Volodia Teitelboim Volosky (; March 17, 1916 – January 31, 2008) was a Chilean Communist politician, lawyer, journalist, and author. A longtime deputy and senator, he later served as secretary-general of the Communist Party of Chile and, in 2002, received Chile's National Prize for Literature for a body of work consisting chiefly of memoirs, biographies, and literary essays.
Early life and education Teitelboim was born in Chillán to Jewish immigrants, Moisés Teitelboim Kraitzer, a Ukrainian, and Sara Volosky Blank, from Bessarabia, and developed a strong interest in literature from an early age.Reseña biográfica parlamentaria: Volodia Teitelboim Volosky, at Historia Política Legislativa del Congreso Nacional de Chile website (Accessed 27 Nov. 2013) His family moved first to Talca and then to Curicó, where he completed his primary and secondary schooling, and it was there, at the age of sixteen, that he joined the youth wing of the Communist Party of Chile. He went on to study at the Faculty of Law of the University of Chile, where, in addition to his legal training, he worked as a sportswriter for the newspaper El Diario Ilustrado and edited the magazine Qué hubo en la semana. Upon graduation he presented his senior thesis titled "The Dawn of Capitalism – The Conquest of America."Teitelboim, Volodia (1943). El amanecer del capitalismo. La conquista de América . He went on to work as a lawyer for the government's price-oversight agency while continuing as a reporter, literary critic, and columnist for the newspapers Frente Popular and El Siglo.
Political career Teitelboim joined the Chilean Communist Party's youth section at the age of sixteen. During the 1940s he endured persecution, along with all the militants of the Communist Party, once President Gabriel González Videla enacted the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy (popularly known as the Ley maldita, or "cursed law"), and was relegated and imprisoned in Pisagua.
In 1961 he was elected to Congress as a Deputy for Valparaíso and Quillota, a post he held until 1965, when he was elected Senator for Santiago. He was re-elected to this post in March 1973, but was only able to further serve in it until Congress was disbanded following the September 11, 1973, coup d'état.
During the military regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Teitelboim lived in exile in Moscow, where he launched the twice-weekly radio program Escucha, Chile ("Listen, Chile").Teiteilboim, Encyclopædia Britannica online (Accessed 27 Nov. 2013) Despite the risk, he clandestinely returned to Chile in 1988Teteilboim, Stalwart of the Chilean Communist Party, Friend of Allende and Award-Winning Writer, The Guardian online, 13 Feb. 2008 (Accessed 27 Nov. 2013) and campaigned for a provisional government following the regime's having been handed a defeat in that year's national plebiscite. The following year he was elected secretary-general of the Communist Party, a position he held until August 1994, when he was succeeded by Gladys Marín.
Controversy over the Prats memoirs In a 2025 memoir, journalist Eduardo Labarca, who in 2005 acknowledged authorship of a fabricated diary attributed to the assassinated general Carlos Prats, wrote that the task of producing the forgery had been assigned to him in Moscow by a senior, unnamed Communist Party leader acting on behalf of the Soviet party apparatus, a description widely understood to refer to Teitelboim. The Communist Party has never acknowledged responsibility for the forgery.
Journalism and literary career Teitelboim's literary work, for which he was awarded Chile's National Prize in Literature in 2002, the Literature prize of the 1931 Floral Games, and the essay prize of the National Council of Books and Reading for Huidobro, la marcha infinita in 1993, is chiefly in the form of memoirs, biographies, and literary essays. His first book, Antología de poesía chilena (Anthology of Chilean Poetry), was published in conjunction with Eduardo Anguita in 1935, and compiled the works of the great poets of Chile. He would later say that it committed the errors of omitting Gabriela Mistral and of accentuating the dispute between Vicente Huidobro, Pablo de Rokha, and Pablo Neruda.
It was Teitelboim who, in late 1934, first noticed that Neruda's "Poem 16" from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair closely paralleled "Poem 30" of Rabindranath Tagore's The Gardener in its 1917 Spanish translation; he shared the discovery with fellow poets rather than publicizing it himself, but Huidobro seized on the finding to accuse Neruda publicly of plagiarism in his magazine Pro. Neruda's defenders maintained the borrowing was an acknowledged paraphrase rather than plagiarism, and from later editions onward the poem carried a note identifying it as a paraphrase of Tagore. Teitelboim and Neruda nonetheless went on to form a close friendship from 1937, and Teitelboim later wrote an acclaimed biography of the poet.
Teitelboim was also active as an editor: in 1954 he founded and directed the Santiago cultural magazine Aurora, and during his exile in the 1970s and 1980s he founded and directed Araucaria de Chile, a review published in Madrid for twelve years that became an important forum for exiled Chilean and Latin American intellectuals. His 1952 novel Hijo del salitre ("Son of Saltpeter") is a fictionalized account of the life of Elías Lafferte, a historic Communist leader and a central figure in the development of Chile's labor movement.
