Fernando Peixoto Translates Turgenev: fundamental notions for a marxist aesthetics

Abstract

In 1965, one year after the coup d'état that established a military dictatorship in Brazil, one of the theater groups most resistant to the newly established regime, Oficina, decides to translate a 19th century Russian playwright who definitely does not fit into the category of revolutionary writer, even though he was arrested after his speech at Gogol's funeral in 1852, he took a stand against serfdom and suffered tsarist censorship in some of his works. Ivan Turgenev advocated gradual reforms towards a more modern state, agnostic, liberal and Europeanized, which earned him the enmity of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, writers contemporary to him. Deep down, he was a pessimistic author, whose ideas appeared in a notorious way in his novel Fathers and Sons (1862), through a nihilist character, Bazarov. At Oficina, Fernando Peixoto (together with José Celso Martinez), in the midst of translations by Maxim Gorki, the later a symbol of the October Revolution, focuses on A Month in the Country (1855), believing, mistakenly, to be moving away from a more political theater. This article aims to refute this opinion of Peixoto, since Turgenev's play strictly adheres to the aesthetic principles defended by the thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.