Pedro Paramo. Plain in Flames

Juan Rulfo Pedro Paramo. Plain in Flames "If I had written Pedro Paramo, I would not worry about anything else and would not publish anything more in my life" – Gabriel Garcia Marquez The stories included in the collection "Plain... in Flames" were written from 1945 to 1955, and despite the fact that they address the problems of the Mexican hinterland, many of which are still relevant today. This concerns not only banditry or abuse of local power ("The Hill of Comadres", "Plain in Flames"), but also such Mexican phenomena as, for example, "coyoteing" – the illegal transportation of migrants to the USA, which became one of the themes of the story "To the North". The heroes of the stories painfully seek a way out of the closed circle of poverty and violence. In some cases, intentional murder is casual and mundane for a number of characters. Rulfo explores human nature on a scale comparable to the works of Cervantes, Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky. "Pedro Paramo" is the opus magnum of the Mexican writer. Juan Preciado, at the behest of his deceased mother, sets out to find his father Pedro Paramo in the village of Comala. He does not immediately understand where he has ended up – Comala is inhabited only by the ghosts of its former residents, although the kingdom of the "dead" retains all the realities of mundane earthly life. The line of Juan Preciado intertwines with the line of Pedro Paramo, a man with whom the stories of all Comala's inhabitants are connected. He has long been dead, but thanks to the intertwining of memories from his real life into the narrative, he alone seems alive. However, everything that Paramo touches turns to dust... The new translation, conforming to the norms of modern Russian language and style, also takes into account the extensive research work conducted over the past half-century in the field of the writer's creativity. The process of creating the novel has intrigued critics and readers for decades: could a writer, until then known only for a handful of stories, create such a powerful modernist work? Moreover, one in which an innovative composition, universal problems, and original poetics would merge into one? The multifaceted introductory article by Peter Kogan will introduce the reader to the writer's personality, reveal the peculiarities of his work, and allow them to immerse themselves in the Mexican color and the history of the Great Plain in southern Jalisco, where Juan Rulfo was born and spent his childhood.