Sofía Casanova

Sofía Casanova
Cover of the short novel Lo eterno, 1917
Born	Sofía Guadalupe Pérez Casanova (1861-09-30)30 September 1861 Almeiras, A Coruña, Spain
Died	16 January 1958(1958-01-16) (aged 96) Poznań, Poland
Occupation	Journalist, writer
Organization	Royal Galician Academy
Spouse(s)	Wincenty Lutosławski
Awards	Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Beneficence

Sofía Guadalupe Pérez Casanova de Lutosławski (30 September 1861 – 16 January 1958) was a poet, novelist, and journalist, the first Spanish woman to become a permanent correspondent in a foreign country and a war correspondent.^[1] She was a cultured woman, well known in the literary circles of the time.^[2] In her work she highlighted the human aspect of her chronicles as a correspondent for the newspaper ABC in Poland and Russia, where she reported on the suffering of the civilian population during the wars she covered, adding literary value.^[3] Her activity throughout Europe allowed her to experience events such as the struggle of the suffragettes in England, the development of trade unionism, the formation of the Bolshevik Party in Czarist Russia, the First and Second World Wars, as well as the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi regime in the Warsaw Ghetto. She wrote for newspapers such as ABC, La Época, El Liberal, and El Imparcial, for the magazine Galicia, for other Galician publications, and for the international press, such as the Gazeta Polska and the New York Times. Of Catholic and monarchical convictions in the Spanish Civil War, she joined the Francoist ranks.

She lived to age 96. Her long life allowed her to leave behind a broad collection of writings covering all literary genres.^[4]

Biography

Sofía Casanova's father, Vicente Pérez Eguía, a lithographer from Ourense, abandoned his wife and three children when Sofía was very young, leaving no resources for the family. They survived with the financial support of her grandfather Juan Bautista Casanova Pla Cancela, a sailor by trade.^[5]

She was born and spent her childhood at the Pazo del Hombre in San Julián de Almeiras, A Coruña,^[6] and began her studies at the Doña Concha school, which she later completed at the Conservatorio de Madrid, a city where she took up residence at the age of twelve with her mother, brothers, and maternal grandparents.^[7] There she began to study poetry and declamation.^[5]

Her first poems were published when she was fifteen years old, in the Faro de Vigo. It was not she but her mother who sent them to the newspaper after finding them in her room. Casanova's talent for poetry was recognized in the most select literary circles^[8] that she frequented assiduously.^[5]

In the court of Alfonso XII

Casanova became the protégé of the poet Ramón de Campoamor, who introduced her to the literary gatherings of the Count of Andino, tutor of King Alfonso XII, and of the Marquis of Valmar,^[4] who became a good friend and mentor.^[5] Through the Marquis she was presented at the court of Alfonso XII, who organized poetic evenings. At twenty she was already a devoted poet.

In 1885 the monarch himself paid for the publication of her book Poesías. According to Alfonso XII's biographers, his weakness for Sofía was partly due to the great physical resemblance that she bore to Infanta Eulalia de Borbón.^[5]

At the gatherings that she frequented, she maintained contact with intellectuals of the time, including Emilio Ferrari and Bernard Shaw. Among the women writers she knew were Concepción Jimeno Gil, her younger friend Blanca de los Ríos,^[4] Sofía Tartilán, Filomena Dato, and Emilia Pardo Bazán.

In these circles, Campoamor introduced her to the professor, philosopher, and Polish diplomat Wincenty Lutosławski, an idealist and expert in Plato who had arrived in Madrid from France.^[7] They were married in the church of San Marcos on 19 March 1887 and had four daughters – María, Izabela, Yadwiga (who would die of dysentery in 1895, plunging Cavanova into a severe depression), and Halina, who was born in Galicia.^[5]

After the wedding they moved to Drozdowo, in northern Poland, which at the time was a province of Russia. However, the couple and their family traveled to Galicia every summer, which allowed Cavanova to maintain a direct relationship with her homeland. Her continuous displacements, as a consequence of her husband's diplomatic career, combined with her work as a journalist and with her study of the languages ​​of the countries where she lived, allowed her to master six other languages in addition to Spanish and Galician: French, English, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian. These became key knowledge for the translations that she would carry out in the future. Her trips also allowed her to meet personalities from the intellectual and political world such as Tolstoy, Marie Curie, and Morel-Fatio, whose opinions about the Spanish she collected in books and conferences.^[4]

