Lugones was the leading Argentine exponent of the
Latin American literary current known as
Modernismo. This was a form of
Parnassianism influenced by
Symbolism. He was also the author of the incredibly dense and rich stories of
La Guerra Gaucha (1905). He was an impassioned journalist, polemicist and public speaker who at first was a
Socialist, later a
conservative/
traditionalist and finally a supporter of
Fascism and as such an inspiration for a group of
rightist intellectuals such as
Juan Carulla and
Rodolfo Irazusta. Leopoldo Lugones went to Europe in 1906, 1911, 1913 and in 1930, in which latter year he supported the
coup d'état against the aging
Radical party president,
Hipólito Yrigoyen. Between 1924 and 1931, Lugones took part in the works of the
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the
League of Nations. On February 18, 1938, the despairing and disillusioned Lugones committed suicide by taking a mixture of
whisky and
cyanide while staying at the river resort of
El Tigre in
Buenos Aires. Political frustration has been the most widely cited cause of his suicide. Nevertheless, recent publications in Argentina have shed light on another possible motivation: Lugones was very enamored of a girl he met at one of his lectures in the university. He maintained a passionate and emotional relationship with her until, discovered and pressured by his son, he was forced to leave her, causing in him a depressive decline that would end his life. His descendants have had similarly tragic fates. It is believed that his son Polo, the chief of police during Uriburu's dictatorship, was the creator of the
picana and the one who introduced it as a method of torture. Polo Lugones committed suicide in 1971. Polo's younger daughter,
Susana "Pirí" Lugones, was detained and disappeared in December 1977 as a victim of the
Dirty War. His older daughter, Carmen, whom he called Babú, is still alive. One of Pirí's sons, Alejandro, committed suicide, like his great-grandfather, in Tigre. This comprises Lugones' tragic familial fate, similar to that of
Horacio Quiroga's, himself a friend and admirer of Leopoldo Lugones. == Selected bibliography ==