Soviet Publishers and Readers of French Literature, Late 1920s – 1930s

Abstract

Soviet images of French literature are often reduced to the Stalinist canon of the late 1930s that comprised classical literature, including “modern classics,” like Romaine Rolland or Anatole France; and Communist and leftist writers selected as ideologically and aesthetically suitable for the Soviet reading audience, such as Henri Barbusse, Paul Vaillant Couturier, and others. This stereotype being partially true suggests, however, a simplistic and flattened view of the Soviet reception of French literature. It should be noted that even in the late 1930s there existed a certain amount of diversity in the choice of French authors; for example, International Literature magazine from time to time published ideological opponents like Pierre Drieu la Rochelle or Henry de Montherlant. As for the 1920s, in the course of the New Economic Policy both state and private publishing companies offered a wide and varied range of writers and books that included classics, “proletarian” and “revolutionary” authors along with adventure fiction, love stories, and “colonial novels,” easy reading, “decadent,” conservative, and “reactionary” writers. The paper traces transformations of publishing policy during the pivotal years of late 1920s and early 1930s, the period of the “Great Turn” in Soviet society, marked by processes of centralization, total state control, and tightening of censorship. Archival documents allow us to analyze the role of Soviet intellectuals (literary critics, reviewers, editors, publishers) in the elaborating of new guidelines and implementing new practices in publishing policy and organizing readers feedback. A collection of readers’ letters of the mid-thirties, stored in the archival funds of GIKHL (State Publishing House of Fiction), documents the process of the making of the Soviet reader and shows a range of readers’ opinions and attitudes to French writers and their works at the early stage of Stalinist canon forming.