Esteban José Antonio Echeverría

Born Sept. 2, 1805, in Buenos Aires; died Jan. 19, 1851, in Montevideo. Argentine sociologist, poet, and historian; father of the progressive-radical school in Argentine historiography.

Echeverría studied in Buenos Aires and in Paris, where he was strongly influenced by utopian socialism and the theories of Saint-Simon. After he returned to Argentina (1830), he and J. B. Alberdi founded a secret organization called Young Argentina, or the May Association (1838), which had as its goal the establishment of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Echeverría described the ideas and principles that should underlie a political party working for the progressive development of the country in “The Socialist Doctrine of the May Association” (Russian translation in Progressivye mysliteli Lat. Ameriki, Moscow, 1965).

Echeverría emigrated to Uruguay in 1841 to escape persecution by the government. He increased his use of patriotic and civic motifs in the narrative poems Avellaneda (1849) and The Uprising in the South (1849). Echeverría’s antidictatorial novella Slaughterhouse (Russian translation, 1957) was one of the first works of Latin American prose to use elements of realism.