Carlos Fuentes and the Mexico-Cuba-Soviet Nexus

To understand how Fuentes came to occupy this contradictory position within the Soviet literary system, we must first consider the arc of his early career and the shifting geopolitical entanglements of Mexico, Cuba, and the USSR. Fuentes emerged in the 1950s as a leading figure in a new generation of young intellectuals who had come of age during the institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution and were beginning their careers amid the sociopolitical shifts brought about by rapid urbanization and industrialization. A relative outsider as the son of a diplomat, with an itinerant childhood and international education shaped by his father’s postings across Latin America and the US, Fuentes settled in Mexico only as a young man. From the outset of his literary and public career, he positioned himself as a privileged interlocutor for presenting Mexican culture to an international audience.Footnote ¹¹

In his early writing and criticism, Fuentes established an ambitious cosmopolitan literary program that sought to bring Mexican culture into dialogue with the rest of the world. Shortly after making a promising literary debut with the short story collection Los días enmascarados (The Masked Days), in 1955, Fuentes founded the journal Revista Mexicana de Literatura (Mexican Journal of Literature) with Emmanuel Carballo. As co-editor and frequent contributor, Fuentes challenged the longstanding preoccupation with the question of national culture that had dominated Mexican letters since the revolution. In its place, he championed artistic freedom and the intellectual autonomy of the writer. For Fuentes, Mexican culture could only develop by escaping the provincialism of the so-called “cactus curtain,” a state-supported brand of nationalist conformism that stifled creativity and isolated Mexico from international currents.Footnote ¹² In opening up to the world, however, Mexican culture also had to reject the hegemonic political and aesthetic ideologies of the Cold War, namely, the totalitarianism and socialist realism of the USSR and the McCarthyite anti-communism of the US. Confronted with the Soviet subjugation of central and eastern Europe and the aggressive American policy of containment, Fuentes viewed the two superpowers as two sides of the same imperialist coin. Latin America, and Mexico in particular, would have to chart an independent course.

Despite Fuentes’s antipathy toward the Soviet system, the first stirrings of the Thaw encouraged him to regard the cultural and political developments in the socialist east with quiet optimism, particularly in his role as editor of the Revista. The journal’s inaugural issue featured both a discussion of Khrushchev’s apology to Josip Broz Tito for the Soviet treatment of Yugoslavia and a statement by Boris Pasternak on the essence of poetry.Footnote ¹³ In 1956, to mark the first anniversary of the journal, Fuentes planned a special feature titled “Literature and Society,” for which he invited responses from a broad spectrum of writers and intellectuals on the role of the writer in the modern world. Among the formidable list of invitees—Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges—Fuentes included three Soviet writers, Pasternak, Ilʹia Erenburg, and Konstantin Simonov, to whom he posed a series of questions about the social function of literature, including: “Is literature, as a valuable human expression, socially valuable in itself?”Footnote ¹⁴ While none of the three ultimately contributed to the feature, the anniversary issue did include commentary on the Thaw and its implications. In response to Khrushchev’s shocking revelations about Iosif Stalin’s crimes in his “secret speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress, Fuentes published a translation of Howard Fast’s widely circulated renunciation of Stalinism, praising the American writer’s remarks for their “great human and historical value.”Footnote ¹⁵

Fuentes’s skepticism toward the orthodoxy of the now-discredited “old left” found new direction in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, which reenergized the Latin American left and offered an alternative model of revolutionary change. As he traveled to Havana in 1959 to witness the Cuban experiment firsthand, Fuentes began to reframe Mexico’s stalled revolutionary legacy through the lens of Cold War geopolitics. His breakout first novel La región más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear, 1958) had offered a critique of post-revolutionary Mexican society, employing modernist techniques gleaned from close reading of James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and others. But the Cuban Revolution gave new urgency to Fuentes’s growing disillusionment with the Mexican state, casting it not simply as a failed revolution but also, as Kate Reed notes, “embedding it in a new context of anti-imperial struggle that positioned the United States as the primary opponent of revolutionary progress in Latin America.”Footnote ¹⁶

