Фернандо Аррабал: Испан жазушысы және театр өнерінің шебері

Spanish writer and actor (born 1932)

Fernando Arrabal Terán (born August 11, 1932) is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist, and poet. He was born in Melilla and settled in France in 1955. Regarding his nationality, Arrabal describes himself as "desterrado", or "half expatriate, half exiled". Arrabal has directed seven full length feature films and has published over 100 plays; 14 novels; 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artists' books; several essays; and his notorious "Letter to General Franco" during the dictator's lifetime. His complete plays have been published, in multiple languages, in a two volume edition totaling over two thousand pages. The New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the "three avatars of modernism". In 1962, Arrabal co founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, inspired by the god Pan. He was elected Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique in 1990. Forty other Transcendent Satraps have been elected over the past half century, including Marcel Duchamp, Eugène Ionesco, Man Ray, Boris Vian, Dario Fo, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard. Arrabal spent three years as a member of André Breton's surrealist group and was a friend of Andy Warhol and Tristan Tzara. Writer and critic Javier Villan wrote of Arrabal:Arrabal's theatre is a wild, brutal, cacophonous, and joyously provocative world. It is a dramatic carnival in which the carcass of our 'advanced' civilizations is barbecued over the spits of a permanent revolution. He is the artistic heir of Kafka's lucidity and Jarry's humor; in his violence, Arrabal is related to Sade and Artaud. Yet he is doubtless the only writer to have pushed derision as far as he did. Deeply political and merrily playful, both revolutionary and bohemian, his work is the syndrome of our century of barbed wire and Gulags, a manner of finding a reprieve.

Arrabal (Terán is his second family name) was born to Carmen Terán González and painter Fernando Arrabal Ruiz. On July 17, 1936, when insurrections within the military were staged against the constitutional government of the Second Spanish Republic, launching the Spanish Civil War, Arrabal's father remained faithful to the Republic and was sentenced to death for mutiny. His sentence was later commuted to 30 years' imprisonment. He was transferred between prisons, from Santi Espiritu in Melilla to Monte Hacho in Ceuta, where he attempted suicide, as well as Ciudad Rodrigo and Burgos. On December 4, 1941, he was sent to the Burgos Hospital due to apparent mental disorder. Later research has found that he likely feigned mental order in order to be transferred to a lower security prison. On December 29, 1941, he escaped from the hospital in his pajamas, despite three feet of snow covering the countryside. Despite extensive research, he was never seen again. About his father, Arrabal has written: "Without trying to compare what is incomparable, when I confront these twilight episodes (and quite often without any logical connection), I often think of that scapegoat, my father. The day on which the Uncivil War began, he was locked up by his 'compassionate companions' in the flag room of the Melilla military barracks. He was meant to think carefully, since he risked a death sentence for mutiny if he did not join them in their insurrection (alzamiento). After an hour, Lieutenant Fernando Arrabal summoned his ex comrades – already! – to inform them that he had pondered long enough. Today, because of this precedent, must I serve as witness, example, or symbol, as he did, of the most fundamental occurrences? I, who am a mere exile. If I am taken away from my beloved numerics, everything around me leads to over the counter confusion and disorder. I have no wish to be a scapegoat like my father, I only ask to die while still living, whenever Pan so wishes." In 1936, Arrabal's mother returned to Ciudad Rodrigo with her young son, Fernando, and found a job at Burgos, then capitol of the Nationalists and headquarters of General Franco's government. Fernando was enrolled in a local Catholic school from 1937 until 1940, when the Civil War ended and he moved with his mother to Madrid. Arrabal was awarded the national prize for gifted children in 1941. He continued his studies at Las Escuelas Pías de San Antón, a church school whose alumni have also included Victor Hugo and Jacinto Benavente y Martínez. Arrabal later studied at another distinguished Madrid school, Colegio Padres Escolapios De Getafe. He was an avid reader and was eager to experience life.

