On the night of Sunday, November 4, 1917, a touring Swiss dancer named Norka Rouskaya performed a dance in the Lima cemetery to the strains of Chopin’s Funeral March before a small, rapt audience of young artists and intellectuals. Although the event was conceived as a fanciful bohemian thrill and perhaps rebellious challenge to bourgeois society, the next day the dancer and her coterie were arrested by the authorities and accused of sacrilege and desecration of a sacred space. The affair quickly burgeoned into a cause celèbre, unleashing a polemic between conservative and liberal elites over its meaning in a country experiencing the social and political convulsions and economic tremors unleashed by the First World War. One of those arrested was José Carlos Mariátegui, at the time a journalist and writer for La Prensa, who, it turned out, was the intellectual author of the deed.
Anthropologist William Stein, who has written widely on Peru during his career, ably dissects the incident and the meanings, often unconscious and ignored, that it had on the principal actors themselves. More to the point, he interprets the dance in the cemetery as a “tectonic experience,” a “precipitant or catalyst that transformed [Mariátegui’s] diffuse insurrection into an active revolutionary intent” (pp. 1-2). In doing so, Stein makes the event the centerpiece of this thought provoking “literary biography” of the man, subjecting the dance to intense analytical scrutiny based on the extensive polemic that developed in succeeding days in the Lima print media. The book originally appeared in Lima in 1989 as Mariátegui y Norka Rouskaya: crónica de la presunta “profanación” del cementerio de Lima en 1917, but is much changed in this English version, despite retaining the extensive journalistic extracts from the Lima newspapers of the time.
Stein also brings a psychoanalytic perspective to his subject, drawing heavily on the works of Sigmund Freud as well as of other literary and cultural theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and, particularly, Julia Kristeva. His fascination with Mariátegui derives from his first reading of the author of Siete ensayos, whose incisive understanding of the condition of indigenous Andeans helped Stein, in his collaboration on the famous Vicos project, to understand the ultimate failure of that early sixties effort to reform a “feudal” Andean estate. Stein also finds much to identify and empathize with in the early life of Mariátegui, who grew up fatherless, sickly, and mestizo in a racist society and under onerous economic circumstances—not unlike the difficulties that Stein himself confronted as an “othered” young Jewish boy in the America of the fifties.
Stein hypothesizes that “Mariátegui’s insurrectionary character, his tendency to seek danger, his reparative urge and his search for the guiding hand of a father led him into revolutionary socialism. … In harmony with what might have been his dreams of repairing a body or a family that was broken, he dreamed of the possibility of repairing a defective (i. e. separated into elites and masses, active rulers and those passively ruled) society” (p. 213). This is a highly suggestive, if not entirely original, interpretation of Mariátegui’s process of radicalization, which Stein adroitly fleshes out from a close reading of the documents surrounding the event. As such it will occupy a respectable place in the legion of works about the man and his times, not as another mystification that so pervades much of “Mariáteguiana,” but as a respectful tribute to the life of Peru’s foremost leftist pensador and seminal intellectual of the twentieth century.