As Fuentes’s profile rose as a self-fashioned spokesman for all of Latin America, he increasingly condemned US interventionist policies. In the spring of 1962, he was invited to participate in a televised debate on the Alliance for Progress with Richard N. Goodwin, then US Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.Footnote ¹⁷ The debate never took place, however, falling victim to escalating Cold War tensions, as Fuentes, like many Latin American intellectuals, was denied a US entry visa under the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 on grounds of suspected communist affiliation.Footnote ¹⁸ In a prepared statement later published in the center-left Mexican periodical Siempre!, Fuentes declared that armed revolution was the only viable path to transforming Latin America and overthrowing US hegemony.Footnote ¹⁹

Fuentes’s celebrated turn toward revolutionary politics in response to Cuba is well documented. But the Cuban Revolution also pushed him to reconsider the USSR in a far more favorable light, a shift that has rarely been acknowledged. Having returned from Cuba to Mexico City, Fuentes planned a trip to the USSR for the summer of 1961; though it ultimately did not take place, he penned an article for the leftist magazine Política reflecting on the legacy of Stalin and the Thaw later that year.Footnote ²⁰ In the article, Fuentes laments the lost revolutionary potential of the leftist internationalism of the 1930s, crushed by defeat in the Spanish Civil War and Stalinist repression, and rejects the “old left” as an obstacle to Latin American liberation movements. Paradoxically, however, Fuentes contends that the forced industrialization and modernization that Stalin achieved through his repressive policies laid the foundations that enabled the democratization and de-stalinization of the Thaw. As Maarten van Delden suggests, Fuentes’s “far more sympathetic reading of the Soviet system” was almost certainly shaped by Khrushchev’s pledge of support for revolutionary Cuba.Footnote ²¹ However, while the USSR could perhaps serve as an instructive example for development in Latin America, Fuentes maintains that it was no longer in a position to guide revolutionary change: “if the hopes of men of the left in 1931 were pinned on the Soviet Union, for many men of my generation this hope is primarily dedicated to the broadest revolutionary solidarity among underdeveloped countries in the process of liberation.”Footnote ²²

An “Honest Intellectual”: Fuentes’s Early Soviet Reception

In the USSR, where the Cuban Revolution resonated with the internationalist aspirations of the Thaw, Fuentes’s advocacy of armed revolution in Latin America was received with enthusiasm. Soon after his article appeared in Siempre!, major Soviet newspapers published Fuentes’s statements with provocative headlines—“Open your eyes, Yankees!”—accompanied by commentary presenting him as an “honest intellectual who does not remain on the sidelines of public life.”Footnote ²³ The warm Soviet approval of the Mexican intellectual’s rebuke coincided with a brief period of intensified cultural and diplomatic engagement between the two countries. Seeking to diversify trade relations, Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos explored cooperation with the USSR as both a model of industrial modernization and a potential counterbalance to US regional dominance. The Soviet government, receptive to this overture, organized a 1959 cultural exposition in Mexico City led by Anastas Mikoian, which introduced Mexican audiences to various facets of Soviet life.Footnote ²⁴ The fascination was mutual. In the early 1960s, Soviet audiences attended exhibitions of ancient Mexican art in Moscow and Leningrad, read about the exploits of Pancho Villa, sang along to folk songs about the Mexican Revolution, and marveled at murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco.Footnote ²⁵ In popular works with such suggestive titles as Mexico Without Exoticism, readers encountered a portrait of a poor country languishing in the “dark shadow of its northern neighbor,” still struggling to fulfill the promises of its groundbreaking, if ideologically misguided, revolution.Footnote ²⁶ Meanwhile, scholars across a range of disciplines contributed to the Soviet understanding of Mexico’s past and present. Most notably, the linguist Yuri Knorozov produced a landmark study of the Mayan writing system that earned him international recognition.Footnote ²⁷ That Fuentes, a Mexican writer, happened to be speaking for Latin America on the world stage only amplified his appeal in the USSR, where he was embraced not only as a critic of US imperialism, but as a cultural intermediary between two revolutionary traditions.

Fuentes’s writing had already begun to appear quietly in Russian translation by the time his Siempre! article circulated in Soviet newspapers. Toward the end of a 1961 anthology of contemporary Mexican short stories, readers encountered a contribution by Fuentes titled “Chistaia sovestʹ” (A Clear Conscience), which tells the story of Jaime Ceballos, a teenager from a bourgeois family who attempts—unsuccessfully—to help Ezequiel Zuno, a striking miner on the run, only to see him arrested in the end.Footnote ²⁸ In January 1963, Fuentes reached an even broader audience when the weekly Literaturnaia Rossiia published “Ispaniia, ne zabudʹ” (Spain, Do Not Forget), a short “novella” narrated as a letter from Lorenzo, a young Mexican volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, to his father back home.Footnote ²⁹ At the end of the story, the perspective shifts abruptly as Lorenzo heroically sacrifices himself in trying to defend his Republican comrades from a fascist air raid. Although Fuentes was born a generation too late to have fought in Spain, his Soviet debut nevertheless cast him as a storyteller of the heroic Republican cause, conveniently signaling his alignment with the ideals of socialist internationalism.Footnote ³⁰

