Ernesto Sabato (; June 24, 1911 – April 30, 2011) was an Argentine novelist, essayist, painter, and physicist. According to the BBC he "won some of the most prestigious prizes in Hispanic literature" and "became very influential in the literary world throughout Latin America". Upon his death dubbed him the "last classic writer in Argentine literature".
Sabato was known for his bald pate head and brush-style moustache, and was often seen wearing tinted glasses and open-necked shirts. He was born in Rojas, a small town in Buenos Aires Province. Sabato began his studies at the Colegio Nacional de La Plata. He then studied physics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he earned a PhD. He then attended the Sorbonne in Paris and worked at the Curie Institute. After World War II, he lost interest in science and started writing.
Sabato's oeuvre includes three novels: El Túnel (1948), Sobre héroes y tumbas (1961) and Abaddón el exterminador (1974). The first of these received critical acclaim upon its publication from, among others, fellow writers Albert Camus and Thomas Mann. The second is regarded as his masterpiece, though he nearly burnt it like many of his other works. Sabato's essays cover topics as diverse as metaphysics, politics and tango. His writings led him to receive many international prizes, including the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), the Legion of Honour (France), the Jerusalem Prize (Israel), and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France).
At the request of President Raúl Alfonsín, he presided over the CONADEP Commission that investigated the fate of those who suffered forced disappearance during the Dirty War of the 1970s. The result of these findings was published in 1984, bearing the title Nunca Más (Never Again).
Biography
Early years Ernesto Sabato was born in Rojas, Buenos Aires Province, son of Francesco Sabato and Giovanna Maria Ferrari, Italian immigrants from Calabria. His father was from Fuscaldo, and his mother was an Arbëreshë (Albanian minority in Italy) from San Martino di Finita."Juana María Ferrari, de ascendencia italiana y albanesa. Francisco Sabato, de origen italiano" He was the tenth of a total of 11 children. Being born after his ninth brother's death, he carried on his name "Ernesto".Antes del fin, Ernesto Sabato; Capítulo I,
In 1924 he finished primary school in Rojas and settled in the city of La Plata for his secondary education at the Colegio Nacional de La Plata. There he met professor Pedro Henríquez Ureña, an early inspiration for his writing career.Diario La Nación: Evocan a Pedro Henríquez Ureña, gran humanista dominicano In 1929 he started college, attending the School of Physics and Mathematics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata.
He was an active member in the Reforma Universitaria movement, founding "Insurrexit Group" in 1933 – of communist ideals – together with Héctor P. Agosti, Ángel Hurtado de Mendoza and Paulino González Alberdi, among others.
In 1933 he was elected Secretario General of the Federación Juvenil Comunista (Communist Youth Federation).Biografía de Ernesto Sabato en Autores de Argentina. While attending a lecture about Marxism he met Matilde Kusminsky Richter, aged 17, who would leave her parents' house to live with Sabato.Homenaje de Matilde a Sabato.
In 1934 he started to doubt Communism and Joseph Stalin's regime. The Communist Party of Argentina, which had noted this, sent him to the International Lenin School for two years. According to Sabato, "it was a place where either you recovered or ended up in a gulag or psychiatric hospital".Cronología de Ernesto Sabato. Before arriving at Moscow, he traveled to Brussels as a delegate from the Communist Party of Argentina at the "Congress against Fascism and the War". Once there, fearing not coming back from Moscow, he left the congress to escape to Paris. It was there where he wrote his first novel: La Fuente Muda, which remains unpublished. Once back in Buenos Aires, in 1936, he married Matilde Kusminsky Richter.
His years as a scientist In 1938 he obtained his PhD in physics from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Thanks to Bernardo Houssay, he was granted a research fellowship in atomic radiation at the Curie Institute in Paris. On May 25, 1938 Jorge Federico Sabato, his first son, was born. While in France he made contact with the surrealist movement, studying the works of Oscar Domínguez, Benjamin Péret, Roberto Matta Echaurren and Esteban Francés among others. This would have a deep influence on his future writing.
On March 18, 1939 he left France, sailing from Cherbourg aboard the Queen Mary.https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-G5N7-SMLV?view=index&cc=1923888&lang=en New York City. Immigration Records Mar 22, 1939–Mar 23, 1939 At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he collaborated with Manuel Sandoval Vallarta.https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.55.1272.2 On Alfvén's Hypothesis of a "Cosmic Cyclotron" By July 7, 1939https://cemla.com/buscador/ Centro de Estadios Migratorios Latinoamerica he had returned to Argentina intent on leaving physics behind. However, serving an obligation to those responsible for his fellowship Sabato started teaching at the Universidad de La Plata for Engineering admission, and relativity and quantum mechanics for post graduate degrees. In 1943, due to an "existential crisis", he left science for good to become a full-time writer and painter.
In 1945, his second son, Mario Sabato was born.
Writing career
In 1941, Sabato published his first literary work, an article about La invención de Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, in the magazine Teseo from La Plata. Also, in concert with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, he published a collaboration in the renowned Sur magazine.
