Dear Diego by Elena Poniatowska

First published:Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, 1978 (English translation, 1986)

Type of plot: Romance

Time of work: The 1920’s and 1935

Locale: Paris, France, and Mexico City, Mexico

Principal Characters:

• Angelina Beloff (Quiela), a Russian painter in love with the Mexican painter Diego Rivera
• Diego Rivera, a famous Mexican painter

The Novel

Dear Diego is based on one chapter of Bertram Wolfe’s The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (1963). The novel is a fictionalized portrayal of Quiela (the Russian painter Angelina Beloff) as a broken-hearted lover waiting for the well-known painter Diego Rivera to send for her from Mexico City.

Dear Diego is divided into twelve love letters dated from October 19, 1921, through July 22, 1922—nine months in which Quiela, in spite of her desperation and longing for her lover, creates her own work as an illustrator for the Parisian magazine Floreal. By painting in nine months exactly, she affirms her identity through the art that Diego Rivera represents for her. The letters are followed by a brief narrative at the end of the book.

The book begins as Quiela is waiting for her lover. She expects him to send for her, but toward the end of the novel she realizes that he does not need her anymore. On one level, the narrative is about one woman in love with someone who does not want her; at the same time, it is about the aesthetic process of painting without the influence of her lover, a process that makes Quiela a newborn woman at the end.

The plot of the novel is fairly straightforward: Angelina Beloff (Quiela), a Russian painter in Paris, falls in love with the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. They live together for ten years. Diego Rivera goes back to Mexico in order to participate in the new beginning of his country after the Mexican revolution, and he forgets about her. Although he sends some money for Quiela, he never answers any of her letters. Quiela (the nickname Rivera gave her) writes him several times about how much she loves him and how important his ideas about painting have been for her. In a sense, he becomes a mentor for her. These episodes are brought out in Quiela’s letters. The short concluding narrative describes Quiela’s trip to Mexico in 1935, thirteen years after she has stopped writing. She does not look for Rivera, but she runs into him at a theater in Mexico City. He does not recognize her. The incident can be interpreted in two ways: Either Rivera has forgotten her to the point that he does not even recognize her, or, alternatively, the woman he sees is no longer the heartbroken lover of Paris but a new Angelina Beloff, an artist who has her own life and art and who does not need him anymore.

The Characters

Angelina Beloff captures the sympathy of the reader. She represents women artists of the 1920’s; she is struggling for her place in modern art. From Pablo Picasso, she learns about the possibilities of playing with lines instead of copying directly from reality. At first, she paints representationally, gradually moving to embrace the abstract style of cubism. This shift in Quiela’s aesthetic coincides with her increasing emotional distance from Diego Rivera. In a way, being alone in Paris helps her to achieve a self-affirmation in her art.

Diego Rivera, the lover for whom Quiela cries and the famous painter who is developing a new Mexican art, is a womanizer who takes up with the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo while Quiela still waits for him in Paris. Rivera is portrayed through the writings of Quiela, and readers do not really have any account of him directly. This fact limits the appreciation of his actions and makes the reader accuse him of neglecting his lover all alone by herself in Paris. One possible interpretation of these actions could be that he is letting her alone so that she can grow as an artist and develop without depending on him. This interpretation, however, is not the best one; rather, Rivera stands for the macho male who thinks that women cannot live without him.

Critical Context

Dear Diego is a testimonial work of fiction in the Latin American tradition of the novela testimonio (testimonial novel) developed by the Cuban author Miguel Barnet with his famous Biografía de un cimarrón (1966; The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 1966). The most important element in this kind of literature is the use of a “witness” to provide the writer with the basic monologue in which the character tells his or her story. In Dear Diego, the “witness” is the chapter dedicated to Quiela by Bertram Wolfe in his biography of Rivera. Poniatowska read Wolfe’s biography and from this material developed the story line of her novel; she thus created a work in which it is the written word itself that acts as the “witness” of the story. The basic monologue is derived not from an interview with Angelina Beloff herself but from research on Beloff done by Poniatowska. The final monologue presented by the narrator is the collection of letters. In this respect, the novel does not follow the testimonial fiction structure of the first voice telling the story. In Dear Diego, the letters to Diego Rivera from Angelina Beloff constitutes the narrative discourse.

Bibliography

Berry, John. “Invention, Convention, and Autobiography in Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela.” Confluencia 3 (Summer, 1988): 47-56. Berry analyzes Poniatowska’s technique of writing the twelve letters to Diego Rivera. He concludes that Dear Diego is neither a testimonial narrative nor an autobiography but contains elements of both. Berry considers the novel to represent a break with existing literary conventions.

Gold, Janet. “Feminine Space and the Discourse of Silence: Yolanda Oreamuno, Elena Poniatowska, and Luisa Valenzuela.” In In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers, edited by Noël Valis and Carol Maier. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1990. A postmodern reading of Poniatowska’s short story “La felicidad” that places her writing in the context of other works by Hispanic women.

Jorgensen, Beth Ellen. The Writing of Elena Poniatowska: Engaging Dialogues. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. A comprehensive book-length study of Poniatowska’s work from the perspective of a number of critical approaches.

Lagos, Maria-Ines. “Elena Poniatowska.” In Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers. Vol. 113 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. A good overview that includes a brief biography of Poniatowska and discusses her fiction, journalism, and criticism. Lagos focuses on the relationship between history and fiction in Dear Diego and argues against criticism of Poniatowska’s creation of a weak, submissive female protagonist.

Paul, Marcella L. “Letters and Desire: The Function of Marks on Paper in Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela.” In Continental, Latin American, and Francophone Women Writers, edited by Ginette Adamson and Eunice Myers. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990. Paul analyzes Poniatowska’s exploration of language as a means of communication that fails when it is not an expression of the self.

Poniatowska, Elena. Interview by Susana Conde. Belles Lettres 7 (Winter, 1992): 41-45. Poniatowska discusses her characters, themes, and style and comments on the effects of gender on writing.