Abstract

In 1934, Marguerite and Jean-Richard Bloch visited the USSR. From there Marguerite sends numerous letters, most of them enthusiastic, and which overlook some of the doubts expressed in her notebook. The couple’s work being organized according to a very clear gendered logic, Jean-Richard, for his part, relies on his wife’s letters to write a series of articles, some sent from or published in the USSR, others published after the stay (in the magazine Europe in particular). Beyond the echoes and repetitions, however, from Marguerite’s private testimony to Jean-Richard’s public speech, we move from a poetics of anecdotal to a logic of political commentary.

Highlights

  • During the 1920s and 1930s over 100,000 foreigners visited the Soviet Union, including several tens of thousands of European and American professionals, scholars, artists, and intellectuals who came to see the Soviet experiment.[1]

  • Executive Summary This paper explores one little examined shift within Soviet system that can be traced through the reception of Western visitors to the USSR during the 1920s-1930s

  • A transnational approach based on new archival materials, it argues, shows how the interwar “pilgrimage to Russia” was about more than just Soviet manipulation and Western utopianism; it was an episode of intense mutual appraisal in which shifting Western and Soviet assertions of superiority and inferiority clashed

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Summary

Introduction

During the 1920s and 1930s over 100,000 foreigners visited the Soviet Union, including several tens of thousands of European and American professionals, scholars, artists, and intellectuals who came to see the Soviet experiment.[1]. Rolland illustrates certain kinds of connections to the USSR that contrast with the distance of both Dreiser and the Arplan rightists: Rolland had been steeped in a non-denominational socialism since the turn of the century He thought his study of the French Revolution and his leadership in European anti-fascist culture gave him special insight into the Soviet Union, and he had extensive links to the Soviet Union through key intermediaries, including his Russian wife, Mariia Kudasheva, and his correspondent of 20 years, Maxim Gorky, who was arguably the most influential architect of Stalinist culture. It implicitly affirmed the superiority of the end-point of his path, that is his embrace of the Soviet order

Conclusions
14 See two very similar treatments the first an expanded version of the second
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