Volume III: The Morning Soul and Other Seasons of Today’s Man
The Morning Soul was published in 1950. Though it was published posthumously, Mariátegui’s children, who compiled and published his complete works, inform us that it was largely organized by the author himself, unlike most volumes in the Complete Works, which they compiled by pulling from various publications. The table of contents left by the author in his manuscript does however indicate a piece, The Adventurer’s Apology, which does not appear in the volume, supposedly because the author passed away before he could write it. Likewise, the editors note that they have retained the order of pieces left by the author despite evidence that they were intended to appear with greater contextual development.
The result of the intentionality with which this volume was compiled by Mariátegui himself is an artistic cohesion that goes beyond the thematic cohesion of most volumes. In The Morning Soul, Mariátegui combines his material analysis with cultural criticism to capture the spirit of the time, looking at some of the cultural trends and artistic works of the time which marked it as a period of cultural flux, where he and countless others acutely felt the situation famously described by Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Scroll through the menu above or click on the buttons below to read more about the individual sections and the pieces that make them up. This volume is organized into the following sections:
The Mariátegui Project 