Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception 0875804705, 9780875804705

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Citation
Introduction
1. Pre-Revolutionary Discoveries of America
2. Post-Revolutionary Columbuses
3. Automobile Journeys of the 1930s
4. Recurrent Subtexts and Motifs in American Travelogues
5. Reverse American Travelogues
Conclusion: From Dante’s Inferno to Odysseus’s Ithaca
Appendix 1. Lexical and Grammatical Neologisms in Pilniak’s OK
Appendix 2. The Transatlantic Journey
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York

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Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception

Milla Fedorova

NI U P r e s s DeKalb, IL

© 2013 by Northern Illinois University Press Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115 Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper All Rights Reserved Design by Shaun Allshouse Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fedorova, Milla. Yankees in Petrograd, bolsheviks in New York : America and Americans in Russian literary perception / Milla Fedorova. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978 0 87580 470 5 (cloth) — ISBN 978 1 60909 084 5 (e book) 1. United States—Description and travel—In literature. 2. Americans in literature. 3. Authors, Russian—Travel—United States. 4. Travelers’ writings, Russian—19th century—History and criticism. 5. Travelers’ writings, Russian—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PG2988.U6F43 2013 891.709’35873 dc23 2012046923

To my family: Victor Joukov, Maria Stoianova, Svetlana Fedorova, and Grigorii Fedorov with gratitude for their care and patience.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Citation xi Introduction

Part I

3

Bolsheviks in New York

1.

Pre-Revolutionary Discoveries of America 25 Korolenko and Gorky

2.

Post-Revolutionary Columbuses 52 Esenin and Mayakovsky

3.

Automobile Journeys of the 1930s 73 Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov

Part II

T h e A m e r i ca n T e xt o f Ru s s ia n L iter at ure

4.

Part III

Recurrent Subtexts and Motifs in American Travelogues

Yan k e e s i n P et r o g rad

5. Reverse American Travelogues

193

Conclusion: From Dante’s Inferno to Odysseus’s Ithaca

Appendix 1 Lexical and Grammatical Neologisms in Pilniak’s OK 227 Appendix 2 The Transatlantic Journey 233 Notes 235 Bibliography Index 291

273

218

101

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help of many people— colleagues, teachers, students, and editors—to whom I am sincerely grateful. I am blessed with wonderful colleagues at the Department of Slavic Languages at Georgetown University—David Andrews, Svetlana Grenier, George Mihaychuk, Olga Meerson, and Marcia Morris, who were always there for me to discuss the ideas of the book, to read various parts of my manuscript, and to provide page-by-page insights. I thank, above all, Marcia Morris, who has been my guardian angel during the entire process of writing, the first reader of everything I have written, and strong supporter at every stage of my work. The input of my life-long teachers—Elena Vigdorova, Olga Sventsitskaia, Nadezhda Shapiro, and Sergei Kormilov—into my scholarly work has been invaluable. I am indebted to all my colleagues who generously provided scholarly feedback on the project. I am extremely grateful to Peter Rollberg and Deborah Martinsen for their incredible input into the book’s content and style, and their interest in my concepts, as well as their attention to detail. I would like to thank Caryl Emerson for her encouragement and valuable advice on the manuscript in its early stages. Special thanks to Penelope Burt, who edited the first draft of the book. I am grateful to Ronald Meyer and Olga Nedelkovich for their support. In the process of writing, I was inspired by Olga Meerson’s philosophy of various characters’ points of view as the author’s poetic means developed in her book Personalizm kak poetika, as well as her analysis of taboos in Dostoevsky’s novels (Dostoevsky’s Taboos). Throughout the years of writing this book, I presented its various ideas at multiple conferences, and enjoyed the privilege of discussing them with scholars—colleagues and friends—whom I would like to thank for their inspiring observations: Carol Apollonio, Julia Vaingurt, Evgenia Ivanova, Anna Arustamova, Eugenia Afinoguenova, and Polina Barskova. My special thanks go to my friends and fellow-students who have been amazing interlocutors during my entire scholarly life: Elena Ostrovskaia, Yuri Kagarlitsky, and Leonid Zubarev. My book originated in two eponymous courses I taught at Georgetown University in Russian and in English, and my gratitude goes to my students for their engagement in discussions and their incisive comments. I am grateful to Georgetown University for awarding me a semester off teaching duties, in which

x

A c k n o w l e dgments

I wrote significant portions of my book, and for three summer grants given by the Graduate School and the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics. Special thanks are due to the excellent editors of Northern Illinois University Press, especially Amy Farranto who supported me throughout the publication process. The NIUP reviewers have been extremely knowledgeable and attentive. I am also grateful to the very helpful librarians and the staff of the Library of Congress, and the libraries and archives in which I worked in Moscow (the Russian State Library, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), and Mayakovsky Museum). My debts to my loving and patient family are very deep, since I have not always been there for them, while they always have been there for me. I am dedicating this book to them: my ever supportive husband and insightful interlocutor, Victor Joukov, my daughter and friend, Maria Stoianova, and my caring parents, Svetlana and Grigorii Fedorov.

Note on Transliteration, Translation,, and Citation

In transliterating Cyrillic into Latin, I have followed the Library of Congress system, simplified form (as in SEEJ). Soft signs in proper names have been omitted. I have used a modified transliteration system, reflecting common usage, for the names of well-known authors. Thus, Gor’kii appears as Gorky, Gogol’ as Gogol, Maiakovskii as Mayakovsky, Trotskii as Trotsky, Pil’niak as Pilniak, Il’f as Ilf, etc. When quoting secondary sources, I use their transliteration. The references to Pilniak come from “O’kei: Amerikanskii roman,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976). Unless otherwise indicated, translations from the Russian are mine, although citations to Korolenko’s, Bogoraz’s, Gorky’s, Esenin’s and Mayakovsky’s autobiographical travelogues come from America Through Russian Eyes, 1874–1926, edited and translated by Olga Peters Hasty and Susan Fusso (New Haven, London: Yale University, 1988); the references to Ilf and Petrov come from Little Golden America, translated from the Russian by Charles Malamuth (New York: Arno Press, 1974). These sources are quoted in the text parenthetically by page number.

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Yankees in Petrograd,, Bolsheviks in New York

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Introduction

What Is to Be Done? one of the protagonists feigns suicide yet goes to America. Conversely, in Fedor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the antagonist, Svidrigailov, announces: “I’m going to America” yet commits suicide. When in America—“on the other shore,” as Russians sometimes put it— Russian émigré characters and writers often feel that, although they have now acquired a new life, this life approximates a posthumous experience. All their previous relationships and obligations seem irrelevant. When, for example, a merchant in Vladimir Bogoraz’s novella Avdotia and Rivka (1902) tries to persuade Avdotia, an émigré, to marry him in New York even though she still has a husband back home, he argues: “Russia is there, and what’s here is America. It’s as if you had died and found yourself in the Other World.”1 Some eighty years later, the writer Sergei Dovlatov, an émigré himself, confesses that for him America offers the hope of a revitalized postmortem experience, i.e., of living in a new world without dying in the old one. These literary examples hail from different periods but share an identical symptomatic perception of America. Although the country across the ocean had already begun to acquire concrete historical features in the Russian mind by the last quarter of the eighteenth century,2 connotations of the Other World, the land on the other side of earthly existence, still lurk in the background of literary texts about the New World. This mythological perception of the New World is not exclusively Russian. From the moment of its discovery, America has offered a universal object of projection for Europeans. A utopia finally located, it represents the materialization of mankind’s dreams about the Golden Age and Paradise. There is, as Sigmund Skard notes, something fantastic about the image of America in different cultures, and utopian images like the “paradisiac city of Philadelphia” can be found, for example, in early English texts about

In Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s

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America.3 But in Russia the mythological concept gained a specificity and a concrete form that persisted through many eras and appeared in the works of very different authors, and thus deserves special scholarly attention. As we know, each country, in conformity with its geographical location, cultural traditions and the demands of the historical moment, discovers its own New World.4 Russia has always claimed a special association with America, a parallel recognized by other nations, because of the two countries’ relative youth, rapid development over the last two centuries, vast territories, and social experimentation, not to mention the fact that Russia literally discovered America from the other side, by crossing the Bering Strait. Thus, we can view Peter the Great’s words commanding discoverers to ascertain “whether Asia meets America” (skhoditsia li Aziia s Amerikoi) as a trope defining Russian-American cultural studies. Perhaps no other country has so often compared itself with and contrasted itself to America (and provoked other countries to make such comparisons)5 as Russia. Indeed, Russians today still perceive the world primarily as bipolar and believe that its fate depends on Russian–American relations, even if for other countries—and for America herself—the situation might seem different. “The American text” of Russian literature, like “the Petersburg text” discussed by Vladimir Toporov,6 exhibits two modes, one positive, one negative. The conception of America as the Other World in its idyllic, paradisal version is present, for example, in Alexander Herzen’s early drama William Penn (1839), which refers to America as “the promised land.” By contrast, the macabre otherworldliness of the proverbial “land beyond the ocean” is made explicit in the titles of travelogues written by Russian radicals, such as Vladimir Korolenko’s “Fabrika smerti” (Factory of Death) or Maxim Gorky’s “Gorod zheltogo d’iavola” (City of the Yellow Devil). Significantly, the most influential literary texts of the nineteenth–early twentieth centuries belong to this second mode. As Hans Rogger notes: “Most of Russia’s most important and influential thinkers and writers— Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Herzen, and the Slavophiles; Populists and Marxists…came to America, whether in thought or in person, with negative preconceptions or ready to be disenchanted.”7 The present book studies this myth of America as the Other World at the moment of transition from its Russian to its Soviet version. While in prerevolutionary texts America-in-opposition-to-Russia could appear as either utopian or dystopian, in Soviet times, the paradigm officially shifted toward a binary opposition: the Soviet Union as socialist Paradise vs. America as Hell. However, in popular thinking, the mass media and fiction, the positive mode still existed and, in the 1920s, paradoxically, even flourished.

Introduction

5

The material on which I base my study comprises a curious phenomenon of the waning nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—pilgrimages to America by prominent Russian writers who then created travelogues. The writers’ missions usually consisted of two parts: the physical journey, which most of the writers considered as ideologically significant (except perhaps Korolenko), and the literary fruit of the pilgrimages. Symptomatically, during this period America became an especially crucial point of attraction for Russians who played key roles in shaping the identity of the new Soviet state (Leon Trotsky,8 Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky). It seems that it was the transatlantic republic rather than the Old World that served as the crucial point of departure in this self-identification, or rather, this ideological creation of the self-identity of the Soviet state.9 As Alexander Etkind notes, many Russians traveled to European countries like Germany, but they created nothing comparable in artistic significance to the literary accounts of American journeys.10 While I concentrate my analysis on the most influential travelogues, I study them against the background of lesserknown texts dealing with the American theme. Russia’s complex attitude to America is reflected in the spectrum of meanings conveyed by the expressions “the Russian America(n)” and “the American Russia(n)” in different periods. Following the expeditions of Bering and Chirikov, Russians christened their settlements in North America “Russian America.” In 1799, Paul I issued a decree founding a monopolistic Russian-American company that would maintain a Russian presence in the Aleutian Islands and in North America. Some thirteen years later, Fort Ross was founded as an outpost of Russian trade in California. In 1867, the Russian-American company was liquidated, but Russian settlements, including various sects and utopian communities, still represented “Russia within America.” “Russian Americans” was a common name for emigrants from Russia: before the October Revolution, they fled the autocratic tsarist regime; after 1917, they fled the new Soviet one. Boris Tageev’s novel, simply titled Russkii amerikanets (A Russian American, 1926), tells the story of one such emigrant family. With the growth of industrialization in Russia, the desire to catch up with and surpass America, to learn from its experience and “Americanize” production, “Russian Americans” became a new media cliché, commonly applied to the most efficient and disciplined workers and engineers.11 This stereotype became so popular that satirical journals found it necessary to mock the excessive reverence for America: in a Krokodil sketch, for example, factory directors implement American methods by borrowing from the “capitalist lifestyle”—American shoes, a black chauffeur, coffee with

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condensed milk—and are quickly arrested by the Revolutionary Tribunal.12 The revolutionary poet Mayakovsky’s claim “I, the poet, am more American than the most American American”13 demonstrates the ambiguity of associations connected with America during the mid-1920s. Over time, Russian and American relations underwent significant changes. At the end of the nineteenth century, opposition to the Russian autocracy and bureaucracy grew in the United States.14 However, although in 1904 America welcomed the revolutionary radical Ekaterina BreshkoBreshkovskaia (“Grandmother of the Russian Revolution”), Gorky’s mission in support of the Bolshevik party in 1906 turned into a disaster. By that time, Nicholas II’s promise of constitutional changes had dampened American sympathy for the revolutionary movement. In 1911, the United States abrogated the 1832 trade treaty with Russia because of the latter’s discrimination policy against the Jews. After the October Revolution, during Russia’s Civil War, U.S. troops supported the White Army. For more than a decade, the United States refused to officially recognize the new Soviet Union, and there were no diplomatic relations. Nevertheless, the 1920s represented a period of “Soviet romance” with America. Commercial relations flourished, and Amtorg [abbreviation for “American Trade”] represented the Soviet Union in America. In 1921–23, the American Relief Administration (ARA) organized extensive aid to Russian areas devastated by famine, which the Soviet Union distrustfully accepted. (The term “American aid” has ironic connotations in Russia, and is used, for example, in the game of Preference when, in exchange for temporary aid, the “helpers” take all the cards of the one assisted.) While actively helping the “former” people, i.e., emigrants escaping from the new regime, America also welcomed many Soviet workers and engineers who wished to adopt its modern technologies for their own factories. However, by 1933, when diplomatic relations were finally established between the two countries, actual relations had begun to deteriorate, and the positive connotations of America in the Russian press radically dropped off. At the same time, the dizzying success of the first years of Soviet industrialization during the very period when the United States plunged into the Depression caused many in America to look for alternative economic methods. Throughout these transitional years, mutual visits by writers, critics, workers, and engineers continued and frequently produced travelogue texts. Scholars of the genre have noted that, because travel accounts compare and contrast the new reality with the familiar one left behind, the travelogue is as much an instrument for studying one’s self as it is a prism for exploring the Other.15 The distinguishing feature of American travelogues written by

Introduction

7

Russians is the high degree of focus on the self: what the travelers look for, and inevitably find, is their own country. Perhaps most strikingly, most of these texts are stories of a non-meeting with America, of not seeing the New World for what it is. Instead, we find a literary model representing an ideological construct. Thus, I suggest that Russian travelogues about America can be seen as a particular type of narrative that ultimately owes less to firsthand impressions than to the framework imposed by literary tradition and its attendant rhetorical demands. In other words, the travelers read America rather than saw it. Ilf and Petrov, for example, write: “We glided over the country, as over the chapters of a long, entertaining novel, repressing in ourselves the legitimate desire of the impatient reader to take a look at the last page” (107). The America they observed must have seemed reminiscent of a literary America they already knew. Indeed, prerevolutionary and Soviet travelogues constitute a text replete with references to Hell and suspiciously reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. Such literary meditations of foreign reality are broadly characteristic for the Russian travel writer. As Orlando Figes observes, for example, the Europe described in Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler became a “mythical realm which later travelers, whose first encounter with Europe had been through reading his work, would look for but never really find.”16 As a consequence, several possible approaches for analyzing the American travelogue present themselves: one can study them within the broad generic context of literary travelogues, within the context of Russian travelogues abroad, or within the context of European travelogues about America. All these frameworks obtain. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” quickly became an exemplary Russian text about a journey abroad, in which Russia is both likened to and contrasted with foreign lands. Dickens’s American Notes (1842) were widely known in Russia. Gorky compares his perception with Dickens’s and refers to his “spitting Americans.” The list of intertextual connections and echoes could be significantly extended. Knut Hamsun enjoyed immense popularity in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his book The Cultural Life of Modern America (1889), he expressed anti-American views that are very similar to those of Russian travelogues. Hamsun deplores the discrepancy between America’s admirable social principles and her actual day-to-day practice, and he regrets that abstract liberty conduces to concrete liberties. He ascribes this gap to the nature of the American populace, which consists largely, in his view, of criminals and newcomers. Gorky considered Hamsun one of the greatest artists of his time,17 and his impressions of America recall Hamsun’s. Both Gorky and Hamsun are anti-urbanists. Even

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though they cannot help admiring American energy, they detect something suspiciously mechanistic in it. Similarly, Pilniak, who mocks American patriotism, equating it with ignorance and neglect of other regions of the world, seems to quote directly from Hamsun. Significantly, Hamsun himself was strongly influenced by Dostoevsky, so one may suspect that Dostoevsky’s image of America as the Other World affected Hamsun and added retrospectively to his impressions of the country. This cycle of mutual influences, as well as Hamsun’s importance in forming the Russian view of America, however, deserve their own discrete treatment, the more so as both America and Russia are significant loci in Hamsun’s biography and writings. A student of the vast material on Russian writers’ American journeys inevitably must choose a focus. Later in this introduction, I will offer a brief overview of important European texts that contributed to the earlier picture of America. But, as Olga Peters Hasty and Susanne Fusso confirm, by the end of the nineteenth century the Russian image of America had come to be based increasingly on Russian texts about America.18 Therefore, in the main body of this book, I will focus on the phenomenon of Russian writers’ American travelogues per se, with their invariants and modifications, and will draw on only the most crucial subtexts, such as Dante and Gogol, which are indispensable for understanding them. I claim that the American travelogues written by Russians, which I will henceforth call “American travelogues,” constitute a distinct type of narrative. While it is impossible for a researcher of pre-Soviet and early Soviet literature to ignore writers’ ideological determinism and censorship restrictions, the primary focus of this book will be on the literary representation of ideological matters. While the transformation of the American image in the Russian mind has attracted historians (for example, Frederick C. Barghoorn; in our days, Robert V. Allen and Norman E. Saul),19 there is currently no literary study of the American travelogue narrative. There are, however, several important works that treat various aspects of the topic; these include Alexander Etkind’s Tolkovanie puteshestvii. Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (The Interpretation of Journeys. Russia and America in Travelogues and Intertexts), Valentin Kiparsky’s English and American Characters in Russian Fiction, and Charles Rougle’s Three Russians Consider America: America in the works of Maksim Gor’kij, Aleksandr Blok, and Vladimir Majakovskij. Etkind explores the mutual reception of America and Russia through numerous case studies, which he draws from a variety of epochs and which present a motley picture of the countries’ mutual attraction. Kiparsky builds his research around English and American characters of

Introduction

9

various social strata and occupations in Russian literature. Rougle deals with images of America in the works of three famous Russians (Gorky, Blok, and Mayakovsky) and predicts the emergence of broader studies.20 In addition, a recent study of the “American world” in nineteenth-century Russian literature (Anna Arustamova, Russko-amerikanskii dialog XIX veka: istorikoliteraturnyi aspekt [The Russian-American Dialogue of the Nineteenth Century: the Historic and Literary Aspect, 2008]) uncovers many lesserknown examples of earlier American texts. Comer Vann Woodward and Richard Ruland briefly discuss Russian travelogues in the context of European myth-making about America.21 The numerous articles and books devoted to particular writers’ American experience will be referred to in the relevant chapters. Among the most recent and helpful publications is Anne Nesbet’s “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell: What Bulgakov and Eizenshtein Learned about Space from Il’f and Petrov’s America.”22 For the purposes of this study, I posit three major stages in the development of the American travel narrative of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. First, we have Korolenko’s and Gorky’s early, prerevolutionary travelogues, which are characterized by the socialist-oriented travelers’ disillusionment with the forms taken by American democracy in everyday life. This disillusionment, as I have indicated, was predetermined by the travelers’ literary predecessors as well as by their own political views. During the second stage, immediately following the 1917 October Revolution, American travelogues are inspired both by attempts to establish a new Soviet identity vis-à-vis America-as-Other and by a search for what might be borrowed from America to build the new Soviet state. For Esenin and Mayakovsky, the most significant of the post-revolutionary travelers, the creation of the American text becomes, in part, a matter of literary rivalry between poets. Yet despite their differences in poetic vision, both writers do agree on the paradoxical backwardness and provincialism of America. They admire the externals of American technology but criticize the social order and narrow-mindedness that underlie this industrial advancement. They nonetheless believe that it would be beneficial to introduce machines into the human Soviet state, where there could be no danger of concomitantly introducing inhumanity. In the third stage, Pilniak’s and Ilf and Petrov’s 1930s travelogues are less rhetorical than earlier exemplars because Soviet ideology has already been stabilized back home in the Soviet Union. Accordingly, the revolutionary pathos evident in texts of the second stage has become milder. Third-stage travelers undertake the most extensive journeys, exploring America by automobile, and they create a wider, more analytical picture of America.

