François Mauriac’s Dialogue With Soviet Reader Within “Ce Que Je Crois” Essay

The story of the making of the essay “Ce que je crois”: the “publisher - author”, the “author - his family”, and the “author - translator” interactions

Unlike Mauriac’s another religious work, the novel “The Life of Jesus Christ” that took 54 years to be translated into Russian (first published in the French “Flammarion” in 1936, it was printed in Russian only in 1991 by the “Mir” Publishing house), his essay “Ce que je crois” came out in the USSR much earlier.

This confessional work by the Catholic author was first published in France, 1962. Its first edition in Russian, translated anonymously, was printed in Brussels in 1979. Mauriac was commissioned to write that essay by the head of the renowned Grasset publishing company who had launched a series of famous persons’ religious confessions, and François Mauriac was the second writer soon after Jean Rostand (1953) who joined that project.  The series turned out quite fruitful, and through it, a number of very famous authors, including Pierre-Henri Simon (1966), Gilbert Cesbron (1970), Maurice Clavel (1975), Jean Vercors (1975), Hervé Bazin (1977), Jean-Marie Domenach (1978), Jean Delumeau (1985), Albert Memmi (1985), Léopold Sédar Senghor (1988), and Monseigneur Gaillot (1996) received a chance to give voice to their creeds. 

From the very outset, the 70 year-old Francois Mauriac, a member of the French Academy of Science since 1933, who in 1958 received the Legion of Honor, envisioned his contribution to the series not only as an authoritative testimony of his faith to some unknown readers. At the beginning of “Ce que je crois” he declares that he dedicates this essay to his grandsons Pyotr Wiazemsky and Gerard Mauriac, meaning them to read it when they turn 16: “Pour mes petits-fils Pierre Wiazemsky et Gérard Mauriac quand ils auront seize ans” (Mauriac, 2015, p. 11). Thus, the outline of his creed, while already a strong testimony of his faith as a practising Christian, is additionally charged with his personal desire to pass it on to his posterity. Surprisingly enough, Russia had become an integral part of the life of the Mauriacs a few years before that: the writer’s daughter Claire married a descendant of the Russian noble dynasty of Wiazemsky, who had fled from the Russian revolution. By the time “Ce que je crois” came out, his grandson Pierre had already turned 13.  

Thus, from the very beginning, by responding to the publisher’s personal request, the author wanted to step into a dialogue with his readers, including his close relatives. Before that essay, Mauriac had been known in the USSR only as an author of prose owing to several Russian translations of his novels available at the time. The first Mauriac’s text published in Russian (the great novel “Thérèse Desqueyroux", which was very dear to the writer himself (Monférier, 2016; O’Dwyer, 2016) was printed in the Soviet Union in 1927 (translated by Maria Abkina) in 1927 - the same year it came out in France. Other Mauriac’s editions published in the Stalin era included “The Knot of Vipers” (Fr. “Le Nœud de vipères”, Russian translation by Novikova (1934) and “The End of the Night” (1936). Also, some fragments of “The Unknown Sea” (Fr. “Les Chemins de la mer”) and “Plongées” were published in the “Foreign literature” journal in 1939 (issues ## 5-6 and # 2 accordingly), those ones translated by Norah Gahl (Dranenko, 2019a; Dranenko, 2019b).

Reception by Soviet critics: from “a foreigner” to “a neighbor”

Ilya Erenburg (1891-1967), a writer, poet and translator from French and Spanish, was the first who noted the talented aspiring French author. In his “Memoirs” Erenburg wrote about their first encounter in 1913: “Francis Jammes sent me to François Mauriac, who writes good novels about bad life. He is a Catholic, but in his books there is much more harsh truth than Christian compassion” (Erenburg, 2005, p. 485). According to Kirnoze and Fomin, “such a reference given to the author of “Thérèse Desqueyroux” by the Soviet writer and translator, sounded prophetic in the 1960s, when the Soviet critics were ready to forgive him his Christian compassion for the sake of the “truth of life” that his books had” (Kirnoze & Fomin, 2010, p. 40). 

