“Spiritual algebra” and “avant-garde tongue-tiedness”: reception of the French nouveau roman in the journals “Voprosy literatury” and “Inostrannaya literatura” in the 1950-1970s
Автор: Balakireva M.E.
Журнал: Новый филологический вестник @slovorggu
Рубрика: Компаративистика
Статья в выпуске: 2 (69), 2024 года.
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The article analyzes the critical reception of the French nouveau roman in the soviet journals “Voprosy Literatury” and “Inostrannaya literatura” in 1950-1970s. An analysis of the works of Soviet researchers shows how the reception of the French nouveau roman changed over time, how Soviet critical discourse changed. A new literary phenomenon was described extremely negatively during the early years (as “literary nonsense” and an “epistemological masquerade”), but criticism gradually became more supportive and cautiously justified new forms, comparing novels’ complexity with that of “consumers’ literature”, which is devoid of complexity and stands lower in the Soviet novel hierarchy. The nouveau roman was gradually incorporated into the modernist tradition and became the heir of the prose of writers like J. Joyce, V. Woolf, F. Kafka, and M. Proust, going through several stages of legitimization, the final stage being individual, non-journalistic publications of translations. A comparison of articles published in the journals “Voprosy Literatury” and “Inostrannaya literatura” reveals that each journal has its own critical approach and interpretation of the new novel. The “Voprosy Literatury” focuses on the criticism of the new trend, comparing it to the current Soviet novel. Articles in the journal sometimes look like “pamphlets”. The “Inostrannaya literatura” publishes less categorical and more informative articles, which aim to analyze the deep mechanisms behind European culture that made the nouveau roman possible. This comparison allows us to assume differences in the readership of these journals : the external reader for “Questions of Literature”, and the internal reader for “Foreign Literature”.
Nouveau roman, french novel in the ussr, voprosy literatury, inostrannaya literatura
Короткий адрес: https://sciup.org/149146233
IDR: 149146233 | DOI: 10.54770/20729316-2024-2-329