Dictionary of Literary Influences

Gropius, Walter Adolph

GROPIUS, WALTER ADOLPH (1883–1969)

Walter Gropius, the son of a Prussian architect, was born in Berlin and studied at that city’s Technical University from 1903 to 1907. Upon graduation, Gropius gained a three-year apprenticeship as chief assistant to the German architect and functionalist industrial designer Peter Behrens. Rejecting historical precedent and ornament for standardization and the use of materials such as glass and steel, Gropius quickly developed what would become known as the modern or international style of architecture, best exemplified in his Fagus Shoe Works Factory in Alfeld, Germany (1910) and the factory buildings for the Werkbund Exposition in Cologne (1914). Gropius served in the army during World War I and upon the completion of his duty was appointed director of the Weimar School of Art, which he subsequently reorganized as the famous Staatliches Bauhaus in 1919. Following the Bauhaus philosophy to eliminate the distinction between the fine and applied arts, Gropius hired prominent visual artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to teach a complete and diverse regimen of disciplines. In 1925, Gropius moved the Bauhaus to Dessau, with classes being housed in 26 new buildings that he had personally designed. Three years later he resigned as director and began a private practice in Berlin. During the Nazi uprising of the early 1930s, Gropius fled to England to establish a practice with the architect Maxwell Fry. In 1937, Gropius became chairman of the Department of Architecture at Harvard University, a position he held until 1952. By 1946, he had formed The Architects Collaborative, within which he continued to produce outstanding works of modernist architecture, including the Pan Am Building in New York City (1958), the U.S. Embassy in Athens (1959), the University of Baghdad (1961), and the Grand Central Building in New York (1963). Gropius died in Boston at the age of 86.

Gropius believed that the form of a building should be derived from both the intrinsic qualities of its materials and the function that the structure would ultimately serve. This was directly influenced by the neoclassical and positivist writings of theorists such as Lyonel Feininger who were proponents of a widespread artistic movement known as De Stijl. Inside of this framework, Gropius based his style on a severe geometry of form and an overall economy of modern materials. This decision was supported in literature by the writings of William Morris and Johannes Itten, who espoused the beauty of the mass-produced, the standardized, and the plain, and encouraged architects to place individual creativity over the prototypes of their heritage. In the socialist writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Gropius had read of the concept of dialectical materialism, which stated that historical change is accomplished through a struggle of opposites that can only be resolved through synthesis. Gropius’s theory of objective formalism extended this idea into the realm of design by fusing all preexisting forms of art and craft into a single universally recognizable style. It was this new vision of design that Gropius believed would act as a catalyst for the idealistic social reform movements the architect had read of in works such as Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.

Archives

The Bauhaus Archive/Museum of Design, Berlin.

Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University. Call No. Ms Ger 208. Special Collections Department, University Libraries, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. Call

No. Ms 92-052.

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Grotowski, Jerzy Marian

Printed Sources

Fitch, James Martson. Walter Gropius (New York: George Braziller, 1960). Sharp, Dennis. Bauhaus Dessau Walter Gropius (London: Phaidon Press, 1993). Zanichelli, Nicola. Walter Gropius (Bologna: Editore S.P.A., 1983).

Gregory L. Schnurr

GROTOWSKI, JERZY MARIAN (1933–1999)

Grotowski was born in Rzeszów, Poland. He studied acting at the State Theatre School in Kraków (1951–55) and then directing at the State Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS) in Moscow (1955–56) and the State Theatre School in Kraków (1956–58). Grotowski was brought up as a Catholic, but his mother, Emilia Kozl⁄ owska Grotowska, practiced “the most ecumenical Catholicism” (Schechner and Wolford 1997, 251) and encouraged Grotowski to read books about Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism (including Hasidism), as well as Christian books that the Church had forbidden. In 1959, Grotowski was named artistic director of the Theatre of Thirteen Rows in the provincial town of Opole, where, together with Ludwik Flaszen, the company’s literary manager, he established an experimental theater—which changed its name first to the Laboratory Theatre of Thirteen Rows, and later, after its move to Wrocl⁄ aw (a larger, more cosmopolitan city), the Laboratory Theatre-Institute for Research in Acting Method (known outside of Poland as the Polish Laboratory Theatre)—that became renowned worldwide for its extremely detailed psychophysical acting style and its equally well-developed vocal technique. During this period of his work (later called the “Theatre of Productions”), Grotowski and his company produced some extraordinary performances, the most famous of which were Akropolis (1962), The Constant Prince (1965), and Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1969); he also evolved a method of actor training, a distinctive style of mise-en-scène, and a method of textual montage. Largely because of Grotowski’s work during this period of his activity, he is now considered, in Richard Schechner’s words, “[one] of the five great forces in European theatre in the twentieth century” (Schechner and Wolford 1997, 464). Nevertheless, in about 1969–70, Grotowski announced his “exit from the theatre,” and never created any new productions again. His post-theatrical work went through several phases: “Paratheatre” (1969–78), “Theatre of Sources” (1976–82), “Objective Drama” (1983–86), and “Art as Vehicle,” (1986–99). Theatre had always been for Grotowski a means, rather than an end, and all these phases were concerned with using the elements of performance as a means by which human beings can access a deeper level of perception. Grotowski remained tremendously influential in the theater world (especially among alternative theater groups) during this posttheatrical phase, and Lisa Wolford suggests that the significance of his work in this period lies “in his radical reconceptualization . . . of what performance is and what it can be used for” (Schechner and Wolford 1997, 18).