Yet as any reader familiar with Fuentes’s work would know, neither story actually existed as such, despite the lack of any indication in print. They were, in fact, excerpts rather loosely adapted from his two most recent novels, Las buenas consciencias (The Good Conscience, 1961) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz, respectively.Footnote ³¹ Stripped of context and presented as stand-alone narratives, these excerpts introduced Fuentes to Soviet readers as a familiar type: a progressive writer who exposed the injustices of capitalist society and stood firmly on the side of the anti-fascist struggle. This image, reinforced by his criticism of US imperialism, suggested a clear through-line between the proletarian internationalism of the 1930s and the socialist internationalism of the Cold War.

This carefully curated image preceded Fuentes’s own arrival on the Soviet cultural stage. In early 1963, Fuentes wrote to the Soviet embassy in Mexico requesting permission to travel to the USSR, and he was invited for a week-long visit that August, during which the Foreign Commission of the Writers’ Union arranged meetings with several prominent cultural figures.Footnote ³² He visited Ilʹia Erenburg at his dacha in Peredelkino, where they discussed Joyce, the Spanish Civil War, and the future of the Thaw. In Moscow, he met with Andrei Voznesenskii at the Central House of Writers and admired his unique style of reciting his poetry; he also spoke with filmmaker Grigorii Chukhrai about Ingmar Bergman and Sergei Eisenstein.

Prior to the trip, Fuentes had been publicly skeptical of official socialist realism and cautious in his appraisal of Soviet support for Cuba.Footnote ³³ But upon his return, he struck a markedly different tone. In a series of articles for Siempre!, he praised the Russian people and their literary tradition in an exoticized, impressionistic register. He described Soviet culture as a dynamic meeting point between collective solidarity and a humanist Marxist vision of life, locating its fullest expression “in the work of writers, filmmakers, and musicians who have managed to embrace both the deep tradition of social solidarity among the Russian—Soviet—people and the truly humanist spirit that Marx, in speaking of the creative process, located in critical freedom, in the artist’s personal vision, and in the capacity to confront honestly socialism’s own contradictions.”Footnote ³⁴ While these encounters surely inspired Fuentes’s hope for the growing freedom of artistic expression in post-Stalin Soviet society, his statements reflect an idealistic conception of the role of the writer in bringing about social transformation.

Later that winter, Iurii Dashkevich, head editor for Latin American literature at Inostrannaia literatura, published a feature on Fuentes, including what he presented as extended quotations from an interview with the writer.Footnote ³⁵ In these comments, Fuentes argues that a century and a half of Latin American independence had merely replaced Spanish colonial domination with American imperialism. The writer’s role, he reportedly asserted, was to serve as the voice of the people—a position articulated in recognizably Soviet terms:

For Mexican audiences, Fuentes emphasized the writer’s critical function in society as a figure who can confront social contradictions with honesty and independence. In Dashkevich’s article, in contrast, the “honest writer” is cast in a markedly different role: not as an active critic of society, but as its mouthpiece, a figure who articulates and transmits the thoughts and feelings of the people. This conception closely mirrors a familiar trope in Soviet commentary on foreign writers during the Thaw. As the new socialist internationalism shifted its focus from advocating world revolution to the cultivation of relationships with writers from the Global South, those writers were valued not for their critical distance but for their presumed capacity to reflect the social reality of their homelands in ideologically legible terms.Footnote ³⁷ In this framework, Fuentes became a conduit through which Soviet readers could access a properly framed vision of Mexico.

