1924
The author Rabindranath Tagore arrives in Buenos Aires. Victoria offers to lodge him at Miralrío, a weekend property a stone’s throw from the Villa Ocampo. She herself moves to the Villa and takes care of Tagore tirelessly.
In the winter, Ernest Ansermet visits Buenos Aires to conduct a Debussy concert. Victoria, interested by his work, manages to arrange for the conductor to remain three additional seasons in the city.

1925
Tagore leaves Buenos Aires. Victoria participates as a récitant in Arthur Honegger’s King David.

1929
In the neighborhood of Palermo, a house designed by Alejandro Bustillo is opened on the street Rufino de Elizalde, and Victoria writes: “modern architecture seemed to me one of the most revealing emblems of the era we lived in.” Neighborhood residents, however, were critical of the house, fearing it would destroy the beauty of the barrio. Victoria travels to Paris in order to meet with Keyserling, whom she finds rude and pedantic. In the city, she also meets such figures as Anna de Noailles, Gisèle Freund, Paul Valéry, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who declares to her “you’re the most beautiful cow of the pampas.” Victoria reads for the first time Virginia Woolf’s novel, A Room of One’s Own. She visits London and meets George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells. Finally, she returns to Buenos Aires to prepare lectures for Keyserling’s visit (Keyserling, for his part, will return from Buenos Aires with a less-than-sanguine image of the entire continent, writing that “my pilgrimage through South America was a descent into a subterranean world”). Victoria also meets Eduardo Mallea and Waldo Frank, who urge her to create a publication.

1930
Manuel Ocampo dies on January 18. Victoria travels to Paris to organize the exhibition of Tagore’s paintings. There, she meets Jean Cocteau, Jacques Lacan, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Leo Ferrero, and Le Corbusier. After traveling in the United States and Latin America, Victoria returns to Buenos Aires.

1931
The Sur magazine is founded; the name had been suggested by Ortega y Gasset in a telephone conversation. Bioy Casares would say: “Sur was a challenge for her, like the forging of a new path through the jungle.” The magazine would publish works by some of the 20th century’s most important authors, including Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, André Malraux, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1931, Victoria also travels to Spain and visits the Spanish prisons.

1933
The Sur publishing house is founded, with the dual aims of advancing the very best literature of the period and of lending solvency to the magazine. The first book to be published is Federico García Lorca’s Romancero Gitano, followed by works by such authors as Eduardo Mallea, Juan Carlos Onetti, Alfonso Reyes, Horacio Quiroga, Bioy Casares, Alfred Huxley, C. G. Jung, Virginia Woolf, Sartre, Kerouac, and Camus. Julio Cortazar would say: “Sur was invaluable to us students trying to find our way in the 1930s and 40s.” Octavio Paz would add: “Victoria is something above and beyond: she is the founder of a spiritual space. Because Sur is not merely a publication or an institution: it is a tradition of the spirit.”
Monaco dies this year.

1934
Victoria travels to Europe with Eduardo Mallea. Mussolini receives her at the Palazzo Venezia. Victoria notes that his gaze “attracts you exactly as the call of a fireplace might.” In London, she meets Virginia Woolf; the latter would recall “the opulent beauty of the millionaire of Buenos Aires”. Victoria appears in Stravinsky’s Perséphone at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and again in the same piece in Rio de Janeiro. “The Perséphone is the most painful memory I keep. I say painful because I would have wished to continue doing these performances, which were the best thing I have done in my life”, she confessed in an interview.

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