“Tiempos de egotismos superhombríos y otras nietzschedades”: The reception of Friedrich Nietzsche in Ruben Dario’s work

Abstract

The article describes the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work and character in Ruben Dario’s literary and journalistic production. It can be determined that, after an initial and groundbreaking enthusiasm -as far as we know, Ruben Dario is the first Hispanic American who writes about Nietzsche-, the Nicaraguan poet’s attitude about the German philosopher becomes more ambivalent and it flows into a complex mixture of assimilation and critical rejection. Such coexistence settles in its Darian belonging to the late modernity and its secularizing process. In order to show the above mentioned, the article presents three focal points of the Nietzschean philosophy -nihilism, aristocratism and the artist’s metaphysics- and it then profiles Ruben Dario’s reception under the forms of the uncommon, antichristian and romantic Nietzsche. The controversial presence of such forms allows for the explanation of the structural tensions of the Darian poetic subjectivity and it offers the framework for the conclusive analysis of the celebrated poem “Lo fatal”.