Gide l’intempestif

Through subtle cues, some of the friends who accompanied Gide to the USSR in 1936 – namely Jacques Schiffrin, Jef Last and Pierre Herbart – made him understand that they feared that the publication of his highly critical travel account (Return from the USSR, November 1936) would be untimely. Gide, for his part, grammatically paints, in the letters he sends shortly after his return from the USSR, his self-portrait as a traveller who cannot fail to tell in the near future what he has seen in the recent past.