Return from the U.S.S.R.

By André Gide

During the 1930s, Gide briefly became a communist, or more precisely, a fellow traveller (he never formally joined the Communist Party). As a distinguished writer sympathising with the cause of communism, he was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet Union of writers. The tour disillusioned him and he subsequently became quite critical of Soviet Communism. This criticism of Communism caused him to lose socialist friends, especially when he made a clean break with it in this book Return From The USSR first published in the 1930's.-Print ed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patavium Publishing
• Release date: Aug 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805232841

André Gide

André Gide (1869 - 1951) was a French author described by The New York Times as, “French’s greatest contemporary man of letters.” Gide was a prolific writer with over fifty books published in his sixty-year career with his notable books including The Notebooks of André Walker (1891), The Immoralist (1902), The Pastoral Symphony (1919), The Counterfeiters (1925) and The Journals of André Gide (1950). He was also known for his openness surrounding his sexuality: a self-proclaimed pederast, Gide espoused the philosophy of completely owning one’s sexual nature without compromising one’s personal values which is made evident in almost all of his autobiographical works. At a time when it was not common for authors to openly address homosexual themes or include homosexual characters, Gide strove to challenge convention and portray his life, and the life of gay people, as authentically as possible.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

DEDICATION 3

FOREWORD 4

1 7

2 12

3 17

4 25

5 29

6 34

APPENDICES 35

1 — SPEECH — Delivered in the Red Square in Moscow on the Occasion of Maxim Gorki’s Funeral — (20 June 1936) 35

2 — SPEECH — To the Students of Moscow — (27 June 1936) 37

3 — SPEECH — To the Men of Letters of Leningrad — (2 July 1936) 39

4 — THE STRUGGLE AGAINST RELIGION 41

5 — OSTROVSKI 43

6 — A KOLKHOZ 44

7 — BOLSHEVO 46

8 — THE BESPRIZORNIS 47

RETURN FROM THE U.S.S.R.

By

ANDRÉ GIDE

Translated from the French by

DOROTHY BUSSY

DEDICATION

I DEDICATE THESE PAGES TO THE MEMORY OF

EUGÈNE DABIT,

BESIDE WHOM, WITH WHOM, THEY WERE LIVED AND THOUGHT

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter relates how the great goddess, in the course of her wanderings in search of her daughter, came to the court of Keleos. No one recognized the goddess under the borrowed form of a humble wet-nurse; and Queen Metaneira entrusted to her care her latest-born child, the infant Demophoon, afterwards known as Triptolemus, the founder of agriculture.

Every evening, behind closed doors, while the household was asleep, Demeter took little Demophoon out of his comfortable cradle and with apparent cruelty, though moved in reality by a great love and desirous of bringing him eventually to the state of godhood, laid the naked child on a glowing bed of embers. I imagine the mighty Demeter bending maternally over the radiant nursling as over the future race of mankind. He endures the fiery charcoal; he gathers strength from the ordeal. Something superhuman is fostered in him, something robust, something beyond all hope glorious. Ah, had Demeter only been able to carry through her bold attempt, to bring her daring venture to a successful issue! But Metaneira becoming anxious, says the legend, burst suddenly into the room where the experiment was being carried on and, guided by her mistaken fears, thrust aside the goddess at her work of forging the superman, pushed away the embers, and, in order to save the child, lost the god.

FOREWORD

Three years ago I declared my admiration, my love, for the U.S.S.R. An unprecedented experiment was being attempted there which filled our hearts with hope and from which we expected an immense advance, an impetus capable of carrying forward in its stride the whole human race. It is indeed worthwhile living, I thought, in order to be present at this rebirth, and worthwhile giving one’s life in order to help it on. In our hearts and in our minds we resolutely linked the future of culture itself with the glorious destiny of the U.S.S.R. We have frequently said so. We should have liked to repeat it once again.

Already, without as yet having seen things for ourselves, we could not but feel disturbed by certain recent decisions which seemed to denote a change of orientation.

At that moment (October 1935) I wrote as follows:

It is largely moreover the stupidity and unfairness of the attacks on the U.S.S.R. that make us defend it with some obstinacy. Those same yelpers will begin to approve the Soviet Union just as we shall cease to do so; for what they will approve are those very compromises and concessions which will make some others say: ‘There! You see!’ but which will lead away from the goal it had at first set itself. Let us hope that in order to keep our eyes fixed on that goal we may not be obliged to avert them from the Soviet Union.

Nouvelle Revue Française, March 1936

Resolving, however, to maintain at all costs my confidence until I had more to go upon, and preferring to doubt my own judgment, I declared once more, four days after my arrival in Moscow, in my speech in the Red Square on the occasion of Gorki’s funeral: The fate of culture is bound up in our minds with the destiny of the Soviet Union. We will defend it.

I have always maintained that the wish to remain true to oneself too often carries with it a risk of insincerity; and I consider that if ever sincerity is important, it is surely when the beliefs of great masses of people are involved together with one’s own.

If I had been mistaken at first, it would be better to acknowledge it at once, for in this case I am responsible for all those who might be led astray by this mistake of mine. One should not allow feelings of personal vanity to interfere; and indeed, such feelings are on the whole foreign to me. There are things more important in my eyes than myself, more important than the U.S.S.R. These things are humanity, its destiny, and its culture.

But was I mistaken at first? Those who have followed the evolution of the Soviet Union during a lapse of time no longer than the last year or so can say whether it is I who have changed or whether it is not rather the Soviet Union. And by the Soviet Union I mean the man at its head.

Others, more qualified than I am, will be able to tell us whether possibly this change of orientation is not in reality only apparent and whether what appears to us to be a derogation is not a necessary consequence of certain previous decisions.

The Soviet Union is in the making; one cannot say it too often. And to