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Between the pre-revolutionary, post-revolutionary, and Soviet periods, a significant semantic shift occurs in the Russian perception of America. Korolenko and Gorky associate America with urbanism and search its cities for the genuine America. Esenin and Mayakovsky claim that American urbanism is provincial. Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov make the association between America and provincialism the focal point of their journey; they search for the real America beyond the urban realm in America’s small “one-storied” towns and villages. Of course, neither Korolenko nor Gorky “discovered America” for the Russian reading public, and even their travelogues echo the previous tradition. As Rogger remarks, “By the late 1800s, it was virtually impossible for any well-read traveler to discover America afresh, to come to it without the baggage accumulated over the century by Western as well as Russian observers and critics.”23 But other scholars have studied the nascent nineteenth-century perception of America as Russia’s transatlantic counterpart,24 so I will review the question only cursorily. Both the positive and the negative images of America that we see in Russian texts are, to a great extent, determined by a search for the ideal. Even now, in the twenty-first century, Russia measures herself against America in terms of economic and social advancement. American culture serves as a source of intense borrowing in a wide range of genres, from Washington Irving’s romantic novellas to Hollywood movies, even though American mass culture is often the object of vehement high-brow criticism.25 Traditionally, Russians have viewed American governmental institutions and American technological advancement as both blame- and praiseworthy. Russian thinkers widely discussed the liberal principles of American social life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, they shifted focus to practical implications, i.e., to the intensive industrialization fomented by an aggressive capitalism. In the texts of the late eighteenth century, Russians generally portrayed America in a positive light, as a young, rapidly developing country, and Russian enlighteners glorified the new republic as a beacon of liberty. Nonetheless, they criticized the persistence of slavery as well as expansionist violence against Native Americans. Chaadaev and Chernyshevsky continued to nurture these critiques in the nineteenth century, and similar denunciations survived well into Soviet times. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian views of America derived from European accounts of transatlantic journeys; from American literature in the original and in translation (especially Irving, Cooper, Stowe, and Whitman); and from discussions of America in the Russian

Introduction

11

press and Russian literature. These textual sources determined Russians’ own accounts of their American journeys to a greater degree than did their actual experience.26 Various European portrayals of America have influenced both the positive and the negative modes of Russian literature’s American narrative. The French Enlightenment contributed to the image of America as an idyllic land of noble savages. Rousseau admired the natural simplicity and purity of Native Americans; Montaigne claimed that a real Golden Age, surpassing even the virtues of Plato’s Republic, could be found in America. Chateaubriand, who was much more influenced by this Enlightenment tradition than by his actual journey to America in 1791, shaped the romantic image of the noble savage for many countries, including Russia, for decades to come. While Europeans ultimately disposed of Native Americans’ Golden Age, the new American society, built on principles of freedom and mutual respect,27 continued to be perceived as a fresh start for humankind. In a similar transmutation, the qualities of Native Americans as noble savages were partially transferred onto white settlers. Marcus Cunliffe deftly summarizes the positive lineaments of the European construct of America: America as “Earthly Paradise”; America as “the Land of the Noble Savage”; America as “the Land of Liberty”; and America as “the Land of Democracy.”28 These images attracted German romanticists who, as Ruland remarks, “some time about 1815 turned to America as an example of the model commonwealth.”29 Ludwig, Chamisso, and Lenau, all of whom were known in Russia, contrasted a youthful America to an ossified Europe. Goethe, a writer essential for the Russian literary tradition, felt a similar pull from a vibrant young America whose destiny was not yet predetermined. However, although his Wilhelm Meister contemplates going to America in search of freedom and social activity, he ultimately remains in Germany, claiming—in ways that unexpectedly anticipate future Soviet travelers—that the real America can be found at home. These positive images, purveyed, on the one hand, by the French enlighteners and, on the other, by German menof-letters, inspired the Russian Decembrists. However, as Cunliffe aptly remarks, the positive aspects of the Europeancrafted American myth also had their antitheses. The downside of America’s novelty and freshness was its alleged ignorance, its lack of a refined culture and a historical memory. The Land of Liberty was perceived as “the Land of Libertinism.” Democracy led to the tyranny of the masses, as the purposeful and energetic character of Americans combined with their preoccupation with materiality. America’s technological advancement suggested a mechanistic heart.

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These negative stereotypes also influenced Russians, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the rise of urbanism and industrialism amplified the ambiguity of the American image. But even earlier, during the Enlightenment, the Russian image of America was informed by sources such as the Abbé Raynal’s A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, which condemned colonization and disparaged America’s white settlers as barbarous. And although America embodied a dream destination for the late romantics’ flight from Europe, their earlier confreres treated it with reservation, suspecting that it harbored a spiritual void.30 Heine fretted about the tyranny of the populace, an aspect of American social life that also alarmed Pushkin. Tieck feared “the industrial spirit” of America. English writers popular in Russia often treated America ironically: Dickens, in the gruesome American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844) and American Notes, mocked American ignorance and materialism. Sometimes, the same writer contributed to both the positive and the negative mode. For example, Stendhal, who in his younger years enthusiastically supported the ideas of republicanism he associated with America, later condemned its commercialism and ignorance. Among the myriad European subtexts that informed Russian notions of America, the most influential was arguably Democracy in America (1835),31 in which Alexis de Tocqueville formulated a crucial concept: the future of humankind will be decided by two nations, America and Russia. Although this idea had existed in the Russian mind before de Tocqueville (we see it, for example, in Pavel Svinin’s Opyt zhivopisnogo puteshestviia po Severnoi Amerike [A Picturesque Voyage in North America, 1815], or in Vilgelm Kiukhelbeker’s “Evropeiskie pis’ma” [European Letters, 1820]), the French intermediary was especially significant for Russian public discourse. Unfortunately, de Tocqueville’s interpretation had an important side note that was often overlooked in Russia: while democracy and freedom guide America, tyranny and servitude dominate Russia. Etkind has demonstrated the paradoxical reception of de Tocqueville’s formulations: interpreted in various ways by Russian thinkers of varying ideological persuasions, de Tocqueville was easily adapted to differing, and sometimes contrasting, rhetorical goals. The idea of a unique Russian destiny appealed to both Slavophiles and Westernizers. The Slavophiles believed that America was not destined to play a role in history similar to Russia’s, even though both countries were young and rapidly developing. Peter Kireevskii based his denial of America’s role on its remoteness, both geographical and political, from Europe and

Introduction

13

on the limitations of a culture built on the supremacy of individualism. Konstantin Aksakov anchored his objections in the sheer existence of the political institution of a state invented by humans (as opposed to a divinely imposed autocracy). Ivan Aksakov developed his brother’s ideas and interpreted the American Civil War as a cruel demonstration of the tragic political extremes that obtain even in a democratic state. The Slavophiles opposed American urbanism to the organic character of the Russian village, American individualism to Russian natural collectivism (sobornost’), American rationality, practicality, and secularism to Orthodox Christianity’s spirituality. Although such negativism is to be expected from the Slavophiles, it is surprising how writers and social thinkers who held very different positions from the Slavophiles seem to echo their view of America. Both Slavophiles and Westernizers, who were philosophical opponents, were equally critical of America’s relationship to Europe and Russia. The Slavophiles saw America as the crown of European civilization, evidence of what Kireevskii deemed to be the Western model of development’s failed social experiment. In the Westernizers’ view, young America did not possess the essential positive qualities of old European civilizations, although it retained and developed the materialism and egoism so characteristic of them. For example, Herzen, a Westernizer of the older generation who in his early years had associated America with his hopes for an idyllic social organization, later warned against the social despotism of the new nation. His resentment of de Tocqueville for lumping Russia and America together in terms of their similar roles might have come from a Slavophile: “Where in America is the start of a future evolution to be found? It is a cold and calculating country. Russia’s future, however, is without limit—I believe in her progressiveness.”32 Indeed, Herzen’s famous remark about Slavophiles and Westernizers—“Like…a two-headed eagle [the Russian national emblem], we looked in different directions, while a single heart beat within us”—is especially true, when the heart in question represents Russian interests and when both Slavophile and Westernizer heads look in the same direction—toward America. As Rougle has pointed out, by the end of the nineteenth century, America “survived as an ideal in more moderate political groups.”33 But Russian radicals—populists and, later, Marxists—inherited the Slavophiles’ nationalistic enthusiasms.34 Peter Lavrov, one of the most prominent Populists, disparaged the United States as “the Republic of Humbug” and condemned its governmental institutions. Russian radicals, many of whom were agrarian socialists, demonized America’s increasing pace of industrialization and the growth of capitalism as signs of its materialism.

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There were only rare exceptions to the radicals’ negative views, such as Nikolai Turgenev’s glorification of America and Chernyshevsky’s later utopian visions. Even if Russians acknowledged the value of some American principles, such as the liberalism of its social life, they criticized their concrete implementation, and usually dismissed the possibility of transferring them to Russia. De Tocqueville himself advised exactly such a cautious manner of learning from America, suggesting that European countries should borrow its democratic principles rather than “copy the means which [America] has employed to attend its ends.”35 Interestingly, during the early Soviet period, Russia’s intention was to follow the reverse scenario—to take America’s concrete features and technologies without borrowing her principles. “The Russia of the mind, whether constructed by Slavophiles or Dostoevsky, Marxists or Korolenko, was bound to be more beautiful, harmonious, and humane than the trans-Atlantic republic,”36 as Rogger observed. Russian critics projected onto America the concept of the ideal society they strove to see in Russia but then were forced to recognize that America’s reality did not necessarily correspond to that ideal. Russians thus used the contrast with America to define themselves through dissociation. But it is also important to remember that this dissociation was constructed on the basis of association, since the evils of America that were most roundly condemned, such as slavery or bureaucracy, were Russia’s very own sore spots,37 even though the native serfs were not black. This negative selfidentification produced the following paradox: Russians defined svoi (one’s own) through contrast with chuzhoi (alien), but at the same time they read chuzhoi in terms of svoi—and sometimes even used chuzhoi to mean svoi. Most of the above-mentioned writers and social critics had never been to America. Those who actually crossed the ocean created a number of non-fictional travelogues that shaped a somewhat different assessment of America’s relation to Russia. Their texts show a general curiosity about and sympathy for America and a particular interest in concrete social institutions and technological inventions. These often dissimilar travelogues nevertheless represent another type of projection of Russian interests and needs onto American reality: the search for what could be learned and borrowed. One of the first Russian travelers who took a genuine interest in America and described the country in a literary text was Pavel Svinin, the diplomat and artist. His travelogue uniquely combines romantic fictional elements and detailed documentary information,38 thus anticipating the accounts that constitute my primary object of analysis. Svinin admired the rapid growth of American cities and, foreshadowing de Tocqueville, pointed out

Introduction

15

the equally intensive development of Russian ones. His interests were broad: he wrote articles on technological achievements and analyzed the state of the American visual arts (meanwhile creating his own series of watercolors while in the United States). The value of Svinin’s travelogue lies in his vivid descriptions rather than in deep analysis. He underestimated the seriousness of the slavery issue and believed that it would be easily and quickly solved. However, in his narrative we see motifs that become proverbial in the later image of America: an almost religious attitude toward money and an advancement of technology in stark contrast with the poor condition of the arts. According to Svinin, it was nature that provided the most magnificent “objects of art” in America (“No object of art can compare with the Niagara Waterfall,” he exclaims). An analytical travelogue written in 1822 by Peter Poletika, Svinin’s successor at his diplomatic post, is more documentary in tone and contains plenty of factual data. Poletika viewed America as an old civilization planted on new soil. He accounted for America’s rapid and extensive economic growth at the expense of the arts and sciences as a result of the confluence of its vast territory and scarce population.39 Although only a fragment from Poletika’s work was published in Literaturnaia gazeta, Delvig, the editor, acknowledged its contribution to the Russian understanding of America and valued it more highly than Svinin’s picturesque description.40 Other significant representatives of positive analytical travelogues include early travelers such as Platon Chikhachev, Eduard Tsimmerman, and later travelers such as Alexander Lakier, Peter Tverskoi, Pavel Ogorodnikov, Ivan Ozerov, and Ivan Ianzhul. Lakier set out to identify the reasons for American technological and social success. Like Svinin’s travelogue, his was intended to educate the Russian reader, but its scope was much broader. Lakier interposed descriptions of his journey with long passages from documentary sources such as Bancroft’s History of the United States.41 Arustamova notes that both Lakier and Bodisko made the significant discovery that “America” was not homogeneous: they focused on the specificity of different states, foregrounding the West as the quintessence of the American dream.42 Both claimed that California symbolized for Americans what America itself symbolized for emigrants: the actual, final promised land. Unlike Svinin, but still in the vein of de Tocqueville’s side note, they focused not on the similarity between young and swiftly growing American and Russian cities but on the differences in their origins: in America freedom and efficient commerce spawned cities, while in Russia government or church authorities did so. In the nineteenth-century Russian mind, the utopian blended with the practical. America—that marginal space beyond the ocean on the outskirts

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of the known world—promised adventure as well as hope for personal liberty and material gain. But these very practical dreams often acquired a utopian coloring, as we see in Korolenko’s novella Bez iazyka (Without a Tongue). Jewish travel literature also produced a similar image of America as a promised land where a traveler could expect to find independence and wealth, and the motif of disenchantment in utopia unites Korolenko, Sholem Asch, and Sholem Aleichem. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a new genre of American travel narrative develops: autobiographical narratives that blend the fictional and the non-fictional. After the October Revolution, this becomes the most influential kind of American text. In these travelogues we can easily recognize the familiar projections: a combination of dissimilation and assimilation,43 comprising an enthusiasm for self-identification by contrast as well as a search for elements to borrow. The blend of Russianness and Americanness in the Russian mind is so peculiar that, on the one hand, not everything that Russian travelers expect from or observe in America is perceived as distinctly and exclusively American. On the other hand, not everything that is considered truly American can be found here. Matvei Lozinskii, the hero of Korolenko’s novella Bez iazyka, expects to find an ideal Russia in America. What he finds instead, at least initially, is the exact opposite. Mayakovsky believes that America is not American enough and that the ideal Russia of the future will be the ideal America. Hasty and Fusso have collected and translated the major pre-revolutionary and early post-revolutionary travelogues in their book America Through Russian Eyes, 1874–1926. Although critics have suggested that the collection demonstrates only the populist tradition of viewing America rather than giving the full picture,44 the book accurately represents the literary construct of the American image that underpins all three stages of the development of the twentieth-century travelogue tradition. As a matter of fact, there is no American travelogue with a fictional element written by a prominent Russian writer in the waning nineteenth and early twentieth century that breaks with this radical/socialist/Bolshevik tradition. These texts were officially sponsored to inform readers about the capitalist counterpart of the Soviet state in an ideologically correct manner, that is, to represent it as the Other World. But this image was also self-selected by the authors: the prominent Soviet writers sent or allowed to go abroad (which by itself was a sign of their loyalty to the regime) chose to follow in Korolenko and Gorky’s footsteps and to show America as a kind of Inferno. Moreover, to a great extent, they were influenced by the radical tradition, which was much better articulated and more powerful than the positive, “practical,”

Introduction

17

documentary trend. Nevertheless, one can find traces of the positive mode in the polemical tone of these major texts.45 In the third stage of travelogue development, especially in Ilf and Petrov’s works, there are signs of a new practical mode emerging. On the one hand, we shall see that the texts influenced each other directly; on the other hand, we shall see that their affinity was determined by a common literary tradition as well as by the authors’ broadly construed common ideology. The travelers usually acknowledged that they were writing within the tradition, and they explicitly referred to other participants in what can be seen as the American dialogue. Each new text established itself through its relation to the existing tradition and contributed to it. All three stages in the development of the American narrative are united by the same imagery, which writer after writer picks up and develops further. Thus, American travelogues continually allude to and directly reference each other. “How helpless Mayakovsky’s American poems are!” exclaims Esenin when he sees New York. Pilniak criticizes Svinin’s sentimental portrayal of Native Americans and approvingly quotes Mayakovsky on the disparity between blacks and whites. Upon reading a list of the American passengers on their steamship, Ilf and Petrov immediately begin to imagine what Marshak would do with these characters in a poem (Marshak had never been to America, but wrote a poem about an American traveling to Russia). Mayakovsky’s description of New York provides not just an account of a steady vertical progress but also a good example of the self-perception, in an ironic vein, of Russian travelers to America as links in the same chain: Thirty years ago V. G. Korolenko looked upon New York and recorded: “Through the haze on shore there appeared enormous six- and seven-story buildings.” Some fifteen years ago Maxim Gorky visited New York and informed us: “Through the slanting rain on shore could be seen fifteen- and twentystory buildings.” So as not to depart from the framework of propriety apparently adopted by these writers, I should probably narrate thus: “Through the slanting smoke could be seen some pretty decent forty- and fifty-story buildings…” While a future poet will record after such a trip: “Through the straight buildings of an incalculable number of stories rising on the New York shore, neither smokes, nor slanting rains, to say nothing of any hazes, could be seen.”46

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Mayakovsky’s travelogue particularly acknowledges the inescapable pressure of the accumulated stereotypes of America and voices the challenge of saying something new within the tradition. Sometimes, however, the dialogue is not explicit. For example, Pilniak implicitly enters into debate with Mayakovsky’s methods of studying America when he states: “One cannot see the real America from a train window. I chose to travel by car.” If we read within the tradition, we see that Pilniak is referring to Mayakovsky’s confession that he saw America from a train window (although Mayakovsky goes on to claim that he saw enough to grasp the essence of the country). Pilniak was, needless to say, responsible for a new mode of traveling across America—by automobile. Ilf and Petrov made similar claims: they announced that they were going to study the real America rather than the one that can be seen from a train window. It is important to remember that none of these writers spoke English: all of them found themselves in America “without a tongue,” like the characters of Korolenko’s eponymous novella Bez iazyka. All their reported conversations with Americans as well as their general vision of America were thus distorted by the language barrier. Ironically, even the linguistic deficiency contributed to the continuity of the genre. Russian travelers often blamed the language they were unable to master for its incomprehensibility and irrationality: Gorky, struggling with English at his friends’ Adirondack estate, complains that, though Americans are rational, their language is not. The narrator in Bogoraz’s “Black Student” discovers on his way across America that, however familiar-looking some people may be, they cannot speak the language familiar to him: “I would be on the verge of speaking to others in my native tongue when, screwing up their mouths, they emitted not broad, rich Russian but those dull indeterminate Anglo-Saxon sounds which resemble the wheezing of a broken barrel organ, and I would fall silent and walk past them.”47 In a reversal of the accepted stereotype, Mayakovsky finds Americans non-talkative (skuposlovye), projecting his own inability to comprehend English onto native speakers of English. New places were gradually added to the Russian traveler’s typical program and, accordingly, new travelogue topoi emerged. A common itinerary in the late nineteenth century included the transatlantic steamship journey, New York, Chicago (with a visit to a slaughterhouse), and often Niagara Falls; in the 1920s a visit to Ford’s Detroit factory was added; in the 1930s—trips to Hollywood, Russian settlements in California, the Grand Canyon, and the Southern states. As Etkind notes, each traveler’s immediate predecessor was the main adversary in this dialogue. We might add, however, that the texts of authors

