Reception of the French “nouveau roman” in the USSR in the 1950s-1970s: recognition of the new form and the role of magazines “Voprosy literatury” and “Inostrannaya literatura”

The article analyzes the critical reception of the French nouveau roman in the Soviet magazines “Voprosy Literatury” and “Inostrannaya literatura” in 19501970s. The works of soviet critics published in these magazines demonstrate that the reception of nouveau roman changed over time because of historical transformation, desire to overpass cliches of Stalinism in critical literature, evolution of literature in France where new, more radical, forms of novel were born. The reception of novels also depended on the magazine in which the texts appeared. In “Voprosy Literatury” the articles were more polemic, rather subjective and similar in some ways to pamphlets because this magazine represented an official critical view of foreign literature and was addressed to “external” reader living aboard. In “Inostrannaya literatura” the articles were more explanatory, neutral, and texts tended to integrate new novel forms into the history of French literature in order to make the new forms legal. Therefore, the reader of “Inostrannaya literatura” is expected to be the “inner” reader living in USSR. Gradually, new forms gained legitimacy: soviet critics tried to find “a gap” in the theories of nouveau roman’s authors and compare them to realist and socialist realist novels, making them less marginalized by their practice and thus clearer and more intelligible: as such, “ultrapsychology” of Sarraute becomes condemnation of the petty bourgeois world; philosophical search of Butor reveals collisions between a character and “the corruptible western world”.