Victor Brombert


Victor Henri Brombert is an American scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century literature, the Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University.

Biography

Brombert was born in Berlin in 1923 into a well-to-do Russian-Jewish family that had fled Russia at the outbreak of the Revolution and settled in Leipzig. When Hitler came to power in Germany, the family left for Paris, and Brombert received his secondary education at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. As the German army advanced on Paris in 1940, the family fled to the unoccupied zone under the control of the Vichy government and a year later, in 1941, escaped via Spain to the United States.
In May 1943 Brombert was drafted into the U.S. army. Due to his fluency in French, German, and Russian he was placed in a special unit, composed chiefly of refugees from Nazi-occupied European countries, that was trained in front-line military intelligence at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and featured in a documentary film "The Ritchie Boys".
In 1944 he took part in the Normandy landings with the 2nd Armored Division at Omaha Beach and also saw action with the 28th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, Brombert studied at Yale University, where he received a B.A. in 1948 and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures in 1953. As a graduate student, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Rome, adding Italian to the languages in which he has native fluency. He is married to Beth Archer Brombert, a translator from French and Italian, and the author of the biographies Cristina: Portraits of a Princess and Édouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat. The Bromberts have two children, Lauren and Marc.

Academic career

On completion of his graduate studies Brombert joined the Yale Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He was appointed Benjamin F. Barge Professor in 1968 and was chair of his Department from 1964 to 1973. In 1975 he moved to Princeton, where he had been appointed Henry Putnam University Professor and was affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures. At Princeton, he was also Director of Princeton's Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism and chairman of its Council of the Humanities. He entered emeritus status in 1999.
Brombert has been a visiting professor at many universities in the U.S. and Europe: the University of California, the Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, New York University, the University of Colorado, the Scuola Normale Superiore, the Collège de France, the University of Bologna, the University of Puerto Rico.

Awards

Brombert has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and from the Guggenheim Foundation. He was Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1986-87 and 1989–90, and a scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy in 1975 and in 1990. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974, and to the American Philosophical Society in 1987. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Toronto. In 1985 he was awarded the Wilbur Cross Medal of the Yale Alumni Association for "distinguished achievements in scholarship, teaching, academic administration, and public service.” In France, he was honored with the Médaille Vermeil de la Ville de Paris " and was made Commandeur des Palmes Académiques and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
In 1988-89 he served as president of the Modern Language Association.

Publications

Brombert’s work is primarily on 19th and 20th century French literature, and also on the history of ideas; the theory of literary criticism; and comparative studies of Italian, Russian, and German narrative writers. In addition to his books, he has contributed to edited volumes and written journal articles on French writers from Pascal to Malraux, Sartre, and Camus, and on many non-French writers: Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy; Büchner, Max Frisch, Kafka, Thomas Mann; Giorgio Bassani, Primo Levi, Italo Svevo; J. M. Coetzee, Virginia Woolf.
Brombert is also the author of a memoir, Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth. He is currently working on a sequel, to be entitled The Sabbatical Years.
In the words of a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal, “Victor Brombert...has been for more than 50 years one of the glories of humanistic scholarship at Yale and Princeton. Though a generation younger than scholarly patriarchs like Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, Mr. Brombert has nonetheless shown himself comparably learned and cosmopolitan in his studies...”
Principal Works of Literary Criticism:
as Editor: