Authors

Bruno Barretto Gomide¹;  ¹ University of São Paulo, Brazil

Discussion

Boris Schnaiderman (1917-2016) was the foremost translator of Russophone literature in Latin America. At the University of São Paulo, he translated and promoted Grossman, Bakhtin, Jakobson and Ivanov, among others. Schnaiderman began writing an autobiography when he was over ninety years old. It is a rich material for biographical studies and for exilic, Slavic and Jewish studies. All these themes are interwoven in the image of the city that gives his autobiography its (provisional) title: "Odessa, mists, Eisenstein". The mixture of cultures in Odesa has already been described in "kaleidoscopic" terms (Richardson, Kaleidoscopic Odessa, 2008), or as a city "text", in the famous formulation by Lotman and Toporov, originally applied to Petersburg. Kataev, Ilf and Petrov, Bagrítski and the "primus inter pares" Isaak Babel were writers launched into Soviet culture by Odesa. Initially grouped by Shklovski under the rubric of "the south-western school", they are today studied as representatives of a special strain of Russophone modernism (Stanton, Isaac Babel and the self-invention of Odessan modernism, 2012). The mythology of Odesa underwent metamorphoses, both in the USSR and in emigration. I intend to comment on how Schnaiderman adapted this mythology in his unfinished autobiography, in his literary criticism, and in his translation of short stories by Babel ("Gedali" and "Guy de Maupassant") and of Olesha’s Envy.