Introduction

19

writing within the same time period, when rhetorical goals were similar, were closer to each other in form and thrust. The concrete genres of these semifictional travelogues varied: early on Korolenko wrote sketches and essays, not to mention unfinished fragments, while Gorky wrote pamphlet essays; shortly after the Revolution Esenin contributed a sketch and Mayakovsky a series of sketches and poems; in the third stage of the tradition, Pilniak wrote an analytical novel and Ilf and Petrov a travel novel with elements of the picaresque. Moreover, some writers created not only autobiographical narratives but also fictional ones. These include Korolenko’s novella Bez iazyka, Gorky’s short story “Charlie Man” (which he later excluded from his American collection), Ilf and Petrov’s story “Tonia,” and Mayakovsky’s poems. Given this variety in genre, the texts’ shared features—on the level of form, the use of the grotesque, hyperbole, animating metaphors applied to objects and objectifying ones referring to people, density of intertextual allusions; on the level of content, recurrent motifs and ideas—are all the more striking and significant. The world modeled by all these texts cannot be reduced to mere physical reality or attributed to a purely ideological agenda. The image of America remains mythological.48 Documentary, fictional, and rhetorical elements blend together in the narrative of American travelogue. The texts extend beyond the frames of concrete genres: Gorky’s pamphlets are close to poems; Mayakovsky’s sketches use the same images and concepts as his poems; Ilf and Petrov’s autobiographical novel includes the same ideas and details as their short story (in fact, “Tonia” was originally supposed to be part of the autobiographical travelogue). It seems that the writers were trying out different forms in order to express the same invariable characteristics of the American chronotope. A crucial factor in uniting the American travelogues and providing the framework for their ongoing dialogue is their Gogolian subtext. The American chronotope is generally structured according to the same principles as the artistic space of Gogol’s tales and especially Dead Souls, a Russian vision and version of Dante’s descent into Hell. In American travelogues of Russian writers, the model of Dante’s Inferno is mediated through Gogol. In their travelogues, Russians usually represent America as an enclosed and isolated space. Multiple temporal paradoxes create the impression that it is located outside of time. By the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of a “young America” is replaced by a more complex paradigm wherein infantilism is combined with senility.49 In Soviet travelogues, America appears simultaneously modern and ancient. A journey to America entails not only geographical and temporal dimensions but also ethical value: it is

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a descent into the accursed land of rationalism, materialism, and egoism— in other words, capitalism. In this respect, Soviet travelogues resemble medieval Russian pilgrimages to the lands of sinners. That notwithstanding, the Soviet writer has to undertake this endeavor in order to appreciate the beauty of his native land, in the same way as the descent into Hell prepared Dante for the revelations of Paradise. The writers’ pilgrimages were marked by similar reactions and even similar events. All the travelers, for example, felt an urge to leave America as soon as they could. In his letters home, Korolenko expressed weariness and anxiety. Gorky endured a public scandal and had to interrupt his lectures. Esenin suffered terribly from public neglect, drank, and led a dissolute life. Mayakovsky, as he confesses in his autobiography “I, Myself,” after half a year of traveling rushed back to the USSR like a bullet. Ilf and Petrov excised the Caribbean segment of their journey and even refused to see Hemingway’s villa at Key West; their letters home testified to their impatient desire to return as soon as possible. Although the authors’ reasons for leaving were different—political, financial, or familial—in a sense, America was indeed a personal Hell for most of them. The arc of the writers’ actual lives in America could supply good material for a novel, since so many mysterious coincidences took place there. If we take the factual realities of these journeys as a text, we can trace a number of recurrent themes, some synchronic, i.e., occurring within the same period, and others diachronic. For example, both Korolenko’s and Gorky’s little daughters died in Russia during their fathers’ American sojourns. This seems to have been a greater tragedy for Korolenko than for Gorky, and he complained that the year of his journey was a cursed one. For Korolenko, a true paterfamilias, the sudden death of his little girl impacted daily life much more than for Gorky, who was not living at the time with his official wife, Ekaterina Peshkova. “I have been expecting news of this kind at any moment, and it did not shock me. I am sorry about the girl and even more about Ekaterina Pavlovna,” Gorky writes at the very end of a business letter.50 Blunders or complications involving children became almost universal in the American sojourns of the travelers. While in America, Mayakovsky fathered a daughter with a Russian emigrant, Elli Jones (this daughter, Patricia Thompson, whom Mayakovsky met only once, published a book in 1993 titled Mayakovsky in Manhattan). During Esenin’s American journey, one of the German émigré newspapers printed a belated report on his arrest and short-term imprisonment at Ellis Island, which included the following error: “Miss Isadora Duncan with her husband, a young Russian poet Serge Esenin, and two [non-existent] children, were forbidden entry to the

Introduction

21

territory of the United States.”51 Both Ilf and Petrov felt especially homesick and constantly wrote home to their young wives and small children. Their letters, filled with inquiries about the children, were later published by Ilf ’s daughter, Alexandra. However, Ilf and Petrov were the happiest of all the travelers with respect to their families, since their children were real, alive, and legitimate. In Pilniak’s travelogue alone we can find no trace of children. Among other biographical themes, the complicated marital relations of traveling couples can be mentioned. Esenin’s troublesome trip with his American wife, Isadora Duncan, echoed the earlier public scandal that had burst out when it became widely known that Gorky had come with the dancer Andreeva, to whom he was not officially married. Esenin and Duncan had married for the purpose of their visit abroad, but the position of the young husband accompanying a famous wife proved unbearable for Esenin. Thus, in contrast to Gorky, it was the official marriage to his companion that gave rise to scandal52—Duncan’s relationship with a Bolshevik ultimately cost her her American citizenship. My major task in this book is to study the recurrent textual motifs that constitute the major topoi of the American travel narrative. In the first three chapters (part one) I will study the three above-mentioned stages in which pre-Soviet and early Soviet writers encountered America. These chapters will focus on synchronic literary connections. The fourth chapter (part two) consists of multiple sections, which study recurrent subtexts (Gogol and Dante) and several prominent recurrent motifs that constitute the vertical, diachronic connections among all the texts. Finally, the fifth chapter (part three) is devoted to the image of Americans traveling to Russia, as they and their perceptions of Russia are imagined by Russian writers. Since the main focus of the book is Russian journeys to America, the purpose of this chapter is not to give a detailed overview of all the Russian texts that deal with Americans abroad, but to observe what happens to the concept of the transatlantic journey when the traveler goes eastward. Thus, in this chapter we will see yet another projection—how the model of the Russian’s journey to America is projected onto the visit of a “typical American” to post-revolutionary Russia. The title of my book—Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York— should not be read literally, since many of the visitors were not technically Bolsheviks. It is based on the title of Marietta Shaginian’s sci-fi adventure travelogue Yankees in Petrograd (discussed in chapter 5) which in its turn is based on Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Like “Yankees in Petrograd,” the generalizing formula “Bolsheviks in New York” emulates a clichéd point of view according to which all the visitors from a

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certain country are similar. One of my book’s tasks is to deconstruct this cliché and to show the peculiarities of each writer and each period against the general unifying populist-socialist tradition. I hope that this study will offer the American reader an opportunity not only to look at him/herself from the point of view of the Other and to see how familiar features can be distorted—and illumined—in that mirror but also to learn more about this Other, by exploring the projection of his/her desires and complexes. However, I also hope this study will help the Russian reader to overcome some familiar prejudices and to understand the barriers that prevent a nationalist self from really seeing the Other. While reading the book, it is especially important to remember that what stands behind the vehement condemnations of America in the Russian texts is not merely a fear and rejection of the American Other. The American travelogue also represents an implicit recognition of Russia’s own failings and a concomitant hope for a better future.

C h apt e r

O ne

Pre-revolutionary Discoveries of America Korolenko and Gorky

autobiographical literary travelogues, which later determined the Soviet image of America, took polemical shape in the waning nineteenth century. Both the Marxist-oriented Maksim Gorky1 and a number of Populist writers, including Grigorii Machtet, Vladimir Bogoraz, and Vladimir Korolenko, contributed to the genre. All of these writers grounded their work in earlier traditions: Dostoevsky’s macabre vision of America and the Slavophiles’ repudiation of the New World political ideal. Meanwhile, their adversaries kept the positive “practical” travelogue tradition alive. In this chapter, I will provide a brief overview across the spectrum of late-nineteenth-century travelogue possibilities. I will then examine Korolenko’s and Gorky’s journeys in particular detail, since, of all the pre-revolutionary authors, these two had the greatest impact on the Soviet tradition. Grigorii Machtet lived in the United States from 1872 until 1874, and his detailed descriptions of prairie pioneers and their way of life are considered to be among his most distinguished literary works.2 They are far from being anti-American, but the sketch “Obshchina Freiia” (Frey’s Community), which resulted from Machtet’s personal participation in William Frey’s socialist experiment, reveals his disillusionment with America’s realization of socialist utopian ideas. A similar far-reaching disillusionment with New World social institutions and relations characterizes the American works of Bogoraz. Bogoraz, an ethnographer by profession, wrote a series of autobiographical sketches, a novel Za okeanom (Beyond the Ocean), several short stories, and a novella, Avdotia and Rivka, which follows the lives of two representative émigré women, a Russian and a Jew. Bogoraz provides a subtle social and

The genre of Russian

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psychological analysis of situations in which different cultures clash and reveal each other’s sore spots. The Populists Machtet and Bogoraz both agreed that American freedom represented, above all, the liberty to pursue material wealth. These views found their counterpoint in an extensive corpus of émigré texts as well as in the non-fictional, “practical” American travelogues written by the economists Ivan Ianzhul and Ivan Ozerov. Among the émigré texts, Peter Tverskoi’s sketches were especially well known in Russia. After having spent fourteen years in America, Tverskoi published extensive adulatory surveys of American life as seen from within.3 In them, he noted the difference between the older generation’s social utopian (or anti-utopian) perception of America—including his own and Korolenko’s—and the practical attitude of younger visitors such as Ozerov.4 The “practicists” were interested in America’s political structure insofar as it could be seen as the prerequisite to industrial advancement, which they studied in detail. Ianzhul, for example, examines the specifics of American business enterprises and the government’s policies concerning them.5 Ozerov analyzes the reasons for America’s extraordinary economic advance.6 In their image of America, the “practicists” emphasize its youthfulness, its equality of opportunity, and the social institutions that ensure democratic relations among its people. Scholars have noted that this westernizing trend in the late nineteenth century was oriented toward the achievements of “an industrial civilization from which more could and should be learned or borrowed than isolated techniques or pieces of equipment.”7 To some extent, the Populists’ radical negation of America was a response to this enthusiastic westernizing, “practical” trend. Importantly, however, it was the Populist response that was fictionalized and, thus, acquired an enduring influence on the travelogue tradition. As Rogger observes, “The names of the challengers, like Ogorodnikov or Tverskoi, cannot match in resonance those of Dostoevsky and Korolenko, Aksakov and Lavrov.”8 Of course, both the Populists and the Westernizers expressed a broad range of views on America, which were neither entirely negative nor entirely positive. For example, although Pavel Ogorodnikov mentions fraud in American professional and public life, he still cherishes America as a land of personal freedom.9 Konstantin Staniukovich’s novel Pokhozhdeniia odnogo matrosa (The Adventures of a Sailor) offers a more complex picture: he too portrays America as the land of individual and political liberty, which awakens the consciousness of his chief protagonist, the sailor Chaikin. In America, Chaikin feels he is a man in his own right for the first time in his life, but in learning more about American life and interacting with people from

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27

various social strata, he begins to question the absolute value of freedom. He comes to the conclusion that, although Americans are free, they do not live righteously. In the literary travelogues that occupied the center stage of the American narrative in later times, the nuances observed by these earlier writers gradually receded. Between 1893 and 1906—the years when Korolenko and Gorky visited the United States—the travelogues’ tone changed. Korolenko’s contribution was analytical and critical, while Gorky’s pamphlets were vehemently negative. This shift was determined not only by the differences in the writers’ political views, their temperaments, and the nature of their talents, but also by the different goals of their travelogues, which reflected changes in the internal political situation in Russia. Both writers, the Populist Korolenko and the Marxist-oriented Gorky, were concerned with the destiny of Russia’s common people, and both evaluated America through the prism of its possible influence on Russia’s destiny. Although biased, Korolenko searched for models, trying to determine whether Russia could profit from the American experience. Gorky, by contrast, visited the country after the upheaval of the 1905 Russian Revolution. He arrived with a concrete, urgent mission: to change history in a real way, that is, to facilitate a new, Bolshevik Revolution. The two writers’ missions—the search for both answers and practical help—for the most part turned out unsatisfactorily. Korolenko came to the conclusion that even the positive aspects of American life could not be adapted to Russia; Gorky, with his overtly provocative revolutionary ideas, was unable to raise the funds he had hoped for. And despite their very different missions, both writers attributed a fantastical, deadly aura to America. In doing so, Korolenko employed defamiliarization, while Gorky used grotesque metaphors and synecdoche. Both provided titles—Korolenko’s “Factory of Death” and Gorky’s “City of the Yellow Devil”—that contributed to the image of a hellish world. Korolenko’s brief visit to America spanned little more than a month: he arrived in New York on August 13, 1893,10 and visited Niagara Falls; he then attended the Chicago World’s Fair, the primary goal of his visit, from August 20 to September 9; and he embarked for Europe on September 15. Anxiety hovered over the journey, which was shorter than Korolenko had initially intended: his daughter was seriously ill, and his wife took her to Romania. After his exhausting journalistic work covering the famine in the Volga Region, the trip had at first seemed a short break in the writer’s routine. However, immediately upon his return to Europe, Korolenko was entangled in multiple crises: his daughter died;11 he was imprisoned on false charges of disseminating revolutionary propaganda in America; and, once

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released, he was caught up in the dramatic case of the Votiaks12—all of which hindered the writing and publication of his American impressions. Russian issues pushed American themes aside. He complained to his editor that it was difficult to focus on the publisher’s timeline and demands.13 In the following years, he constantly mused: “It’s not the time for America! What America can there be if such things are going on in Russia!”14 Yet, he repeatedly returned to his American notes, reediting and reevaluating them in the light of Russian public life. Public events linking America and Russia also captured his attention. In 1899, for example, he wrote an article for Russkoe bogatstvo, “Pereselenie dukhoborov v Ameriku” (The Resettlement of the Dukhobors in America),15 in which he traced the history of the Dukhobor sect in Russia and its final exodus to America. He also voiced his skepticism as to whether the Dukhobors would be able to preserve their religion and culture intact in the new land. In fact, Korolenko’s diaries and letters show that even in America he remained focused on Russia. During his journey, he tries to relate every social phenomenon he encounters to a Russian context. When he hears people at the Chicago Fair singing the American national anthem, he bitterly regrets that the singing of the anthem in Russia is much more formal. In his opinion, this is a consequence of the Russian lack of freedom of speech: when one cannot criticize freely, one cannot praise sincerely either. When he discovers that international traveling does not require a passport anywhere except in Russia, he comments ironically that a Russian consists not only of a body and a soul but also of a passport. In a short, witty excursus about the significance of the Russian passport, Korolenko negatively compares “a man without a document” (bez vida), to Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, who sold his shadow to the Devil.16 Here Korolenko anticipates Bulgakov’s famous dictum describing the Soviet bureaucracy in The Master and Margarita: “No document, no man.” This use of synecdoche is common in the critical portrayal of bureaucratic Russia and America, as we will see shortly.17 Given the brevity of Korolenko’s visit and the fragmented form of most of his American texts, we should acknowledge his attempt at objectivity and broadmindedness. He does not judge America but tries to perceive it from several different angles. Korolenko’s most prominent American text, Bez iazyka (published in English as In a Strange Land),18 defamiliarizes America by portraying it from the point of view of two Russian peasants, Dyma and Matvei, who come to the new land in search of a better life. Later writers will adopt this technique of defamiliarization in their American travelogues.19 Many of Korolenko’s American texts are structured as dialogues between characters who defend their differing ideologies, and Korolenko’s image

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of America emerges out of their conflicting perspectives. Even his titles reflect this dialogical approach. His first story involving American material, written even before his journey, is significantly titled “S dvukh storon” (From Two Points of View). Similarly, he gives a dialogical title to another work “Russkie na chikagskom perekrestke” (Russians at a Chicago Crossroad). Korolenko usually explores a phenomenon from more than two angles; he is aware of the danger of binary oppositions. In the sketch “Factory of Death” three visitors observe a Chicago slaughterhouse. The first-person autobiographical narrator finds the enterprise’s machine-like efficiency disgusting. The conflict between his pro-American friend and a sentimental, Old World painter represents in miniature the clash between Westernizer and Slavophile attitudes toward America. The narrator’s Westernizer friend praises Americans for their rationalism and fairness. He does not allow his companions to turn away from reality when, horrified by their first impressions, they attempt to leave the slaughterhouse. The painter nostalgically recalls the process of “lovingly” killing a calf in the Russian village back in his childhood but confesses that he has never observed the process down to its brutal end. Each point of view emphasizes the other’s flaws: the reader is equally repelled by the automated animal slaughter and by the sentimental, hypocritical picture of the personalized killing of a beloved animal. But the authorial message is clear: Korolenko expresses his attitude to the slaughterhouse through his story’s macabre title; and he grants the reader access to the narrator’s emotions and physiological responses as well as to his thoughts. The narrator also has the last word in the argument. There is, however, a dose of bitter self-irony in his final judgement: he is so horrified by the morbid spectacle he has witnessed that he initially refuses to eat meat; but he confesses that his abstinence lasts no longer than a week. The subtlety of Korolenko’s dialogic method is especially evident if we compare “Factory of Death” with Tolstoy’s classic essay, “Pervaia stupen’” (The First Step, 1891). In its portrayal of a slaughterhouse, Tolstoy’s essay promoting the vegetarian cause preceded Korolenko’s sketch. For both Tolstoy and Korolenko, a visit to the slaughterhouse was a self-imposed moral obligation. Tolstoy pursues a clear rhetorical task: combining aggressively anti-aesthetic sensual images with ethical logic, he leads his reader to realize that vegetarianism is the first step to real humanity. By contrast, Korolenko’s sketch does not preach, which strengthens its artistic effect. Korolenko not only allows his narrator’s interlocutors, whose views he does not share, to have their say, but he also engages the reader in the animals’ point of view. At first, we glimpse the animals’ feelings as reflected

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in their eyes: “I am absolutely certain I saw mortal dread in the eyes of those hundreds and thousands of living creatures huddled together, awaiting their hour.”20 He suggests that the horses belonging to the cowboys who deliver the cattle are “intelligent animals”: they understand where they are, and their “animal’s heart[s] shudder in sympathetic horror” (92). So far, the author is still an observer, albeit a sympathetic one. But then he takes another step, seeing himself in the place of a slaughtered pig: “I couldn’t help imagining that if my foot were to accidentally get caught in the noose and I were to roll up to him along the rail, he would scarcely interrupt the automatic gesture of his practiced hand on my account” (91). Korolenko shows all the stages in the efficient process of meat production; the animals, whose feelings the narrator reads in their eyes and whose point of view he briefly adopts, probably “were the very ones now leaving in the sealed and soldered tin cans” (91). The horrifying effect is intensified because the narrator does not change the sentence’s subject: instead of the conventional “the meat left the factory in cans,” he insists on the animals’ status as once-live subjects. Korolenko painfully focuses on the only individuality left to various animals—their manner of death: the majestic death of a bull; the meek one of a sheep; the fretful one of a pig, who, in a human way, “dashes about and curses its fate” (91). Here the author repeatedly aspires to the solemn language of tragedy: the animals are “doomed” (90); the pig butcher is “the master of death” (91); and the “spectacle” of the stockyard is divided into acts. This vocabulary clashes with the gruesome atmosphere of the dirty stockyard and adds a new dimension to the narrative: Korolenko grants the animals their roles as tragic heroes and notes that the factory conveyor belt is as relentless as doom. In so doing, he simultaneously introduces the theme of America and its institutions as theater, a theme that will recur in the American text and be developed by Esenin, Mayakovsky, and others. Korolenko’s seemingly balanced accounts of his journey abound in hellish images. In his In a Strange Land, Matvei, disillusioned in America, thinks that the Statue of Liberty’s torch “lighted the entrance into a gigantic grave” (129). The title “Factory of Death” gruesomely suggests that death, not meat, is the factory’s final product. “The Factory of Death” epitomizes growing industrialization, a distinctively urban phenomenon in the traveler’s eyes. In creating an expressionist image of the slaughterhouse, Korolenko registers the motifs that will later recur in the Russian narrative of American factories. In order to understand the origins of Korolenko’s macabre images, we must look to the fictional and autobiographical beginnings of his characters’ journeys. Significant foci in Korolenko’s American travelogues are the trans-European and transatlantic passages that precede the actual

