Gide and Soviet Communism

Abstract

The political peregrinations of André Gide are emblematic of the pursuit of meaning through politics that many Western intellectuals engaged in during this century and especially during the 1930s and 1960s. More generally, as one of his biographers argues, he was “representative of the modern intellectual’s contradictory longing for individualist freedom and comforting submission to authority” (Guerard viii) as well as of “the isolation … , the sense of guilt, the schizoid anxiety of the modern intellectual—and his alternating impulses toward order and anarchy” (Guerard 13), to which one may add a combination of elitism and egalitarianism. Understanding Gide’s politics helps us understand the period and the writer, although of course the foolish political attitudes do not illuminate his nonpolitical writings, nor do they distract from his literary contributions.

[W]hat leads me to Communism is not Marx, it is the Gospel. It is the Gospel that formed me.

—André Gide, Journals¹

[T]here is something tragic about my Soviet experience. I had come as an enthusiast, as a convinced supporter, to admire the new world and to win my affections I was offered all the prerogatives I abominated in the old one.

—André Gide, Afterthoughts ²

1. Journals 564. “[C]e qui m’amene au communisme, ce n’est pas Marx, c’est l’Évangile. C’est l’Évangile qui m’a formé” (Journal 421).

2. Afterthoughts 62. “[I]l y a dans mon aventure soviétique quelque chose de tragique. En enthousiaste, en convaincu, j’étais venu pour admirer un nouveau monde, et Ton m’offrait, ajin de me seduire, toutes les prérogatives que j’abominais dans Fancien” (Retouches 59–60).