Brazil’s public intellectual
When Nicolau Sevcenko’s parents arrived in Brazil as political refugees — a destination chosen mostly because it was one of the few nations in the 1950s that accepted Soviet émigrés — they never imagined their newborn son would become perhaps the world’s leading authority on Brazilian cultural history. Sevcenko was born in the coastal city of Santos while his family was en route to São Paolo to escape the turmoil of Europe after World War II. Once settled in Brazil, however, Sevcenko’s parents were reluctant to integrate into the culture. Convinced that the Soviet Union would soon collapse and they could return home, they made no effort to learn Portuguese, or to teach it to their young son. The Harvard professor remembers sitting at the back of the classroom on his first day of school and not understanding a word that was said. “I came home and told my mother that she had...