Dashkevich also quoted Fuentes offering a conveniently simplified reading of La muerte de Artemio Cruz: “It is the biography of one man and, at the same time, the history of my country over half a century. The rise and fall of Cruz is the trajectory of the Mexican haute bourgeoisie.”Footnote ³⁸ This framing, reducing the novel to a narrative of class struggle, aligned neatly with Soviet ideological expectations and helped to secure Fuentes’s reputation as a politically committed writer. In 1964, likely at Dashkevich’s urging, Inostrannaia literatura added the novel to its publication schedule for the following year.Footnote ³⁹

La muerte de Artemio Cruz and the Context of Soviet Translations

At the end of his feature on Fuentes, Dashkevich quotes him as paraphrasing Maiakovskii on revolutionary aesthetics: “A work that has revolutionary content should also have a revolutionary form.”Footnote ⁴⁰ One wonders whether Dashkevich fully grasped what the journal had committed to by selecting La muerte de Artemio Cruz for translation. Publishing this major work by Fuentes in Russian translation was undoubtedly politically expedient, showcasing the prestige of the Soviet world literature project while bolstering support for one of Latin America’s brightest young stars. But the novel hardly resembled the canonical critical realism that the Soviets had long promoted as the literary mode of the international left. Written from the epicenter of the Cuban Revolution, La muerte de Artemio Cruz was in fact a paradigmatic text of the Boom, revolutionary in both form and content.

The novel examines the life of Cruz, a former revolutionary who consolidates power through violence and betrayal, becoming one of the wealthiest men in Mexico while selling out to foreign capital. In tracing his rise to the top echelons of society, the novel provides a damning retrospective assessment of the legacy of the revolution. And although Fuentes was clearly writing within an established literary subgenre—the novel of the Mexican Revolution—he remained equally committed to his modernist aesthetic allegiances.Footnote ⁴¹ Readers encounter the title character’s biography as it unfolds through a tightly structured alternation of three distinct narrative modes. The novel opens with a first-person interior monologue, delivered from Cruz’s deathbed in a stream-of-consciousness style. Pages later, the narration shifts to the second person, as an indeterminate narrator explores alternate paths Cruz’s life could have taken in a sort of future tense conditional. This is followed by a passage of conventional third-person omniscient narration that depicts a single day in Cruz’s life. Over the course of twelve cycles, these three temporal and narrative frames repeat in sequence, compelling the reader to view his life from shifting, sometimes contradictory perspectives. Cruz’s rise and fall encapsulate, in microcosm, the history of modern Mexico, rendered both in concrete social detail and on an allegorical, mythic plane.

Throughout the novel, Fuentes uses techniques that deliberately frustrate the reader’s understanding of the events, including nonlinear temporality, fragmented narrative perspectives, intentional ambiguity, and recurring motifs whose meanings become clear only gradually. Readers are thus forced to take an active role in interpreting the events and reconstructing the timeline of Cruz’s life. The novel’s content, too, broke with literary convention: graphic descriptions of bodily decay and sex, as well as the frequent use of vulgar language, marked a departure from earlier Spanish-language fiction.

Such deliberate formal difficulty and provocative content could not be easily accommodated by Soviet literary norms, let alone by official censorship. Precisely because of its aesthetic complexity and political ambiguity, La muerte de Artemio Cruz could only enter the Soviet literary system through the tightly managed institutional channels of translation and publication. As scholars of Soviet translation have shown, virtually all foreign literature was subject to a rigorous review process.Footnote ⁴² Although the specifics varied between journals and publishing houses, the typical process involved an initial internal review of the original text, followed by authorization for translation. Once completed, the translation itself underwent further internal evaluations before final approval by the editorial board. A foreword, often used to frame the work ideologically, was also required and subject to approval.

The translator tasked with rendering the novel into Russian for Inostrannaia literatura was Margarita Bylinkina, an experienced translator of Spanish-language fiction.Footnote ⁴³ Her translation, Smertʹ Artemio Krusa (The Death of Artemio Cruz), appeared in abridged form over two issues of Inostrannaia literatura in July and August of 1965. In late 1966, after the translation had received favorable assessments through both official and informal channels, the editorial board of the state publishing house Progress added the novel to its thematic publishing plan for the following year.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was issued in book format with a foreword by Dashkevich in 1967, in a print run of 50,000 copies—a substantial quantity, though relatively modest for a first translation of a novel by a foreign writer.Footnote ⁴⁵

