Giants. Heroic biography and transnational communist culture in the 1930s

Authors

  • José Carlos Rueda Laffond Universidad Complutense de Madrid

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18042/cepc/rep.195.07

Abstract

The article approaches the genre of communist heroic biography in the 1930s, particularly in Spain. It starts from the notable weight that the «biocratic» and biographical vector and transnational perspectives have acquired in recent years in the international historiography on communism. Using a comparative methodology, it analyses a range of accounts of the personal that appeared in Spanish in those years, either in the form of translations with wide circulation in the international communist space or as original texts generated from the national singularity. The study highlights several aspects: the empathetic, exemplary, didactic and socializing functions of these narratives; the coupling between particularities and shared meanings in the communist culture; the location of these stories in a «glocal» —global and local— context, typical of anti-fascism; or their involvement in the magma of the personality cult, an essential feature of communist identity based on the power of charisma and the political-symbolic capital generated by the image of an idyllic convergence of individual trajectory, collective and party.

Published

2022-03-29

Issue

Section

ARTICLES