Casanova in Vida Gallega

Over time the couple began to grow apart. Some biographers point to their not having had male children as an influence on the separation, as Wincenty began to have relationships with other women in search of an heir to his surname.^[5]

In 1905 Cavanova decided to settle permanently in Spain, at age 43, and began to have vision problems. She made literary contributions to ABC, El Debate, Blanco y Negro, El Mundo, and Galicia, and her home in Madrid became a meeting place for Basilio Álvarez, Alfredo Vicenti, Ramón y Cajal, Alberto Insúa, Victoriano García Martí, and Castelao, who would illustrate her book Princesa del amor hermoso (1909). She maintained an intense social life, giving lectures and participating in so-called "social works".

In 1906 she was elected a member of the Royal Galician Academy. In 1911 she joined the Academy of Spanish Poetry.

La madeja: Pérez Galdós releases her first play

Sofía Casanova is one of the few women whom Benito Pérez Galdós praised. After Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, only Rosario de Acuña had managed to put on her dramas in the Teatro Español before Sofía Casanova. Pérez Galdos premiered Sofía's first dramatic piece, La madeja, on 12 March 1913. In the decision, the opinion of the lead actress, Matilde Moreno weighed heavily. The premise of the work responded to the idea that foreigners, with their eagerness for emancipation, wanted the destruction of the family. This was a reaction, according to the scholar María del Carmen Simón Palmer, of numerous writings of the late 19th and early 20th century against feminist currents from the United States. Although critics praised the content of the work, a misinterpretation on the night of the premiere – the chronicle tells – prevented its comedy from being represented on successive days.^[4]

War correspondent

Casanova traveled frequently to Poland, where her daughters lived. During one of these trips, in July 1914, World War I broke out. After a month of resistance, she left Drozdowo in the direction of Warsaw, where she became a battalion nurse for the dying. This horrific trip, her biographers recount, hurt her deeply and would change her life.^[7]

She reported on it in a letter to ABC, trying to convince her compatriots that their growing admiration for the Germans was not justified.^[5] Torcuato Luca de Tena, owner and director of the newspaper, wrote another letter with the proposal that she become its correspondent in Eastern Europe, which she accepted.^[9]

In 1915 the German advance forced the evacuation of Warsaw. She continued working in the hospital until the Germans entered the city from the Vistula and fled with her daughters in the last train to Minsk, Moscow, and finally Saint Petersburg.^[7] The Romanov dynasty was about to fall and the writer and journalist witnessed the moment and reported on it – not without difficulties, since she was persecuted and censored for her stories from St. Petersburg, where she reported on the death of Rasputin and interviewed Trotsky.^[7] After these reports, the Russian censors forbade her to communicate with Spain, and her silence even caused some to consider her dead.^[5]

In 1917 she witnessed the Russian Revolution, which she again shared in her writings.^[10]

During the popular uprising of 3 July, harshly suppressed by government troops, Casanova received an accidental blow in the eyes from one of those fleeing the street shooting. The consequences of this accident were disastrous for the writer, because in spite of the care she received she would never again be able to see well. In spite of everything, she did not stop writing.^[5]

In 1918 Poland achieved independence and Casanova could return. In 1919 she returned to Spain and was received as a heroine with many tributes.^[5]

Between 1920 and 1930 she returned to Spain six times and wrote more than 400 articles and four books. In 1925 her name was among the Spanish candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. That same year she received the Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Beneficence from Alfonso XIII for her collaboration with the Red Cross during World War I.^[5]

Sofía Casanova gives the fascist salute surrounded by her grandchildren at her house in Poland in 1938

In 1931 she witnessed the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, with the conviction that what happened to her while living in Russia in 1917 was going to happen in her own country. With the closure of the newspaper ABC, she lost her job for a few months. This fact made her hate the Republicans, a feeling that increased until in 1936 she wrote one of the last articles of her collaboration with the newspaper: "Mirando a Rusia" (Looking to Russia).^[5]

