Todorov defined the fantastic as a story's moment of hesitation before choosing reality
Is the woman Alvaro loves real, or is she the devil? Tzvetan Todorov argued that a tale is truly fantastic only while a reader cannot decide. The Bulgarian-born scholar also read camp survivors' testimonies closely and found something popular accounts missed: prisoners repeatedly helping one another, even amid terror.
Todorov was born in Sofia on 1 March 1939, into the family of the linguist Todor Borov. He finished a philology master's in his home city's university in 1963, then moved to Paris and completed a doctorate under Roland Barthes in 1966. Two years later he became a research director at the CNRS, and in 1970 he helped launch the journal Poétique, which he co-edited until 1979. He also taught as a visitor at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Berkeley.
His best-known idea came in a 1970 study of fantastic literature. A fantastic event is one that seems supernatural yet occurs in our ordinary world, forcing us to judge whether it happened. If a rational explanation wins, such as a dream, a drug, madness or a trick of the senses, the story tips into the uncanny, and natural law holds. If the event really occurred, the rules of reality must bend, and we are in the marvelous. Only while the implied reader stays suspended between the two is a text purely fantastic. His example was Alvaro in Jacques Cazotte's Le Diable amoureux.
Later books turned toward history and ethics, including studies of the conquest of the Americas, Rousseau's thinking on happiness, and the Enlightenment. In Facing the Extreme he challenged the common view that Nazi camps and Soviet Gulags erased all moral life and pitted everyone against everyone. Working from survivor testimony, including passages in Primo Levi, he found many acts of compassion and concluded that staying alive always depended on others.
Across his career he wrote 39 books and gathered honours including the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences and election to the American Philosophical Society. His second wife was the Canadian novelist Nancy Huston. He died on 7 February 2017, aged 77.
Source: Tzvetan Todorov
