Wladimir Krysinski: International Comparatist

A citizen successively of Poland, France, and Canada, who eventually came to speak or read a dozen languages, Wladimir Krysinski exemplifies the invaluable cohort of international comparatists who tirelessly circulate throughout the world and help knit us together. He earned his master’s degree at Lodz in his native Poland in 1957 with a thesis on a major Polish modernist, and his doctorate in Strasbourg in his adopted second homeland of France in 1966 with a dissertation on Pirandello and a range of French modernists to existentialists. At that point Krysinski accepted an appointment at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he rose in the ranks to full professor of French and Comparative Literature by 1975. Accepting a full professorship in Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal in 1976, he continued exclusively as a comparatist from 1989 at this home base. He was also a member of the Editorial Board of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée.

In an astonishing display of scholarly energies, Krysinski also served as a guest professor on a score of occasions from 1963 onward in France, Canada, Italy, Brazil, Israel, Argentina, Germany, and Japan. His emphasis was on topics concerning modernist literature and theatre, and modernist to postmodernist theory, often reaching out to Latin American literature as a major love of his mature years in Canada. All the while, he remained an indefatigable participant at conferences at home in Canada and abroad, including such nations as Austria, (former) Yugoslavia, Spain, Ireland, Mexico, South Africa, Poland, the Netherlands, and China.

Notably, several of Krysinski’s critical works in French have enjoyed even wider diffusion in translation. A glance at the WorldCat will quickly remind his fellow comparatists, above all those who are broader-gauged modernists, that his often essayistic style has left a deep mark. Probably his most influential work worldwide, Carrefour des signes: Essais sur le roman moderne (1981), appeared somewhat later in Spanish as Encrucijada de signos (1997). The French version, Le paradigme inquiet: Pirandello et le champ comparatif de la modernité (1989), actually followed its Italian version, Il paradigma inquieto: Pirandello e lo spazio comparativo della modernità (1988), but waited a good while for the Spanish companion version, El paradigmo inquieto: Pirandello y el campo de la modernidad (1995). Krysinski became a strong critical presence in Latin America through such Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese-language works as La novela en sus modernidades: A favor y contra de Bajtin (1997), Il romanzo e la modernità (1998), Comparación y sentido: Varias focalizaciones y convergencias literarias (2006), and Dialéticas da transgressão: O novo e o moderno na literatura do secolo XX (2007).