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American experience. Here, Korolenko compares not only Russian and American but also European institutions and ways of life. The title of his extended essay is “To America,” not “In America,” as Mayakovsky will later title his own travelogue. This anticipation of the journey and the period of transition—the ocean crossing—are crucial because the gap between expectation and actual experience makes America truly hellish. Disillusionment with the West begins in Europe, where the narrator, even though cognizant of his own naïveté, nevertheless expects to find a Paradise. Against this horizon of expectations, his eyes capture “the bold figures of ‘European’ paupers with their rags, and their expression of suffering, degradation and vice stick in the memory with an intensity and vividness that they never had at home.”21 Korolenko introduces the concept of the Devil for the first time in these European excerpts in his sketch about General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, and his followers, titled “V bor’be s diavolom” (Struggling with the Devil). The Devil appears here as a symbolic stand-in for the community’s collected vices, as a not entirely unsympathetic corrupter of a proper Protestant Sunday morning service. Endowed with “talent, critical instincts, and wit,”22 Korolenko’s syncretic Devil foreshadows Gorky’s similarly syncretic portrayal of the American crowd as a single monstrous creature. At the end of “Struggling with the Devil,” we learn that General Booth has embarked on the same ship as the narrator; he sails to America in order to engage in a New World battle with the Incarnation of Evil. He has high hopes for success because America, in his opinion, is less rigid and less immersed in sin than England. Even so, however, the sketch still suggests an association between America and the Devil. Thus, even before crossing the Atlantic, the reader becomes aware both of the narrator’s expectation of finding Eden on the other shore and of the serpent’s presence there. Like the autobiographical narrator of Korolenko’s sketches, Matvei Lozinskii, the protagonist of his novella In a Strange Land, envisions the country of his destination as an earthly Paradise, even while he is still crossing the ocean. His image of the ideal America encompasses the essence of early Russian dreams about the New World: America is very similar to Russia, only better; peasants are not so lazy, their clothes are cleaner, and they do not curse. However, Matvei discovers quite the opposite of a peaceful Russian village in New York City’s horrible urban landscape. In a typically Populist contrast between the village as the embodiment of Russia and the industrial city as the representation of America, New York City is portrayed as viscerally repulsive. Streets look like caverns, houses are tall and dark; steel clangs overhead as the elevated train flies by, “curv[ing] like a

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serpent.” “It seemed to [Matvei and his companions] that now they were in Hell, surely” (40). Much later, Matvei discovers that it is indeed possible to get used to America and to build a decent life, even to enjoy its freedom, i.e., that America is neither Hell nor Paradise. But he will always be tormented by dreams of Russia, since the new land is alien to him not just in its external manifestations but in its very essence. In the best traditions of both romanticism and modernism, Korolenko unfolds in parallel fashion the symbolic and the realistic levels of his stories,23 and his American writings are a good example of this technique. In a Strange Land can be read as a parable: its meaning resides far beyond the plot level. Throughout the novella, new semantic layers of the original Russian title, Bez iazyka, accrue. The title’s most obvious meaning is “Without Language/Tongue-less” (the Russian word iazyk denotes both). The traveling characters do not know foreign languages and thus are totally helpless outside Russia. “A man without a language is like a blind man or a little child” (17–18)—Matvei realizes as soon as he goes abroad. In the essay “To America,” the autobiographical narrator confesses the same problem. A speechless traveler to a foreign country is similar to an inhabitant of Hades. Although Matvei has never been particularly articulate (in this sense, he was “without tongue” even in his native village), this deficit was not significant in his homeland, where he understood the rules and norms of life. In America, by contrast, tongue-less means clue-less. After their arrival in America, Matvei and Dyma discover that they know neither the English language nor the language of social behavior. The friends fail in social identification: they cannot believe that gentlemen, whose dress signals their association with high society, share a room in a doss-house with them. Back in Russia, Matvei and Dyma could avoid inappropriate situations, easily distinguishing people “of their own sort” from those belonging to other social groups. In America, they gradually learn that while all people are supposedly equal, there is still a huge difference between social strata, although it can be hard to discern. Over the course of the story, Dyma and Matvei represent a single split hero: one of them, Matvei, possesses strength and purity, the other, Dyma, wit and agility. Dyma learns the twinned languages of English and social behavior faster than Matvei. But along with adaptability comes moral relativism: he sells his vote—in Russian, his golos (voice)—to a shady political leader. Dyma tries to persuade Matvei to do the same, reasoning that nothing real or material will be lost. Matvei, however, refuses to sell what he considers a part of himself. Here again, Korolenko invokes Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl. Korolenko literalizes the idiom poteriat’ golos (literally—“to lose

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one’s vote/voice”), making the loss of voice symbolic: when Dyma returns from a political meeting, he cannot speak because he has been shouting too loudly and lost his voice. So, for some time, neither hero can speak: one is without tongue, the other, without voice. After Dyma sells his “voice,” both are defined through related deficiencies. Korolenko develops the concept of a voice that can separate from its owner and exist independently in his sketch, “Zaarestovannyi golos” (The Voice Arrested), written several years after In a Strange Land, for the journal Russkoe bogatstvo. In this sketch, he relates an anecdote about a gramophone legally charged for playing a song based on one of Nekrasov’s forbidden poems; the police not only confiscate the gramophone from its owner but lock it in a cell. The title of this satirical sketch suggests that Korolenko had in mind a parallel with the loss of voice in his American novella.24 Additionally, Gogol’s “Nose” operates as a subtext relevant to both the sketch and the corresponding episode in the novella. The voice’s arrest stressed in Korolenko’s sketch recalls Major Kovalev’s search for his runaway nose. The overt link between Gogol and Korolenko, absent from the novella but present in the journal sketch, is the independence of the missing part and its official recognition by the state system. While Gogol’s earlier tales abound in images of witches and demons, in the Petersburg Tales, of which “The Nose” forms a part, Gogol removes the culprit of the demonic from the narrative.25 Korolenko takes this one step further by making his story subliminal and more subtle. For him, the fantastic is merely a hint, sensed as a plot turn and realized through the strangeness of events in the journal sketch and the implicit allusions to Chamisso and Gogol. For Korolenko’s Matvei, America now symbolizes human alienation; because of his inability to speak English, he is astray in the American city. And his speechlessness is contagious—everyone he encounters turns speechless as well. A desperate, jobless man in a park commits suicide for want of a single kind human word; he and Matvei fail to understand each other and, thus, cannot help each other. The meaning of the novella’s title is generalized to take in the absence of a common language among the world’s people. Later in the novella, Matvei gets into trouble with the police. The conflict arises because the policeman cannot understand the only language Matvei is able to use, the language of gestures—which also turns out not to be universal. While Matvei begs the policeman to help him and tries to kiss his hand, the policeman beats him with a club, assuming that this gigantic, wild-looking man is trying to bite him. In a burst of anger, Matvei nearly kills him. Only a chance meeting with a fellow countryman finally saves

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Matvei. In this savior Matvei recognizes his one-time neighbor, a former member of the gentry. While the inability to understand each other’s language is mortally dangerous in Korolenko’s world, it is not the only hazard. The Russian who chooses to stay in another country and learn its language—in all senses of the word—eventually forgets his own culture and mother tongue. Distinctions between emigrants’ national cultures dissolve not because of religious or national intolerance, but under the pressure of economic demands. In order to survive, one has to become like all the others.26 Therefore, according to Korolenko, political liberty can be achieved only through a corresponding economic freedom. Still, Korolenko believes that this freedom is better than anything other countries offer. He confesses to feeling proud of the democratic spirit that allows Americans to overcome personal prejudices. Korolenko observes and pays homage to American social institutions, at least in principle (Tammany Hall is, of course, criticized in In a Strange Land). But it is the general democratic spirit of the Constitution, rather than the results of its implementation, that makes him admire America.27 He applauds the American spirit but dislikes the people: “Despite the excellent state order, you see cruelty and ruthlessness everywhere.”28 He seems to infer that American freedoms are wasted on Americans: in Russia, people are beautiful and deserve freedom, but it is not given to them. He disagrees with his fellow Russian emigrants, who believe that Americans do not deserve their own Constitution, but he nevertheless thinks that the Constitution’s principles represent America’s best. Significantly, Korolenko’s heroes are mostly emigrants experiencing America, like Dyma and Matvei.29 Individual Americans rarely appear in the travelogue except as background figures, with the notable exception of the sketch “Mnenie amerikantsa Dzhaksona o evreiskom voprose” (The Opinion of Mr. Jackson, the American, on the Jewish Issue, 1915), which centers on a single American character. But even in this sketch, Korolenko demonstrates that in America, virtue lies in an individual’s ability to overcome personal prejudice in favor of the democratic idea. Mr. Jackson may be conceited and narrow-minded and express anti-Semitic sentiments, but he passionately protests and begins to despise his Russian interlocutors when they mockingly ask if he would demand that official action be taken against Jews—some sort of limitation of their individual rights or rights of residency, for example. When the mediocre Mr. Jackson states that, as an American citizen, he would be offended if anybody’s rights were to be diminished, the narrator suddenly notices that his face has been transformed by his nation’s noble spirit. The narrator further observes that even the petty

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tone of American newspapers changes for the better when their writers are provoked on the same issue. Attempts by Soviet critics to find a consistent social “class” analysis in the subtle observations and deep insights of Korolenko’s American texts are not very convincing.30 Korolenko considers social ideas secondary to general philosophical issues. In a Strange Land is less a critique of America than an exploration of man’s loneliness in the world, his striving for an ineffable ideal, and the tragic absence of a common human language. As R. F. Christian notes, the author “is more unhappy at the breakdown of human intercourse than embittered over material institutions.”31 He is more interested in the general qualities of America as a nation than in the nature of different social groups. More intuitive than analytical, Korolenko feels that American ways of development cannot be transferred to Russian soil, but he does not explain why. Deeply convinced that freedom must be given to the Russian people, he does not see any practical means for bringing this about. He concludes that America cannot serve as a model since it is neither an ideal Russia nor its opposite. He vaguely states: America might be good, but “not in our ways…nowhere does a Russian person feel as misplaced as in America.”32 Nilov, the member of the Russian gentry who helps Matvei,33 complains that in Russia he longs for freedom, “not a foreign one, but our own.”34 Homesick in America, he finally returns home to work for this other, Russian freedom. Nilov thus voices a sentiment that was very familiar to Korolenko himself. After the October Revolution, Korolenko realized that revolutionary changes in Russia’s social life would not bring the freedom and justice he longed for.35 Korolenko preceded Gorky in visiting America, and Gorky regarded him as his teacher. Indeed, Korolenko was one of the writers who discovered Gorky, and he published his early works in Russkoe bogatstvo. Korolenko’s writings, with their infernal connotations of America as a “Death Factory,” must have especially influenced Gorky, but Gorky nevertheless did not inherit from his “Virgil” the inclination to consider phenomena from various angles so as to grasp their complexity. Instead of Korolenko’s multiple prisms, we find in Gorky the single perspective of a voyeur of violence. Reading Gorky’s American texts, we cannot help recalling that Korolenko, in one of his first letters to Gorky, criticized his literary method for its oversimplifications, excessive negativism, and dreary picture of the world.36 Gorky’s comprehensive vilification of America was deliberate. He intentionally ignored easily accessible, more objective and balanced information about the country and its institutions. His adopted son, Zinovii

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Peshkov, had lived in America for a long time and had provided a much more balanced portrait of the country in his letters to his stepfather.37 Additionally, Gorky’s sojourn allowed him more exposure to different sides of the country, as well as more time for literary work, than had Korolenko’s. While staying on Staten Island and in the Adirondacks, Gorky met many class-conscious workers, people from the working intelligentsia, but these meetings find no reflection in his texts. It is hardly a coincidence that during his American sojourn Gorky both presaged the contours of socialist realism38 by writing the novel Mother and set forth a gruesome picture of America that became a model for later Soviet writers and journalists. According to Anatolii Lunacharskii, the first Soviet People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, the socialist realist writer’s task was to discern within the imperfect present-day society those features that heralded the shining ideal of the future, and to convey and promote that ideal.39 With his American travelogue, Gorky accomplished the opposite: he revealed an image of pure Hell. This did not, however, represent a new departure in imagining America. Rather, Gorky utilized a set of expressive, ideological verbal and visual clichés, including New York as the City of Mammon and America as the Land of the Yellow Devil (the Yellow Devil being gold). He built upon the already canonical image of the greedy and gluttonous American capitalist. Gorky explicitly calls America Hell and, continuing the Slavophile line of argument, he attributes its hellishness to Americans’ lack of spirituality: “Everywhere we see around us the work of the mind which has made of human life a sort of Hell, a senseless treadmill of labor, but nowhere do we feel the beauty of free creation, the disinterested work of the spirit which beautifies life with imperishable flowers of life-giving cheer.”40 Describing New York, the epitome of America, he uses biblical expressions to create the image of an accursed city. Thus, Gorky builds on the nineteenth-century Populist tradition with its image of New York as a New Babylon.41 Gorky’s vehement negativism toward America should be read against the background of the pre-existing literary tradition. He persuasively demonstrates the chief argument of this book: that pre-Soviet and Soviet travelogues were determined by their authors’ preconceived notions of America rather than by the actual reality they observed. Given his importance for my argument, I will provide a brief overview of the details of Gorky’s American journey and summarize the most important scholarly interpretations of his travelogue. Gorky arrived in the United States in 1906 under instructions from Lenin. He was accompanied by Nikolai Burenin, a leading party member

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who served as his secretary during the trip, and by Maria Andreeva, his common-law wife, who worked as his personal assistant. Back in Russia, the turmoil of the 1905 Revolution had ostensibly been quelled by the creation of a representative assembly, the State Duma, and Sergei Witte, the new Chairman of the Council of Ministers, had requested a Western loan to support this democratic innovation. Gorky’s mission was multipronged: to discredit both Witte and the proposed Duma; to dissuade the American public and the American government from granting the Russian government’s request for a loan; and to persuade America to support, instead, the Bolshevik party and the future revolution, which would be genuinely democratic. He was also charged with the more abstract task of demonstrating to working people in different countries the kinship between all imperialist governments. Thus, Gorky’s polemical intentions were defined from the very outset. Accordingly, it is hard to agree with Dmitrii Filosofov’s claim that Gorky did not know what he expected or wanted from America.42 A number of scholars attribute Gorky’s bitterness against America to the public scandal that took place soon after his arrival.43 Usually muted in official Soviet critical literature, and referred to without further explanation as an outburst of “hypocritical puritan American morality,”44 this scandal was undoubtedly exacerbated by Gorky’s initial successes. As Tovah Yedlin notes, “The progressive segments of American society were opposed to the Russian autocracy, its disastrous war with Japan, and its policy of dealing harshly with the participants of the revolution.”45 According to the newspapers, the Russian emissary was welcomed in broad public circles by a thunderstorm of enthusiasm as a fighter for human rights. In the first days of his sojourn, Gorky met Mark Twain at the A Club and H. G. Wells, who was in America at that time, at a reception at the Wilshire. In New York, he gave public speeches pleading for the “replacement and punishment of Witte,” explaining the unrepresentative nature of the new Duma.46 He later repeated these speeches in Boston and Philadelphia, and he even planned a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt.47 Yet Gorky apparently considered the task of enlightening and uniting the working people more important and realistic than attending meetings in the higher official circles that might have aided his practical mission of preventing an American loan to the Russian government. According to the official Soviet version, his revolutionary propaganda displeased the American authorities, who were not interested in upsetting diplomatic relations with Russia. However, it is more accurate to say that Gorky’s propaganda did not evoke a sympathetic response in American society at large, which trusted in

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constitutional social change. Gorky himself complained in a letter to Boris Krasin that many important people refused to support the Revolution after they discovered that the Russian government had taken measures to resolve the situation in a democratic way by constituting the Duma.48 At this point, scandal erupted. Public attention was diverted from Gorky’s message when newspapers revealed that his companion on the trip, Andreeva, was not his official wife.49 The meeting with Roosevelt never took place; public speeches in Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, and Chicago were cancelled. The committee that had been formed before Gorky’s arrival to help him raise money for the Revolution now fell apart. Gorky and Andreeva were ejected from their rooms, and no hotel in America would receive them. Gorky accepted an invitation to the Adirondack estate of a compassionate American couple, Prestonia Martin and her husband John, who were close to workers’ circles50 and who eventually organized a new committee to support the revolutionary cause. Although Gorky continued to give occasional public speeches, managed to visit Boston and Philadelphia, and continued to publish his proclamations, after the scandal broke, he devoted most of his time to literary work, first on Staten Island, and then on the Martins’ Adirondack estate. The whole episode was especially painful for Andreeva and determined her attitude to America. She constantly complained in her personal letters that she was surrounded by aliens with incomprehensible motives. She confessed that she felt as if she had “half died already—so different everything was”; that in America it was as if she were “in a coffin.”51 Of course, to some extent, the public scandal also influenced Gorky’s writings. Its echo is most noticeable in the satirical essay “Zhrets morali” (A Priest of Morality), where Gorky transforms the episode and pushes it to the limits of absurdity. In this text, Gorky maintains that the purpose of public scandals concerning morals is to blur the public’s vision: “If you throw a lot of small chips into a river, quite a big log can float past among [the Americans] unperceived.”52 He echoes these ideas in the pamphlet “City of Mammon.” Nevertheless, we have evidence that neither the personal affront nor the failure of his political mission blinded Gorky. Leaving aside his political speeches, all his American texts can be divided into three genres: the essays comprising the cycle “In America,” the fictional interviews collected in “My Interviews,” and the personal letters. Symptomatically, Gorky’s portrayal of America in the essays and interviews differs from that in his personal letters. As Hasty and Fusso, as well as Yedlin, note, Gorky’s letters from America contain not just criticism, but also interest

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and optimism: “America is really something, you know. Not everyone has the good fortune to see it. It’s amazingly interesting here. And damned beautiful, which came as a surprise for me”;53 “I delight and I curse, it’s both sickening and enjoyable, and—it’s a hell of a lot of fun!”54 It is also important to stress that Gorky wrote enthusiastic letters about America after the scandal broke, not merely before. While Korolenko’s finished sketches and stories harmonize with his diaries and letters from America, there is a striking disparity between Gorky’s letters, with their distinct notes of enthusiasm and respect for Americans, and his mordant essays, where everything is painted in black and white (with black in the ascendant). But a more nuanced image would have been incompatible with the propagandistic nature of Gorky’s mission and his chosen genre, the political pamphlet. The distant respect, anxiety, and feeling of alienation in Korolenko’s works were a natural part of his attempts to understand America, but for Gorky, the denunciation of capitalist America was a self-imposed political task. The Soviet critic Alexander Ovcharenko approvingly states that the fury of Gorky’s essays resulted “not from his overwhelming impressions abroad,” but rather from his preconceptions based on his earlier revulsion at the West’s “treacherous help of the foreign imperialists to the Russian government during the first Russian revolution.”55 Significantly, Ovcharenko seems to consider such preconceived criticism more mature and objective than criticism based on actual impressions. He emphasizes that Gorky went to America already knowing what he was going to denounce: his task was to write propaganda rather than to gain new experience. Thus, first and foremost, we should read Gorky’s American essays as exemplars of rhetoric. Even the interviews, which, as their genre suggests, might be expected to give voice to alternative opinions, are in fact monological. The narrator shows his opponents in a harsh satirical light, so that the reader can easily see that their words are evil and absurd. By analyzing Gorky’s rhetorical strategies, we can clearly see that he designed his pamphlets and speeches for very different audiences. For example, he aims the proclamation “Do Not Give Money to the Tsarist Government” at a broad audience and addresses not just the workers but also those who actually have money to give, namely, the bourgeoisie, explaining that the revolutionary movement in Russia is so strong that a change in regime is inevitable and that the money would simply be lost. His “Address to the French Workers” is targeted not only at French but also at American workers. As Gorky “unveils the connections between all imperialists,”56 he acknowledges that even if he failed to raise any money he would still be

