Alba de Céspedes within Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s Imaginary

Abstract

The interest of the literary criticism in Spain towards the Italian writer Alba de Céspedes, of Cuban origins, has never been very warm both at the time of her debut and in the following decades, despite the popularity achieved by some of her novels in the Iberian Peninsula. The only eminent exception seems to be constituted by the professor Ernesto Gimenez Caballero, Francisco Franco’s cultural collaborator and ideologist,  who conceived toward the Italian writer an admiration which went beyond the literary dimension. This work aims to focuse the nature and the quality of this admiration, expressed in Caballero’s article «Alba Cubana» edited in 1942 and again in 1954  and the relationships between the two writers in their unpublished correspondence, currently kept at the National Library of Madrid and here reproduced in transcription.