In 1947, when his mother ordered him to attend preparatory classes for entrance to the Academia General Militar, Arrabal protested by playing hooky. She subsequently sent him to Tolosa (Gipuzkoa), where he studied business at the Escuela Teórico Práctica de la Industria y el Comercio del Paper, in 1949. By 1950, he had begun writing several plays, which remain unpublished. In 1951, Arrabal began working in the paper industry at La Papelera Española. He moved to Valencia and passed his bachillerato, the first non compulsory educational option in Spain for admission to university. He later moved to Madrid and began legal studies. During these years, he frequented the cultural institution Ateneo de Madrid and heard poets from the Postismo school. He was also finishing his early play Picnic, then titled The Soldiers, and writing El triciclo, at first titled Men with a Tricycle. In 1954, Arrabal hitchhiked to Paris to attend a performance of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children given by the touring Berliner Ensemble. Later that year, in Madrid, he met Luce Moreau, who became his wife. In 1955, he was awarded a three month scholarship to study in Paris, during which time he lived at the Colegio de España at the Cité Universitaire. While in Paris he suffered a serious relapse of tuberculosis. He considered this disease to be a "lucky mishap" that allowed him to move permanently to his "veritable homeland, that of Kundera and Vives, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Picasso: exile." In 1976 he appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's New York film Underground and Friends.

Arrabal had been known for being anti Francoist and anti monarchist and interested in anarchist trends in cultural production. Arrabal had a complicated relationship with Communism. He had ties with the Communist Party of Spain during his exile, but a rupture seems to have occurred in 1977 due to a conflict with his play The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria being performed in Barcelona with artists reputed to have Communist Party ties.

Arrabal has described himself as a "frustrated painter". He has produced approximately 50 canvases and 100 drawings and collages, which have been exhibited in museums such as the Paris Art Center, Musée de Bayeux, and the Villa San Carlo Borromeo Art Museum in Milan. His approach to painting involves close collaboration with artists who produce large format oil paintings based on the detailed sketches he provides. In 1962, his first painting was chosen for reproduction in the art publication La Brèche: Action Surréaliste Revue by its founding editor, André Breton. Arrabal has collaborated with sculptor and video artist Christèle Jacob, with whom he has created a dozen videos and photomontage series, including Les artilleurs des échecs et de la littérature (The artillery corps of chess and literature), inspired by a 1909 artwork by Henri Rousseau.

Carta al General Franco (bilingual Spanish French edition, Paris: Bourgois, 1972, col. 10–18; Paris: Anonyme Anarchiste Pop, 1971; Buenos Aires: Granica, 1973; Noce: Babilonia, 1976; Barcelona: Actuales, 1978). Le Panique (Paris: Union Générale d'Edition, 1973). Sur Fischer: Initiation aux échecs (Monaco: du Rocher, 1974; Fischer, le roi maudit [revised edition], Luxembourg: Phi, 1988). Carta a los militantes comunistas españoles (Sueño y mentira del eurocomunismo) (bilingual Spanish French edition, Paris: Bourgois, 1978; Barcelona: Actuales, 1978; Acción directa, 1980). Les échecs féeriques et libertaires (articles from L'Express) (Monaco: du Rocher, 1980). Carta a los comunistas españoles y otras cartas (Letters to Franco, to the King, etc.) (Murcia: Godoy, 1981). Carta a Fidel Castro (Madrid: Playor, 1983; Mexico: Diana, 1984; Europa, América, Portugal, 1984). Echecs et mythe (Paris: Payot, 1984; Mitos em Xeque, Río de Janeiro: Globo, 1988). Introducción a Feliciano de Silva (Cátedra, col. Letras Hispánicas, 1986). El Greco (Steidl, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1991; El Greco, Barcelona: Destino, 1991; El Greco, London: Calder and Boyars; New York: Grove Press – Viking, 1991; El Greco, Milan: Spirali, 1991; El Greco: Le frénétique du spasme, Paris: Flohic, 1991). Goya / Dalí (Milan: Spirali – Vel; Rome: Studio di Val Cervo, 1992). Fêtes et défaites sur l'échiquier (Paris: L'Archipel, 1992). Cartas a Baltazar (versión de F. Torres Monreal, 1993). Genios y figuras (preface by A. Berenguer, Espasa Calpe, 1993). Las manazas del Samaritano. Conversaciones con Ionesco (La Vuelta, nº 210, mayo, 1994). La dudosa luz del día (translated into Spanish from the original French with notes by F. Torres Monreal, Espasa Calpe, 1994). Carta al Rey de España (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1995). Un esclave nommé Cervantès (Paris: Plon, 1996; Un esclavo llamado Cervantes, Madrid Espasa Calpe, 1996). Diccionario pánico (Bruxelles: Escritos, 1998). Lettre à Staline (Paris: Flammarion, 2004). Houellebecq! (Paris: Le cherche midi, 2005). El Pánico, Manifiesto para el tercer milenio, 2007. Diccionario pánico, 2008. Universos arrabalescos, 2009. Defensa de Kundera, 2009.