To cope with Fuentes’s experimental form and provocative content, Bylinkina had several tools at her disposal. Although early efforts to codify a “socialist realist” method of translation never fully materialized, by the start of the Thaw, it had become standard practice for translators to take liberties with the source text in order to bring it into alignment with Soviet literary norms.Footnote ⁴⁶ More than standard, it was, in effect, the only acceptable approach. Soviet publishers and readers alike expected “free” rather than “literal” translations: not the “dead word,” but the “living word,” as the influential translator Nora Galʹ put it.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such translations were inherently “domesticating,” to borrow Lawrence Venuti’s term: they were tailored to the language, expectations, and ideological sensibilities of the average Soviet reader.Footnote ⁴⁸ It was common for translators to resort to euphemism, paraphrase, or omission when dealing with politically sensitive material or graphic depictions of sex and violence. In some cases, entire passages or storylines could be removed altogether. Authors were rarely consulted on such decisions, and—as Fuentes would lament decades later about La muerte de Artemio Cruz—the final publication often lacked any disclaimer indicating that the text had been abridged or altered.Footnote ⁴⁹

Translating an Experimental Novel

Throughout her translation, Bylinkina employs two principal domesticating strategies: suppressing the novel’s experimental form and resolving its conceptual ambiguity. The translation consistently presents a more straightforward account of events, easing the interpretive burden on the reader. Bylinkina explains and defines what Fuentes merely implies or suggests.

Cruz’s thoughts on his deathbed are rendered in interior monologues that often employ stream-of-consciousness narration. These passages feature long, syntactically unstable sentences, sudden shifts in voice and content, onomatopoetic cries of pain, and echolalic repetitions. By forcing the reader to engage with the semantic and formal dissonance of these moments, Fuentes draws attention to the texture of language itself. In one such monologue, Cruz plays with the letters of his own name:

This kind of formal and semantic play was, of course, quite alien to the conventions of contemporary Soviet literature. In her translation, Bylinkina brings the text closer to the stylistic norms of standard literary Russian. Her rendering of the passage is representative of her domesticating approach:

Bylinkina tames the unruliness of the original by dividing the run-on sentence into two and introducing clarifying punctuation. While the anagrams’ strangeness is preserved, the translation guides the reader with an interpretive gloss: “this abracadabra.” What in Fuentes is an open-ended linguistic puzzle becomes, in Russian, an easily decipherable code.

The novel’s passages in third-person narration employ similarly challenging techniques. Seemingly straightforward narrative scenes are frequently disrupted by abrupt shifts in perspective or time. The first of these passages, dated July 6, 1941, begins with Cruz riding in a limousine en route to a meeting with American businessmen in Mexico City—a pivotal scene that highlights his willingness to exploit his country’s resources for personal gain. Cruz’s thoughts, rendered in free indirect discourse, are suddenly interrupted mid-sentence by a parallel scene: his wife Catalina and daughter Teresa shopping for a wedding shower dress and stopping to eat at a restaurant. This cinematic cross-cutting juxtaposes private luxury with public corruption while also revealing the deep infiltration of American capital and culture into Mexican society:

Bylinkina’s translation neutralizes this abrupt transition by breaking the sentence into two, inserting an ellipsis and a paragraph break to signal the change in scene:

The first mention of “ellas” (feminine “they”) is immediately clarified as “zhenshchiny” (the women)—a choice perhaps dictated by the absence of a commonly used feminine plural personal pronoun in Russian. Bylinkina also renders the shopkeeper’s request as direct speech, marked by quotation marks, in contrast to the original’s ambiguous reported speech. More significantly, the translation removes the abruptness of the narrative shift, smoothing over the formal disjunction that in the original serves to disorient the reader and emphasize thematic links between the two scenes.

In other passages in the novel, Fuentes uses deliberately defamiliarizing techniques to depict Cruz’s thoughts in first-person narration. In one such scene, the bedridden Cruz senses only indirectly that someone (or something) has entered the room:

Fuentes forces the reader to read between the lines and wade through Cruz’s fragmented and incomplete perception of his surroundings. Bylinkina’s Russian translation, in contrast, immediately identifies the visitor as the priest summoned to administer last rites:

Bylinkina resolves the ambiguity of the scene, replacing implication with explicit definition. Her decision to name the priest outright and provide a clear narrative subject streamlines the passage.

Decisions such as these throughout the text, clear departures from the original, were not only sanctioned under the banner of “free translation”; they were expected, and from the perspective of publishing house editors, often necessary. Bylinkina’s flattening of the novel’s formal complexity shifts the reader’s attention away from its aesthetic innovations and redirects it toward the “moral” of the story: a condemnation of US economic imperialism enabled by magnates like Cruz.