In the 1930s, that view was fully supported by Ivan Anisimov in the most comprehensive way. The critic wrote in his prefatory note to the 1936 translated edition of “The End of the Night”: “His novels depict a rigid system of beliefs drenched with the clerical obscurantism [...] He is an arbiter of decay” (Anisimov, 1936).

Even after Mauriac became a Nobel prize winner in 1952, Soviet critics persevered in condemnation of his style from the ideological point of view. Maurice Vaksmaher (1964) criticized Mauriac for graphic naturalism and primitivism in his depiction of life resulting from his Christian convictions: “The truth of life in Mauriac’s works is vivisected and warped by his Christian and didactic ideals: thus, his realism is always smeared by an excessively graphic depiction of “the grime” and his persistent references to the concepts of “sin”, “redemption” and “grace”. However, the critic cannot help pointing out that “the novel “The Knot of Vipers” is arguably the most realistic anti-bourgeois book ever written” (Ibid.). 

Two years after Mauriac’s death, new Russian translations of his several works were released by the “Progress” publishing house in its “Masters of Contemporary Prose” series. In the prefatory note called “The Purgatory of Francois Mauriac”, Leonid Andreev reviews the writer’s works from a less ideologically biased viewpoint, and, consequently, even uses some terms of the Christian religion: “The world of Mauriac’s prose is a Purgatory for his contemporaries, people of the XXth century” (Andreev, 1972). However, while praising Mauriac’s relevance to the time, the critic still focuses solely on his criticism of the bourgeois society. Leonid Andreev calls Mauriac “one of the sharpest critics of the church and the established religion”. In his opinion, Mauriac’s novels are “preoccupied with human obsessions”, any bourgeois family portrayed there is “a “prison cell” and bourgeois ideals just make no sense. Thus, his characters turn into “vipers” (Ibid.).

It was only in the period of the Perestroyka that Viktor Balahonov in his preface “These People are my People, and their History is my History” to a collection of Mauriac’s essays published on the 100th anniversary of the author, noted the writer’s outstanding contribution to literature:  “[Mauriac’s prose] is the legacy that gives us a chance to encompass the human nature in the most profound way. They open up new perspectives on the Western European life. The influence of his works has spread far beyond France. Francois Mauriac is a writer whose art belongs to readers from all countries of the world […]” (Balahonov, 1986). And it was only the Perestroika’s wind of change that made such a positive review possible. 

Discovery of Mauriac as a religious writer

The first translation of the essay “What I Believe” (Fr. “Ce que je crois”) into Russian was made anonymously in Brussels, 1979, and published in the journal Logos (## 3-4). In the post-Soviet time its second impression was printed by the Kievan publishing company “Duh i Litera” in 1996, The most recent Russian edition in Russia came out in 2015 in Nizhnij Novgorod’s “Hristianskaya biblioteka” (Mauriac 2015), and it was translated by Zoya Maslennikova.  

Zoya Afanasievna Maslennikova (born Vlasova; 1923-2008) was a sculptor, painter, poet, writer and translator. She was also an associate of Fr. Alexander Men’ (1935-1990) a Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, and missionary; author of a number of books on theology and history of Christianity and other religions. His educational role in that period, when the Russian Orthodox Church was not publishing religious books by herself and had to apply to European authors for help, was hugely important.  And this is exactly the reason, as Zoya Maslennikova explains in her preface to the translated edition of the novel “The Life of Jesus” (Fr. “La Vie de Jésus”), why Russian readers were so fascinated with Mauriac’s religious works: “The contemporary reader is poorly versed  in religious literature.  Until recently, they even could hardly get hold of the Bible, because the Patriarchy who distributed it, had only a very limited number of copies available […]. This kind of literature remains totally obscure to our readers” [Maslenikova, 1991].

It was no accident that Fr. Alexander Men’ considers the word of Mauriac more than authoritative.  In the first volume of his “History of Religion” he puts him on a par with such renowned writers “protecting spiritual values” as C. Peguy, P. Claudel, G. Greene and A. Saint-Exupery [Men', 1991]. And due to the publicity given to Mauriac by A. Men’, Russian readers started discussing the true-to-life nature of both characters and Gospel allusions of his books. 

