Emigration and Russian studies: French-Latin American transfers and dialogues

• Grant number: 18/23276-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: August 23, 2019
• End date: March 22, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Comparative Literature
• Principal Investigator: Bruno Barretto Gomide
• Grantee: Bruno Barretto Gomide
• Host Investigator: Monica Raisa Schpun
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France

Abstract

This research will deal with the role of Slavic, Baltic and Jewish emigration in processes of cultural transfer, reception and circulation of russophone literature in France and Latin America. The cases of Brazil and Argentina (the two countries that received the largest emigration from those regions and in which the performance of émigré critics, editors and translators was most significant) will be prioritized in the period after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and until the decade of 1960, when the first experiments of university institutionalization of Russian literary studies appeared in South America. The French context, and specifically Paris, the "capital" of emigration that established the most relevant links with Latin America, will be the specific object of the FAPESP fellowship I am requesting. I propose to collect critical and documentary sources related to three kinds of intellectual circuits: 1) emigrants who were, in France, bibliographical reference for Latin American studies in the twenties, thirties and forties (Troyat, Berdiev, Weidlé, Pozner, Levinson); 2) emigrants who came to Brazil and Argentina after spending an intermediate stage in France (Chostakovsky, Emmanuel de Bennigsen); 3) the critical and institutional performance of emigrant researchers who were important for the formation of French professional slavistics, which has had wide repercussion in Latin America. The trajectory of Alexander de Bennigsen, founder of the EHESS Center for Russian, Caucasus and Central European Studies (CERCEC) will be highlighted. The goal of my research is to produce, in the short term, a systematic mapping of the theme and a monograph; in the medium term, a critical-biographical profile of Boris Schnaiderman.