Bohemian lights, a classic work of Spanish and world theater, marks the great leap by Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) towards a new aesthetic and ethical political-social commitment, while maintaining the artistic brilliance of his previous work. Its fusion of artistic and political avant-garde gives rise to a new tragic-comic dramatic modality that it baptizes "esperpento", where the tragic sense of Spanish life is exhibited through a systematic deformation by the "concave mirrors" of the artistic act, creating its own course within the new literary and artistic forms that emerged after the catastrophe of European bourgeois civilization as a result of World War I.
This edition by the distinguished professor and critic, Víctor Fuentes, is a literal transcription of the book edition of Luces de bohemia, 1924. Contrary to other editions, it takes into consideration, as has been recently revealed, that the three determining Scenes, incorporated in said edition were not written for that version, but were already included in the original manuscript, and were censored in 1920 by the editor of the magazine Spain. Which asserts that the complete original manuscript of Luces de bohemia was written on dates of great political-social convulsion, within the so-called "Bolshevik triennium" (1918-1920), during the decomposition of the corrupt Spanish government system of the Restoration, and the uypsurge of the revolutionary yearnings and hopes. All of this is expressed in the satire and elegy of Luces de Bohemia; satire of a world in decomposition and elegy of the historic golden Spanish bohemia, and with all what it had to confront the values of such a world.
With its clear introduction and its detailed body of Notes, this edition of Luces de bohemia is a decisive contribution to a full understanding of the work of Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and his grotesque in particular, and a fundamental axis for the courses of Hispanic Literature that focus on the splendid expressionist Modernism of the first third of the 20th century.
