How is a museum born? Lygia Fagundes Telles and the construction of the unknown Museum of Literature

Abstract

This essay is a piece of a huge research on Brazilian Literature Museum Collection, conceived by the writer Lygia Fagundes Telles in the 1970’s. Her efforts to collect an extensive amount of literary documents of many authors was almost forgotten in the last 40 years:  for biographical reasons, the project was left behind resulting in a plenty of manuscripts, photographs and letters unknown so far held at Brazilian Studies Institute (ieb). In this article, I’m proposing to bring out this story based on the desire of the authors involved in creating a singular space for literary memory, observing that the collection could be organized in two categories: category of document and category of movement. The first one is related to items which would be available for future researches. The second category holds items which reveal the backstage articulation to create the Museum. In the last part of this essay, I’m putting together “Lygia’s Museum” and the “Archive-Museum of Brazilian Literature” at Casa de Rui Barbosa Foundation created by Plínio Doyle in the same period which is like its twin brother, pointing out differences and similarities between them. To support my argument, I choose an unpublished letter shelved on the Brazilian Literature Museum Collection.