Grotowski’s earliest productions showed the influence of Russian constructivism, especially the thinking of Vsevelod Meyerhold, whose work he had studied as a student in Moscow. The most famous productions of the Laboratory Theatre, despite being quite outside the mainstream of Polish theater practice in the 1960s, drew upon two common streams of Polish thought: the sacred images of Catholicism (often treated by Grotowski in a blasphemous way) and Polish romanticism (especially the writings of Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Sl⁄ owacki, and the neo-romantic

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Guevara, Ernesto “Che”

Stanisl⁄ aw Wyspian´ ski). From the beginning of his activity, he also emphasized research into the fundamental principles of the actor’s art and took actor training ideas from Meyerhold, Konstantin Stanislavsky, and Juliusz Osterwa (one of the founders of the Reduta Theatre, a Polish interwar commune/theater company) and added his own approach to their work. In Towards a Poor Theatre, Grotowski wrote that he wanted to create a method to fulfill Antonin Artaud’s vision that “Actors should be like martyrs burnt alive, still signaling us from their stakes” (Grotowski 1968, 93); in the same book, he also indicated that he found Bertolt Brecht’s theories intriguing, but as an aesthetic rather than a method (Grotowski 1968, 173). From his student days onward, Grotowski had studied Indian and Chinese philosophy and traveled widely in Central Asia, India, and China; he continued to draw upon these interests and experiences during both his theatrical and post-theatrical phases. Grotowski’s interest in ritual, evident even in his “Theatre of Productions” phase, became even more pronounced during the “Theatre of Sources” and “Objective Drama” phases, during which he worked with a core, multinational group that explored “source techniques” from various native cultures, such as Haitian voodoo, the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, the Huichol Indians of Mexico, and yogis in India. Schechner also points out Grotowski’s connections with G. I. Gurdjieff, Carlos Castaneda (whom Grotowski met), Sufism, Hasidism, and American youth culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Schechner and Wolford 1997, 474–87).

Archives

Archiwum, Os´rodek Badan´ Twórczos´ci Jerzego Grotowskiego i Poszukiwan TeatralnoKulturowych (Center for Research on Jerzy Grotowski’s Work and Theatrical-Cultural Pursuits), Wrocl⁄ aw, Poland: films and videos, photographs, some costumes and fragments of scenery, audiotapes, personal and official documents, posters, leaflets, brochures, magazine articles, and books, all connected with the activity of the Laboratory Theatre; in addition, there are materials connected with some Grotowski-derived groups and with the Grotowski Center itself.

Printed Sources

Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968). Kumiega, Jennifer. The Theatre of Grotowski (London: Methuen, 1985).

Osin´ski, Zbigniew. Grotowski I jego Laboratorium (Warsaw: Pan´stwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1980); trans. and abridged as Grotowski and His Laboratory by Lillian Vallee and Robert Findlay (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986).

Schechner, Richard, and Lisa Wolford (eds.). The Grotowski Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1997).

Kathleen M. Cioffi

GUEVARA, ERNESTO “CHE” (1928–1967)

Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla leader, was born in Rosario, Argentina. Prompted to study medicine by childhood asthma, Guevara received his medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1953. During and after medical school, Guevara embarked on numerous trips from Argentina to explore Central and South America.

