André Gide's Return From the USSR


Book Description

André Paul Guillaume Gide (22 November 1869 - 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1947). His work "Retour de l' U.R.S.S." (1936) is a simple, yet important testimony to life inside a totalitarian society and the ensuing disillusionment felt by those who believed in the socialist utopia. Gide's informal style allows the reader to travel inside Stalin's Soviet Union and understand the disillusionment that Gide and others felt at seeing hopes dash upon the rocks of reality. It is a must read for anyone interested in learning about totalitarianism from inside a system.




André Gide


Book Description

Sheridan presents a literary biography of one of the most important writers of the 20th century--an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man, whose work was deeply and inextricably entangled with his life. 35 halftones.




Return From The USSR


Book Description

During the 1930s, Gide briefly became a communist, or more precisely, a fellow traveller (he never formally joined the Communist Party). As a distinguished writer sympathising with the cause of communism, he was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet Union of writers. The tour disillusioned him and he subsequently became quite critical of Soviet Communism. This criticism of Communism caused him to lose socialist friends, especially when he made a clean break with it in this book Return From The USSR first published in the 1930's.




Corydon


Book Description

In 1907 Andre Gide began work on a series of Socratic dialogues on the subject of homosexuality and its place in society. These were published piecemeal, without the author's name, in private editions of twelve copies (1911) and twenty-one copies (1920) before a signed, commercial edition finally appeared in France in 1924. In his preface to the first American edition--published in 1950, the year before his death--Gide says: "Corydon remains in my opinion the most important of my books."




If It Die


Book Description

This is the major autobiographical statement from Nobel laureate André Gide. In the events and musings recorded here we find the seeds of those themes that obsessed him throughout his career and imbued his classic novels The Immoralist and The Counterfeiters. Gide led a life of uncompromising self-scrutiny, and his literary works resembled moments of that life. With If It Die, Gide determined to relay without sentiment or embellishment the circumstances of his childhood and the birth of his philosophic wanderings, and in doing so to bring it all to light. Gide’s unapologetic account of his awakening homosexual desire and his portrait of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas as they indulged in debauchery in North Africa are thrilling in their frankness and alone make If It Die an essential companion to the work of a twentieth-century literary master.







The Notebooks of André Walter


Book Description

DIVThis debut work lays bare the early brilliance and philosophical conflicts of André Gide, a towering figure in French literature/divDIV /divDIVAndré Gide, one of the masters of French literature, captures the essence of the philosophical Romantic in this profoundly personal first novel, completed when he was just twenty years old. Drawing heavily on his religious upbringing and private journals, The Notebooks of André Walter—with its “white” and “black” halves—tells the story of a young man pining for his forbidden love, cousin Emmanuelle. But his evocative memories and devoted yearnings, carefully crafted through quotations and diary excerpts, lead only to madness and death./divDIV /divDIVAnnotated with footnotes from translator and scholar Wade Baskin, this story within a story offers a unique portrait of the artist as a young man, as it reveals the key themes of self-analysis and moral conscience that Gide explores in his mature works./div




Notes on Chopin


Book Description

DIVAn inspiring discourse on the power of music from one of the twentieth century’s most important figures, André Gide/divDIV /divDIVAndré Gide, one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century and a devoted pianist, invites readers to reevaluate Frédéric Chopin as a composer “betrayed . . . deeply, intimately, totally violated” by a music community that had fundamentally misinterpreted his work. As a profound admirer of Chopin’s “promenade of discoveries,” Gide intersperses musical notation throughout the text to illuminate his arguments, but most moving is Gide’s own poetic expression for the music he so loved./divDIV /divDIVThis edition includes rare pages and fragments from Gide’s journals, which relate to Chopin and music./div




Prometheus Illbound


Book Description




Showcasing the Great Experiment


Book Description

Showcasing the Great Experiment provides the most far-reaching account of Soviet methods of cultural diplomacy innovated to influence Western intellectuals and foreign visitors. Probing the declassified records of agencies charged with crafting the international image of communism, it reinterprets one of the great cross-cultural and trans-ideological encounters of the twentieth century.