Álvares de Azevedo and Victor Hugo

romantic poets’ foreign sources and the criticism of imitation

Abstract

Victor Hugo is one of the foreign authors most quoted in epigraphs by our romantic poets. If we observe the works of Gonçalves Dias, Álvares de Azevedo, and Castro Alves, representatives of the three generations of our Romanticism, we can see that even in competing with Musset and Lamartine among the French poets cited, excerpts from Victor Hugo are used a dozen times in epigraphs by these Brazilian poets. Thus, in an attempt to rescue this contact between Brazil and France in this article, in the midst of 2022, we are inevitably faced with the problem of imitation. The poet Álvares de Azevedo, his critical fortune in the nineteenth century, and his “dialogue” with Victor Hugo are highlighted. We detect in the Brazilian poet a type of foreign model anthropophagy, before our Modernism. Contrary to the harsh criticism of the Brazilian Modernists, we believe that certain products of Brazilian Romanticism, including the contact with the work of Victor Hugo, prepared the ground for the intellectuals of 1922. Used in different ways in the 18th and 19th centuries, epigraphs pay homage to the quoted writer, reveal the authors’ readings and precursors, and anticipate and dialogue with the text they anticipate. In the case of Victor Hugo as a model, it is not only his recognized work that inspires. His enthusiasm, his character, his status as a citizen, many qualities present in a man who lived through practically the entire 19th century, are responsible for the “hugolatry” in Brazil and in the world.