Translating with a Political Bent

Bylinkina’s tendency to resolve ambiguity in the original text is especially evident in the politicized interpretations she introduces throughout her translation. In the same passage dated July 6, 1941, Cruz’s meeting with American businessmen offers the novel’s first depiction of Mexico’s exploitation at the hands of the US. When the Americans present their plan to mine sulfur domes, they communicate in condescending, broken Spanish:

Fuentes has the Americans assume Cruz lacks the capacity to understand their proposal, leaving it to the reader to infer that they regard all of their Mexican business partners with the same paternalistic condescension. In her translation of this fragment, Bylinkina explicitly ascribes the Americans’ assumption that Cruz cannot understand their proposal to the Americans’ attitudes toward Mexicans in general:

Her insertion of the particle mol (as they say) reinforces the idea that the Americans’ prejudice is not individual but cultural, part of a broader pattern of chauvinism. Bylinkina also clarifies—and in doing so, intensifies—the national allegory embedded in the novel’s second-person narration. In the section that follows, Cruz reflects on the satisfaction he feels in having earned the Americans’ respect:

In Bylinkina’s version, the anonymous ellos (they) is immediately defined as the Americans:

The Russian translation uses a typical idiomatic expression, ty von iz kozhi lez (literally, “you climbed out of your skin”), adding emotional intensity to Cruz’s desire for acceptance. In the context of his resentment toward the Americans, it also invites a reading of Cruz’s internal conflict as stemming not only from class anxieties, but from racial or national self-alienation.

Fuentes’s critique of contemporary Mexican society brings sustained attention to the cultural hegemony of its northern neighbor. The world of Cruz’s elite Mexico City milieu abounds in English phrases, all of which are left untranslated in the original text. During a flight from Hermosillo to the capital, the airplane signs glow “No Smoking, Fasten Seat Belts”; later, when Catalina and Teresa try on dresses, the shopkeeper reminds them, “The customer is always right,” and at lunch, they argue over how to pronounce Joan Crawford’s name.Footnote ⁶¹ Members of the new post-revolutionary bourgeoisie consume American goods—Canada Dry, Pepsi, Cadillacs—and casually drop terms like “front-man” and “know-how” into their speech. Bylinkina’s translation retains nearly all of these English phrases, adding footnotes to gloss their meaning.Footnote ⁶² By retaining the English untranslated, the translation reproduces the jarring effect of the original, thus underscoring Cruz’s complicity, and by extension, that of the Revolution itself, in selling out the nation to American capital and cultural values.Footnote ⁶³

“That Word”: Translating the “Chingar Passage”

The full implications of Bylinkina’s translation strategy emerge most clearly in her rendering of one pivotal passage, central in both a narrative and ideological sense, which appears in the sixth iteration of the novel’s twelve cycles of shifting temporal and narrative frames. As Cruz lies dying, his interior monologue erupts into pain and profanity: lárguense: ay dolor: lárguense: chinguen a su madre: (get out: oh pain: get out: go fuck yourselves).Footnote ⁶⁴ What follows is a remarkable second-person meditation on the word chingar, a word that—like Cruz himself—encapsulates the violence at the heart of Mexican history and identity.

A vulgar term of uncertain origin, chingar is most widely used in Mexican Spanish and broadly means to harm, violate, or destroy. Its connotations often involve sexual violation and are typically rendered in English as “to fuck.” The reflexive form, chingarse, carries meanings such as “to have failed,” “to screw oneself over,” or simply “to be ruined.”Footnote ⁶⁵ A polysemous word that connotes violence and power—and like its Anglophone or, much more to the point, Russian equivalent, ebatʹ—it is used widely in conversational speech in a vast number of idiomatic expressions that do not necessarily reflect the literal meanings of the word.

In this section of the novel, here discussed as the “chingar passage,” Fuentes performs an exhaustive linguistic and cultural analysis of the word, listing over twenty variations of its inflections of meaning. This passage serves as an unmistakable homage to Octavio Paz, who interpreted the centrality of chingar in Mexican culture in his book El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950). In his essay “The Sons of La Malinche,” Paz writes that

In Paz’s reading la chingada—the violated woman—becomes the foundational metaphor for the Mexican nation borne out of the trauma of its origins. As Paz writes, “If the chingada is a representation of the violated Mother, it is appropriate to associate her with the Conquest, which was also a violation, not only in the historical sense but also in the very flesh of Indian women.” Expressions such as hijo de la chingada, then, can be understood literally—“son of the violated woman”—but they also evoke the symbolic figure of La Malinche (Malintzin), the indigenous woman who served as Hernán Cortés’s translator, consort, and mother to his children. In this way, all Mexicans, Paz suggests, are “sons of La Malinche,” descendants of violence and betrayal.

