TZVETAN TODOROV (1939–2017)
Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-French historian, theorist, and structuralist literary critic who studied human behavior during World War II, died in Paris at the age of seventy-seven, Sewell Chan of the New York Times reports.
Born in Bulgaria in 1939, Todorov earned his master’s degree in philology from the University of Sofia in 1963 before relocating to France, where he enrolled at the University of Paris. He studied under Roland Barthes, who oversaw his doctoral thesis, and received his doctorate in 1970. Todorov was appointed director of research at the French Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in 1968. He helped found the journal Poétique in 1970, where he worked as one of its managing editors for nearly a decade, and established the Center for Arts and Language Research in 1983.
Todorov wrote more than twenty books throughout the course of his career, often examining collective trauma, the concept of otherness, and human decency. Among his most influential works are On Human Diversity (1989), Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991), Hope and Memory (2000), Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (2002), and In Defence of the Enlightenment (2009).
In Facing the Extreme, Todorov focuses on “the extreme experience of the camps as a basis from which to reflect on moral life, not because moral life was superior in the camps but because it was more visible and thus more telling there.” New York Times critic Neil Gordon said, “More than anything else, this book is a fascinating tour through the subtlety, the integrity, and the brute honesty of Mr. Todorov’s thought.”
Rony Brauman, a former president of Doctors Without Borders in France and a longtime friend of Todorov, said, “He helped me look at the world in a different way, to step outside the frame of ‘them and us’ that was always being built.” Brauman added, “He had such a remarkable open mind, always looking beyond appearances, refusing to be hypnotized even by great evil, but searching for empathy. In his writing and in person, there was always that impressive capacity for kindness and good will.”