In 1942, working for Sur magazine reviewing books, he was put in charge of the "Calendario" section and participated in "Desagravio a Borges" in Sur nº 94. He also published articles in La Nación and a translation of The Birth and Death of the Sun by George Gamow. The following year he published a translation of The ABC of Relativity by Bertrand Russell.
In 1945, his first book, Uno y el Universo, a series of essays criticizing the apparent moral neutrality of science and warning about dehumanization processes in technological societies, was published; with time he would turn towards a libertarian and humanist standing. That same year he was awarded a prize by the municipality of Buenos Aires for his book and the honor wand of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores.
In 1948, after being rejected by several Buenos Aires editors, Sabato published in Sur his first novel, El túnel, a psychological novel narrated in the first person. Framed in existentialism, it was met with enthusiastic reviews by Albert Camus, who had Gallimard publish a French translation. It has been further translated to more than 10 languages. Others who enjoyed the book included Thomas Mann.
France's literary industry named Sabato's book Abaddon, el Exterminador (The Angel of Darkness) the best foreign book of 1976.
His eldest son Jorge died at the age of 56 on 10 February 1995 in a car accident. In 1998, Sabato's wife died.
In 1999 he acquired Italian citizenship in addition to his original Argentine nationality.
Sabato died in Santos Lugares on April 30, 2011, two months short of his 100th birthday.Murió Ernesto Sábato InfoBae, April 30, 2011 Murió Ernesto Sábato Clarín, April 30, 2011 His death was the result of bronchitis, according to his companion and collaborator Elvira González Fraga. The Spanish newspaper El Mundo said he had been "the last surviving Argentine writer with a capital W".
Political activism and ideology In his youth, Sabato was an activist in the Communist Party of Argentina, where he became general secretary of the Communist Youth Federation. In this regard, as he recounted in his interview with the Spanish journalist Joaquín Soler Serrano on the television program A fondo (1977), he became disillusioned with the policies of Joseph Stalin while representing the Argentine communist youth at a congress of young communists in Paris in the years prior to World War II. He subsequently distanced himself from Marxist communism, disillusioned by the course taken by Stalin's dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
A critic of Peronism, Sabato was one of the first to provide an interpretation of the government of General Juan Domingo Perón after the overthrow of his second government, which appeared under the title El otro rostro del peronismo in 1956. In this essay, Sabato harshly criticized Peronism:
Despite his criticisms of the Peronist movement and Juan Domingo Perón, Sabato praised Eva Perón, stating that she was the "true revolutionary".«Una histórica charla para argentinos. Diálogo Fangio-Sabato», in Medio siglo con Sabato. Interviews. Preface, compilation and notes by Julia Constenla. Buenos Aires: Ediciones B, 2000, p. 186.«Una lectura mítico-simbólica de Evita y Juan Domingo Perón a partir de Ernesto Sabato y otros narradores argentinos», Alejandro Hermosilla Sánchez, University of Murcia. He later refused to reissue El otro rostro del peronismo; and in 1987, when his Complete Works were published, he ensured in the preface that this essay would appear in a new volume of political writings, which has not been published to this day.
Regarding the so-called Revolución Libertadora that overthrew Perón in 1955, Sabato wrote in correspondence exchanged with Ernesto Che Guevara:
When General Juan Carlos Onganía overthrew President Arturo Illia, Sabato applauded, stating:
Infobae, 21 January 2018Revista Sudestada, April 2004
This statement was notable coming from a recognized intellectual, as the Argentine Revolution dictatorship was particularly harsh against writers and scientists, leaving for Argentine memory the Night of the Long Batons, an attack on the University of Buenos Aires that forced dozens of leading academics into exile. Sabato did not comment on this.
During the government of María Estela Martínez de Perón, Sabato felt threatened by the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. Nevertheless, he was not intimidated and published the essay Nuestro tiempo del desprecio, as well as articles abroad denouncing repression. According to Ángela Dellepiane in research for UNESCO, the newspapers La Razón (Argentina) (20 May 1976) and La Opinión (Buenos Aires) (21 May, directed by Jacobo Timerman) recorded his testimony: "There is something else that distresses me and that I felt obliged to raise: the witch-hunt." Referring to cases such as Antonio Di Benedetto and architect Jorge Hardoy, Sabato stated: "...I named people who honor the country and who have suffered expulsion from their workplaces and even detention."
Complicity with the dictatorship of 1976–1983 On 19 May 1976, dictator Jorge Rafael Videla hosted a luncheon with a group of Argentine intellectuals, including Sabato, Jorge Luis Borges, Horacio Esteban Ratti, and priest Leonardo Castellani. Of all present, only Castellani referred to the disappearance of Haroldo Conti and asked about his situation. After the meal, Sabato stated:
Writer Osvaldo Bayer later argued that Sabato attempted to justify this meeting as concern for disappeared colleagues, a version denied by others.Osvaldo Bayer, Rebeldía y esperanza, Planeta, 2016, pp. 288–289.
This episode drew criticism, including from Bayer, who accused Sabato of "forming part of Argentine hypocrisy".La Capital, 12 June 2005
In 1979, Sabato published Apologías y rechazos, challenging censorship. On 12 August 1980, he was among 175 signatories in Clarín (newspaper) demanding information on the disappeared during the National Reorganization Process.
CONADEP