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TWO DECLARATIONS BY ANDRE GIDE
(With introductory notes by Justin O'Brien)
Early this year, less than a month before his death, Andre
Gide received two letters from abroad soliciting
his
opinion on ques–
tions of urgent and international interest.
It
had long been customary
for intellectuals allover the world to turn to Gide for guidance in the
problems that beset us all, until, during the last ten years of his life,
he was submerged under an avalanche of mail. Only by a constant
exercise of the will was he able to reserve essential time for the creative
writing on which he was engaged up to the end. Yet the two appeals
of January 1951 seemed to him, for different reasons, to justify inter–
rupting his work in order to reply with a declaration of principles.
The first letter came from Tokyo and bore the signature of a
Japanese scholar and writer, Mitsuo Nakamura. It began with the
statement that Japan is a country outside the circle of Gide's interests and
the assumption that "Your impression of Japan at present must be
the one left you by the
war
and you would like, if possible, to see that
very country erased from the surface of the globe together with that
painful impression." But the fact remains, says the writer, that Andre
Gide has exerted and continues
to
exert the greatest influence over
the youth
of
Japan, where no native writer enjoys such widespread
prestige. His works have been known in Japan since 1920, and as early as
1933 (when the French were just beginning to
~ssue
his "Complete
Works") a twenty-volume translation was published in Tokyo; today
a new edition, brought up to date by the inclusion of Gide's recent
writings, is beginning to appear simultaneously with a complete trans–
lation
of
his "Journals." Such are the facts which embolden Mr.
Nakamura to ask Andre Gide certain questions in the name of Jap–
anese youth.
His questions are based on the belief that "The value of European
culture lies in its universality, its humanity. These qualities aroused the
desires and active powers of all humanity and wherever humanity
