Anthology of Rufino Blanco Fombona

In this Anthology of Rufino Blanco Fombona he writes about:

• Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,
• Gonzalez Prada,
• Ruben Dario,
• Leopoldo Lugones,
• Oscar Wilde,
• Gogol
• Ibsen
• Dostoyevsky
• Maria Baskirtsev
• and Anatole France among others.

Rufino Blanco Fombona (Venezuela, 1874-Argentina, 1944), was a combative author and polemicist.
His impetuous political life, most of it in Europe as persecuted and exiled by the government of Juan Vicente Gómez, left a deep mark on Spain and Latin America.
Likewise, texts included here such as “The Americanization of the World”, “The America of English origin against the America of Spanish origin” and “Yankee cinema and some of our peoples” show Fombona’s interest in the cultural dilemmas of his time.

There is no breed less gregarious than the Spanish. Few have so much personality. He is individualistic in the highest degree. It always was. The very fact of accepting to live in communities, in convents, is not to communize life, but to individualize it. At most, by obedience, by a spirit of sacrifice, in order to be pleasing to God, one arrives at confusing one’s life with that of the monastery or community in whose bosom one dwells; then the convent is “my convent”; the Order is “my Order”.
There was a time when orders were called religions. “My religion, our religion,” the Dominicans, for example, said, as if the Jesuits, the Benedictines, belonged to another faith. Abroad it was said the same; but it is very likely that the expression was formed in Spain, whose voice then reverberated in the world, and the world used to return it as an echo.
Very often communities hate each other and declare all-out war. They also sometimes arise in the individualistic, rule-proof convents of Spain. San Pedro de Alcántara spent thirty-six months in a monastery without talking to anyone, without even looking at the faces of his fellow prisoners. Then he lived thirty years in the wilderness, on his knees. The trapistas, phenomena of antisociability, which have disappeared from almost everyone, still persist and flourish in some corners of Spain.

Fragment of the work