The Russian professor Natalia Arséntieva and professor J. Vercher García are the persons responsible for the edition of the special number “Cervantes in the Slav countries” published by the journal of the Universidad de Granada “Slav World” to pay homage to Cervantes and the Quixote, on the occasion of the centenary of the edition of the first volume of the novel in 1605.
With a presentation by professor Juan Carlos Rodríguez, of the department of Spanish Literature of the Universidad de Granada, this special number includes more than a dozen contributions by as many more specialists, researchers and professors, scholars of Cervantes in the Slav world.
In his presentation of this special number devoted to Cervantes in the Slav countries, professor Juan Carlos Rodríguez has started from his lecture on “Don Quixote” in which he condensed the basic ideas of a manuscript that finally would result in the book “The writer who bought his own book. To read the Quixote”:
“I was especially interested in that lecture –the professor of the Universidad de Granada says- for a basic fact: after the disturbances happened in East Europe, I tried not to refer to easy arguments. I did not want to talk about the “Slav soul”, their identity and/or the differences as regards the “Spanish” or the “Western soul”. In other words, I intended not to cover the tragedies of so many years with that other invisible smog so-called by the Germans the Volkgeist or the “Spirit of the people”. It has never involved a scientific conceptualization and has not got any theoretical value. I thought, again in the smog, that it was necessary to talk about real or cultural historiographies and to trawl through the clues which had sustained so much ignorance among us”.
According to Juan Carlos Rodríguez, there can be no doubt that for the Spanish –and, in general, for the rest of the Western world- the Slav world and, especially, the Great Russian Empire, have always been considered to be barbarians: “For the Russian, the Spanish were hardly an “exotic tribe” in which men were highwaymen or corrupts and women were “cigar sellers” with a penknife in the suspender of the tight (in short, Merimée and Bizet’s Carmen)”.
In the Hispanic world and in the rest of the West, the great Russian writers have always been key figures according to professor Juan Carlos Rodríguez, who wonders how could we understand the European and American linguistic/literary thought of the second half of the 20th century without the discovery de Russian Formalists, the Opojaz Circle, with Tinianov, Sklovski, Eichembaum and, of course, Roman Jakobson.
Professor Juan Carlos Rodríguez emphasizes the attention paid by the Slav languages to the Cervantine literature and says that, one way or another, “the strength of the theoretical and literary Russian thought has revived in the West in the last years. And quixotism is again one of the discussion key points”.
For the UGR professors “humanities can always do us a big favour: they can force us to think and question ourselves about our own thoughts. The serious and objective reunion between the depth and diversity of the Slav and the Hispanic world survives today as an unavoidable challenge. A challenge for which should turn to read our Don Quixote.”
Reference:
Professor Juan Carlos Rodríguez Gómez. Department of Spanish Literature. Universidad de Granada.
Phone numbers: 958 243 599 and 958 243 484.
E-mail: jcrodri@ugr.es