In December of 1953, he arrived in Guatemala, where he became involved with a leftist revolution and met exiled Cuban revolutionaries. Guevara escaped to Mex-

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Guevara, Ernesto “Che”

ico when U.S.-supported forces overthrew the Guatemalan government in 1954. While in Mexico City during the summer of 1955, Guevara met Raul and Fidel Castro. Inspired, Guevara joined Castro as one of 82 rebels who landed in Cuba in December of 1956. Though originally a medical assistant for the rebel army, Guevara was promoted to commander of his column in 1957. After the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959, Castro appointed Guevara as director of the Industrial Department of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), president of the National Bank of Cuba, and minister of industry.

To further his adamant opposition to dictatorships and U.S. imperialism throughout Latin America, Guevara wrote Guerrilla Warfare (1960) as a guide for revolutionary insurrections. Guevara held that such insurrections would liberate Latin America. In 1965, he resigned as minister of industry and left Cuba to start guerrilla campaigns in Congo and Bolivia. Bolivian troops executed Guevara on October 9, 1967.

Hindered by childhood asthma, Guevara spent much of his early years in bed reading classic American and European adventure novels. As an adolescent he turned his attention to the works of Jack London, Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, and Franz Kafka.

In 1945, Guevara took his first philosophy course, studying The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. During this course, he began to record thoughts on his philosophical readings in a series of notebooks. Over the next seven years he would complete 10 such notebooks covering the works of Pablo Neruda, Frederich Nietzsche, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, H. G. Wells’s Brief History of the World, and advanced readings of V. I. Lenin. As a university student, Guevara indexed the literature he read and continued his readings in social philosophy, including Benito Mussolini (Fascism), Josef Stalin (Marxism), and the speeches of Lenin.

In Guatemala in 1954, Guevara met his first wife, Hilda Gadea, who introduced him to the works of Mao Zedong (New China), Walt Whitman, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung. While living in Mexico City in 1955, together they read Pancho Villa’s memoirs and general accounts of the Mexican revolution. Guevara also borrowed numerous Russian works, including those of Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, from the Instituto Cultural Ruso-Mexicano. Still in Mexico City in 1956, he and other rebels under Castro’s command began training for their Cuban invasion. Guevara studied the economic theory of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes and condensed his philosophical notebooks into one volume.

While in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba (1957–59), Guevara kept a copy of Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare, despite fellow rebels’ ongoing suspicion of his “Red” book collection. Throughout the remainder of the Cuban revolution and into his term of office under Castro, Guevara continued to read and write on guerrilla warfare, economic and agrarian reform policy, anti-imperialism, and accounts of peasant revolts.

Archives

Guevara’s journals are in the private collection of his widow, Aleida March. They include his “Diccionario Filisofico” and “Indice Literario,” which provide detailed accounts of what he read between the ages of 17 and 28.

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Gutierrez Merino, Gustavo

Printed Sources

Anderson, Jon Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997). Deals extensively with Guevara’s reading.

Castañeda, Jorge G. Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (New York: Knopf, 1997).

J. Brandon Hinman

GUTIERREZ MERINO, GUSTAVO (1928– )

Gustavo Gutierrez was born in Lima, Peru. Born with osteomyelitis, he was left with a permanent limp, a condition that inspired him to study medicine at San Marcos University from 1947 to 1950. At San Marcos, he read the works of Karl Marx and joined the Christian student movements that challenged the political order in Peru. His teachers, Cesar Arrospide and Geraldo Alacro, stimulated Gutierrez’s interest in spirituality, an interest that led to his decision to study theology at the Catholic University in Santiago de Chile. Continuing his theological studies, Gutierrez entered the Catholic University at Louvain, Belgium, where he earned a master’s degree in 1955. His thesis focused on the work of Sigmund Freud. After Louvain, Gutierrez moved to the University of Lyon in France, gaining exposure to the progressive Roman Catholic movement known as la nouvelle theologic. It was during this time that he read Henri de Lubac’s The Mystery of the Supernatural (1950) and Karl Rahner’s Theological Investigations (1954). After earning a master’s degree at Louvain in 1959, he enrolled at the Gregorian University in Rome and was ordained a priest in 1959.

Gutierrez returned to Peru in 1960 and became interested in Albert Camus, Karl Marx, and the poet Cesar Vallejo. As a Roman Catholic priest, Gutierrez was certainly influenced by the documents of the Second Vatican Council, Gadium et Spes (1962), which encourage a commitment to the poor. Gutierrez’s commitment to the oppressed was further enhanced by reading the socialist José Mariategui’s Peranicemosal Peru (Lima, 1970). Gutierrez contributed to, and was influenced by, the final documents of the Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968. These writings emphasize the church’s responsibility to the downtrodden. Gutierrez embarked upon a close friendship with the novelist José Maria Arguedas in the late 1960s, whose novels Todas Las Sangres and El Zorro de ariba e el zorro de a baja heightened his interest in popular religion.