Clearly following Paz’s example, Fuentes invokes chingar not simply to provoke, but to offer a diagnosis of Mexico’s existential condition. The wound of the conquest, he suggests, has produced a society caught in a cycle of domination and submission, where power is exercised through violation and internalized through language. Chingar names this structure, and its everyday use re-inscribes the trauma it expresses. All Mexicans are collectively “sons of the word,” and each generation bequeaths the curse to the next: “chain of la chingada that imprisons us all: … you will inherit la chingada from above; you will inherit it from below: you are the son of the sons of la chingada; you will be the father of more sons of la chingada.”Footnote ⁶⁷

As the novel’s third-person sections make clear, Cruz exemplifies this cycle. He advances through betrayal and opportunism, rationalizing even his most violent acts. Cruz is the chingón who perpetuates the cycle of violence and domination, but he is also its product. Near the end of the novel, Cruz is revealed to be the child of an Afro-Mexican woman raped by a criollo descended from Spanish colonists. If Cruz is understood as a national allegory, as many critics suggest, then his very origin affirms the novel’s tragic vision of Mexican identity: a society born of conquest, sustained by domination, and haunted by the unbreakable chain of la chingada.Footnote ⁶⁸

As one might expect, translating this passage posed a serious challenge for Bylinkina and her editors. Given the strict Soviet censorship rules regarding vulgar language and depictions of sensuality, along with a traditionally prudish attitude towards the same prevalent in Russian letters, what was a translator to do? In the name of “free translation,” Bylinkina could attempt to work around such material through excision, euphemism, or circumlocution. But in this case, profanity and sexuality were not simply ornamental, but rather integral to the novel’s treatment of national identity and cultural mythology. The chingar passage, in its density of linguistic, political, and symbolic meaning, put the limits of Soviet translation practices to the test.

Bylinkina’s solution, at least in the first serialized edition of the translation published in Inostrannaia literatura in 1965, was to avoid the problem entirely. The first installment of the novel ends just before the chingar passage; the second installment picks up immediately after it.Footnote ⁶⁹ Besides the chingar passage, three other sections of the novel’s thirty-eight were omitted. These include the sections dated January 18, 1903, which narrate Cruz’s origins on the Menchaca estate and establish his mixed Spanish and Afro-indigenous ancestry (foreshadowed throughout the novel by repeated references to his dark skin, curly hair, and green eyes). The fact that these two important points in the novel are absent is significant, as they address Cruz’s ethnic origins and, by extension, the question of national identity. For Bylinkina and her editors, this symbolic mode of representing social history was, if anything, an obstacle to the reader’s understanding of the concrete causes of Mexico’s socioeconomic problems. In short, these moments were likely seen not just as formally difficult, but as politically unproductive, if not misleading.

The book edition of the translation, from 1967, includes all of the sections that were left out of the journal variant. Soviet readers, though, encountered the chingar passage heavily bowdlerized, riddled with deletions and euphemisms. Cruz’s invective that introduces the passage (“chinguen a su madre”) is translated into Russian as “Ubiraitesʹ … vashu matʹ” (Go away … your mother). Bylinkina uses a Russian analog to the Spanish insult, but excises the vulgar word, leaving the reader to read between the lines. She was forced to adopt a different strategy, however, for the cascade of profanities that follows. Bylinkina replaces chingar with the euphemism “eto slovo” (that word). She omits entirely the list of linguistic examples and attempts to compensate for this loss by inserting generalizing idiomatic statements that convey the word’s presence in Mexican culture:

As the passage continues, the word “chingar” is replaced with a range of euphemisms, making it unclear whether the text refers to a specific word or to profanity more generally. In addition to “sploshnoi mat” (sheer profanity), the translation substitutes “paskudstvo” (vileness), “nepotrebstvo” (indecency), “raspokhabshchina” (coarse vulgarity), “matershchina” (obscene language), and “svoloch’” (scum) for the Spanish chingada. The verb chingar is rendered using terms such as “izmateritʹ” (to curse out) and “opoganitʹ” (to befoul). The phrase los hijos de la chingada (the sons of la chingada) is rendered as “vse eti nichtozhnye liudishki” (all these pitiful little nobodies).

