Leopoldo Lugones

• 1. Introduction

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  Leopoldo Lugones died the way he had lived: in the grip of extremes. On the 18th of February 1938, at the river resort of El Tigre in Buenos Aires, he mixed whisky and cyanide and ended his own life. He was sixty-three years old and had spent decades as Argentina's most celebrated and most controversial literary voice. The man who some called the father of modernismo in Spanish-language poetry had also become, in his final years, an apologist for Fascism. His bibliography runs from supernatural short fiction to patriotic odes to pamphlets on military preparedness. How does one man hold all of that? That is the question this documentary tries to answer.

• 2. Villa de Maria to Buenos Aires

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  Villa de María del Río Seco, a city in Córdoba Province, sits in what the source describes as Argentina's Catholic heartland. That is where Lugones was born on the 13th of June 1874, the firstborn son of Santiago M. Lugones and Custodia Argüello. His father was the son of Pedro Nolasco Lugones and had been passing through Villa de María on the road back from Buenos Aires to Santiago del Estero when he met Custodia. The town itself was disputed territory at the time, claimed by two provinces at once. Lugones grew up in a family of landed gentry shaped by movement and boundary disputes.

  When Lugones was six, the family relocated to Santiago del Estero, and then again to Ojo de Agua, a small town near the border with Córdoba. His two younger brothers were born along the way: Ramón Miguel in 1880 in Santiago del Estero, and Carlos Florencio in 1885 in Ojo de Agua. It was his mother who gave him his earliest lessons and impressed upon him a strict Catholic faith. His parents later sent him to study at the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat in Córdoba, where his maternal grandmother lived.

  In 1892, the whole family moved to Córdoba, arriving just as the young Lugones was beginning to write. He found work at a newspaper called La Montaña, and he aligned himself with Manuel Quintana, a candidate for the Argentine presidency whom the source describes as aristocratic. That connection brought him to Buenos Aires in 1896, a city where his literary talent, by all accounts, developed fast. The year of his arrival in Buenos Aires he also married Juana Agudelo, and the couple would have one son: Leopoldo Polo Lugones.

• 3. The Modernismo Current

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  Lugones stood at the center of Modernismo, the Latin American literary movement that fused Parnassianism with the influence of Symbolism. Whether he was its father or simply its leading Argentine exponent depends on which sources one consults; the debate is recorded in his own lifetime. What is not debated is that his poetic output is often treated as among the founding works of modern Spanish-language poetry.

  His first major collection, Las montañas del oro (The Mountains of Gold), appeared in 1897, the year after he reached Buenos Aires. He kept writing poetry across four decades. Los crepúsculos del jardín (The Twilight of the Garden) came in 1905, followed by Lunario sentimental in 1909, Odas seculares (Secular Odes) in 1910, and a string of further collections through the 1910s and 1920s. Romances del Río Seco, named for the river near his birthplace, appeared posthumously in 1939.

  His short fiction placed him in a different tradition entirely. La guerra gaucha, published in 1905, is described as an incredibly dense and rich collection. Las fuerzas extrañas (Strange Forces) followed in 1906, and its 2001 English translation by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert brought it to a wider readership. Cuentos fatales (Fatal Stories) appeared in 1924. Those three collections together made Lugones a crucial precursor and pioneer of both fantastic and science fiction literature in Argentina, putting him in a lineage that would later include Jorge Luis Borges, who dedicated his book Dreamtigers to Lugones.

• 4. The Shifting Politics

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  Lugones spent his adult life migrating across the political map, and each position he occupied he held with total conviction. He began as a Socialist. He became a conservative. He ended as a supporter of Fascism and an inspiration to a group of rightist intellectuals that included Juan Carulla and Rodolfo Irazusta.

  In 1899 he became an active Freemason, which sat alongside his Socialist phase. He traveled to Europe repeatedly, in 1906, 1911-1913, and again in 1930. That last visit coincided with a significant act: he supported the coup d'état that removed the aging Radical party president Hipólito Yrigoyen from power. Between 1924 and 1931 he also took part in the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, bringing his polemical energy into an international diplomatic forum.

  The source describes him as an impassioned journalist, polemicist, and public speaker. He wrote essays on everything from feminist issues (El problema feminista, 1916) to military readiness (La patria fuerte, 1930) to the equitable state (El estado equitativo, 1932). His essays on Greek studies span multiple volumes across the 1910s and 1920s. His son Polo's trajectory under the dictatorship of José Félix Uriburu reflected, in a darker register, the family's entanglement with Argentine authoritarian politics.

• 5. A Tragic Inheritance

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  Polo Lugones became the chief of the Federal Police during the Uriburu dictatorship. The source states that he is believed to have created the picana, an electrical torture device, and introduced it as a method of state torture. He committed suicide in 1971.

  Polo's younger daughter, Susana, known as Pirí, was detained and disappeared in December 1977, a victim of the Dirty War. His older daughter, Carmen, whom he called Babú, was still alive at the time the source was written. One of Pirí's sons, Alejandro, died by suicide in Tigre, the same river resort where his great-grandfather Leopoldo had done the same. The repetition of location, and the repetition of method across generations, gives the family's story a weight that the source explicitly compares to that of Horacio Quiroga, himself a friend and admirer of Leopoldo Lugones who died under similarly dark circumstances.

  As for Leopoldo's own final days, recent publications in Argentina have complicated the long-standing explanation that political frustration alone drove him to suicide. He had formed a passionate relationship with a young woman he met at a university lecture. When his son Polo discovered the relationship and pressured him to end it, Lugones broke off contact with her. The source describes that rupture as triggering a depressive decline that led directly to the night at El Tigre.

• 6. Afterlife in Argentine Culture

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  La guerra gaucha, the 1905 story collection, became the basis for a 1942 Argentine film of the same name. Lucas Demare directed it; Enrique Muiño, Francisco Petrone, Ángel Magaña, and Amelia Bence starred. The screenplay was written by Homero Manzi and Ulyses Petit de Murat. The film premiered in Buenos Aires on the 20th of November 1942 and is considered by critics of Argentine cinema as one of the most successful films in the history of the medium.

  Jorge Luis Borges, who shaped the reputation of Latin American literature in the second half of the twentieth century, dedicated Dreamtigers to Lugones. That act of dedication carries weight: Borges was not casual about such gestures, and Lugones had directly pioneered the fantastic and speculative modes that Borges would later carry to international recognition. The posthumous collection Romances del Río Seco, published in 1939, appeared after Lugones was gone but still carried his name back to the landscape of his childhood, to the river near Villa de María del Río Seco where his story began.