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enlightening the “people of labor.” That is to say, his first concern is to distinguish among the social strata of his implied audience: workers, intelligentsia, and capitalists. What is more, the tone in the texts intended for the American versus the Russian public clearly differs. The first version of “City of the Yellow Devil,” titled “City of Mammon” (the only one of his American pamphlets that was actually published in America), is milder than its Russian version. Its tone is more didactic, while “City of the Yellow Devil” is pure invective. The American version contains social analysis and developed reasoning. Gorky preaches that Americans should become more cultured and free themselves from the power of money. His reaction to the recent scandal can be easily traced in the pamphlet’s bitter remarks about hypocritical moralists taking it upon themselves to judge others. But at the same time, Gorky expresses his belief that America is strong and healthy, although the sincerity of this remark is seriously undermined by his quote from Edgar Allan Poe: “Keep telling a thief that he is an honest man, and he will justify your opinion about him.”57 Reworking the text for a Russian audience, Gorky makes it more visual; he omits the sermonizing and the personal references, so that the Russian reader gets a hopelessly depressing picture. Thus, Gorky’s implied audience determined his rhetorical tasks and significantly altered the image of America in his texts. Gorky himself acknowledged that his pamphlet “City of Mammon” had no artistic value, but, firm in his intention to provoke the American public and warn the European one, he published it nonetheless. He was aware of his role as a mentor to the reading public, a shaper of public opinion; everything he wrote was immediately translated in Europe, and he insisted on publishing a work if he believed that it would set off fireworks. Filosofov declared that public success corrupted Gorky as a writer. Indeed, based on the material from his American journey, we can see how he subjugated the artistic side of his personality to his political task. Thus, it is paradoxical that some American readers of the pamphlet perceived it as pure truth, although the text, with its grotesque images and exaggerations, is as far as could be from a “photographic copy of reality.” However, it is important to remember that Gorky’s preconception was formed not only by ideology. His resentment of America took on a shape that cannot be understood in isolation from the literary movements of the time, both Russian and European, especially expressionism and urbanist poetry. In Gorky’s texts, the familiar image of America as the land of the dead gains its strength from its urbanist specificity: New York appears as an octopus-like city devouring its inhabitants. Rougle shrewdly observes that, for Gorky, the encounter with America was not just an encounter

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with the highest stage of capitalism but also one with the city. He studies Gorky’s texts through the prism of the Verhaern-Briusov tradition, offering persuasive examples of their stylistic closeness. Korolenko’s In a Strange Land must also have influenced Gorky, since Dyma and Matvei perceive the American city as the epitome of Hell.58 The image of the Devil in Gorky’s texts is not exclusively negative. In his letters from America we occasionally see colloquial references to the Devil and Hell that are positive59—Hell appears to be a place bustling with energy and the Devil is a very industrious fellow: “Americans work like devils.” “It is interesting here, like in Hell.” “I work like the Devil.”60 But Gorky transforms this sense of restless movement into a horrible picture in his pamphlets, where he accentuates the fruitlessness and senselessness of this incessant motion. He stresses its futility and represents city life as alternating cycles of hunting for gold and wasting it. Gorky explicitly extends Korolenko’s image of the meat factory to the city as a whole, thus linking the images of meat and gold. What Korolenko’s narrator visualizes momentarily as a horrible accident—a man being slaughtered at the factory as easily and automatically as a pig—Gorky makes into his central metaphor for the city. He maintains that, in the culture he is describing, people are meat indeed. “The streets are deep ditches that lead people down into the depths of the city, where—you imagine—there is a huge, bottomless hole, cauldron, or frying pan. All these people stream into it and there they are boiled down into gold.”61 This image is so dear to Gorky that it appears in both “City of the Yellow Devil” and “A Priest of Morality.” In the latter, Gorky enhances the effect by putting his own words into the American antagonist’s mouth: the antagonist admits that the image is not his, but somehow “it has gotten into his head.” In Gorky’s expressionist interview “Khoziaeva zhizni” (The Lords of Life, 1906), the Devil is a positive figure, a descendant of Goethe’s romantic Demon—the spirit of doubt and negation, and a predecessor of Bulgakov’s Woland, a “part of the power…that always works good.” In an earlier sketch “I eshche o cherte” (Yet More about the Devil, 1905), Gorky had already explored the rhetorical potential of the Devil as the representative of one’s subconsciousness, and therefore, a participant in one’s dialogue with oneself. The ironic Devil of this sketch, not unlike Ivan Karamazov’s guest, appears as a moderate liberal’s dream and asks provocative questions that reveal the hypocrisy of his interlocutor, who, in Gorky’s case, supports the Revolution but errs in his belief that it can be carried out peacefully. The Devils in both the sketch and the interview obviously share socialist sympathies, but the latter Devil is more magnificent—which is quite

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understandable, since he is the autobiographical narrator’s dream.62 He takes the narrator on a spiritual journey to the “fountains of truth” (istochniki istiny)—to the literal and symbolic graveyard of ideas upon which modern society is built. Gorky materializes the image of these dead ideas, visualizing their creators as corpses in various stages of decomposition. His principal charge against the intellectuals of the past is that they tried to justify the fragmentation of society and proclaimed the inequality of different social groups. The symbol of the cemetery goes beyond satirizing American society: Gorky uses it to critique the social development of humankind. But some of the cemetery’s inhabitants are responsible for problems that are traditionally connected with America, such as racism and capital punishment—especially the electric chair. Moreover, the final framing episode of “The Lords of Life” also places the pamphlet into the American context: the narrator reports that he told his dream about the journey with the Devil to an American “who seemed more like a human being than the rest.”63 The American’s reaction was entirely practical; lacking imagination and unable to move beyond the parable’s literal meaning, he assumed that the Devil was the agent of a cremation company. Gorky thereby suggests that Americans are naïve and simple and do not recognize their connections with the dead ideas of the past, simply dismissing, or “burning,” them. In Gorky’s American texts, the romantic Devil of his imagination, the one who strives for harmony and beauty, stands in contrast to the actual Devil of the present day—the Dostoevskian Devil of poshlost’, or petty mediocrity. This opposition foreshadows the conflict in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, where real evil is embodied not in the image of Woland but in Moscow’s petty clerks. Gorky’s mediocre Devil reminds us not only of Ivan Karamazov’s notorious Devil, who dreams of being reincarnated as a merchant’s wife, but also of Fedor Sologub’s Melkii bes (Petty Demon).64 According to Gorky, the petty Devil rules America in his incarnation as the “Yellow Devil,” gold. However, there is a discrepancy between concept and style here; Gorky’s vivid imagination betrays him. His images of America are so intensely expressionistic, his condemnations so passionate, that the reader can hardly believe that the Devil of poshlost’ is boring and petty. Although Gorky tries to de-aestheticize evil, his creation is luxuriously picturesque: “I imagine that somewhere in the center of the city a large lump of Gold, squealing voluptuously, spins at a horrifying speed and diffuses fine specks along the streets, and all day people greedily angle for them, search for them, grab them” (140). To some extent, however, Gorky’s narrative and syntactical monotony contribute to the image of America as the land of the Devil of Petty Routine.65

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Gorky’s greatest success in conveying the image of a tedious Hell is perhaps the essay “Tsarstvo skuki” (Realm of Boredom). Here, he describes the amusement park on Coney Island as a place where the traditional Devil’s functions are performed: it simultaneously seduces with illusions and threatens with punishment, i.e., the many moralistic “attractions” presage the future tortures of wrongdoers. Coney Island virtually neutralizes the difference between sin and virtue, since both are for sale. Gorky focuses on the attraction that literally represents Hell. This artificial Hell is supposed to terrify the audience and teach its members a moral lesson, but Gorky claims that it is unbearably boring. Here we recognize the familiar conflict between a conception and its embodiment, which characterizes Gorky’s own manner of representing evil, but in reverse. The managers’ failure to create a truly horrifying Hell becomes the author’s success in demonstrating a petty one: “Hell is made of papier-mâché painted a dull crimson, the whole steeped in a fireproof substance exuding the foul odor of some heavy fat. Hell is very badly made—it will arouse disgust even in the most unexacting spectator.”66 The narrator notes that even the devils are bored in this Hell, and he ironically contemplates taking on the Devil’s traditional role as provocateur and organizing a strike: “Enough of this nonsense! Why don’t you go on strike, boys!”67 Gorky uses the technique of defamiliarization to create this twofold image of Hell: looking at the fake tortures, observers do not realize that they are in Hell already—the Hell of boredom and poshlost’. What Americans perceive as the fake demons of Coney Island Gorky perceives as the very real demons of America. In this respect, Coney Island is indeed the epitome of America. Ironically, its clumsy replica of Hell manages to fulfill its original function—to repel potential sinners. The visitors, as Gorky suggests, inevitably come to conclude that if the real Hell is as tiresome as this one, perhaps they should not sin. Gorky’s principal contribution to the tradition of the Russian travelogue as a journey to Hell is that he achieves a perfect equilibrium between the fantastic and the realistic. His most prominent technique in showing America as the land of the dead is the inversion of the living and the dead: he portrays people as objects or animals, and things and machines as animate beings. In Russian literature, Gogol developed the technique of showing an empty, dead world in his Petersburg tales and especially in Dead Souls. Gorky borrows Gogol’s poetics of the grotesque synecdoche and applies it to his American material. Later, in chapter 4, I will analyze the Gogolian subtext in American travelogues of Russian writers in detail.

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The sensation of Hell becomes especially vivid when Gorky’s narrator suggests that the city’s denizens are not really alive because they lack imagination and the ability to think: “To a living person, who thinks, who creates dreams, pictures, and images in his brain, who conceives desires… to a living person this wild wailing, screeching, roaring, this trembling of stone walls, this cowardly rattling of windowpanes—all this would bother him” (136). The American smile gains new connotations—it makes people’s faces look like skulls: “His face is smeared with a thick layer of greasy dirt and on it flash not the eyes of a living man but the white bone of his teeth” (133). Gorky combines metonymical fragmentation with the technique of showing people as dead: “A bold skull flashes dimly” (136). Even without proclaiming their deadness openly, he often describes New York City’s inhabitants as if they were dead bodies, which produces an even stronger image: “the bodies of the children sprawling on the balcony grills” (135). In his anti-urban pathos, he even reverts to shockingly gruesome and decadent images in Baudelaire’s vein: he shows people not only as corpses but also as worms inside a corpse. Gorky constructs the sensation of a deathly American “otherworldliness” mostly by using animating metaphors to describe objects. Thus, “dead matter” lives, moves, and breathes in his city: “Everything [not everybody!—MF] hurries, speeds, tensely quivers. The propellers and wheels of the steamships hastily beat the water—it is covered with yellow foam, broken by wrinkles” (132); “it all moans, wails, and screeches” (133); “over the entire bosom of the water” (133). Things are full of (negative) emotions: “Square, devoid of any desire to be beautiful, the dull, heavy buildings rise gloomily and tediously upwards. In each house one can sense an arrogant pride in its height and its ugliness” (133). Gorky endows objects and animals, but not people, with the virtue of social consciousness: “And it seems as if everything—iron, stones, water, wood—is full of protest against a life without sun, without songs of happiness, in captivity to hard labor” (133). By contrast, the city’s human inhabitants are satisfied with their meaningless work. They move like automatons with expressionless faces: “In their eyes there is no anger toward the rule of iron, no hatred for its triumph” (135). On closer analysis, however, we see that Gorky’s objects are not exactly living: they are often likened to the living dead. He galvanizes rather than truly personifies things, emphasizing that this life of dead matter is unnatural and terrible: “all the houses look at each other walleyed from their dingy windows in exactly the same indifferent and lifeless way” (141). What is more, in Gorky’s system of images the animation, or zombie-like galvanization, of things works alongside the de-personification of people.

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His city is full of sounds—unbearable whistles, rasping and howling. Yet the sound of human beings is absent. Gorky uses multiple techniques to stress people’s dehumanization. His ghoulish picture of New York shows people as animals, worms, and microbes, as dead bodies, fragments of the whole, objects, and, finally, as an amorphous, liquid mass—the city’s food source. To aggravate this impression of chaos, Gorky piles up synecdoches, repetitively objectifying metaphors, and comparisons. In portraying New York’s capitalist inhabitants as denizens of the Other World, Gorky significantly avoids calling them “people.” He defamiliarizes them: “A two-legged creature stunned and deafened by noise…looks at me strangely” (133). In contrast to the anthropomorphic features of objects, people’s body parts are sometimes not quite human: “With their little paws the children grab the thin chips” (136). He objectifies them with derogatory similes: “The small people walk without volition, like stones rolling downhill” (139). “All day long people pour into [the square] from five streets very much like potatoes rolling out of sacks.”68 He also reduces people to indistinguishable parts of a multitude, acted upon rather than acting: “Man is an insignificant screw, an invisible dot in the midst of monstrous, dirty complexes of iron and wood” (133); “all around, life boils feverishly like soup on a stove; little people run, whirl, and disappear in this boiling like bits of grain in a broth, like wood chips in the sea” (134); “in these streets, packed with people like sacks full of groats” (137); “[they] teem in filthy ditches, rub against each other like refuse in a stream of turbid water; they are spun and twirled by the power of hunger” (138). Gorky’s collective images are of two distinctly negative kinds. A group is either a pile of similar objects (sacks of grain, specks of iron on a magnet), or an entity different from its parts—a monster or a machine: “Sidewalks are flooded with the dark streams of human bodies” (139). The crowd is described as one creature, in the singular. It has one face, “the face of the crowd,” and one gaze: “Hundreds of blank eyes acquire a common expression and a common stare—a watchful, suspicious stare.”69 With his image of a creature that can restructure itself, lose parts and regenerate, Gorky anticipates the sci-fi images of alien monsters. But even when his group falls apart, its members do not become individuals. Gorky stresses their massproduced uniformity: “Their heads are all identically covered with round hats and their brains—this is evident in their eyes—have all already gone to sleep” (139); “the old, the young, the children—all are identically silent, invariably placid” (135). Even taken individually, people seem to be merely shards of a whole rather than self-sufficient persons. Fragmentation here has two meanings:

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all people are mere fragments of something larger but, at the same time, by the means of the narrator’s description, each person has been torn into fragments: “More and more faces, one after another, flash in the windows like splinters of some single thing—a large thing, but smashed into insignificant specks of dust, ground into gravel” (136); “into the gutter-like streets the people drift, grim and silent. Broken people, disbanded people” (41). Thus, both collective and individual images of people are negatively charged. Gorky’s city looks like a dissecting room where men and women are represented as body parts, mere synecdoches of themselves, a Gogolian parade of garments and body parts.70 Formally, this fragmentation is justified by the observer’s experiences: he travels above the streets of New York on the “El,” catching glimpses, like snapshots, of people and their activities from the train window. He conveys his impression of a city full of dismembered people: “The dark face of an old woman…flashed by;” “women’s bosoms and men’s heads tremble” (135). The narrator virtually tears people apart, describing them as collections of organs: “What sort of a fluid runs in their veins? What must be the chemical structure of their brains? Their lungs are like rags fed upon dirt; their little stomachs like the garbage boxes from which they obtain their food.”71 Gorky also uses similes to compare people with animals: “An old man, tall and skinny, with a predatory face…carefully rummages in a pile of garbage, picking out pieces of coal. When someone approaches him, he turns his torso clumsily, like a wolf, and says something” (138). The old man is not just like a wolf—he is like a wolf puppet, with separate body parts that can move independently of each other. Gorky creates chains of similes that emphasize the insignificance of his subjects. First he turns children into animals: “[Children] fight like little curs.” Next, they become collective: “They cover the pavements in flocks, like voracious pigeons.” Finally, he reduces them to “pitiful microbes of poverty” (137). Sometimes, Gorky mixes several similes in a cumbersome image, simultaneously comparing people with material objects and animals: “She stands as if made of stone and her eyes are as round as an owl’s” (137–138). In “Realm of Boredom” Gorky transforms similes into metaphors, portraying the same crowd as an animal and a pagan idol with a copper face, requiring a human sacrifice. A piteous lion tamer is trapped between two beasts, the tiger and the crowd, but the latter is the scarier one: “He shouts to hide his deadly terror in the face of the tiger and his slavish anxiety to please the herd that calmly watches his capers, tensely awaiting the fatal leap of the beast.”72 Only in Gorky’s non-ideological and generically singular story “Charlie Man” does he portray a man with humanity, by sharing his noble feelings

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with a wild creature’s. The story does not deal with an urban theme or condemn America but treats it with mild irony. The hero, a hunter named Charlie Man, is a romantic character, opposed to society. In the story’s first part, Charlie Man is portrayed rather ironically: he demonstrates a typically “American” pragmatism when he refuses, in spite of his fellow villagers’ requests for protection, to hunt a bear that is devastating their farms; he knows that bear fur has no value in the fall. Later Charlie Man frees a hawk, because he feels a kinship with the wild, gloomy bird who suffers in captivity. While his neighbors had recognized his prudence regarding the bear, now they condemn him for impracticality and stupidity. Charlie, thus, loses his reputation because he does not behave like an American. For the same reason, he gains the author’s sympathy. It is easy to see why Gorky excluded the story from the collections of his American texts; its tone and setting undermined his general picture of America as a capitalist and urban Hell. As a lone short story, it did not fit in with his sketches and interviews. When using images of animals in his pamphlets, Gorky suggests that comparing animals to a city’s inhabitants offends the animals. In the “Realm of Boredom,” he portrays animals as much more noble, caring, and courageous than people. Unlike Gorky’s people, animals in America have memories, passions, and real human emotions. For example, he portrays a monkey in the Coney Island Zoo as a mother protecting her child, who has been stabbed and pinched by the public: “The infant clings to its mother’s breast, its long skinny arms wound round her neck and the tiny fingers locked behind” (30).73 Nobody in the audience, not even the women, as Gorky emphasizes, pities the poor mother; only the elephant feels compassion. In “City of the Yellow Devil,” Gorky creates a parallel and yet contrasting “human” image—a starving and exhausted woman remains indifferent to the sufferings of the child she is holding: “A tall woman with big dark eyes stands in the doorway. She has a child in her arms, her housedress is unbuttoned, a bluish breast droops helplessly like a long purse. The child screams, scratching with its fingers at its mother’s flaccid, hungry body, pushes its face into her, smacks its lips, falls silent for a minute, and then screams with greater force, beating its mother’s breast with arms and legs. She stands as if made of stone” (137). The monkey proves a better mother. In Gorky’s America, animals figure as martyrs and prophets. Gorky therefore describes them in a solemn and elevated mode. Thus, he chooses a wise bear with knowing eyes as the protagonist of “Realm of Boredom.” The bear realizes what people are unable to understand, that their intolerable life in the city and their pitiful weekend entertainments are a huge set-up, intended to fool them and to deprive them of their humanity. Gorky uses

