Original scientific paper
Uses of Return form the USSR: A Yugoslav André Gide
Branimir Janković
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
The article is concerned with Yugoslav readings and uses of the famous travelogue by the French writer André Gide Return from the USSR published in 1936. Gide's book became a paradigmatic text of the eponymous corpus of post-revolutionary „returns from the USSR“ (Derrida 2012). It had an exceptional resonance considering that it contained a key dilemma in the period between the two world wars which was: did the October revolution succeed as a social revolution or not? That question had great repercussion on Yugoslavia, so much so that Gide's work was translated and published in three different editions in 1937, 1952, and 1980, respectively. In addition, at the end of the 1930s—in the period preceding the Second World war, when the ideological stakes were at their highest—many Yugoslav papers and journals representing different political, social, and cultural options were very engaged in commenting Gide's travel narrative. Those multiple transfers, receptive readings, and uses of Gide's Return from the USSR are analyzed in the context of contemporary travelogues based on the conceptual framework of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu concerning „social conditions of the international circulation of ideas“ (Bourdieu 2013).
Keywords
André Gide; Retour de l'U.R.S.S. (Return from the USSR); travelogue; the October revolution; the USSR; Yugoslavia
Hrčak ID:
190765
URI
Publication date:
15.12.2017.
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