Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: Reception in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article furthers reflections developed in the research project entitled, Discursos de resistência: tradição e ruptura [Discourse of Resistance: Tradition and Rupture]/CNPq, and focuses on the aspect of the project devoted to how Bakhtin and the Circle’s works have been received in Brazil. The published translations, an indisputable source of this reception, are studied through paratexts, or, more specifically, as we call them, frame-texts, included in the translated editions since the late 1970s. The authorship of these frame-texts helps to outline a clear overview of the various Brazilian articulations of the dialogical perspective, as per Bakhtin and the Circle, at different moments in time. This paper aims to focus on five editions (translations and re-translations) of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1981, 1997, 2002, 2008 and 2010), translated from Russian into Portuguese by Paulo Bezerra. The frame-texts included in these editions, also written by the translator, present and deepen the understanding of characteristics of the author translated, and his work, tracing the systematic and institutional development of Bakhtinian thought in Brazil, carried out by researchers who, along with the necessary listening to international voices, construct a characteristically Brazilian path.

KEYWORDS:
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics ; Frame-texts; Reception in Brazil; Dialogical Analysis of Discourse