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Christ’s words and asks the animals to forgive human beings who know not what they do, promising them that the time will come when people will change. For the moment, however, Gorky, the proclaimed socialist, ignores progressive American workers and discerns no portents of change. Gorky’s picture of America might not have been so gloomy if his socialism had been more consistent. In his “literary portrait” of Korolenko, Gorky recounts a conversation he had with him on socialism. Korolenko claimed, “It’s a muddle to me. Socialism without idealism—I can’t understand that. And I don’t believe the consciousness of common material interests is enough to build an ethical system on—we can’t get on without ethics.”74 Gorky, of course, maintained that he himself was much closer to the Marxist worldview, but he too found it difficult to reconcile socialism and individualism. This is particularly evident in his American texts, where his self-imposed political agenda exacerbates the discrepancies in his social views. Soviet critics found it hard to represent Gorky’s American texts as products of conscious Marxist analysis, although they needed to do so in order to legitimize them as anti-American propaganda. Since the classic socialist realist novel Mother was written in America, it was simply impossible to admit that the author was anything less than a fully developed Marxist. Although one scholar claims that Gorky perceived New York not only as the “City of the Yellow Devil” but also as “the city where the working people take on Capital in the struggle for socialism,”75 there is nothing in the 1906 texts to support this argument. Scholars like Cioni and Rougle, unhampered by ideological dogmatism, rightly argue that Gorky’s 1906 works hardly constituted a conscious Marxist analysis and that his perception of reality remained aesthetic and individualistic.76 Among Gorky’s contemporaries, Filosofov offers the most revealing analysis of Gorky’s American texts with respect to this controversy (“Konets Gor’kogo” [The End of Gorky]). According to Filosofov, Gorky failed to provide a convincing picture of American social life for two major reasons. The first was his purely mechanical acceptance of socialism; lacking deeper understanding, Gorky merely tried to apply it as a universal lever for all social problems. The second and more profound reason was an intrinsic antinomy within socialism itself—its inability to reconcile the happiness of the individual with the needs of society. As Filosofov shrewdly remarks, Gorky had already failed to do this with Russian material. His major artistic discovery was the image of the bosiak, the rebellious outcast, the anarchist filled with rage and ready to wreak havoc on everything around him. Filosofov criticizes Gorky’s attempt to draw a direct line from the bosiak to the socialist. He believes that rage was not an immanent quality of

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the man “from the lower depths” but, rather, that it marked a certain stage in his continuing evolution toward spirituality. He maintains that Gorky’s attempts to turn his furious and large-souled bosiak into a revolutionary, to pass him off as no more than a product of his milieu, were tragically reductive, as were his attempts to reduce the human scale to the socioeconomic one. Filosofov differentiates between Gorky-the-writer, an instinctive romantic, and Gorky-the-citizen, an earnest, if superficial, social democrat, and thinks that the latter diminished and crippled the former. Interestingly, Plekhanov, one of the leading Russian theorists of Marxism and ideologically very different from Filosofov, echoes his criticisms of Gorky’s texts that feature an explicit social agenda—American essays, Mother, and the novella Ispoved’ (Confession). While paying tribute to Gorky-the-artist, Plekhanov casts doubts on his capacity for theoretical thinking. He mocks his shallow, mechanistic understanding of socialism and regrets that he has turned into a preacher: “M. Gorky has very badly digested the truth which the proletariat brings into the world. This is the reason for many of his literary failures. If he had digested the abovementioned truth, his American sketches would have been written entirely differently: their author would not have seemed like a populist cursing the emergence of capitalism.”77 Indeed, Gorky makes it his mission to denounce America from top to bottom; hence, what he sees is a crowd, not the nascent, still disorganized proletariat. As Filosofov declares, Gorky undermines the very socialism that he proclaims. In fact, Gorky, like Korolenko, simply cannot accept socialism without idealism, cannot believe that common material interest is enough to unite people and restructure society. In “The City of Mammon,” he claims that socialism is a creative process, the religion of the future,78 but then he ascribes American socialist ideas strictly to the upper classes. According to Gorky, even physical labor as such is no virtue—those who praise work as a cure-all end up as corpses in his cemetery of dead ideas. Gorky does not accept the idea of work without spiritual fulfillment and creative thought. Labor in America amounts to the meaningless drudgery of slaves, since people work merely for food and entertainment. He disparages workers as functional tools.79 Filosofov connects this condemnation with the sad irony of Gorky’s own role in the Bolshevik movement, claiming that Gorky’s party comrades always perceived him as merely a tool for broadcasting their ideas. In his essays, Gorky connects the American disjuncture between labor and socialism with anarchy. As long as individual men are shown in the process of gathering or dispersing, he occasionally refers to them as “people”; but

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once they unite, their human qualities are completely submerged. The mob, in the singular, is a monster, overwhelmed with violent desires; it wants to rape, murder, torture, and cannibalize. “A Mob” offers a scene of mass violence cast as the author’s ghoulish dream, in which a crowd rapes and dismembers a woman. By story’s end, this vision becomes fact when the mob murders a tram conductor. These episodes of carnal violence drip with sadistic eroticism to such an extent that one might suspect that Gorky’s anarchistic nature secretly rejoices in creating them. The question of anarchism seems to be Gorky’s personal sore spot. Indeed, Tolstoy accused him of a “malicious and cruel” anarchism after he published the novella “Troe” (The Three). But Gorky occasionally disparages the anarchism of the American masses quite violently, perhaps as a result of his continual struggle to fend off the label of “anarchist” himself. In “The City of Mammon,” for example, Gorky criticizes the masses’ destructive anarchism. However, in “The City of the Yellow Devil,” he seems implicitly to long for the coming of an anarchist; his narrator imagines a young man destroying the city’s dead matter and mixing it into one colossal heap. Nonetheless, Gorky felt compelled to emphasize the difference between socialism and anarchism and to proclaim himself a socialist. As Burenin reports, he insisted that American newspapers should emphasize this difference.80 On his entry to America, when a guard asked him whether he was an anarchist, Gorky denied it, paradoxically claiming that the tsarist regime, to which he was opposed, was in fact an organized form of anarchy. The distinction between anarchism and socialism in Gorky’s writings is very murky. Idealizing Russia, Gorky was inclined to see the seeds of a future revolution in the outbursts of the stirring masses. His personal letters and proclamations reveal that he was well aware of the dirty and violent nature of revolution. And, where Russia was concerned, Gorky was ready to accept the collateral damage of mass protest.81 But since he opposed America to his revolutionary ideal, he condemned American outbursts as mere anarchism. He portrays the crowd of strikers in Mother as a gigantic bird, with the leader as its beak. But he is repulsed by the “raw” rage of America’s oppressed working people and equates it with a monster’s rage. Indeed, he uses the image of this terrible monster to represent the dark side of the workers’ movement, which is a manifestation of the Other (chuzhoe). He divorces American workers from their Russian comrades, imagined in Mother as a collective, noble bird. Gorky’s contemporaries’ reactions to his American sketches ranged from suspicions that Gorky’s literary talent had deserted him (Filosofov)82 to admiration for his merciless unveiling of capitalism’s contradictions.

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Contrary to the popular opinion that Gorky’s American journey was a failure, Burenin states that the trip was indeed successful, if not in the manner expected. Summarizing the results of Gorky’s American sojourn, Burenin lists the impressive number of texts he wrote there. As a matter of fact, Gorky’s political mission was not a failure either; he was unable to raise money for the party, but at least America did not actively participate in the tsarist loan—although it is, of course, hard to determine whether this was a direct result of Gorky’s intervention. Gorky’s greatest success was artistic: he created a repulsive, derogatory image of America as Hell against which Americans could contrast the glories of the Paradise to be built in Russia. As Rogger remarks: “In any comparison between Russian utopia and American reality, America had to be (and still is) the loser.”83 But in fact, as we see in Gorky’s American sketches, Russian writers compared a Russian utopia with the literary construct of an American dystopia. In the most influential pre-revolutionary travelogues, the hellishness of America lies in its urbanism. Their American journeys convinced Korolenko and Gorky that the American way of life was unsuitable for Russia. According to Korolenko, Russia can hardly learn anything from America, because it is too spiritually remote. For Gorky, America is useless because he discerns no sign of political activity among the workers of this most industrialized of countries. America’s aura of energetic youthfulness, so typical for Westernizers’ “practical” travelogues, is absent in Korolenko and Gorky. Instead, we find lifeless, mechanistic movement deprived of a higher goal. By contrast with these pre-revolutionary travelogues, travelogues written after the Revolution will recognize America’s urbanism and technological advancement as major sources of attraction. Thus, although Soviet-era travelers will preserve the infernal features that Gorky and Korolenko so vividly stressed in their pictures of America, they will discover them in new places.

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t h e m o s t pa r t , America did not feature prominently in Russian literature in the years leading up to World War I and the 1917 Revolution, although several noteworthy exceptions deserve mention, among them Alexander Blok’s poem, “Novaia Amerika,” (New America, 1913),1 and Osip Mandelstam’s “Amerikanka” (American Girl, 1913), which features a young American traveling in Europe. Importantly, Mandelstam’s poem adds new overtones to the literary opposition between America and Europe. Previously, America had represented youth, naïveté, ignorance, and naturalness (“the savage,” be he noble, as in the positive mode of the American narrative, or ignoble, as in the negative one), while Europe had represented the old and the refined. Mandelstam’s poem complicates the image of the American by adding urban associations that blur the usual oppositions between nature and culture, rural and urban. Here, the young American is linked both with nature and with the industrial city, but American urbanism does not necessarily imply “culture” in the European sense. What is more, Mandelstam’s concept of America’s youth encompasses not merely ignorance but also disregard for experience, or amnesia: the American girl traveling to Europe has failed to heed the “Titanic’s advice.” The poem is both tender and ironic. Europe is seen through the girl’s eyes, as an object of her interest, while at the same time the poet perceives the American girl herself from a European point of view. Mandelstam evaluates the American phenomenon from a European perspective for a second time in his review of a Russian translation of Jack London’s novellas. But, as Pavel Nerler has observed, Mandelstam’s review article (published in Apollon in 1913) is much harsher toward America than his poem.2 Mandelstam writes that from the European point of view,

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London’s ideology is striking in its mediocrity and its outmodedness: he passes off a quite consistent and well-digested Darwinism, unfortunately embellished with a cheap and ill-understood Nietzscheanism, as the wisdom of nature itself and the inflexible law of life. This conclusion reflects a characteristic late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian perception of the New World as a paradoxical anachronism, wherein old Europe perceives young America as old-fashioned. As scholars have observed,3 the new interest in America that re-emerged before the October Revolution was connected with Russian industrialization, and it represented, first and foremost, the interest of a developing country in an advanced urban one. To some extent, it was a continuation of the “practical” trend whose evolution has been noted earlier. Besides, America had never lost its attraction for the common people, who saw it from afar as the embodiment of a perfectly organized life. Zoshchenko’s 1924 short story “Bania” (The Bathhouse) supplies a typical example. The narrator, Zoshchenko’s ironic linguistic and socio-psychological reconstruction of an ordinary fellow, first tells about his humiliating experience in a public bathhouse and then contrasts the Russian bathhouse to an imaginary American one where, as he supposes, everything is much cleaner and more orderly. Less obviously but equally significantly, Zoshchenko’s story associates America with the theater. Since the narrator claims that the Russian bathhouse is “not America” and “not a theater,” the two entities inevitably and paradoxically merge in the reader’s mind. Zoshchenko thereby adds subtle overtones of illusion and showmanship to his image of a “perfect” America. In this period, the romantic image of Columbus’s voyage to the New World appears in Nikolai Gumilev’s poem “Otkrytie Ameriki” (The Discovery of America, 1910). The traveler dreams of the unknown land as “another existence” (inobytie) with “new, better grass and lakes.” Gumilev portrays America’s discovery as a creative process similar to writing a poem; Columbus foresees the new continent with his spiritual eye (dukhovnym okom) and through his tremendous creative labor glimpses a reflection of Paradise. Gumilev’s Columbus evokes the figure of Christ: he “walks on water as on the ground,” and he is likened to the Midnight Bridegroom. By contrast, in the later poem “Khristofor Kolomb” (Christopher Columbus), written during his American journey, Mayakovsky makes the discoverer’s image explicitly mundane; his Columbus is a drunkard, an adventurer with a high-pitched treble voice, who appears comical to his anti-Semitic companions. In Mayakovsky’s poem, the grand discovery of the new continent results from the courage and persistence of this “little man.”

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Exotic stereotypes of America, with buffalos and Indians like those in Chekhov’s “Mal’chiki” (The Boys, 1887) had never ceased to nourish the imagination of Russian children. In his short story “Razgovor v shkole” (A Conversation at School, 1922), Arkadii Averchenko contrasts the child’s dream of a Rousseauian, idyllic America with the “official” picture of an urban civilization that the teacher tries to impress upon her pupils. Averchenko thus mocks the positivist mainstream stereotype; his teacher tries in vain to proselytize the stereotypical benefits of industrial progress— “huge multi-storied houses, hundreds of rushing tram cars, electricity and elevators”—which she sees as “culture.” The children defend their ideal of a natural, uncivilized world, especially because it matches their lack of enthusiasm for formal education. They argue that people feel much happier in the woods, close to a fire, eating buffalo meat and hand-picked bananas—another attribute of exotic American life—than in the boring city. The narrator remarks ironically: “Culture, notably, was bursting at the seams, violently besieged and attacked by Indians, bonfires, panthers and baobabs.”4 In Averchenko, the cultural and the natural both characterize America, but they are distributed as “grown-up” vs. “children’s” stereotypes. In Russian literature, when America is represented as a kind of Eden, the tempting Devil or his shadow is often nearby. As Averchenko’s narrator notes in passing, the children’s argument with their teacher must have been inspired by a little school devil, an image that implicitly conjures up the connotations of America as a source of guilt in Chekhov’s “Boys.” Russian children continued to idealize and search for America before and after the Revolution. In Daniil Kharms’s children’s story, Kol’ka Pankin and Pet’ka Ershov choose an airplane, a modern means of escape, to facilitate an attempted escape to Brazil.5 They are attracted by a familiar nexus of American images: palms, wild beasts, and Indians. Although the friends never get farther than a village outside of Leningrad, it is enough for Kol’ka to believe that they have visited Brazil. In his imagination, a cow turns into a bison, sparrows into hummingbirds, and a pine into a palm.6 Village boys successfully play the roles of Native Americans, creating an association between Russian and American “savages” that is symptomatic for the Soviet travelogue tradition and that Kharms ironically re-interprets. In Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s children’s book Kak Boria gulial po N’iu Iorku (How Boria Went for a Walk in New York), published in 1927 in Russian,7 the escape from home to America is quite different, with nothing imaginary or fantastic about it; little Boria, apparently an immigrant, actually lives in New York. Bored by sitting at home with his exhausted mother, Boria goes for a walk on his own and explores the city. The book offers a glimpse

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of New York realia from a child’s point of view, in which the city proves friendly to little people—Boria has no trouble riding the train and finding his way to Central Park. The city, as represented in Mitchell’s book, is very much like the one that Averchenko’s teacher unsuccessfully tried to convey to her pupils. Boria’s not-very-dramatic adventures are also reminiscent of Korolenko’s fascination with the attention paid to children in an American city, where all the tram cars stop when a little girl crosses the street. The October Revolution was often compared in public discourse to the discovery of America, and after the Revolution, Russians’ attention to America increased dramatically. While waiting for the world to discover it, the new country, Soviet Russia, launched its own process of discovery. Virtually everything—history, geography, world culture—was revisited and redefined synchronically and diachronically for new ideological purposes so that the young country could construct its own identity. Later, in the 1930s, this redefinition would ossify into the rigid form of ideological clichés. America played an enormous role as Russia’s point of departure in its search for self-identity, and the two nations’ processes of assimilation and dissimilation dramatically converged. As Ball and Etkind show, the scale of change in the United States was comparable to that in Russia, but American change was technological, while Russian was social. Russia, however, also needed a technological revolution. On the one hand, Russia still viewed the land beyond the ocean as a capitalist Hell, as per Korolenko and Gorky; and caricatures vilifying America in Soviet satirical journals played into these images. On the other hand, Russia studied and borrowed some of America’s intrinsic features for the purposes of building a socialist Paradise, seizing on both the idyllic, romantic motifs in America’s image and the practical trend glorifying industrialization. Dozens of Soviet engineers and workers crossed the ocean in the 1920s and 1930s in order to acquire practical experience in capitalist factories for later implementation at home. Many of them composed documentary travelogues, which I will discuss in chapter 4, in the section on technology. During this same period, writers and journalists who traveled to America carried out a more complex social commission (sotsial’nyi zakaz), creating appropriate ideological imagery in and through the arts. With varying degrees of awareness, they grappled with the inherent inconsistency of modeling Paradise on Hell. In their travelogues, they addressed the disparity between the American social system and its utilitarian industrialism, which they understood as a demonic disagreement between form and substance. The journalist and party activist Kazimir Dobranitskii’s documentary travelogue V Ameriku i obratno (To America and Back Again, 1927) offers

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an account of the author’s 1925 journey aboard the commercial Soviet vessel Vatslav Vorovskii. Typically for the times, Dobranitskii challenges stereotypes by claiming that American technology is less sophisticated and less widespread than popularly assumed, even though it may be advanced in a few places. He quotes a farmer of Russian origin: “For the poor, there is no technology—only, maybe, an automobile.”8 Dobranitskii’s book abounds in popular aesthetic and ideological anti-American clichés: he is repelled by the ugly skyscrapers; condemns the racism; argues that the ubiquitous automobiles do not significantly improve their owners’ lives; and, above all, debunks American pretense and hypocrisy (“A lying, pharisaic country!”9). Many of the narrator’s interlocutors in America are Russian immigrants who are dissatisfied with their present difficult existence. Not only those who came before the October Revolution but even former White officers and members of the bourgeoisie ask him whether it might be possible for them to return to their newly revitalized homeland. In his 1926 novella Russkii amerikanets (A Russian American), Boris Tageev, an officer, traveler, journalist and writer, casts doubt on the myth of America as the land of hope and opportunity for immigrants.10 His protagonists, Petia and his father, leave Russia for America in search of a decent life. The father finally finds a job at Ford’s Dearborn factory but, exhausted by the inhuman labor conditions, eventually dies. On his deathbed he makes Petia promise that he will return to Russia, where the October Revolution has taken place, and start a new life. Tageev’s novella illustrates how the American dream was projected onto Russia during the 1920s. In the new Soviet myth, Russia replaces America as the final happy refuge for all working people. We see a similar redirection in Aleksei Tolstoy’s play and film scenario Zolotoi kliuchik, ili prikliucheniia Buratino (The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino, 1936). Tolstoy’s protagonist, the picaro Buratino, and his friends experience a series of dangerous adventures in the capitalist “Land of Fools” but finally escape to a “Land of Happiness,” in which we cannot fail to recognize the Soviet Union.11 The most important Russian writers to visit America in the 1920s—and the primary subjects of this chapter—were Esenin and Mayakovsky, two poets for whom America became an arena for poetic rivalry. Both Esenin and Mayakovsky considered themselves pioneers in artistic form as well as in the subject of their explorations (Mayakovsky even signed the letters he wrote to Lilia Brik during the journey “your Columbus”). Nevertheless, both of them relied on the literary experience of their predecessors, and their “discoveries” were generically predetermined. Paradoxically, the country that

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these two Columbuses had left, the young Soviet Union, was newer than the one they set out to discover. As major poets, Mayakovsky and Esenin transcend the declarations of their respective opposing artistic groups, Futurism and Imaginism. As Lekmanov and Sverdlov note, their primary antagonism lay in their choice of contrasting literary modes (stikhii)—the declamatory (oratorskaia) and the songful (pesnopevcheskaia).12 Nevertheless, their rivalry was amplified by the significant ideological and aesthetic differences between Futurism, which strove for functionality in art as a means to grasp the skeleton of reality, and Imaginism, which relied on the expressive abilities of images as the conveyers of meaning par excellence. America became a testing ground for the expressive abilities of each artistic movement and, as we will see, revealed the limitations of both.13 While contemporary critics generally opposed the Imaginist Esenin, the poet of the village, to the Futurist Mayakovsky, the poet of the city, both men’s American journeys as well as their American texts reveal significant convergences. The revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whose taste, as Etkind notes, was paradoxically neo-classical, singled out Esenin as Russia’s most talented contemporary poet, and he welcomed Esenin’s trip to America. In an article written while Esenin was traveling abroad and later published in book form as Literature and Revolution, Trotsky stressed Esenin’s closeness (as well as that of a number of “fellow travelers”)14 to the interests of the Revolution.15 Trotsky believed that, given the new reality at hand, Esenin would broaden his repertoire of subjects and techniques, cast off his “peasant” limitations, and fully realize his potential. Paradoxically, therefore, Esenin, the “village poet,” was the first major writer after the Revolution to experience industrial America first hand. Mayakovsky had already initiated the post-revolutionary literary exploration of America in advance of both Esenin’s and his own actual journeys by means of his poem “150,000,000” (1919–1920), in which he created hyperbolic images of urbanism based on the capitalist American city par excellence, the Chicago of his imagination. Esenin, however, arrived first, in 1922–1923, and tried to take advantage of his priority as an eyewitness. After experiencing the “real” America, Esenin feels entitled to exclaim: “How untalented Mayakovsky’s poems about America are!”16 Appearing at the beginning of his essay “Zheleznyi Mirgorod” (An Iron Mirgorod), this remark highlights the literary rivalry between him and Mayakovsky and signals the text’s dialogical mode. According to Esenin, only real experience can guarantee true representation. As the first official Soviet Columbus, he mocks Soviet urbanist poets, calling them “dear old

