Interest That Became a Vocation: Russian Studies in the Life of a Spanish Philologist

This article details the professional trajectory of Rafael Guzmán Tirado, a Spanish Russianist and professor at the University of Granada. He played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Department of Slavic Philology, which has since become a leading department in the field of Slavic Studies in Spain. He also took part in the establishment the first centre of the Russkiy Mir Foundation and the Cuadernos de Rusística Española journal, the only periodical in Spain and the Spanish-speaking world devoted exclusively to Russian Studies. For 20 years, he was a member of the Presidium of the International Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature (MAPRYaL). In 2015, during one of the MAPRYaL congresses in Granada, a monument to A. S. Pushkin was unveiled in the university park Fuente Nueva. The article addresses issues related to artistic translation, focusing specifically on the works of Russian writers such as A. Averchenko, M. Zoshchenko, E. Vodolazkin, and D. Danilov, among others, translated into Spanish by the author. Special attention is paid to the development of innovative educational resources that promote the Russian language and Russian culture in the Spanish-speaking world with an emphasis on the cultural component, as well as other topical issues of Russian studies existing in the European educational space.