Adrián del Valle was a Spaniard who came to live in Cuba in 1895 and identified with the Cuban cause almost immediately, even establishing contact with some insurgents and later contributing to the revolutionary cause from New York. At that time, he had already collaborated on a student weekly in his hometown of Barcelona and in other cities in Europe and the United States, where he had traveled before his arrival in Cuba.

Carlos Loveira, who dedicated himself to rescuing the figure of Adrián del Valle for Cuban culture, says about him: “The works of Adrián del Valle, despite being so many and of such a diverse nature, have a constant ideological unity, based on what could be considered an ideal of human perfectibility (…) he is an idealist, but an idealist who sees and analyzes the present reality.”

His narrative work is quite extensive, part of it contained in “Cuentos inverosímiles” (Improbable Tales) from 1903, which is characterized by its deepening of the deforming impact of the social environment on the individual and various dysfunctional manifestations, bordering on madness or already beyond its limits, in which the pessimistic perspective imposes its dark stitches on the events that await the characters and their reactions.

She had already begun this line of writing before her arrival in Cuba, with the publication of “Marta,” associated with the trope of the sinner, who later dies in a hospital with no hope of physical or moral vindication. The character reveals the backstage of a sordid world, also derived from the very institution of the class division of society and typically bourgeois values.

“The Polish Musician” also embodies the human condition and action in extreme circumstances. The protagonist Kosec, after having touched the gates of heavenly glory with his art as a cellist, is forced to pawn his instrument in order to feed himself and finally decides to end his life by hanging himself with a forgotten string from his old instrument.

A certain perspective on the uselessness of art per se is also seen in “Maldita Glory,” in which a neophyte in the world of theater receives the news of his daughter’s death after being acclaimed by the public.

Scientific madness, perhaps as an expression of human alienation resulting from an overdose of civilization, is manifested in the stories “Vitalis,” “Cerebalis,” and “Strange Madness,” which have no great literary pretensions but do demonstrate in a parodic way the distancing of the vital space from nature and human contact.

His narrative career was quite extensive – more than thirty works, according to Carlos Loveira when the author had not yet finished his production – which includes, in addition to those mentioned and others, the works “Por la Patria”, “Incesto”, “La eterna lucha” and “El Mar”, in which a disenchanted irony is present, in whose background however still beats a certain confidence in the self-reforming condition of the human.