The existential project of Cesar Moro: make yourself a new man

Abstract

For his lifestyle, Cesar Moro is a unique case in the field of arts and literature in the twentieth century. This is because of the way he transforms himself into a new person by means of a series of conscious and voluntary resignations to the characteristics that determine the usual condition of a human being: his name, his place of birth, his mother tongue. Thus, they were the result of his own choice to adopt a new name, his departure to Europe, his poetic expression in French. Added to all that, he discovered art and his homosexuality giving him a completely out of the ordinary profile. But these traits became construction elements to build his new being when he met in Paris with the Surrealist group and the ideals of Communism. Surrealism and communism gave him the concepts that he hoped for. The first on the person liberation through love and poetry, the second on the man liberation through revolution. That ideal of the new man, designed by and for himself, was not exempt from contradictions or drives out of control that had led, for example, his returns to Lima or his temporary return to the Spanish language. These rifts give a deeply human sense and his universal value to the figure of Moro and his work.