“Russian” and “Soviet” in Claude Simon’s Novel “The Invitation” (1986): The Reception of the USSR in the French “New Novel”

The article analyzes Claude Simon’s novel “The Invitation” (1987) in the historical and literary context associated with the writer’s trip to the USSR for the Issyk-Kul Forum. Simon is a 1985 Nobel Prize laureate, an outstanding representative of the French “new novel”. The subject of the study is the image of tsarist and Soviet Russia, images of former splendor and deterioration and anachronism of the Soviet regime. The theme of farewell to Soviet Russia appears in the episodes of the novel describing the meeting of the guests invited to the Forum with the head of state M.S. Gorbachev, and also in the final episode of the changing of the guard at the Mausoleum and a visit to Red Square and burials at the Kremlin wall. The motif of youth and the new Russia is carried out in the descriptions of the General Secretary, who personifies the change in the USSR’s policy. The novel is written in an impersonal manner, without names, but all the participants are recognizable due to the vivid imagery and metaphorical nature of the narrative. An important theme in Simon’s novel is the opposition between the natural life of nature and the vanity of human society. The theme of genuine and inauthentic life reaches its culmination in the episode of the compilation of the Statement of the Forum participants, which Simon refused to sign because of its obvious utopianism. Simon’s novel is a unique attempt at artistic reception of the phenomenon of the USSR in the “new novel”.

Claude Simon, novel “Invitation”, USSR in 1986, Aitmatov, Gorbachev, Issyk-Kul Forum, Statement of the Forum participants