Writing, Public Opinion, and National Identity in the Crônicas of Olavo Bilac

OLAVO Bilac (1865-1918) is most often remembered as a Parnassian poet. While continuing to write poetry after his success with Poesias (1888), he began to acquire a separate identity as a cronista, a transition that implied much more than a change in format. Among other adjustments, Bilac would have to use a more direct language, speak to a sometimes different though overlapping reading public, reflect more on matters of a political nature and less on aesthetics, and rethink his role as a writer in society. From 1890 to 1908, he published a vast amount of cronicas in many different newspapers, most notably the Gazeta de Noticias, where he replaced Machado de Assis as the newspaper’s primary cronista in 1897.2 Despite the Modernists’ later attack on his poetry, Bilac has, over the years, regained his noteworthy status in the history of Brazilian literature. Yet, his cronicas have gone largely unnoticed by critics. While these writings are by nature fragmented, dispersed, and sometimes contradictory to each other, as a whole they constitute a peculiarly constructed body of works that reflects the efforts of nearly twenty years of exploring different perspectives and forms of expression in order to shape public opinion in belle epoque Rio de Janeiro. The two-fold objective of this study is to demonstrate the ways in which Bilac utilized the genre of the cronica as a socially committed writer intent on engaging his readers and challenging them to think critically and, secondly, to attempt to piece together the fragments of a lifelong project of shaping a national identity in a recently established republic.