses his admiration for the Valencian writer for his descriptions of the Valencian orchard and its splendid sea, notable in his works set in the Valencian Community, his native land, similar in luminosity and vigor to the brush strokes of his great friend, the illustrious Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla.

Blasco cultivated several genres within the narrative. Thus, works such as Arroz y tartana (1894), Cañas y barro (1902) or La barraca (1898), among others, can be Consider regional novels, with a Valencian environment. At the same time, his historical novels stand out, among which are: Mare Nostrum, The Knight of the Virgin, the aforementioned The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916), The Pope of the Sea, At the feet of Venus; or of an autobiographical nature, such as The Naked Maja , The Will to Live and even The Argonauts , in which he mixes something from his own biography of him with the history of the Spanish colonization of America. Add The Cathedral, a detailed fresco of the ecclesiastical intricacies of Toledo Cathedral. In March 1987, some newspaper articles under the generic title From Toledo preannounced his Toledo novel, which would see the light of day six months later (1903). A work “of rebellion”, according to Blasco's own words, of radical anti-clericalism, which presents suggestive similarities with the Galdosian novel Ángel Guerra, published twelve years earlier.

The work of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, in most of the histories of Spanish literature made in Spain, is classified by its general characteristics as belonging to literary naturalism. You can also see, in its first phase, some elements of customs and regionalism.

However, his literary works can be grouped according to their great variety of themes, often ignored in his own country, since in addition to the so-called novels of a Valencian setting (Arroz y tartana, Flor de Mayo, La shack, Among orange trees, Reeds and mud, Sónnica the courtesan, Valencian tales, La condenada), there are social novels (The cathedral, The intruder, La bodega, The Horde), psychological (The Naked Maja, Blood and Sand, The Dead Rule), American themed novels (The Argonauts, Everybody's Land), novels about war, World War I (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Mare nostrum, The enemies of women), novels of Spanish historical exaltation (The Pope of the sea, At the feet of Venus, In Search of the Great Khan, The Knight of the Virgin), adventure novels (The Paradise of Women, Queen Calafia, The Ghost with the Golden Wings), travel books (A Novelist's Around the World, In the country of art, Oriente, Argentina and its greatness) and short novels (The loan of the deceased, Novels from the French Riviera, Novels of love and death, Schubert's Farewell) among his many works.

Novels

In chronological order of first editions:

• Fantasies (Leyenda and traditions). Print the Mail of Valencia (1887).
• For the homeland!. Print the Mail of Valencia (1888).
• The black spider. Editorial Seix, Barcelona, 2 vols. (1892).
• Long live the Republic!. M. Senent, Valencia, 2 vols. (1893).
• Wedding night. Book Foundation. (1893).
• Rice and tart. Library of El Pueblo, Valencia (1894).
• Flower of May. Library of El Pueblo, Valencia (1895).
• The fanatics, Barcelona: Seix, 2 vols. (1895).
• In the crater of the volcano, Madrid: Cosmópolis, s. a.
• Valencian Tales. Imprenta Alufre, Valencia (1896).
• The boat. Brochure The People (1898).
• Between oranges. Sempere, Valencia (1900).
• The doom (short removals). Sempere, Valencia (1900).
• Sonica the courtesan. Sempere, Valencia (1901).
• Cañas and mud. Sempere, Valencia (1902).
• The Cathedral. Sempere, Valencia (1903).
• The intruder. Sempere (1904).
• The winery. Sempere (1905).
• The horde. Sempere (1905).
• The naked maja. Sempere (1906).
• The will to live. Sempere (1907, published in 1953).
• Blood and sand. Sempere (1908).
• The dead send. Sempere (1909).
• Moon Benamor (short removals). Sempere (1909).
• Argonauts. Valencia: Prometheus (1914).
• The Four Horsemen of Revelation. Valencia: Prometheus, 1916.
• Mare Nostrum. Valencia: Prometheus, 1918.
• The enemies of the woman. Valencia: Prometheus, 1919
• The land of all. Valencia: Prometheus, s. a.
• The loan of the deceased (short removals). Valencia: Prometheus, 1921. Includes: The loan of the deceased; The monster; The king of the meadows; Servia night; The feathers of the caburé; The crazy virgins; The old of the cinema; The car of the general; A kiss; The mad of the house; The revolt of Martinez; The employee of the car-bed; The cigar and the ant
• The Paradise of Women. Valencia: Prometheus, 1922
• The Earth of All. Valencia: Prometheus, 1922
• La Reina Calafia. Valencia: Prometheus, 1923
• Novels of the Costa Azul (short removals). Valencia: Prometheus, 1924.
• A kidnapped nation (The Militaryist Terror in Spain). Paris, 1924.
• The potato of the sea. Valencia: Prometheus, 1925.
• At the foot of Venus: the Borgia. Valencia: Prometheus, 1926
• Novels of love and death (short removals). Valencia: Prometheus, 1927. Includes: The secret of the Baroness; Moonstone; King Lear, Printer; The Devouring; The Reprobo; The Waking of the Buddha
• Mademoiselle Norma, Madrid: Cosmópolis, 1927.
• A nihilistic idyll (novels). Madrid: Mireya, 1928. Includes A nihilistic idyll; The Death of Capeto; Marinoni.
• Count Garci Fernández, Madrid: Cosmópolis, 1928
• Marujita Quirós, Madrid: Cosmópolis, 1928
• Mr. Avellaneda, Madrid: Cosmópolis, 1928
• Midnight Mass: legends and traditions, Madrid: Cosmópolis, 1928
• The Knight of the Virgin (Alonson of Ojeda). Valencia: Prometheus, 1929. Posthumous edition
• Looking for the Great Khan (Cristobal Columbus) 1929, posthumous.
• Father Claudio, Madrid: Columbus, 1930, posthumous.
• The ghost of the golden wings, 1930, postuma
• The doomed and other stories1979, edited by its heirs.

The original works of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, according to Spanish legislation, entered the public domain in 2008, on the 80th anniversary of the author's death.

Other works

• The Catechism of the Good Federal Republican. Printed Ripollés, Valencia, 2 vols (1892).
• Paris, impressions of an emigration. M. Senent, Valencia (1893)
• The judge. Drama in three acts and prose, Valencia: Imprenta de Ripollés, 1894.
• In the country of art (three months in Italy), Valencia: El Pueblo, 1896.
• East (via)Sempere, 1907.
• Argentina and its great, Madrid: Hispanoamericana, 1910; 2.o ed. Buenos Aires: Spanish Cultural Institution, 1943
• The Shadow of Atila: emotions of the Great War, Santiago de Chile: Editorial Chilena, 1916.
• Mexican militarism: studies published in the main newspapers of the United States, Valencia: Prometheus, 1920.
• A kidnapped nation (militarist terror in Spain)Paris, 1924.
• Turning the world of a novelist Valencia: Prometheus, 1924-1925, 3 vols.
• For Spain and against the King (Alfonso XIII unmasked), Paris: Excelsior, 1925.
• What will be the Spanish Republic (to the country and the army)Paris, 1925.
• History of the European War of 1914. Valencia: Prometheus, 1914-1921, 9 vols.; 2.a ed. 1920-1930, 9 vols.
• History of the Spanish Revolution (from the War of Independence to the Restoration of Sagunto) 1808-1874, Barcelona: La Enciclopedia Democrática, 1890-1892, 3 vols; 2.a ed. Madrid: Cosmópolis, 1930-1931, 15 vols.
• Literary studies1933.

Translations

• La History of the French Revolution Jules Michelet (Valencia: Biblioteca Popular, 1898-1900, 3 vols.)
• Richard Wagner, Novels and thoughts: (musics, philosophers and poets): Valencia: F. Sempere, 1901.
• New Universal Geography by Elisée Reclus, in six volumes (1906). Translated by the geologist Alberto Carsi with his brother-in-law.
• La New universal history (from prehistoric times to 1908) written by the individuals of the Instituto de Francia Gastón Maspero, Jules Michelet, Ernesto Renán et al., Madrid: Editorial Española-Americana, 1908-1920, 16 vols.
• The book of the thousand nights and one night, translation from the French version of J. C. Mardrus (1889), (Valencia: Editorial Prometeo, 1916, 6 vols.)
• Numerous classic works, highlighting William Shakespeare's "full dramas", which he signed under the pseudonym Rafael Martínez Lafuente and which have resulted in plagiarism from other translations.

