On Tzvetan Todorov: A Personal Recollection

Early one morning in February 2017, I received a text from a friend in Paris telling me that Tzvetan Todorov had died. The text concluded with the word "Désolée" a French word which captures so well feelings of regret and sorrow, and also empathy. My friend knew that I had known Tzvetan for twenty-five years, that I admired him tremendously, and that from being an intellectual mentor Tzvetan had become a close friend who I looked forward to seeing every time I went to Paris. Although I had known that Tzvetan suffered from Parkinson's disease, and that I had been shocked by his condition when I last visited him in September 2016, I never really imagined that he would be gone, and so soon

I first met Tzvetan when he came to Texas and stayed in my house for three days while he lectured and gave a seminar for the Interdisciplinary Group for Literary Historical Study at Texas A&M University. Unlike so many other visiting scholars of his stature who fly in, give their lecture, dine with faculty, stay at a nice hotel and fly out the next morning, Tzvetan wanted to get to know the people he visited, and not just academics. At my house, where he wished to stay even though we only knew each other through correspondence, he spent as much time talking to my wife and two sons as he did me. Later, in his autobiography, Devoir et délices he would speak about how the birth of his first child changed his life as well as the trajectory of his intellectual interests, and it became clear to me then why he wished to spend time with my entire little family. For many years Tzvetan was married to the novelist Nancy Huston, with whom he had two children. In conversations he would refer to "my Nancy" and "your Nancy" when talk to turned to family and daily life at home. As so many of his works confirm, for Tzvetan, "life in common" with family and friends was the cornerstone of a rich and happy life as a public intellectual who was respected and admired around the world. In the first years I knew him I visited Tzvetan in his study in his apartment near the Bastille. His daughter Léa and especially his son Sacha were very frequently around, and his tenderness for them and attentiveness to their needs was always evident. Later when he had moved over to the Left Bank and we would take long walks in the Jardin des Plantes or chat in a café near his apartment, he would speak fondly and proudly of his children, now grown. His daughter Léa had become a documentary filmmaker, and at our memorial conference for him at Reid Hall in Paris in July 2017, she showed parts of a documentary she was making on Tzvetan during his last visit to his native Bulgaria. Unfortunately, he died before the film could be completed.

In our many conversations we ran the gamut of family, politics, books we had read and admired, travels, and many other subjects. He was generous with me in every way—he offered advice on my life and career, told me of important events or debates in Paris, often before they happened. For example, involved early on as an advisor in the Black Book of Communism project—which for obvious reasons, was very close to his heart, given his youth in Communist Bulgaria—Tzvetan told me months before it appeared about the controversy it would generate, and what his own views were.

Tzvetan frequently expressed admiration for friends and intellectuals he admired, and was always circumspect about those whose ideas or views he disliked, or found dangerous (in Devoirs et delices, he is open about his dislike of Jacques Lacan and André Glucksmann). Always seeking to live the role of the "responsible intellectual" rather than the "engaged" or (all-too-often narrowly) politically committed intellectual of whom he was suspicious, he was cautious about the positions he took in the public arena. He wanted...