Abstract

This study reopens the question of the nature of political commitment and its causes during a time that drastically altered the history of the 20th century, the 1920s and 1930s. Focused largely on a body of texts produced by Japanese female writer Miyamoto Yuriko who returned from a three-year long trip to the Soviet Union in late 1920s as a convinced communist, the study offers a comparison with communism renunciation writings produced by leftist Romanian French writer Panait Istrati, as well as other communist and fellow travelers who experienced the same Soviet realities as Miyamoto but with opposite outcomes, such as French writer André Gide. What made those members of the intelligentsia so passionately embrace or renounce certain political ideologies that ultimately changed the face of modern history?