Overall, Bylinkina’s handling of the chingar passage leaves at best a murky impression of what would be self-evident to Fuentes’s readers in Mexico. The link between contemporary Mexican identity and the trauma of the conquest is reduced to a vague portrait of a society saturated with vulgarity and dominated by violence. Bylinkina’s decision to euphemize, paraphrase, and censor the original text was not simply a matter of appeasing censors. Her rendering reflects both prevailing cultural norms and a specifically Soviet discomfort with printed obscenity. Translators were expected to rework such passages as a matter of professional and ideological propriety. Still, the consequences are clear: Bylinkina’s version effaces the cultural specificity of Fuentes’s hymn to the word chingar, flattening its layered significance into something generically obscene.Footnote ⁷¹

Fuentes, Disillusionment, and the Soviet Reader

For the Soviet literary establishment, the experimental form of La muerte de Artemio Cruz was at best a curiosity, at worst, a serious defect that distracted from the critique of the Mexican bourgeoisie. The evolving parameters of socialist realism could tolerate certain modernist techniques, but only in an attenuated form that ultimately distorted the novel’s structure and symbolic scope. Yet although Bylinkina’s translation made it onto Soviet bookshelves as a peculiar work of critical realism attacking the undelivered promises of the Mexican state, the motifs of the stagnated revolution and state corruption were meaningful for Soviet readers who felt that Fuentes had captured something from their own experience. In her memoirs, written forty years later, Bylinkina recalls her enthusiasm at being handed the opportunity to translate the novel for this very reason:

In a similar vein, Vera Kuteishchikova remembers the response she received upon submitting a review of the translation for the journal Novyi mir in 1967. Aleksandr Tvardovskii, then the journal’s editor, remarked on the similarity of the two countries’ fates: “So, their revolution has also degraded!”Footnote ⁷³ Accustomed to decades of heavily censored literature, Soviet readers were adept at reading between the lines. Just as novels by Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, and J. D. Salinger defined a generation’s ideals and modes of behavior during the Thaw, Latin American writers’ condemnations of tyrannical dictators and failed revolutions spoke to Soviet readers’ privately-held convictions about their own country’s history.Footnote ⁷⁴ Forced to accommodate the state’s ideological demands in translating and interpreting texts, translators had thoroughly internalized the rules and were adept at “playing the game,” finding ways to get a translation published by any means possible under the guise of “free” translation. Bylinkina suggests, albeit with decades of hindsight, that this game had high moral stakes.

Fuentes’s political engagement waned by the end of the decade, and his utopian hopes of revolution were brought down to earth by his clashes with Cuban cultural functionaries and the fractious response of the Latin American Left to the Padilla Affair.Footnote ⁷⁵ The promises of the Thaw, too, proved empty for Fuentes, as he closely followed the Siniavskii-Danielʹ trial and witnessed firsthand the degradation of cultural life in Czechoslovakia following the crushing of the Prague Spring.Footnote ⁷⁶ This overall political disillusionment echoed clearly in his writing: the appropriately-titled Cambio de piel (Change of Skin, 1967) signaled his departure from the pretenses of realism into a more recognizably postmodern intertextuality, as he explored the capability of language to represent reality in his investigation of Latin American identity. As Nicola Miller, among others, has argued, this retreat into self-referentiality and pastiche can be understood as “an acceptable substitute for more tangible forms of action in protest against the imperialist practices to which twentieth-century Spanish America was subject.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Nowhere is the Latin American intellectual’s sense of political futility better articulated than in Fuentes’s novel La cabeza de la hidra (The Hydra Head, 1978), in which the two Cold War superpowers are incarnated in the symbol of the two-headed eagle:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, little of Fuentes’s work written after La muerte de Artemio Cruz was translated and published in the USSR.Footnote ⁷⁹ Soviet critics writing on contemporary Latin American writers were obligated to include a patronizingly gentle critique of his later works.Footnote ⁸⁰ It would be only in 2001, a decade after the fall of the USSR and the collapse of the state-supported translation industry, that Bylinkina returned to her old work and published an updated version of her translation. No longer beholden to the strictures of Soviet aesthetics and the Communist Party, she made sure to return to the central passage of the novel that had caused her so much trouble decades earlier. The euphemism is named … but left untranslated: “you have pronounced, will pronounce that cursed Mexican word, that vulgar word. Chingada.”Footnote ⁸¹