The power of the bad example: Louis-Ferdinand Celine and the “genealogy” of the socialist realist literary project (side notes)

This article is devoted to a particular episode in the history of Western-Soviet literary relations in the first half of the twentieth century - the comprehension of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's work by Soviet aesthetic theory. The fact is that his debut novel “Voyage au bout de la nuit”, which was published in mid-October 1932 and became a notable event in the European literary context of the 1930s, almost immediately became a fact of Soviet cultural and socio-political life. The success of the novel became an incentive for the Soviet side, which closely followed the cultural situation in the West through the diplomatic services of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers and the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, to start translation work as soon as possible: it began six months after the Paris publication. Translated in 1934, the text of “Voyage au bout de la nuit” was quickly integrated into the complex context of the formation of the Soviet literary project and the elaboration of the “main creative method”. Literary theorists and critics dubbed the novel a “bad example” against which the “virtues” of Soviet literature could be seen more clearly. Moreover, Celine's text as an example of the “decay of bourgeois realism” served in many ways to prove that Soviet theorists who described the history of Western European literature and culture by contrasting “(petty)-bourgeois” and “proletarian” (“revolutionary”) lines were right. This perspective of reception opened up the diplomatic prospect of a “friendship” with Celine in the role, not of praising Stalin's “socialist reality”, then at least of heralding the imminent demise of the capitalist West.