Gutierrez, among other liberation theologians, redefined the study of Western theology. His work helped to move theology away from purely metaphysical questions and placed it squarely in the lives and struggles of the poor. Gutierrez broadened this enterprise when serving as a visiting professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary in 1976, where he engaged in close dialogue with James Hal Cone, author of A Black Theolog y of Liberation (1970). Gutierrez maintains that the sixteenth-century friar, Bartolome de las Casas, inspires much of his work. The most significant influences on Gutierrez’s writings are the voices of the Peruvian poor, written in their struggle for liberation.

Archives

Instituto Bartolome de Las Casas, Rimac, Lima, Peru. Gutierrez’s personal library and writings.

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Gutierrez Merino, Gustavo

Printed Sources

Cadorette, Curt. From the Heart of the People: The Theolog y of Gustavo Gutierrez (Oak Park, Ill.: Meyer Stone Books, 1988).

Ellis, Mark, and Otto Maduro (eds.). Expanding the View: Gustavo Gutierrez and the Future of Liberation Theolog y (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988).

McAffee Brown, Robert. Gustavo Gutierrez: An Introduction to Liberation Theolog y (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1990).

Carl Mirra

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H

HAILE SELASSIE (1892–1975)

Lij Tafari Makonnen was born in Harar, capital of one of Ethiopia’s important provinces. His father was (Ras) Prince Makonnen of Showan and the first cousin and close advisor of the celebrated Ethiopian emperor, Menilek II. Tafari’s mother, Yeshi-immabet Ali was not of Ethiopia’s elite class. It was this fact, as well as his father’s Christian example of feeding the poor, that influenced the emperor’s benevolent policies toward the non-elite. Tafari, who through his father’s ancestral line was believed to be a direct descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, began moving up the royal ranks during his early teens. At age 14 he was confirmed as a dejazmach or earl. A year later he became governor of a part of Sidamo Province in southern Ethiopia. Tafari later became governor of his birthplace, Harar; however, Lij Iyasu, impetuous heir to the throne and Tafari’s longtime political rival, demoted the future emperor to the governorship of a remote and impoverished province in southwestern Ethiopia. He later resumed his governorship of Harar under the empress Zauditu. Tafari and Zauditu engaged in a 10year power struggle in which Tafari was the victor. In 1930 Zauditu was forced to declare Tafari negus or king. Tafari became the last emperor of Ethiopia and adopted his baptismal name Haile Selassie. During his 60-year reign he accomplished major land reform, abolished slavery, and revised a constitution that provided universal suffrage. Nevertheless, his failure to secure socioeconomic reform forced him to abdicate in 1974. He was held under house arrest until his death in 1975.

Haile Selassie’s literary influences are sketchy. In The Autobiography of Emperor Haile Selassie 1892–1937, he merely noted that his father prized Western civilization and thus hired private tutors to provide the future emperor with a European education. Selassie studied French extensively, but the bulk of his education was provided by the Catholic mission school. Like his father, the emperor believed that his country and people could “learn much from Western lore and life. . . . He was

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Hammarskjöld, Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl

an avid reader, and his study was filled with books in French in all subjects” (Marcus 1987, 56). The economist and progressive writer Gebre Heywet Baykedagn greatly influenced the young emperor to initiate domestic reforms. Being well versed in the Western intellectual tradition enabled Selassie to form alliances with Western powers. Of all of the literary texts Selassie read, the Bible appears to have been the most influential. Many of his speeches were laced with scriptural references. Like his father, Selassie was a devout Christian and believed he was appointed by God to lead his people to modernization and prosperity.

Archives

Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University.

Printed Sources

Marcus, Harold G. Haile Selassie I: The Formative Years 1892–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

Selassie, Haile. The Autobiography of Emperor Haile Selassie: My Life and Ethiopia’s Progress 1892–1937 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Arika L. Coleman

HAMMARSKJÖLD, DAG HJALMAR AGNE CARL (1905–1961)

Dag Hammarskjöld was born in Jönköping, Sweden, the fourth son of Agnes Maria Karolina Almqvist and Knut Hjalmar Leonard Hammarskjöld, a prominent Swede who served as prime minister from 1914 to 1917, governor of Uppland from 1907 to 1930, and chairman of the Nobel Prize Foundation from 1929 to 1947. Before turning to law and politics, Hjalmar Hammarskjöld was a scholar of Germanic languages and literature, especially fond of Hermann Hesse, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and August Platen. He instilled this love of learning and reading in his son Dag. Another strong influence in his home was traditional Lutheran piety, involving a sense of duty in general and noblesse oblige in particular. Hjalmar wanted to build an Augustinian “City of God” in Sweden. In contrast to Hjalmar’s severity and aloofness, Dag’s mother was romantic, friendly, and effusive, yet equally pious and literary.

