Tzvetan Todorov

Tzvetan Todorov (Bulgarian: Цветан Тодоров; Sofia, March 1, 1939 - Paris, February 7, 2017) was a Bulgarian nationalized French linguist, philosopher, historian, critic and literary theorist.

Biographical data and career

He was the son of Sofia librarians, and was educated in communist Bulgaria. After studying at the University of Sofia, in 1963 he moved to Paris, where he completed a doctoral thesis on the work Dangerous Liaisons. He was going to stay there for a year, but he stayed permanently in France, later supported by Roland Barthes.

In the 1970s he began his studies of the philosophy of language, publishing in 1977 Theory of Symbols and in 1978 Symbolism and Interpretation.

Then he abandons that theme of thought and turns to a reflection specific to the social sciences, specifically, the history of ideas. He focuses on studying the Enlightenment and dedicates texts to Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot.

With the publication in 1982 of The Conquest of America it focuses on human beings and their relationship with history.

Todorov was a professor and director of the Center for Research on Arts and Language, at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Paris. He also taught at Yale, Harvard, and Berkeley.

After a first work of literary criticism dedicated to the poetics of the Russian formalists, his interest extended to the philosophy of language, a discipline that he conceived as part of semiotics or the science of signs in general. Of his theoretical work, the dissemination of the thought of the Russian Formalists stands out. Later, he took a radical turn in his research, and in his new historiographical texts the study of the conquest of America and the concentration camps in general predominates, but also the study of certain forms of painting. However, what stands out time and again are his journeys through Enlightenment thought, through its origins and its echoes of all kinds: Fragile Happiness, Us and the Others, Benjamin Constant, The Imperfect Garden or The Spirit of the Enlightenment.

Todorov was a man of both Europe, East and West, who also taught in the United States. He defined himself as a "displaced man": he had left his country of origin and had a new and surprised outlook on the country of his arrival. From that enriched perspective he spoke in his books about truth, evil, justice and memory; of uprooting, of the meeting of cultures and of the drifts of modern democracies. He reviewed his life in Bulgaria and France, his love for literature, his distancing from structuralism and apoliticism. He explained his critical humanism, his extreme moderation, his distaste for Manichaeisms and the Iron Curtains. His obsession—perhaps due to the passage from one nation to another—was to cross borders, jump barriers, unite seemingly irreconcilable areas, whether they were languages, cultures or disciplines. He was interested in meeting points, nuances, "gray areas." It is there where he sought the answer to a single question: how to live?

Todorov harshly criticized the neoconservative thinking and ultraliberalism of the current democratic states that, according to him, have the same features that built Stalinism and fascism. In The totalitarian experience, as he pointed out in El País (10-10-10), after reviewing the ancient situation of Bulgaria, shows how the Eastern countries embrace the ultraliberal doctrine, which is a crusade in which it is stated that history does not exists.

In 2008 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Social Sciences for representing "the spirit of the unity of Europe, East and West, and the commitment to the ideals of freedom, equality, integration and justice."

He died on February 7, 2017 in Paris, France, victim of complications derived from a neurodegenerative disease.

Verisimilitude

[...] it is not a matter of establishing a truth (which is impossible) but of approaching it, of giving the impression of it, and this impression will be so much stronger the more skillful the account...

Tzvetan Todorov

Bibliography used

• Interview and bibliography The Times of the Present, four.ediciones, 2001.
• Conversation with Ger Groot ('Un humanismo bien temperado'), in Go ahead, get me!Sequitur, 2008.
• Conversation with J. Ruiz Mantilla, The Weekly CountryNo. 1176, 10-10-1910.