El papel que juegan las vanguardias en César Vallejo supone un paso más en la gestación y reafirmación de una obra que asume, con todas sus contradicciones, la contextualización de un tiempo que, poco a poco, dará paso a una brutal dialéctica. Vallejo lo vivirá de primera mano junto a los intelectuales europeos y del llamado grupo del 27, los cuales condensaban una sensación de vacío y de pérdida de identidad que en Vallejo poco o nada tendrá que ver con ese universo tan personal que hace visible lo real para ofrecernos una nueva forma de entender la poesía del siglo XX. ¿O estamos hablando del XXI?

With The Black Heralds (1919), Vallejo begins his first literary archeology that already hoarded, from previous compositions, a broad knowledge of the symbolic structures of the literary currents that flooded the gatherings and academic forums of the early twentieth century. So much so that a poem like «Campanas muertas» («Dead Bells»), published in La Reforma on november 13, 1915, that is, several years before the publication of The Black Heralds, will have a major importance. In addition, in that same year of 1915, Vallejo draws a new line in its complex poetic universe, benefiting from new friends and «fellow travelers» (Orrego, Garrido, Imaña, Haya de la Torre, etc.) and readings of Schiller, Poe and Tennyson that, with the years, will allow him to know better his reality and his time; a time that, in Vallejo, is always dialectical, that is, contradictory, pessimistic, of exal...

Vallejo is the sum and result of his actions and his work. Write knowing the commitment that comes with a challenge. He does not improvise; he does not feel the need or the foolishness of the careerists who wield criticism with the ideological arguments of a certain caste of the empowered.

César Vallejo’s universe, which includes biography, works, literary criticism, studies, editions, and publications, is complex and contradictory. When we speak, for example, of his first readings or incursions into Vallejo’s works, as in the case of El romanticismo en la poesía castellana (1915), we are defining a working methodology that runs through the old positivist discourse of Comte, S. Mill or H. Taine, reinforced by the readings of Schlegel, Le Bonn, Menéndez Pidal, Dante, Petrarca, Byron and Schiller, which cemented his knowledge of literary reality and which, over the years, would open the doors to a new «avant-gardism» which proved to be not exempt from some infelicities of form.

This article offers a brief overview of the notion of the consciousness of time and pain in César Vallejo’s Escalas. Through the evocation of the past (childhood, the family home, the memory of the mother), Vallejo contrasts and juxtaposes two dimensions of reality (time and space), a «happy there» (the dreamed and recreated reality of childhood) and a «prison here» (the space of prison), generating a new way of «being» in the world which, in turn, reveals the true magnitude of tragedy, as occurs, for example, in «Alféizar» and «Más allá de la vida y la muerte» («Beyond life and death»). It is in this dynamic that one can observe a materiality of the space that surrounds the characters in Escalas’ stories, as well as an awareness of the pain and alienation of the human being in an unjust and corrupt world.