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Simone de Beauvoir Studies, Volume 12, 1995 59 FROM MOSCOW TO traces in her writing. We expected to see Beauvoir explore the real meaning of "Moscow" AND BACK: during the 1950s and 60s. That was the time of SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, her liaison with Marxist Claude 1..anzmann, and of Sartre's herculean efforts to preserve his POLITICAL PERIPATETIC precarious relationship to . Studs Terkel, Algren 's good friend, has MARY LAWRENCE TEST, called Chicago a Janus-headed city - the city of LOS ANGELES, CA Jane Addams and of Al Capone.6 Moscow too is MYRNA BELL ROCHESTER a Janus-headed city - the city of Czarist and Communist regimes. Did coincidence alone link PALO ALTO, CA Beauvoir to these two cities and to Algren and Lanzmann, or, more intriguing, if Algren and "Who will play Lenin to Chicago?" Lanzmann had not existed, would Beauvoir have , "Makers of Music," had to invent them? Did she choose both these The New Anvil (April-May 1939)1 relationships as a function of her intellectual development, within the context of her ties to In his October 1945 essay "La fin de la Sartre?7 These are some of the questions we guerre,"2 Jean-Paul Sartre described how the sought to answei: French people greeted the end of \\brld w.i.r II. It * * * was to be a return to the peace, prosperity and In the summer of 1934 in Moscow, at the political grandeur of "Jes annees folles." They First Congress of Soviet Writers, Stalin's culture soon recognized their error: ". .. la fin de la minister, A. A. Zhdanov, spoke to an assembly guerre, c'est tout simplement la fin de cette of international writers, many of whom Beauvoir guerre," Sartre wrote. 3 "Le monde est simplifie: knew. The audience included leftist writers such deux geants se dressent, seuls, et ne se regardent as Paul Nizan, Andre and Clara Malraux, Louis pas d'un bon reil."4 The two giants were, of Aragon and Elsa Triolet, as well as Ilya course, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., and in 1947 Ehrenburg.8 the Cold War set in., At the Congress, Zhdanov proposed a In the years following \\brld War II, new aesthetic canon of socialist realism that broke Simone de Beauvoir found herself drawn to both with nineteenth century "critical realism" or Russia and the U.S. and what the two naturalism, the "mirror held up to nature." It also represented. She toured both countries and came broke with the "non-existent heroes" of the to know two cities well - Chicago and Moscow. naturalist school that included "thieves, police Although Beauvoir herself dated the birth of her sleuths, prostitutes and hooligans."9 However, political consciousness from the outbreak of the Zhdanov did not envision a worker-writer; the war, her colleague and erstwhile biographer, call to proletariat literature -- formerly the Francis Jeanson, wrote that it was " ... done en keystone of Soviet literary policy -- was almost quelque fa<;