Литературная искренность. Дискуссия о Достоевском и о романе во Франции в конце 1920-х годов

Abstract

Literary sincerity. Discussion about Dostoevsky and the novel in France at the end of the 1920s.

Confession is a peculiar and ancient genre, but after Rousseau’s claim to an individual, inner truth, modern confession lives by paradoxes and borders. It is a conscious monologue that, however, still keeps inside a virtual dialogue; it is a word that is locked in itself, but desperately tries to reach out to others, conscious, however, that this is almost impossible. Dostoevsky’s path begins here: from the painful reclusion of the modern self and the opacity of the self for himself. That is why Dostoevsky was at the core of the discussion about the novel and the literary sincerity that was held in the late 1920s in France around the works of André Gide and Marcel Proust. Both writers, actually, more than once openly acknowledged their debt to the Russian novelist. The article focuses particularly on how the discussion developed at the Paris Franco-Russian Studio, where Dostoevsky’s name sounded constantly, often in connection with the question of sincerity and the new novel. In the Studio the existentialist reading that Gide and his associates of the NRF gave of Dostoevsky has been vehemently refuted, in particular by the writers of the Maritainian area.

Keywords: Dostoevsky, novel theory, literary sincerity, confession, Studio Franco-Russe, Jacques Maritain