| Summary: | This essay is focused on the prefacial discourse in the accounts of travels in the USSR by Georges Duhamel (1927), Luc Durtain (1928), Stefan Zweig (also 1928), Ella Maillart (1932) and André Gide (1936). These prefaces and forewords distinguish between the discourse of travel and on travel (as a genre) on the one hand, and the discourse on the USSR on the other: indeed, while the journey to the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s was a singular experience that inevitably altered the very essence of the journey and thus of its narrative, the authors who will interest us seem eager to ensure that their viatical experience, despite the singular nature of the space crossed, is not entirely political.
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