A política da memória na construção biográfica de Luiz Carlos Prestes (1945-2015).

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to point out the limits and possibilities of biographical narratives in their relation to history, through the analysis of the politics of memory in the construction of Luiz Carlos Prestes' biographies (1898-1990). Focused on its 50 years of life (1898-1948), the study compares four narratives launched in Brazil between the years 1945 and 2015: The Knight of Hope: the life of Luís Carlos Prestes, of the writer Jorge Amado (1945); Tragic Hheroism of the 20th Century: the fate of Luiz Carlos Prestes, of the historian Boris Koval (2007); Luís Carlos Prestes: a revolutionary between two worlds, by historian Daniel Aarão Reis Filho (2014); and Luiz Carlos Prestes: a brazilian communist, by historian Anita Leocadia Prestes (2015). In addition to the study of narratives, we seek to recover the process of negotiation that occurred between biographers and Prestes' family members, observing the impacts of this relationship with biographical making on the communist leader. Framed in defined conceptual schemes and in reasonably pre-established theoretical frameworks, the various aspects of Luiz Carlos Prestes' life were presented by biographers with certain regularities, repetitions and permanences, having just, in his own way, by pointing out ways of interpreting a character attached to certain political mythology. The four biographers, therefore, won the biographical challenge, having exposed their qualities and limitations, in different time periods, thus building a Luiz Carlos Prestes permeated by a certain fixed, unitary and coherent individuality.