Between permanence and travel: salvific paths in the work of two contemporary Swiss writers, Monique Saint-Hélier and Annemarie Schwarzenbach

• Autor(a) principal: Laurel, Maria Hermínia
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/fb.v0i15.2050

In this article, we intend to study some viatical, but also biographical, itineraries of two twentieth century Swiss writers, paths converging around a common goal: salvation. Irrespective of the lack of mobility or the mobility that has marked their lifes, an objective is evident from their works. If, for Monique Saint-Hélier, condemned by illness to immobility, writing reveals itself as a reason for living, but also as the stage of unresolved conflicts that tear their characters in search of an impossible salvation, it is in the journey and in a state of permanent mobility that Annemarie Schwarzenbach tries to find the promised land (to paraphrase the title under which she publishes the account of her trip to Afghanistan between 1939 and 1940 in the company of the photographer and also great traveler Ella Maillart, Où est la terre des promesses?). Writers who have nothing in common (other than their nationality and their contemporaneity), nor in biographical terms, which we will cover briefly, nor in the modes of writing, on which we will focus more carefully, the search for salvation appears in their works at a particularly grave time in European and world history, marked by the signs of the imminent conflict that would partly determine their lives and works.