André Gide and the Discourses of Power; A New Approach to the Process of Disillusionment with Communism in Return from the U.S.S.R

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 PhD Student of French Studies, Department of European Studies, Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor of French Studies, Department of European Studies, Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

After the victory of the October Revolution in 1917 and the establishment of the communist regime in the Soviet Union, this land became the utopia of many intellectuals. Among them André Gide, who was invited by the Union of Soviet Writers in 1936 to visit the land of his dreams. But what he saw and wrote in his return entitled Return from the U.S.S.R (1936) and Afterthoughts on the U.S.S.R. (1937) expressed his regret and despair for the realization of the great human aspirations of the twentieth century. This apparent disillusionment in Gide's text, however, is not simply achieved, but at the same time conveys the effects and factors that, according to Michel Foucault, shape the discourse of power in a particular period and influence the individual and collective choices of the author. In this article, we try to figure out the interaction of central discourses of power and their relation to the possibility of communism disillusionment by Gide, using the historical research methodology and relying on new historicism theories.

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References

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Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 27, Issue 1
August 2022
Pages 644-673

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