Les pérégrinations de Gide et de Krleža : les Russies ou les lignes de fuite du référentn (Retour de l’U.R.S.S., Retouches à mon « Retour de l’U.R.S.S. » et L’Excursion en Russie) ; The peregrinations of Gide and Krleža: Russians or reference flight routes (return from the U.S.S., Return to my “Return from the U.S.S.” and “Excursion to Russia”)

The perspective of the distortion of reality in writing introduce the issue of a genre apparently “condemned” to the reproduction of reality “as it is”, to the blind enslavement to the referential illusion – literary travelogues. Both authors, one French, André Gide (1869-1951), and the other Croatian, Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981), wrote about their USSR, retelling the story of a Barthesian fascination that doesn’t necessarily lead to disappointment. The infatuation creates a reality that isn’t one, but that doesn’t confine it to a mere exoticism. The differences between the two texts are both structural and ideological, cultural and historical. Hence both U.R.S.S. constructed by the text are necessarily individual and other, somewhere in between a utopian and a heterotopian (Foucault) discourse, both figures of the “mobled queen” of Hamlet. Reality, constructed and deconstructed, remains eminently unreal.