Introduction

This issue of South Central Review has a special, personal resonance for me. The first part of the issue is devoted to the life and work of Tzvetan Todorov, the great critical theorist, historian, and public intellectual who died in Paris in February 2017 from complications from Parkinson's disease. I had known Todorov for more than twenty years. When I first met him, he was an intellectual inspiration to me. As the years passed he became a mentor and a dear friend.

Todorov was a formidable presence on the intellectual scene in France and around the world for almost a half century. Originally a literary critic and one of the most important, if not the most important of the structuralist theorists, Todorov introduced the West to Russian Formalism and wrote, among many other early works, a book which remains the definitive study of literature and the fantastic (The Fantastic: A Structualist Approach to a Literary Genre). Following the publication in the early 1980s of The Conquest of America, dealing with the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the Sixteenth Century, Todorov turned his attention to more historical (and often) more controversial topics, including World War II, the Holocaust, and life in concentration and death camps. Todorov also wrote brilliantly about totalitarianism, a subject he knew only too well, having spent his childhood and adolescence in Communist Bulgaria. Often reluctantly, Todorov waded into contemporary political topics in France as well as in the world at large, discussing and denouncing French racism, American imperial ambitions, torture, and especially terrorism, both after 9/11 and in the wake of the Islamic extremist terrorist attacks that have rocked France since 2015. Always a humanist seeking what the great seventeenth-century French playwright Molière called le juste milieu—the "just" or "reasonable" middle ground—Todorov was of course highly critical of torture and terrorism, but also of excessively xenophobic responses by the nations that fell victim to the latter. By no means completely preoccupied by these matters, Todorov also found time to write important studies of the French moraliste tradition and especially the Enlightenment. A life-long admirer of the plastic arts, Todorov also wrote important works on painters including the Dutch masters, Goya, and Russian modernist painters like Malevitch.

The cluster of materials devoted to Todorov in this issue includes several essays by Todorov scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. Henk de Berg offers a thoughtful appreciation of Todorov the intellectual, and Karine Zbinden provides a concise account of Todorov's evolution as a thinker and writer. Nathan Bracher assesses Todorov's importance in helping us to understand the role of the autobiographical, the subjective, in the writing of history, and William Vaughan makes a compelling case for why academic philosophers should take Todorov's work seriously.

We also include here an interview I did with Todorov not long before his death in his apartment on two chilly gray evenings in Paris in September 2016. At that point Todorov could leave his apartment in the Latin Quarter only with the greatest of difficulty. As the reader will see, despite his illness and the great fatigue that accompanied it, Todorov offers in the interview a sweeping and concise account of his youth in Communist Bulgaria, his immigration to France, and his intellectual evolution over a long and extraordinarily fruitful career. (I wish to thank my colleague and friend Nathan Bracher for ably transcribing the recorded interview. I have edited the transcription in some instances for concision and clarity). The concluding piece in the cluster is a remembrance I wrote of Todorov following his death. I include it here in the hope that it will convey to the reader some sense of Tzvetan's generosity and wisdom, and his courage at the end. Modest though he was, I suspect Todorov would have been embarrassed with the mention of these personal qualities that, however, describe him very well.

We are also happy to include in this issue several other pieces on a wide range of other topics. First, however, we are printing here a series of photographs of the remarkable cane that a French...