Even earlier than that, the literary work of the Catholic writer had been endorsed by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. In 1970, Fr. Alexander Shmeman (1921-1983), one of the foremost XXth century Orthodox theologians, gave an interview for Radio Svoboda at the passing of Mauriac. In 2015, that very speech, under the title “In Memory of Francois Mauriac” became the Preface to the Russian edition of “What I Believe” (Shmeman, 2015). In this way, the religious message of Mauriac becomes a story of freedom in the land of slaves, and the sincerity of the French author becomes the most essential quality one needs to have to fight for freedom: “Mauriac never decorates the man, but neither he ever lies about him. The man is called to freedom, but it turns out the most burdensome gift imaginable [...]. Indeed, the characters in the novels by Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Mauriac are totally free. They are free, since they were created by those authors’ human totality” (Shmeman, 2015, p. 8). Further on, disagreeing with the Soviet critics, the priest stands up in defence of the writer, calling him a successor of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the greatest Russian classical authors: “No one would dare to call Mauriac an “exploiter” or an “obscurantist” [...]. He was the one in the succession line started by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who not only proved the compatibility of faith and art, but also revealed that faith is the deepest source of inspiration for artists” (Shmeman, 2015, p. 7). 

Mauriac as a journalist

Mauriac as a journalist, daily interacting with his readers through his articles, was virtually unknown in the USSR, because they were where he was creating the most complex literary images, and where his “spiritual totality” (“ une tonalité spirituelle ”) really prevailed.  It was exactly the reason why no single work out of that hugely important part of his legacy had ever been translated in the USSR.

But it was exactly through his essays and autobiographical works that Mauriac was able to talk to his reader in a completely straightforward way and crystallize the everyday life, and, in doing so, he always used his word as a weapon to fight for his ideals (Casseville & Touzot 2019; Ruttik, 2019).

For one thing, Mauriac in his journalism keeps paying a special attention to the Soviet Union, sharply criticizing all the things Soviet. In doing so, he makes use of special forms of dialogue, transcending the mundane and the trivial. For instance, he made lots of notes on the personality of Stalin which are second only to those on the great French philosopher Blaise Pascal. Taking into account Mauriac’s philosophical views, Kashlyavik concludes that his attitude to Stalin had much to do with the writer’s hope for the Christian revival that would at some point get started in Russia. He expected such revival to make up for the bloodshed of the Revolution and Stalin’s regime (as cited in Dubnyakova & Mihalova, 2020).

On the other hand, Mauriac keeps on his personal spiritual quest, hoping to find the word of authority in Russia, though he is far from idealizing the history of Russia as did André Gide (Lineva et al. 2017), the “Holy Rus”, or the “Russian drama”. Bearing in mind “The Possessed” by Dostoevsky he remembers the words from “The Brothers Karamazov”: “If God does not exist, one can do as they please” (Mauriac, 1944). Despite that, in Russia, which had seen unthinkable sufferings from the darkened depths of its history and its forests, he is able to recognize the eternal Rus (Ibid.), and a great future laid down for it (Dubnyakova & Mihaylova, 2020). He calls Dostoevsky and Tolstoy his best friends, and deems the former dearer to him than even his favorite author Marseille Proust: “The oeuvres of the Christian writer Dostoevsky go far beyond the best works of Proust, because the former, albeit saw criminals and prostitutes as fallen creatures, but nevertheless able to redeem their sins. I have already written once, that God is totally absent in Proust’s works, and it is truly horrible” (Mauriac, 1944). 

It is exactly the spiritual quest that becomes central in Mauriac’s “What I Believe” (like in all his oeuvres). The essay begins with the words: “Chapter 1. “Point of Departure”: What I believe in is, sadly, not equal to what I know” (Mauriac 2015, p. 15). And in the last chapter “Regrets” he says that he does not need to delete any single line of his book […] (Ibid, p. 135), and formulates the summary of his faith: “To believe means to love” (Ibid., p. 139). The Soviet readers first came upon these words only in the post-Soviet era, and in the 1990s as well as in the 2000s, at the time they start rediscovering Mauriac due to the numerous translated editions that had come out by then.