Владимиро До́рфман: Жизнь в изгнании и борьба за права человека

Argentine Chilean writer and human rights activist

Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman (born May 6, 1942) is an Argentine Chilean American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, since 1985.

Dorfman was born in Buenos Aires on May 6, 1942, the son of Adolf Dorfman, who was born in Odessa (then Russian Empire) to a well to do Jewish family, and became a prominent Argentine professor of economics and the author of Historia de la Industria Argentina, and Fanny Zelicovich Dorfman, who was born in Kishinev of Bessarabian Jewish descent. Shortly after his birth, they moved to the United States, where he spent his first ten years of childhood in New York until his family was forced to relocate due to political tensions. His family eventually settled in Chile in 1954. He attended, and later worked as a professor at, the University of Chile, marrying Angélica Malinarich in 1966 and becoming a Chilean citizen in 1967. From 1968 to 1969 he attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley and then returned to Chile. Since the restoration of democracy in Chile in 1990, he and his wife Angélica have divided their time between Santiago and the United States.

From 1970 to 1973, Dorfman served as a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende. During this time he wrote, with Armand Mattelart, a critique of North American cultural imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck. Dorfman went on to live in Paris, Amsterdam, and Washington, D. C. Since 1985 he has taught at Duke University, where he is currently Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature and Professor of Latin American Studies. Dorfman details his life of exile and bi cultural living in his memoir, Heading South, Looking North, which has been acclaimed by Elie Wiesel, Nadine Gordimer, Thomas Keneally and others. In 2020 he wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Fifty years ago today, on the night of Sept. 4, 1970, I was dancing, along with a multitude of others, in the streets of Santiago de Chile. We were celebrating the election of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist leader in the world. President Allende’s victory had historical significance beyond Chile. Before then, political revolutions had been violent, imposed by force of arms. Allende and his left wing coalition used peaceful means, proclaiming it unnecessary to repress one’s adversaries to achieve social justice. Radical change could happen within the confines and promises of a democracy. I have often fantasized about how different the world would be if Allende had not been overthrown, three years later, in a bloody coup. I wonder where humanity would be if his peaceful revolution had been allowed to run its course and become a template for other countries.”