Movie adaptations

Film poster Blood and sand (1922).

Hollywood was a pioneer in carrying out versions of the Valencian novels, but Spanish cinema in the 1900s was already in charge of making some adaptations. The writer himself directs, together with Max André, the first version of Blood and Sand and José Luis León Roca mentions in his biography, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (ed. Diputación Valenciana, 1986)., that the writer could have adapted in 17 his story The old woman and the cinema although the tape would have been lost. They had great success The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a blockbuster by Rex Ingram released in 1921, which made Rodolfo Valentino a star, along with Nita Naldi (Vincente Minnelli made another version in 1962); Blood and Sand (1922) by Fred Niblo, which consolidates Valentino as a film star throughout the world, which had a new version with the same title directed by Rouben Mamoulian in 1941 with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth and Anthony Quinn; and Mare nostrum (1926) by Rex Ingram, with Antonio Moreno and Alice Terry in a spy role that preceded that of Greta Garbo in the film Mata Hari. Greta Garbo made her Hollywood debut that year with two adaptations by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez: El Torrente, directed by Monta Bell and based on Entre naranjos, and La tierra de all that the Swedish maestro Mauritz Stiller began to conduct and ended with Fred Niblo. In 1930 a film with a silent and sound version was made called La bodega, by Benito Perojo, with Concha Piquer almost making her film debut.

In 1941 another version of Blood and Sand was made with all the luxury of means and shot in technicolor for 20th Century Fox with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Rita Hayworth. In Spain, Rafael Gil shot one of his best titles, adapting the work Mare Nostrum in 1948 and Juan de Orduña directed another Spanish-Italian version of Cañas y Barro in 1954.. Spanish-American cinema also makes versions of the author's most famous novels, such as La barraca from 1945 and Flor de Mayo from 1959, both directed by Roberto Gavaldón. In 1962, Hollywood reintroduces The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse which results in a resounding box office flop.

The 1970s saw its rediscovery through television in Spain with La barraca and Cañas y barro with leading actors (Victoria Vera, Victoria Abril, José Bódalo) and a production that has turned them into classics of television culture, judging by the audience figures and the TP Awards obtained.

In the 1980s, a new version of Blood and Sand was shot, directed by Javier Elorrieta, in a co-production starring a then-unknown Sharon Stone together with Christopher Rydell and national supporting actors such as Antonio Flores, Guillermo Montesinos or Ana Torrent. The film moved Blasco's story to the 80s.

In recent years, two Spanish television productions based on works by the Valencian author have shone: Entre naranjos in 1996 directed by Josefina Molina, and Arroz y tartana in 2003, with an award-winning performance by Carmen Maura. A biography on his life entitled Blasco Ibáñez, the novel of his life was also made in 1997 directed by Luis García Berlanga, with Ramón Langa and Ana Obregón as actors. The last adaptation of a novel by Blasco Ibáñez was Flor de Mayo, directed in 2008 by Vicente Escrivá for RTVV, starring, among others, José Sancho and Ana Fernández.

Historical memory

Busto de Blasco Ibáñez in the avenue of Valencia that bears his name

His remains were repatriated after his death, during the Second Spanish Republic, and arrived at the port of Valencia on October 29, 1933. The mausoleum that the city of Valencia planned for him was not built when the Civil War broke out Spanish, as can be read in the biography published by the foundation that bears his name:

His memory was erased, his forbidden books, his persecuted family and his seized property. The works carried out so far in the mausoleum were destroyed and the site where it settled, in a privileged place of the Municipal Cemetery, was used years later to build the crematory. In spite of all this, its remains were preserved, and are now resting in an ordinary niche, almost anonymous, in the civil cemetery of Valencia.