His series of memoirs, Un muchacho del siglo XX (A Boy of the Twentieth Century, 1997), La gran guerra de Chile y otra que nunca existió (The Great War of Chile and Another That Never Existed, 2000), and Noches de radio (Radio Nights, 2001), present from a political and social perspective the great arc of Chilean history during the 20th century. His best-known capacity is that of a biographer, in which he wrote about Jorge Luis Borges and Vicente Huidobro, and, to the greatest critical acclaim, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral. He is generally located within the Chilean Generation of '38, and, along with contemporaries such as Miguel Serrano, Eduardo Anguita, and Juan Marín, was influenced by literary surrealism.
Personal life At the age of 29, Teitelboim married Raquel Weitzmann, who was also a law student. During the 1940s, Teitelboim, like other members of the Communist Party, was forced to go underground, while Weitzmann became pregnant with the child of a former university colleague. They named the child Claudio, and Teitelboim adopted him, keeping their affair concealed. However, due to Teitelboim's frequent absences caused by party activities, persecution, and imprisonment, their marriage suffered and eventually ended in 1957 when Weitzmann left for Cuba with Jaime Barros."Los hijos de Volodia" , La Nación online, 2 Feb. 2008. Teitelboim then took sole responsibility for raising Claudio, who was 10 years old at the time. However, in 2005, Claudio discovered the truth about his parentage—that his biological father was the lawyer Álvaro Bunster—and severed ties with Teitelboim, adopting his biological father's surname."Volodia Teitelboim se confesó "triste" y "resignado" por la postura de Claudio Bunster", Cooperativa online, 24 Oct. 2005 (Accessed 28 Nov. 2013)"Claudio Bunster no asistirá a funeral de Volodia Teitelboim", El Mercurio online, 1 Feb. 2008 (Accessed 28 Nov. 2013)
Teitelboim's second marriage took place when he was 51 years old and was to Eliana Farías. While in exile in Moscow following the Chilean military coup d'état of September 11, 1973, they raised Farías' son, Roberto Nordenflycht, as well as their own daughter, Marina. Roberto, inspired by Teitelboim's communist ideals, joined the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front under the nom de guerre "Aurelio" and rose to become one of its senior commanders. On the night of August 20, 1989, he was killed during a botched attempt to install rocket launchers at the Tobalaba airfield in Santiago, in the course of which he fatally shot an army lieutenant on guard duty before being killed himself. The grief over Roberto's death eventually led to the end of Teitelboim's marriage to Farías. Marina, meanwhile, pursued a career in diplomacy, graduating from Chile's Andrés Bello Diplomatic Academy.
Death and legacy Teitelboim died on January 31, 2008, at the Catholic University's hospital in Santiago. He succumbed to kidney failure resulting from lymphatic cancer, following a decline in his health that began in mid-January and culminated in pneumonia and progressive loss of consciousness. It was reported that he and Claudio Bunster reconciled in the end.
Teitelboim's remains lay in state at the former National Congress building, where a large crowd, including politicians and intellectuals of varied political affiliation, paid posthumous tribute; among those present was President Michelle Bachelet, and, according to several accounts, those gathered—Bachelet among them—sang "The Internationale" in his honor. His funeral took place on February 2, 2008, at Santiago's General Cemetery, attended by thousands of mourners as well as a delegation sent by Fidel Castro.
Since 2008, the public library of Chillán, his birthplace, has been named in his honor.
List of published works Antología de poesía chilena (Anthology of Chilean Poetry) - 1935 El amanecer del capitalismo. La conquista de América (The dawn of capitalism. The conquest of America) - 1943 Hijo del salitre (Son of saltpeter) - 1952 La semilla en la arena. Pisagua (The seed in the sand) - 1957 Hombre y hombre (Man and man) - 1969 El oficio ciudadano (The duty of the citizen) - 1973 El pan de las estrellas (The bread of the stars) - 1973 La lucha continúa, pólvora del exilio (The struggle continues, powder from exile) - 1976 Narradores chilenos del exilio (Chilean storytellers from exile) - 1978 La guerra interna (The internal war) - 1979 Neruda - 1984 La palabra y la sangre (The word and the blood) - 1986 El corazón escrito (The written heart) - 1986 En el país prohibido (In the forbidden country) - 1988 Gabriela Mistral, pública y secreta (Gabriela Mistral, public and secret) - 1991 Huidobro, la marcha infinita (Huidobro, the infinite march) - 1993 Los dos Borges (The two Borges) - 1996 Un muchacho del siglo XX (A Boy of the 20th Century) - 1997 Notas de un concierto europeo (Notes from a European concert) - 1997 Voy a vivirme (I am going to live myself) - 1998 La gran guerra de Chile y otra que nunca existió (The great war of Chile and another which never existed) - 2000 Noches de radio (Nights of radio) - 2001 Ulises llega en locomotora (Ulysses arrives in a locomotive) - 2002
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