Begoña Regueiro
Sofía Casanova: transnational point of a view of a Spanish woman in Russia
Abstract
Sofía Casanova is probably one of the most attractive and ignored figures, male as well as female, of the Spanish Literature of the late 19th and early 20th century. Being married to the Polish diplomatic Vicente Lutoslawski, she moved to Poland where she lived the rest of her life, except for some short holiday periods spent in Galicia and the time in which she had to leave Poland to live in Russia. All these “adventures” made her become a witness, as a journalist, of the First and the Second World War, the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her work as a journalist of the ABC newspaper lets us read her impressions of this time. Because of the historical value of these chronics and the originality of a female journalist, this is the part of her work that has been studied most. Another part of her work includes novels, poetry and theatre.
Links between Casanova and the East of Europe are clear, not just in her life but also in the fact that some of her works have been translated into Polish (as we can see in our database. What I want to study now is the way in which transcultural and transnational elements appear in her work while she lives in Poland, but writes in Spanish for Spanish readers. I will especially focus on how the morphology of the text reflects the step from the Hispanic to the Polish, from the “here” to the “there”, from the “me” to the “other”, everything reflected by a woman. Titles as Princesa rusa (Russian Princess) shows how important East Europe is for the author and other titles as La mujer española en el extranjero (The Spanish woman abroad) prove that the author cared about the Spanish women’s point of view about other cultures. Both issues appear together in Viajes y aventuras de una muñeca Española en Rusia (Travels and adventures of a Spanish Woman in Russia). The way in which Sofía Casanova analyzes Russia and the way in which her female condition is important in her perceptions, is what I will show in this paper, in which I also will reflect about the ways in which to visualize these kind of transnational elements appearing in the texts.
AsK, September 2012
- Conferences > NEWW international conferences > Bucharest April 2012 > Regueiro