Amid Echoes and Shadows

Abstract After his arrival in Chile in the summer of 1939, Vicente Salas Viu resumed the activity that, as a writer and music and literary critic, he had been developing in the Spanish press in the 1930s. The weight of Salas Viu’s experiences during the Civil War has been discussed in part, but studies do not fully evaluate Salas’s criticism and musicological writings in exile from the perspective of the thematic and argumentative impact of the Spanish Civil War. This inescapable shadow permeates the literature of Salas Viu’s “anguished generation”, which was connected through multiple intellectual networks at an international level. The aim of this essay is to explore how these writings by Salas Viu, mainly disseminated in cultural and music journals of several Latin American countries, respond to this generational shock and demonstrate both continuity and ongoing adaptation in relation to his pre-war and wartime aesthetic and political premises.