Spanish Civil War

Casanova lived through the Spanish Civil War in Warsaw, and from there, with ABC seized, sent letters and chronicles in defense of the Nationalist side. Rosario Martínez, a scholar of the figure of Sofía Casanova, points out that her position was used by the Franco regime:

Sofía Casanova was going through some horrible years of extreme hardship, and professed to be supporting her family, one that had had a lot of money but lived through a long series of wars: the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Frontier Wars of Poland, suffered political persecutions with great difficulty. And Sofía, at a certain moment, let herself be carried away, perhaps with good will, by the advice of some friends, and was very used. Do not forget that in 1938 she was expressly brought to Burgos for an act of political propaganda. Nor should we forget that Sofía was a person of conservative ideas and that she had lived through the Bolshevik Revolution and that in good faith she trusted in fascism. Within its mentality she was coherent but in Spain she was taken advantage of much more than could be ethical.^[1]

Francisco Franco wanted to meet her, and had her brought to Burgos in 1938. In December of that year she declared to La Voz de Galicia on the occasion of her departure to Warsaw that she was convinced that the coup d'état provoked by an army sector would bring moments of development and splendor to Spain.^[2] It is also the year in which she visited A Coruña and her village for the last time.

World War II

Casanova returned to Poland to spend Christmas with her family and was surprised by the start of World War II in 1939 when the Nazi occupation of Polish territory took place, after the signing of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, which resulted in the termination of Poland's independence. She was forced to flee to a village with one of her daughters and her grandchildren.

The intercession of the Spanish ambassador in Berlin allowed her to live with some security while contemplating the barbarism of the concentration camps. She returned to Spain with the Blue Division.^[5]

In 1952 the Royal Galician Academy named her an academic of honor.^[11]

She died in Poznań, Poland on 16 January 1958. Although she was almost blind, she continued to write, aided by her grandchildren, to whom she dictated her last experiences. She did not see her wish to end her days in Spain fulfilled.^[3] On 25 January the newspaper ABC published a short article entitled "Ha muerto Sofía Casanova" (Sofía Casanova has died).

Journalistic and literary career

At the time of the founding of the Royal Galician Academy, in 1906, Casanova already had work and recognition worldwide, which led to her being named a member of this organization, and in 1952 she was unanimously granted the title of academic of honor.^[11]

She published novels, short stories, a comedy, and more than 1,200 articles in newspapers and magazines in Galicia and Poland. Her literary, narrative, poetry, and theater output was very prolific. It includes four collections of poetry, five novels, eight short novels, short stories, a play that Benito Pérez Galdós premiered at the Teatro Español, a children's book, and eight volumes of social, cultural, and political commentaries. She gave numerous lectures on the situation of women and international relations, both in Spain and in Poland, and translated classical works from Polish and Russian into Spanish.

As a journalist she wrote almost 1,000 stories,^[3] of which the articles published in ABC between 1915 and 1936 stand out, as do the titles La mujer española en el extranjero (Madrid, 1910), De la Revolución rusa (Madrid, 1918), Impresiones de una mujer en el frente oriental de la guerra europea (Madrid, 1919), La revolución bolchevista, Diario de un testigo (Madrid, 1920), and El martirio de Polonia.^[12]

She took a pacifist and anti-war stance, and said so in her contributions to the press during the Rif War in Morocco and the Tragic Week of Barcelona. But the work where this position is most forcefully demonstrated is in the chronicles of Poland and Russia that she wrote for the press and which were collected in the book De la guerra in 1916.

Her penchant for studying led her to learn six languages ​​and translate the most famous Polish writers such as Sienkiewicz and Kowalewska into Spanish. Her work was also translated into French, Polish, Swedish, and Dutch.^[4]

Works

References

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sofía Casanova.

• Pazos, Antón M. (2010). Vida e tempo de Sofía Casanova (1861–1958) (in Spanish). Santiago de Compostela: CSIC. ISBN 9788400091309.