For most of Dag’s childhood the Hammarskjölds lived in Uppsala, where they were friends with the family of Archbishop Nathan Söderblom. On the advice of Yvonne Söderblom, the archbishop’s wife, he read Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, which was thereafter his favorite book. After achieving a brilliant record in primary and secondary schools in Uppsala, Hammarskjöld matriculated at the University of Uppsala at 17 and earned his bachelor’s degree just two years later, majoring jointly in literature, French, philosophy, and political economy. Among the authors he studied were Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Thomas Wolfe, Emily Dickinson, and Katherine Mansfield. He knew Sundar Singh and Rabindranath Tagore personally through the archbishop.

Continuing his studies, he received a licentiate in economics from Uppsala in 1928, a bachelor of laws from Uppsala in 1930, and a doctorate in economics from the University of Stockholm in 1933. He taught political economy at Stockholm from 1933 to 1936, then embarked on the political career that eventually led to his becoming the second secretary general of the United Nations. During this period he read Albert Schweitzer, Jacques Rivière, Paul Claudel, Charles Pierre Péguy,

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Bertil Ekman, Gabriel Marcel, Erik Gustaf Geijer, and Léon Bloy. He began but never finished a Swedish translation of Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

Hammarskjöld’s fragmented, poetic, spiritual autobiography, Markings, was discovered as a manuscript in his New York apartment after his death, bequeathed to his friend Leif Belfrage, who published it in Swedish in 1963 and, with translation by Leif Sjöberg and Wystan Hugh Auden, in English in 1964. Hammarskjöld saw it only as a diary, but sensitive literary minds and religious souls consider it a masterpiece. The mysticism that pervades this book came to Hammarskjöld in the 1930s, primarily through the works of St. John of the Cross, Thomas à Kempis, Meister Eckhart, and St. Teresa of Avila.

Archives

Hammarskjöld’s letters and papers are held in many libraries worldwide, including the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the United Nations in New York City, but the largest and most significant collection is in the Manuscripts Section of the Royal Library of Sweden, Stockholm.

Printed Sources

Beskow, Bo. Dag Hammarskjöld: Strictly Personal: A Portrait (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969).

Gillett, Nicholas. Dag Hammarskjöld (London: Heron Books, 1970).

Henderson, James Lewis. Hammarskjöld: Servant of a World Unborn (London: Methuen, 1969).

Kelen, Emery. Dag Hammarskjöld: A Biography (New York: Meredith, 1969). Simon, Charlie May Hogue. Dag Hammarskjöld (New York: Dutton, 1967).

Stolpe, Sven. Dag Hammarskjöld: A Spiritual Portrait, Naomi Walford (trans.), (New York: Scribner, 1966).

Thelin, Bengt. Dag Hammarskjöld: Barnet, Skolpojken, Studenten (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2001).

Urquhart, Brian. Hammarskjold (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

Van Dusen, Henry Pitney. Dag Hammarskjöld: A Biographical Interpretation of “Markings”

(London: Faber & Faber, 1967).

———. Dag Hammarskjöld: The Statesman and His Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

Eric v.d. Luft

HASˇEK, JAROSLAV (1883–1923)

Jaroslav Hasˇek was born and lived most of his life in Prague, the city whose streets and pubs were the setting for the adventures of his famous character, the good sol-

ˇ

dier Svejk. From an early age, Hasˇek displayed a contempt for authority and a love of high jinks, which earned him expulsion from gymnasium. He completed studies at the Commercial Academy in Prague in 1902 and held a succession of jobs—bank clerk, editor of a nature journal, reporter for a political newspaper, proprietor of a dog-breeding business—that he usually lost due to his irreverence and fondness for a day at the pub. Hasˇek paid for his mugs of beer by writing. During his lifetime, he published some 1,200 pieces, including commentaries for Anarchist newspapers, short stories and feuilletons inspired by his travels in Austria-Hungary and Germany, mock-serious articles describing fictional species for the nature journal he edited, and polemics in support of whichever political party agreed to pay him (he sometimes carried on debates with himself in rival partisan dailies). In 1911 Hasˇek

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