André Gide's Return from the U.S.S.R.

Extract

In 1934, when it was known that André Gide had turned to Communism, the news excited much attention. Gide had stood for an extreme individualism. Had he not, in a popular phrase, exalted the morals of the aesthetic? Had he not glorified that type of individual merely in order to portray a personality pure and real, beyond all moral ties? Had he not always been in search of truth, in praise of truth, despising all dogma, all belief in the possibility of a traditional authority capable of comprising the truth? And now André Gide, the descendant of an old French family, the symbol of an over-refined intellectualism, had become the follower of revolutionary dogmatic Moscow. Did this fact alone not signify that the bourgeoisie was at the end of its power and influence?

André Gide was a model to all those intellectuals, coming out of the bourgeoisie, to whom the existing order had become so unbearable that they took in earnest the promises of Communism, sometimes even knowing, as Gide knew, that the world of Communism was in reality a contradiction of their own being.