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dumb, home-grown Russian urbanists and electrifiers in poetry,” and he points out that their poems are “based on the pictures in bad American magazines” (151–152). His essay not only debunks the Futurists but also reveals Esenin’s disillusionment with the power of the poetic word in general and Imaginism in particular to convey the miracles of urban technology. Refusing to describe the grandeur of the steamship aboard which he made his transatlantic journey, Esenin laments: “An image with no likeness. This was when I came to feel very clearly that the Imaginism my friends and I preached was exhaustible. I came to feel that the important thing was not comparisons but the organic thing itself ” (148). He claims that technology is the art of the present day and that it does not need to be doubled or paraphrased by secondary artistic representation. Mayakovsky must have been affected by this challenge, especially since Esenin was not the only one who chastised him for lacking practical experience of industrial life.17 Although critics often claim that Mayakovsky visited the United States merely out of curiosity, he was clearly compelled to make the journey, if only to convince himself and others that it was unnecessary. After being refused an American visa several times, he nevertheless embarked on a journey to Mexico, expecting to gain entry from there, even despite the fact that his money was stolen prior to departure. He was driven by the urge to compare real-life urban America to his own previous urbanist images.18 Paradoxically, travel to America was the only way Mayakovsky could prove the power of his poetic imagination. After visiting the real Chicago, Mayakovsky finds confirmation that he had, after all, known the truth about America from the very beginning. He lauds the superiority of poetic truth over plain facts, comparing the image of Chicago in his poem “150,000,000” with both the Chicago of Carl Sandburg’s representation and the more prosaic version in a guidebook. He concludes: “The guidebook described Chicago accurately and with no resemblance. I described it inaccurately but with a resemblance. Sandburg described it both inaccurately and with no resemblance” (201). Like Bulgakov’s Master, who receives confirmation that his fantasy has, after all, been truthful, Mayakovsky could have exclaimed after visiting America: “Oh, how I guessed! How I guessed it all!” On the one hand, his American experience proved to Mayakovsky that Futurism was suitable for grasping the essence of modern technology. In the colossus of the Brooklyn Bridge, he recognizes the structural principle of Futurism, “a fight for construction instead of style.”19 On the other hand, Mayakovsky also emphasizes the downside of technology in America, its intrinsic connection with a corrupt social order.20

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The “village poet” Esenin admires New York’s urban landscapes as enthusiastically as the Futurist Mayakovsky. Even so, Gordon McVay’s assumption that he “succumbed to the compelling power of America’s industrial might”21 oversimplifies the matter. Although Esenin admits that literary urbanism might have its place in America, he argues that in contemporary Russia it would be fairer to describe actual horses and carriages—the routine one knows—than to be a Futurist. Here again we encounter an unexpected discrediting of the power of poetic imagination. Esenin humbly recognizes his personal backwardness and limitations but tries to exonerate himself from the charge of counter-revolution by insisting that, although his writings may be insufficiently revolutionary, he has embraced Communist ideas in his heart. Nevertheless, as we shall see, various slips and contradictions in his texts demonstrate that, while his desire to be modern might have been sincere, he was more deeply attached to the old reality. Even as he praises the glorious industrial society to be built in Soviet Russia, claiming that he is ready to master the new style required from him by the Revolution, Esenin fails to achieve harmony with modern reality. After his arrival in America, Esenin intended to write a series of essays and a collection of poems about the country, but he never did so. Thus, his American travelogue took the form of an essay composed after his return to Russia, “An Iron Mirgorod,” as well as of an episode in his lyrical drama Strana negodiaev (The Land of Scoundrels, 1923).22 To some extent, this paucity of texts resulted from the disastrous personal circumstances of Esenin’s journey. Biographers note that Esenin’s initial expectations of public success were fantastically high. According to Lola Kinel, Isadora Duncan’s secretary, Esenin dreamed of being translated into English and being appreciated by thousands of new readers, even though Kinel warned him that his poetry’s melodic quality was unlikely to survive translation.23 Esenin enjoyed extraordinary popularity in Russia, but he was not widely known in America. Although he planned several literary readings (and even published an address to the American public), there is no confirmation that they ever took place. No more than a handful of his poems had been translated at the time of his voyage. Thus, Esenin was reduced to being a companion to his wife, the world-famous dancer Isadora Duncan. Duncan was returning to her homeland after years of teaching modern dance in Europe and Russia,24 and her performances, not Esenin’s readings, gathered crowds. Esenin was extremely envious. In a letter to Vsevolod Rozhdestvenskii, he tells how excited he was to see his own picture in the papers, only to discover that he was referred to merely as Duncan’s husband: “I was so furious that I tore the paper to shreds.”25

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Like the Gorky scholars who trace his anti-Americanism to the public scandal with Andreeva, many of Esenin’s biographers attribute his negativism toward America to his humiliating role as Duncan’s “prince consort.” But scholars who focus on the trip’s scandalous details tend to underestimate the depth of Esenin’s inner crisis at the time of his American journey. It would be more productive to read the biographical data in the context of the disparity in importance of the poetic word in America and Russia and Esenin’s general disillusionment with the expressive ability of the word. While English was Duncan’s native language, she hardly needed it to attract public attention, since she spoke the universal language of dance. Esenin tried to take revenge by pointing to the temporal (although not geographical and national) limitation of dance as compared to poetry. He maliciously predicted that, while Duncan’s movements would inevitably disappear together with her body, his poems would live eternally. When contrasting their artistic domains, it must have been especially infuriating for Esenin that Duncan did, in fact, co-opt his means; she never considered a show finished until she had delivered a speech. Although she introduced Esenin in these addresses and called him the Russian Whitman and the greatest Russian poet since Pushkin, this could hardly compensate for the fact that Esenin was compelled to remain mute. Lacking a language to conquer or at least to surprise America, he too turned to the language of gesture—albeit social rather than artistic—constantly drinking, initiating scandals, and provoking the public. While Duncan tried to carry out the cultural mission of raising funds for her children’s dance school in Moscow, Esenin practiced the life of a hooligan, like the lyrical hero of his earlier poems. Paradoxically, at the end of this disastrous tour he proclaimed the superiority of the gesture over the word—at least in America—stating that Americans would never have remembered him for his poetry, but after his debauchery they would remember him better than Duncan.26 And yet, even in the public arena of scandalous gestures, he was no match for his wife; Isadora’s tour was curtailed by the authorities because of her “inappropriate” dances and her “pro-Bolshevik” propaganda. Upon his return to Russia, Esenin reclaimed his voice and writer’s identity and made certain retrospective corrections to the story of his journey. In “An Iron Mirgorod,” he either avoids mentioning Duncan or attempts to diminish her role. He writes mainly about his male companion (sputnik), apparently referring to Vetlugin, his and Duncan’s interpreter and secretary. When it is absolutely necessary to refer to Duncan, he mentions her in such a way that the reader does not identify her as Esenin’s traveling companion, saying, for example, that he and his sputnik were allowed into

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the country because “friends of Duncan’s had sent a telegram” (151). Esenin also mentions that the “huge articles” in morning papers told “a little about Duncan” (150), and then discusses in detail what they wrote about him, creating the impression that he, rather than his wife, was the major news, although in fact the reverse obtained. This belated literary revenge demonstrates Esenin’s unreliability as a narrator and prepares the attentive reader for other inconsistencies in his text. Such contradictions abound in “An Iron Mirgorod” and evidence the deep inner conflict Esenin experienced during his journey. His disillusionment with Imaginism, his complex relations with the new Bolshevik regime— particularly his readiness to please Trotsky—and his desire not to be an outsider in the new life even as he struggled with his heartfelt attachment to the old, all contributed to this crisis. One could say that the paradoxes of the Russian attitude to America in the 1920s are condensed in “An Iron Mirgorod” and enhanced by Esenin’s inner problems. In “An Iron Mirgorod,” Esenin glorifies urban landscapes. Yet, in order to describe them, he employs the images of that very village reality he criticizes. For example, portraying New York City at night, he mentions “haycocks and stacks of lights” (kopny i stoga ognei, 150) around the skyscrapers. Voicing Nietzschean ideas, he praises Americans for putting man in God’s place, but then he criticizes Americans for being primitive and narrow-minded. He approves of the merciless efficiency of American technological progress, making an explicit connection between American colonization of the New World and post-revolutionary Russian industrialization (carried out at the peasants’ expense), but he exclaims in the next moment, “Poor Russian Hiawatha!” (153). Although he claims that the reason for his pity is the backwardness of Russian peasants, which he transplants in the American context onto the Native Americans, his words sound ominous. Esenin’s American essay is both cheerful and sad. He writes that the American experience was rewarding but also that it has taken a lot out of him. What has been taken is, apparently, his illusions of world fame; and in the face of changes coming in his own country, he has lost the certainty of his own leading role. He finds himself in a position where he must accept and even welcome those changes: “I am close to [communists] intellectually and I hope I will perhaps be close to them in my works as well,” he confesses in the essay (149). Esenin’s urge to belong to the new era, to the people, his desire to “run after the Komsomol,”27 has the same pathos as Mandelstam’s triumphant and desperate claim: “You should know by now, I am a contemporary too!” (Pora vam znat’, ia tozhe sovremennik!)28 At the same time, Esenin feels acutely that in the land of victorious socialism he is an unwanted stepson rather than a

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legitimate heir.29 “An Iron Mirgorod” foreshadows the bitter confessions of his late verses. In the poem “Rus’ ukhodiashchaia” (Rus’ Departing), written after his return from America, Esenin will sadly accept that there is no place for him in the new Russia. And, as his American experience showed him, he simply did not exist for any audience outside of Russia. American urbanism had no real effect on his verses, and Trotsky’s expectations remained unfulfilled. It is obvious that the much-anticipated poems about America could never have been written. The journey to America deepened Esenin’s inner crisis, both personal and poetic. As Esenin’s friend Mariengof testifies, he came back from his journey a ruined man.30 Two years after his return from America he committed suicide. By contrast, Mayakovsky enjoyed extraordinary success in America. In the transatlantic “old” New World, he acted as the ambassador of a new revolutionary land. More than any other writer I examine, he represented the public face of Russian literature to America, and his immediate impact was greater than anyone else’s. He managed to attract thousands of people to New York and Chicago’s public halls; he gave readings in Nit Gedaiget, a summer camp for Jewish workers. Although the majority of his audience was Russian-speaking, he impressed other Americans too: his poetry’s declamatory nature, as well as the overwhelming passion of his declamation, were much more suited to represent the Revolution than Esenin’s melodiousness. With the grandeur of his poetic figure,31 Mayakovsky epitomized the new state that had sent him abroad. In America he felt that he personally was on the same—large!—scale as that country’s feat of industrial construction, which was not surprising for a poet to whom the sun occasionally paid a friendly visit (as in his poem “Neobychainoe prikliuchenie, byvshee s Vladimirom Maiakovskim letom na dache” [An Extraordinary Adventure that Happened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky, One Summer in the Country], 1920). As a result of his journey, Mayakovsky compiled a cycle of American poems, which appeared in print while he was still traveling, and a book of essays, “My Discovery of America.” This output is rather impressive, even if we take into account that Mayakovsky, to use Vladislav Khodasevich’s expression, ran an economical poetic household, reusing images, ideas, and whole lines in both his prose essays and poems.32 Although some critics are perplexed that such significant biographical facts as the meeting with his fellow Futurist, the poet and artist David Burliuk, who had emigrated to America some years before, or even his love affair with Elly Jones, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, are not reflected in the travelogue,33 these omissions are quite understandable. Mayakovsky was, after all, writing not

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a literary autobiography but an ideological, rhetorical work, developing the trend that had begun with Korolenko and Gorky and adapting it to postrevolutionary needs. Soviet scholars acknowledge Mayakovsky’s crucial role in creating the American text; they point out that although Korolenko and Gorky had been to America, they went too early to be able to contemplate it from the Revolution’s radiant heights.34 Edward J. Brown doubts the sincerity of Mayakovsky’s negativism and suggests that in his critical portrayal of America Mayakovsky not only censored his immediate impressions but also harked back to Gorky’s “City of the Yellow Devil.”35 Rougle argues that Mayakovsky did not have to make a special effort to censor himself and that Mayakovsky simply agreed with Gorky, with whom he shared an ideological platform.36 My task, however, is to advance this issue beyond the mutual influences of particular authors and to represent it as a narrative tradition that, while maintaining its core features, was transformed during each historical period and correlated with the immediate rhetorical needs of the Soviet homeland and the peculiarities of each author’s style. Mayakovsky acknowledges participating in the existing tradition of describing America in general and New York City in particular; moreover, he realizes that it would be impossible in his time to write a travelogue without referring to this tradition. Recalling Korolenko’s awe at huge sixand seven-story buildings, and Gorky’s mention of New York’s fifteenand twenty-story buildings, he facetiously claims his place in this line by describing forty-to-fifty-story buildings, and he even conjures up a future poet who will continue the tradition and tell his readers about New York’s “incalculable number of stories.”37 There is a grain of skepticism in this statement that hints at Mayakovsky’s attitude toward American technology: he does not anticipate a major breakthrough in engineering that might produce new types of housing but predicts more of the same. In order to see the uniqueness of Mayakovsky’s treatment of America, we need to ask how, being “without tongue” in America, he deals with the muteness that plagued Esenin. Mayakovsky places the linguistic problem at the forefront of his American travelogue, focusing especially on the issue of translation. His search for a means of communication—in the most general sense—determines the spirit of his text and distinguishes him from all other Russian authors of American travelogues. Already at the American border, Mayakovsky must face the disadvantages of his language deficiency. Ashamed at knowing only Russian, his autobiographical narrator at first pretends that he also knows French.38 After an unsuccessful attempt to communicate in a mixture of broken

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French and English and a search for an interpreter, he manages to pass the entry interview and gets an American visa. Yet, as soon as he learns enough English to communicate on the everyday level, he discovers that in New York he is surrounded by a multinational, multilingual crowd, and English is of no great use. New York City reminds him of the Tower of Babel after the Confusion of Tongues, but in reverse: in Babel “languages were mixed up so that no one could understand them, while here they are mixed up so they can be understood by everyone” (193–194). However, Mayakovsky notes that in Ford’s factories the managers prefer not to place people of the same nationality together on the assembly line. The resulting difficulty of communication between the workers, enhanced by a ban on unions, prevents the spread of a revolutionary movement that Mayakovsky, like Gorky before him, is unable to effect in America. The absence of class-conscious communication—the language of revolution—in the multilingual crowd worries the poet most of all. In his poem “Svidetel’stvuiu” (I Witness), he invests some hope in “translation” and calls upon the Communist International to transform (in the Russian, literally “translate”) racial rage into class rage: “Komintern, perevodi rassovyi gnev na klassovyi” (italics mine).39 Because the “original” source of revolution is Soviet Russia, the Revolution must be exported, translated into English, transferred into American reality. Mayakovsky perceives language as the embodiment of social values and therefore posits it as a vehicle for projecting them. Thus, in his view, Russian is the original language, the language that most clearly expresses thought, and English is merely its shadow or simulacrum. The uniqueness of Russian history and the experience of the Revolution guarantee exclusive status to the Russian language. Translating revolutionary songs will be the first step in America’s social change: song will help to fill the temporal and spatial gap that now divides the new Russia and “the backward” America: steamships “with translations of Zharov’s [revolutionary songs]” will furrow the ocean.40 Mayakovsky’s witty macaronic poem “Baryshnia i Vul’vort” (The Lady and Woolworth’s) perfectly illustrates his socially determined linguistic attitude. The poem’s title and its archetypical situation—an amorous relationship between an anti-social male and a refined female—is reminiscent of the early film Baryshnia i khuligan (The Lady and the Hooligan, 1918), in which Mayakovsky did triple duty as co-director (with Evgenii Slavinskii), scriptwriter, and actor. But in the poem’s title, the male hero is replaced by a store, pointing to the petty nature of the girl’s tender feelings. Moreover, in the poem the love affair exists only in the girl’s imagination. The poem’s lyrical hero, a Soviet poet wandering the streets of New York, stops in front of the

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window of a huge department store, amused by the sight of a girl advertising razors. Trying to distract her with his own sidewalk “advertisement,” he begins to glorify the virtues of the Revolution. From the other side of the shop window, he addresses her with a passionate propagandistic speech in Russian, including a call for violence against the bosses. Assuming that he is speaking English, the girl behind the glass tries to read his lips and takes his harangue for a declaration of love. She thus perceives what she is ready to hear—just like Russian travelers to America. The poem is bilingual: Mayakovsky turns his “shards of English” into macaronic speech. The message, sent in the original language, is therefore distorted by the English code through which the girl deciphers it and by the girl’s stereotypical sentimental consciousness. Revolutionary preaching in Russian sounds like a romantic confession in English. Mayakovsky holds the girl, rather than the hero, responsible for the misunderstanding. As McLean notes, “The Lady and Woolworth’s” is a wonderful example of how Mayakovsky “succeeds in making poetic capital out of his own breakdown in communications.”41 Finally, the poet gives up on the idea of explaining anything to the girl either in Russian or in English, metaphorically suggesting a direct, violent transfer of thoughts, akin to mental rape: “How can one cut knife-thoughts into her head?” (Kak vrezat’ ei v golovu mysli-nozhi?).42 The desired impact of revolutionary language in Mayakovsky’s poem is dangerously close to a brain transplant. Here we might recall that a similar brain operation is performed at about the same time by Professor Preobrazhensky, a character in Bulgakov’s novella Sobach’e Serdtse (Heart of a Dog, 1925), where the surgeon, indeed, manages to “cut” revolutionary ideas into a dog’s head, albeit unintentionally. Preobrazhensky transplants a “proletarian” pituitary gland and testicles into a dog and creates Sharikov, the monstrous homo soveticus.43 While Mayakovsky’s lyrical hero wants to teach the American girl revolutionary language, Bulgakov considers the ability to spout revolutionary verbiage, which his dog-turned-into-man masters, as evidence of his inhumanness. In Mayakovsky’s view, in order to spread the Revolution, Soviet Russia must translate itself to America, even if this translation requires violating the recipient. Correspondingly, in order to understand America, to establish contact and to appropriate its achievements, Russia must also “translate” America. Explaining the transatlantic country to his readers, Mayakovsky finds Russian equivalents for American political realia. He renders American diplomatic euphemisms into simple Russian, the language of common sense that reveals the truth of events. For example, he discusses America’s ambiguous policy toward the conflict between France and Morocco, according to which

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the United States first supplied pilots to France and then recalled them “on humanitarian grounds.” Mayakovsky ironically suggests the real reason for these actions: “Translated into Russian: Let’s have the money and you’ll get your pilots” (italics mine, 188). English, which, for Mayakovsky, is prone to euphemisms that disguise the truth, is thus contrasted to Russian, the truthful language, which directly reflects the meaning of reality. In his American prose sketches, Mayakovsky registers another curious function of the Russian language in America. He relates the story of some New York City street boys whom their teachers punish for cursing, which they, naturally, find very inconvenient. A quick-witted man solves their problem by teaching them—for appropriate compensation—Russian curses (182–183). Here, Russian functions as a sacred language for expressing genuine emotions. Mayakovsky was not limited to language as a means of communication; the official reason for his visit to America was to participate in an exhibition of advertising posters.44 The lyrical hero of his later poem “Vo ves’ golos” (At the Top of My Voice, 1929–1930) “licked off the spittle of consumption with the tongue/language of the poster” (iazykom plakata vylizyval chakhotkiny plevki).45 This line’s shocking effect is achieved by combining the visual and the linguistic: the double meaning of the word iazyk prompts the reader to visualize the image, so that the poetic line itself turns into a “poster.” Although he makes good use of the universal language of drawing, Mayakovsky primarily relies on verbal expression— even though he is limited to one language. He nevertheless continually recruits the techniques of the visual arts for his poems. For example, portraying New York’s skyscrapers, he employs perspective as if he were describing a drawing: “Finally houses with well-like walls with squares, little squares and dots of windows rise up.”46 In his descriptions, Mayakovsky contends with Russia’s common literary stereotypes of America. He criticizes the Russian reader’s picture of Americans—based on O. Henry’s stories—as inauthentic. He claims that he will not repeat the platitudes formulated by, among others, Korolenko and Gorky and known to any first-grade schoolboy, such as America as “the country of the dollar” inhabited by “the jackals of imperialism,” even though he acknowledges their validity. Yet, he claims that he has discovered the universal power of money as well as its poetic and religious status in the United States, declaring that this phenomenon requires a new means of description: “A country that annually consumes a million dollars’ worth of ice cream alone deserves some other epithets….God the dollar, the dollar the Father, the dollar the Holy Ghost” (181). In fact, Mayakovsky’s

