In June 2001, at the initiative of Elena Galtsova, my Russian correspondent in surrealism matters, I first went to Moscow, invited by the Russian Academy of Sciences (the equivalent of our CNRS), to meet the directors of the Maxim Gorky Institute, otherwise called the Institute of World Literature, to examine the modalities of permanent collaboration with the Surrealism Research Center. Then, still in her company, I went to Saint Petersburg, to participate in a colloquium on the image of Russia in French letters. Jean Brun, the undisputed specialist of Marcel Proust, was already there, as well as Russian colleagues who wanted to talk to us about Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. Why not? But was it really necessary, in these places, and at this moment, ten years after the fall of the Stalinist regime, to deal with his essay: Fascist Socialism (1934)? Frankly, I hadn't made such a trip to hear about that. During the discussion that followed, I understood that these speakers took me for a Stalinist communist, which my presentation should absolutely deny. Very opportunely, Elena Galtsova addressed the image of Dostoevsky in Paul Claudel's work... Elena Galtsova, researcher at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor at the State University of Humanities RGGU (Moscow, Russia), Doctor of State in Letters. Author of the book Surrealism and Theater. For Theatrical Aesthetics in French Surrealism, 2012, Moscow, RGGU, 524 p. (in Russian), of more than 150 scientific articles, a large part of which is devoted to French surrealism, to the currents of historical avant-gardes and to Russian and French theater in the 20th century. Director and co-director of about ten collective works and proceedings of colloquia published in Russia and France, including The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Surrealism (Moscow, 2007). Translator: among her translations, of Nadja (1994), The Magnetic Fields (1994, re-ed. 2012), The Anthology of French Surrealism of the 1920s (1994-texts by Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Péret, Leiris, Artaud, Péret, Vitrac, etc.), stories, novels and Eroticism by Georges Bataille (1999, 2006). The proceedings of the Saint Petersburg colloquium were published in 2005, entirely in Russian, in a careful small hardcover volume of 11x17 cm. To my knowledge, it has never been translated into French. Here is the cover and table of contents:

Download my intervention in French

Reproduced text: "Moscow and the Image of Russia in Surrealist Journals", Literature and its Golem. Volume II, pp. 295-319. Coll.: Studies in Literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries, n° 10

Download here: Literature and its Golem. Volume II - Moscow and the Image of Russia in Surrealist Journals (classiques-garnier.com)