In what would prove to be his last interview, Bolaño named for Monica Maristain the books that had marked his life. Alongside works in Spanish, English, French, and Latin, he also named Franz Kafka’s novels, the Aphorisms of Lichtenberg, and the Tractatus by Wittgenstein. This troika can be supplemented with Russian authors mentioned repeatedly in works and essays, for example Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. This chapter enumerates and analyzes Roberto Bolaño’s deep and persistent engagement with German and Russian literatures, and tries to make sense of a fundamental difference in the two repertoires: most of the Russian authors mentioned or alluded to in Bolaño’s work are recognized names in world literature read and appreciated by non-specialists, whereas his chosen German authors range from immortals such as J. W. von Goethe to long-forgotten names like Heinrich Lersch and Max Barthel. It is no surprise that these two literary traditions join in dialectical fashion in Bolaño’s magnum opus, 2666, where a German, Hans Reiter, derives literary inspiration from the diary of a Russian Jew, Boris Abramovich Ansky. The two literatures struggle with each other as do the two armies to cognitively map the evils of the 20th century.

The ancestors of modern Czechs and Croats encountered literacy in Old Church Slavonic, but having fallen into the orbit of the Western Church embraced the literary culture of Latinate Europe. Yet, caught between Latin and Church Slavonic, these communities made different choices. The Czechs relinquished Church Slavonic and developed literature in Latin, a foreign learned language. The Croats, while accepting the dominance of Latin in the literary sphere, nevertheless, managed to preserve Church Slavonic and create their own variant of literary language and writing in Glagolitic, which they used in liturgy on a par with Latin. These choices were crucial in determining how literatures in the vernacular emerged and took shape in Bohemia and Croatia. By contrasting these two literary itineraries, the chapter revisits the question of how we study and piece together a literary history, how we understand the concept of a ‘national literature’, and whether this concept should hinge exclusively on the vernacular that corresponds to the modern standard language. Central to the approach is Iurii Lotman’s model of literary traditions as dynamic semiotic cultural systems, in which cultural change results from the coexistence and interaction of two processes of human activity: cultural evolution and explosion.

The overwhelming majority of works on world literature hitherto have been written by Western scholars. The almost endemic neglect of literatures other than European or Western in these writings over the last twenty years or so has drawn heavy critical fire. Usually, such Eurocentrism has been seen as the result of either ignorance on the part of these scholars or on an ingrained cultural bias. However, a deliberate concentration on European literature, or even on a very restricted version of the latter, may also be a strategic choice in particular times and under particular circumstances. A 1929 essay by the German literary scholar Victor Klemperer illustrates my point.

Chapter 25 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in early modern Germany, Italy, and Spain, examining figures such as Benjamin Neukirch, José Antonio Conde, Maria Fortuna, Louisa Karsch, Alessandro Verri, Vincenzo Maria Imperiali, Benito JerÓnimo FeijÓo, María Rosa GÁlvez de Cabrera, Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Madame de Staël, Franz Grillparzer, Carolina Coronado, Gertrudis GÓmez de Avellaneda, Giovanni Pascoli, Magnus Hirschfeld, Pierre Louÿs, Rainer Maria Rilke, Natalie Barney, Renée Vivien, Colette, Federico García Lorca, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Nada Peretti, Salvatore Quasimodo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Christine Brückner, and Carme Riera.

It is hardly surprising, given Gustav Mahler’s conservative disposition toward literature, that studies of his reception among writers have only marginally featured in an otherwise remarkably wide and sophisticated spectrum of critical engagements with the composer. The poets he set to music were inevitably older figures, usually folk-influenced, and he gave fin-de-siècle Vienna’s vibrant literary scene of coffeehouse intellectuals and salonnières (Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, et al.) a comfortably wide berth. Nonetheless, important examples of his influence on subsequent writers do exist, first among them Thomas Mann, who based the name and physical description of the central character of his 1912 novella Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach, on Mahler. This and subsequent cases are reviewed here, among them Stefan Zweig, Kurt Frieberger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Rosegger, and others from the very recent past.

In contemporary parlance, magical realism is most often considered to be a phenomenon of Latin American origin that as of the 1960s spread to the rest of the world, and primarily to postcolonial or emerging literatures. It should be remembered, though, that between the two World Wars in Europe there arose something we might call magic realism, to distinguish it from later magical realism. The roots of this European movement are to found in German and Italian literature, with a later development in Flemish literature. Names to mention are Ernst Jünger, Massimo Bontempelli and Hubert Lampo. Later authors to have been linked to the mode, though now usually retrospectively with reference to the magical variant, are Günther Grass, Milan Kundera, Angela Carter, José Saramago and Carlos Ruiz Zafón.