At a railway station: Sérgio Sant’Anna meets Oswald and Mário de Andrade

Abstract

It is proposed here the analysis of the short story “A man alone in a railway station”, by Sérgio Sant’Anna, originally published in 1989 in the book The miss Simpson. In it, Sant’Anna stages an imaginary meeting between Oswald and Mário de Andrade that took place in the 1920s, in a city in the interior of São Paulo, on the occasion of the inauguration of a public library. With a remarkable capacity for synthesis, the short story writer manages to explore differences in personalities between the two writers from São Paulo, also putting into critical perspective dilemmas faced by Brazilian Modernism, especially the problem surrounding the incorporation of European avant-gardes in a country marked by artistic lag and economic underdevelopment. It seeks to show how Sant’Anna, through his acute and subtle fictional reflection on Modernism, introduces a very particular reading and a position on the sociocultural destinations of the country in an intense dialogue with the legacies of Oswald and Mário de Andrade.