Otto Maria Carpeaux: Prophet of our literary time

Abstract

Among the European intellectuals forced to immigrate during the interwar period, the Austrian Otto Maria Carpeaux (1900-1978) exerted one of the most significant influences on Brazilian literary life, with the publication, three years after arriving in the new country, of the first volume in a series of brilliant studies on literature: The Ashes of Purgatory (1942). The author’s work, though extensive and luminous, was unjustifiably neglected after his death, but is currently being re-studied with interest, particularly his monumental History of Western Literature (1959-1966), a book that ranks alongside Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948) and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). This trend is attested to by the recent release of two collections of essays, both edited by José Carlos Zamboni (Homens e destinos, 2022; Mais livros na mesa, 2024), alongside the publication of Mauro de Souza Ventura’s second volume on Carpeaux, O Danúbio não é azul (2025). Therefore, this article aims to contribute to the development of a scholarly debate around Carpeaux’s writings by proposing a critical examination of certain of the author’s essays that address the historical process of the exhaustion of traditional concepts of literature. This study argues that just as Carpeaux called Jacob Burckhardt a pessimistic prophet for having foreseen the two wars in his Reflections on History, the Austro-Brazilian master should likewise be considered prophetic in diagnosing the roots of our moment of disconnection from the Western literary tradition.