Nathalie Sarraute

Sarraute, Nathalie 

(née Cherniak). Born July 18, 1900, in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. French writer.

Sarraute has lived in France since 1907. She graduated from the faculties of philology and law of the University of Paris. One of the creators of the “new novel,” Sarraute has written Portrait of a Man Unknown (1948), Martereau (1953), The Planetarium (1959), The Golden Fruits (1963; Russian translation, 1969), and Between Life and Death (1968). She contrasts poetical and highly metaphorical descriptions of what she calls “tropisms”—preconscious, unverbalized psychological impulses—with impoverished, stereotyped dialogue. Sarraute strives to re-create “psychological substance,” free of social and personal identity. In theoretical articles collected in her book The Age of Suspicion (1956), she justifies the renunciation of heroes, chronology, and plot, citing the exhausted techniques of the traditional sociopsychological novel. Despite Sarraute’s theoretical tenets, her novels, especially Do You Hear Them? (1972), reflect the mystified consciousness of the French bourgeois intelligentsia and the spiritual crisis of contemporary Western Europe.

WORKS

Tropismes. (Paris), 1971.
Le Silence suivi de la mensonge. (Paris, 1967).
Isma. (Paris, 1970).

REFERENCES

Zonina, L. “V pogone za psikhologicheskoi substantsiei.” Inostrannaia literatura, 1960, no. 2.
Zonina, L. “Novyi roman’ vchera, segodnia.” Voprosy literatury, 1974, no. 11.
Velikovskii, S. “V laboratorii raschelovechivaniia iskusstva.” In the collection O sovremennoi burzhuaznoi estetike, Moscow, 1963.
Balashova, T. Frantsuzskii roman 60-kh gg. Moscow, 1965.
Lakshin, V.”Fiziologiia uspekha.” Novyi mir, 1968, no. 4.
Micha, R. Nathalie Sarraute. Paris, (1966).
Tison-Braun, M. Nathalie Sarraute ou la recherche de l’authenticité. (Paris, 1971).

L. A. ZONINA