Novelsofacosmopolitancity

With the Proclamation of the Republic on November 15, 1889, it was not just Brazil's political regime that was changing. In the country's capital, the literary scene was also witnessing a new configuration. With the death of Machado de Assis in 1908, the last great literary name of the Empire made way for a new generation of writers – but not before leaving to future generations his final, quintessentially Rio novel Memorial de Aires. After the transformations the 1880s had brought – with romanticism's emotional appeals giving way to the scientificist and racialist theories of naturalism and positivism – the new century began a literary cycle in which the city and its inhabitants would be ever more present.

Image description: The image shows the cover of a book titled "Memorial de Ayres". The cover is made of yellowed paper with stains of wear. At the top, "MACHADO DE ASSIS" is written in large, bold letters. Below that, there is a mention of "DA ACADEMIA BRAZILEIRA". The main title, "Memorial de Ayres", appears in even larger letters, followed by a handwritten dedication in cursive script. This dedication mentions "ao querido amigo Verissimo" and "seu braço de velho amigo". Below the dedication, there is a small floral ornament. At the bottom is the publisher's name, "H. GARNIER, LIVREIRO-EDITOR", followed by the addresses of Rio de Janeiro and Paris.

The period that would come to be called the tropical Belle Époque intensified the presence of political – and police – power among a population with a small share of educated people and a massive presence of formerly enslaved people and their descendants. This coexistence produced a clash between the formality of republican bourgeois institutions and the informality of urban spaces abandoned by those same institutions.

The Pereira Passos reform in the first decade of the 1900s ensured that, more than ever, the capital of the Republic was shaped after a European ideal, particularly a French one. Its new parks and prestigious buildings — such as the monumental National Library —, seaside avenues, and wealthy neighborhoods stood in contrast with the presence of tenements, unsanitary conditions, and a popular, multiethnic cultural occupation that took over the city's streets — maxixe, samba, carnival, revue theater, barbers' orchestras, or circuses. Between these two extremes, a myriad of migrants: Italians, French, Roma, Arabs, Jews, and other groups who enriched the city's social fabric and landscape.

In this scenario, literature was gaining growing status. If in previous decades the “man of letters” had been becoming professionalized in the press, from 1900 onward what we see is a greater autonomy of the publishing market. Even so, newspapers remained an unavoidable place of work, at a time when it was practically impossible to live solely from the sale of fiction or poetry books.

This does not mean that the literature of the period did not produce its best-sellers and popular idols. Names such as Coelho Neto and Benjamin Costallat were among the leading prose writers of their time and achieved success, each in his own way – quite different from one another.

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph of an adult man. He is wearing a dark suit with a black tie. The background is dark, possibly a wall.

Coelho Neto (1864-1934), treated with reverence in intellectual circles and by the city's elite, was an extremely prolific writer and one of the founders of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He crossed the century publishing books on different themes, such as Turbilhão, a successful novel from 1906, and Cidade Maravilhosa, a book of short stories dedicated to Rio, from 1928. However, the Modernist movement of São Paulo considered Coelho Neto's work a type of Brazilian literature that needed to be overcome, and his name fell into obscurity, erasing the immense fame he once had in Rio and in Brazil.

Costallat, another author who became a celebrity during this period, became the Republic's biggest best-seller, with Mademoiselle Cinema, a scandalous success published in 1923. An active chronicler and writer for the Rio press since 1918, he had already published four books, whose themes of urban modernity - cinema, the machine, cosmopolitanism, and impeccably designed covers - set the tone.

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph of a man. He is facing the camera, with dark, well-groomed hair. His expression is serious and he looks directly at the viewer. He is wearing a black suit with a white shirt and a tie. In the lower right corner of the image, there is an inscription in lowercase letters that reads "Jesús M. Arque".

With the scandal surrounding Rosalina — the free-spirited character from Mademoiselle Cinema, whose melindrosa figure created by artist J. Carlos was the writer's inspiration — Costallat saw his book pulled from circulation a year later (at the request of the Liga da Moralidade). Even so, it became the best-selling book of its time, reaching the incredible number of 75 thousand copies in five years.

The two writers portray two extremes of what the Rio de Janeiro literary scene was like in these early decades of the 20th century. On one side, erudite success, tied to a local idea of high culture and proper use of the language; on the other, popular and commercial writing that portrays a city in the midst of modern, mechanized movement. Between the extremes of Neto and Costallat, however, other prominent writers made Rio's literature grow in number of authors, themes, and spaces.

From Adelino Magalhães and his innovative impressionism to Orestes Barbosa and his urban accounts of marginality, from Medeiros e Albuquerque to Júlia Lopes de Almeida, from Ribeiro Couto to Humberto de Campos, and critics such as José Veríssimo and Araripe Junior, not to mention the notable presence of Euclides da Cunha, this was the generation that sought to make the craft of letters a more stable means of professional activity.

Still interfacing with the press and public service, and with a permanent connection to the French language and its aesthetic and intellectual schools, the city of Rio de Janeiro was becoming both stage and audience for the stories of its streets, its characters, and its voices.