Making Pierre Menard: Jorge Luis Borges contra Lev Shestov and Benjamin Fondane

Borges’ storytelling genius first burst forth in Ficciones, a collection of short stories he wrote during WW2. Yet, surprisingly, many of the characters therein remain a mystery. Drawing on his youthful fascination with Alphonse Daudet’s idea of merging Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza into one character, Tartarin, Borges, in the spring of 1939, created Pierre Menard, an amalgamation, as I hypothesize, of the philosopher Lev Shestov and his disciple Benjamin Fondane. This hypothesis, like Ariadne’s thread, leads the author through Borges’ famed literary labyrinths that conceal a largely forgotten group of Jewish, Russian, French, Spanish, German, American, and Argentine intellectuals of the 1930s, whose personalities, biographies, and ideas inspired much of the content of Pierre Menard and later spilled over to other stories of Ficciones and beyond.