Andrew Sobanet is a Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of politics and literature. His research interests include the twentieth-century novel, testimony, mass media, and European history. He is the author of Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) and Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Indiana University Press, 2018). He has also published widely on Vichy France. Since 2011, he has been associate editor of the journal Contemporary French Civilization. He served as chair of the Department of French and Francophone studies from 2009 to 2015 and again in 2018-19. Additionally, he served as convenor of Georgetown’s Faculty of Languages and Linguistics in 2014-15.
Generation Stalin traces Joseph Stalin’s rise as a dominant figure in French political culture from the 1930s through the 1950s. Andrew Sobanet brings to light the crucial role French writers played in building Stalin’s cult of personality and in disseminating Stalinist propaganda in the international Communist sphere, including within the USSR. Based on a wide array of sources—literary, cinematic, historical, and archival—Generation Stalin situates in a broad cultural context the work of the most prominent intellectuals affiliated with the French Communist Party, including Goncourt winner Henri Barbusse, Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, renowned poet Paul Eluard, and canonical literary figure Louis Aragon. Generation Stalin arrives at a pivotal moment, with the Stalin cult and elements of Stalinist ideology resurgent in twenty-first-century Russia and authoritarianism on the rise around the world.