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“discovery” demonstrates his dependence on the tradition: it was Dickens who coined the term “the almighty dollar” in his American Notes to describe Americans’ chief aspiration, and Gorky had already employed hyperbole to describe the power of money. Like Gorky and Esenin, Mayakovsky attempts to uncover America’s national identity. Accordingly, we find qualities in his texts that we have already seen: Americans are limited, developed technically but not culturally, and obsessed with money. Much more consistently than his predecessors, however, Mayakovsky emphasizes class differences among Americans, employing the Marxist vocabulary of an early revolutionary poster: “Americans vary. Some are proletarian and some are bourgeois” (192). Likewise, he also differentiates among national groups within New York’s population, even if social criteria override ethnic difference. For Mayakovsky, immigrants from different countries are, first and foremost, foreigners, brought together “for exploitation, speculation, and trade” (193). In contrast to Korolenko, who worried that the core qualities of any national character would dissolve in America’s multinational environment, Mayakovsky stresses that national communities in New York City do not mix with each other but preserve their customs and language intact for decades. Besides, Mayakovsky queries who is entitled to be called “an American”47 and argues that New Yorkers of all nationalities—including black as well as South Americans—have this right. By activating the broader connotations of the word “American,” he struggles against American linguistic imperialism and protests its “appropriation” by the United States. An analysis of Esenin’s and Mayakovsky’s texts demonstrates that both poets, despite their aesthetic, ideological, and personal differences, develop similar broad strategies for representing America. Both writers develop a complex system of anachronisms that help them deal with the problem of borrowing from their antagonist. They find that America, for all its technological advancement, is socially backward. They constantly stress the discrepancy between modern appearance and archaic substance, shell and core. Esenin demonstrates America’s backwardness through allusions to the much earlier Gogol. Mayakovsky’s poem “Neboskreb v razreze” (A Skyscraper in Cross Section) portrays New York’s signature building as both provincial and archaic, like something out of a small town, a “pre-October Elets or Konotop” (sovsem dooktiabr’skii Elets al’ Konotop).48 In contrast to the Soviet ideal of communal living, Mayakovsky’s outwardly magnificent skyscraper is merely a pile of isolated cells occupied by petty inhabitants. Mayakovsky constantly emphasizes America’s anachronistic contrasts: he

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is outraged that an old-fashioned, hypocritical Texas tar-and-feathering of an adulterous woman can coexist with “the finest train in the world,” the Twentieth-Century Express (184). The central poem in Mayakovsky’s American cycle, “Brooklyn Bridge,” hinges on a temporal paradox: an archaeologist of the future will be able to reconstruct the image of twentieth-century civilization from a single fragment of the Brooklyn Bridge, as if it were the fossil fragment of a dinosaur skeleton. This image is twofold: on the one hand, the bridge magnificently represents twentieth-century civilization; on the other hand, future generations will see this epitome of modernity as an antiquity. Contemporary American civilization is described here as ancient from the point of view of the future.
Esenin and Mayakovsky conceive the American journey as a journey in time. Science fiction associations are unexpectedly relevant here, since each writer understood his American experience as a journey “back to the future”: what seems a sci-fi future turns out to be a retrograde past, Mirgorod (rather like Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). Mayakovsky, playfully mixing together space and time in order to debunk America’s pretensions to modernity, states: “I was striving to get seven thousand versts ahead, but came seven years back” (Ia stremilsia za 7 000 verst vpered, a priekhal na 7 let nazad).49 This temporal paradox must be understood in the context of relations between one’s own and the Other—svoe and chuzhoe. The America that the writers perceived during their journey was a complex projection of Russia, combining characteristics of Russia’s past and future. Since postrevolutionary Russia was proclaimed the new America, it was understood that the poets were sailing from this “new America” (see Blok) to the “old” one. Thus, what they discovered in present-day America were features of Russia’s provincial past. At the same time, the “new America” in Soviet Russia had yet to be built, and, paradoxically, the experience of the presentday, actual America was indispensible for accomplishing its construction. Hence, throughout their journeys, the poets continually looked for the seeds of the Russian future in the American present. The common feature that strikes the reader of Esenin’s and Mayakovsky’s travelogues is the recognition of certain elements in a foreign land. Portraying President Woodrow Wilson as the symbolic grand capitalist in his “150,000,000,” Mayakovsky writes: “His enormous top hat rises up on his head like the Sukharev tower” (tsilindrishche na nem vozvyshaetsia bashnei Sukharevoi).50 In his travelogue, he calls the Mississippi the Russian Volga; the manner in which Americans spend money—“with real style”—reminds

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him of Russian merchants. Esenin’s first impression of the real New York is the familiar smell of the hardware stores back home. While defining new realities through familiar ones is typical for travelogues, the travelogues of the 1920s project Russia onto America much more extensively and complexly than before. In fact, Esenin’s entire essay narrates a Russia that sprouts from the America he is observing. His admiration for American technology provokes not only regret for Russian backwardness but, simultaneously, praise for the process of Communist construction. The farther he moves into America’s depths, the more “Russian” it becomes: “Before your eyes pass plains with sparse forest and—alas, terribly reminiscent of Russia!—little wooden Negro villages” (153). When Esenin discovers that American policemen dress like Russian ones, he explains that “the textile industry has been mainly concentrated in the hands of Russian emigrants” (154). Finally, he realizes that a significant proportion (30 percent) of New Yorkers are emigrants from Russia, which makes this most American of cities look “somewhat akin to Odessa and the western districts” (154). Indeed, Esenin establishes a rather unexpected progression—he moves from criticizing Russian backwardness to realizing that, at heart, America is much like Russia and that many Americans, or at least New Yorkers, have come from Russia! Yet Esenin found no place for himself on either side of the Atlantic. Perhaps his disillusionment with America was so bitter because it reflected his violently suppressed disillusionment with Soviet Russia. For Esenin and Mayakovsky, the “familiarization” of certain aspects of America serves multiple ideological purposes. Esenin, who admires the magnificence of Broadway, writes: “Comparatively recently, Broadway still resembled our old Nevsky” (152), an observation that builds on Pavel Svinin, who, more than a hundred years earlier, had admired the rapid progress of the two young countries, America and Russia, both of which managed to erect magnificent new cities in the wilderness. Thus, by establishing a parallel between the two countries, Russian writers saw America’s success as evidence for the possibility of even greater progress in Russia. Moreover, both Esenin and Mayakovsky recognize American technical achievements as “Soviet” by nature. “After all, this street is ours too,” Esenin announces about Broadway (152). In his poem “Nit Gedaiget,” Mayakovsky points out that the Brooklyn Bridge is no more than an imperfect reflection of the ideal bridge to Communism that will be built in the land of the Soviets:

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We

have bridged the gap between us and Communism And this bridge is a hundred years long. Are we looking down with disdain from this giant bridge? too proud of ourselves? No. We are not trying to fool anyone by bridges. What’s a bridge, after all? A device for catching colds. (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 89)

Nevertheless, comparisons with Russian backwardness compromise America. For example, Mayakovsky finds that New York’s streets are as dirty as those in a Russian province. Yet, the comparisons also indirectly criticize the Russian realities that needed to be transformed in the process of socialist construction, and they provide a blueprint for change. Esenin’s and Mayakovsky’s mutual projections of Russia and America onto each other reveal their stances on colonialism. Depending on their immediate rhetorical goals, Soviet travelers actualize and combine two perspectives—that of the colonizers and that of the savages. Viewing the Brooklyn Bridge, Mayakovsky exclaims: “I stare as an Eskimo gapes at a train,” which Etkind reads as “identification with the colonized mind,”51 since Mayakovsky admires New York like a savage witnessing a technological miracle. This is correct as far as it goes, but the simile is part of a complex, self-contradictory system of images. In the poems “Nit Gedaiget” and “Broadway,” Mayakovsky transforms a “savage’s” humble admiration into the condescending disdain of a representative of a more advanced race. From the heights of the “bridge to Communism,” the actual Brooklyn Bridge seems like an outdated artifact. Soviet superiority is superimposed on the European tradition of depicting Americans as technologically advanced savages (see Mandelstam’s “American Girl”), which is preserved in Soviet travelogues. This earlier tradition is especially evident in Esenin, who simultaneously pities Russia for her lack of industrial culture and criticizes America as a young and therefore primitive nation. The picture is even more complicated by the fact that Esenin justifies the inevitable

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cruelty of American cultural development—including the extermination of the “savage” Indians. Analyzing the poets’ projections in travelogues, we should not underestimate the degree of their dissimilation with America. Even the structure of some of Mayakovsky’s sentences reflects the alienation of Americans. For example, he writes of their obsession with a healthy lifestyle: “Celery has iron. Iron is good for Americans. Americans love celery” (189). This would have been mildly ironic if the poet had not implicitly separated Americans into special organisms with special characteristics (“good for Americans”). Mayakovsky’s pronouncement is modeled on the famous syllogism “All human beings are mortal. Socrates is a human being. Therefore, Socrates is mortal,” which enhances the impression of American otherness, since the reader has no choice but to assume that Americans are not like all human beings. Both Esenin and Mayakovsky employ hellish references in describing their American experience. Esenin mentions the Devil in occasional, usually cheerful, slips into colloquialisms, like those we have seen in Gorky: “These Americans do a hell of a good job of [advertisement]” (152). He can also imitate the Native American’s vision of white Americans: “The Indian would never have done what the ‘white devil’ has done on his continent” (152). Mayakovsky’s references to Hell are more diverse and macabre. He confesses to his companion that the noise in the center of New York reminds him, like Gorky, of the howling of beasts, “gluttonous and hungry,” making him think of Dante’s she-wolf, a beast who “devoured its prey but could not satiate itself.”52 His prose sketches demonstrate with dark irony that getting to the world of the dead can be easier than entering America: he tells a story about guides who do a profitable business smuggling illegal immigrants across the U.S. border but sometimes prefer to kill their clients along the way: “Many have emigrated directly to the other world” (166). Here, the Other World functions as a virtual substitute for America, as it does for Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov. Later Mayakovsky shows how emigrants who were lucky enough to have reached not the literal world of the dead but New York’s Penn Station exclaim, “We’re lost, brothers; they’ve driven us into the grave alive” (170), reacting like Korolenko’s peasants on arriving in the city. Of course, direct colloquial references to Hell do not exhaust the theme of a hellish America in the travelogues of the 1920s. America’s demonic nature reveals itself in its hollowness. Money has replaced the most basic and natural human feelings: even the baby in Mayakovsky’s poem “Broadway” suckles its mother’s breast “as if it were not a breast but a dollar.”53 The

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disparity that the travelers discover between surface and substance confirms their expectations: America is nothing but a phantom, albeit a paradoxically materialistic, “iron” one. In looking with increased interest toward the “land beyond the ocean,” Russia idolizes America’s technical achievements and perceives it as a model for the organization of labor. Yet Russian travelers also persist in portraying America as a capitalist rival, and America emerges as a land of paradoxes. But these stereotypical paradoxes in the works of Russian travelers of the 1920s are overlaid with logical and structural textual discrepancies and contradictions, the most significant of which concern the oppositions between old and new and svoe and chuzhoe. Both Esenin and Mayakovsky disparage the old in America as svoe for the Russia of the past, and recognize the new in America as svoe for Russia’s future. The concept of incorporating certain elements of American life into Russia without grasping their substance in its entirety is problematic from the outset. The official exhortation of the period—“to catch up with and surpass America”—implies the possibility of building an ideal America in Russia, of combining advanced production with a quintessentially humane social order. Therefore, Soviet writers who traveled to America in the 1920s criticized it for its divergence from the ideal that they believed would manifest itself in a “future America,” a new “America-in-Russia.” In this sense, the America the travelers experienced was no more than the negative of a blueprint.

C h apt e r

Three

Automobile Journeys of the 1930s Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov

was finally officially recognized by the United States, its major ideological rival and “negative ideal.” The amicable period in official relations between the two countries was, however, shortlived and less than idyllic, owing to ongoing antagonism between the two socio-economic systems.1 The Soviet Union blamed America for its failure to regulate the situation concerning tsarist debt. The United States sent a note protesting the seventh Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow in 1935, because the U.S. State Department considered it a violation of the initial agreement between Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and President Roosevelt. According to this agreement, each country pledged not to interfere in the other’s internal affairs, and Soviet support for the American Communist Party was considered an example of such interference. As Nadzhafarov has suggested, the Soviet Union saw little danger in ignoring the agreement, given the United States’ relatively passive role in international politics during the 1930s.2 Matters worsened dramatically after Russia and Germany concluded an alliance, and RussianAmerican diplomatic relations remained frozen until Hitler’s invasion of Soviet territory. Throughout the 1930s, a twofold image of America persisted in the public imagination as well as in official discourse: America was the embodiment of capitalist evil, on the one hand, but a paragon of new technology, accuracy, and efficiency on the other. According to Jeffrey Brooks, the perceptions of industrial America’s glory were already beginning to fade in the early 1930s.3 But Sonia Hoisington refutes his claim, pointing to articles in architectural journals throughout the 1930s, in which the double image persisted—and even acquired more concrete details.4 In fact, both positions are justified;

In 1933, the Soviet Union

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Hoisington’s observation that “America took on flesh and blood” is not irreconcilable with Brooks’s statement that the dissociation between Soviet Americanism and the actual America had reached its peak by the end of the NEP era. Since America was navigating a devastating economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it served Soviet ideologists as living evidence that capitalism had failed as a socio-economic form. Therefore, separate aspects of American life, including its technology and its architecture, could still be studied enthusiastically. This was less dangerous than in times of American prosperity, since these isolated features by no means justified capitalism as a method of production. The 1930s are marked by a new professional interest among Russians in American architecture and cinema—in concrete, tangible images of America that are conveyed not only through verbal means but also through visual media. The achievements of American architecture appeared in such journals as Arkhitektura SSSR. Ogonek, Inostrannaia kniga, and Krasnaia nov’ reviewed developments in American cultural life.5 In 1934, a group of architects, including Boris Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko, and Vladimir Gelfreikh, visited the United States.6 In 1939, Iofan designed the Soviet pavilion for the New York World’s Fair. Film-making was one of the areas in which it was considered urgent to learn from America, at least in its technical aspects, and in the 1930s Soviet filmmakers traveled to America as frequently as did Soviet writers.7 In 1932, the famous director Sergei Eisenstein worked in Hollywood and undertook a journey across Mexico. While his cinematic works mostly concern Mexico,8 his written sketches ironically describe his experience in the United States, portraying it from an angle previously unknown to the Russian reader— from onboard a helicopter.9 In 1935, the chief administrator of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumiatskii, came to the United States accompanied by the director Fridrikh Ermler and the cameraman Vladimir Nilsen. They faced a daunting task: to study the American process of film-making in detail, from the first to the last stages of production.10 The tasks of Soviet writers traveling to America in this decade are also more global than ever before. Boris Pilniak visits America in 1931. In his O’kei: Amerikanskii roman (OK: An American Novel), published as a book in 1933, he reviews the entire history of the country as the history of capitalism, and he demonstrates on the basis of facts and numbers that America’s socio-economic system is doomed. Four years later, in 1935, the duo of prominent Soviet satirists, Ilia Ilf and Evgenii Petrov, visit the country with a different task; curious travelers and careful masters of the collective Soviet household, they tour America in search not only of capitalist vices

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to be mocked and disparaged but also of what can be borrowed. Their travelogue, Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (One-Storied America; published in English as Little Golden America),11 brims with concrete propositions for borrowing American workers’ accuracy, precision, and work ethics, as well as the democratic character they have observed in people’s relations. In 1936, after their return to the USSR, they even write a letter to Stalin suggesting that the American standard of living should be transferred to Russian soil. Both OK and One-Storied America are travelogue novels, but while Ilf and Petrov’s plot generally coincides with the heroes’ itinerary, as in traditional travelogues, Pilniak’s narration ignores his actual trajectory and follows, instead, unfolding recurrent motifs and the development of the narrator’s thoughts. Ilf and Petrov’s novel resembles a picaresque tale, but Pilniak’s OK, driven by his “Scythian” universalism, is intended as a new chapter in the collective memory of world history. Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov explored America in Ford automobiles, which allowed them to study it more closely than earlier Russian travelers. They charted new places on the map of the America of Russian travelogues: the reader of both novels finds not only traditional descriptions of New York, the Ford factory, or Chicago slaughterhouses, but also impressions of the Grand Canyon and California, accounts of visits to Molokan communities, and sketches of Hollywood. The authors of both travelogues strive to experience “the real,” everyday, rural life—the one-storied America that supplied the title for Ilf and Petrov’s novel. Both traveling parties had brief opportunities to work for the American film industry: MGM hired Pilniak as a writer and adviser for a film set in the Soviet Union, and Ilf and Petrov wrote a cinematic adaptation of The Twelve Chairs. Both projects failed, as had Eisenstein’s, but the writers had the opportunity to experience Hollywood from inside. In America the writers were treated with friendliness and attention. The Great Depression spawned a new U.S. interest in Soviet Russia. Inspired by the success of the first five-year plans—especially the images transmitted abroad—many Americans sought to study the Soviet experience.12 Pilniak’s visit was partially sponsored by the Hearst Foundation. Ilf and Petrov brought “pockets full” of letters of recommendation and spent their first months in the United States attending receptions and giving speeches. The theme of American hospitality achieves hyperbolic levels in their novel: the travelers confess that they cannot “manage the powers they have summoned.”13 All of the travelers enjoyed their meetings with prominent figures in American cultural and political life, as well as unexpected encounters with common people. Americans served as guides both for Pilniak and for Ilf

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and Petrov: Pilniak was accompanied by Joseph ( Joe) Freeman, a member of the American Communist Party and a writer and journalist who actively participated in The New Masses proletariat magazine. Additionally, for part of the way, Isidor, an itinerant Hollywood actor, also went with them. Ilf and Petrov traveled with the Thrones, portrayed in their novel as the Adams couple. While the writers share itineraries and motifs, they take different stances toward America. Pilniak uses exclamations of surprise and delight ironically “Ah!”, “Oh!”, “Uh!”, as the reaction of other travelers, which he does not share. Ilf and Petrov sincerely admire the organization of American daily life. They especially praise America’s work ethic, while Pilniak, by contrast, avers that it is a hypocritical atavism left over from the age of Puritanism.14 Pilniak stresses that everything in the country is mechanized, including elements of life that should remain individual—like driving, eating, entertaining, loving one’s country. Ilf and Petrov acknowledge that such uniformity at least guarantees a high level of service even in the distant small towns: although road motels lack an individual touch, you can always rely on having hot water, and the ubiquitous service stations make the journey safe. Of course, Ilf and Petrov’s novel also contains a good dose of social criticism, and it condemns the vices of capitalism, if not America itself.

Pilniak— Poetics and Rhetoric Among American travelogues, Pilniak’s OK is striking for the absence of a traditional, cohesive narrative. Striving for a universal scale of social and historical analysis, its author chooses instead an impressionistic, fragmentary form. A modernist writer15 with a superimposed ideological task, Pilniak tries to convey the essence of America by scattering personal observations, reports of seemingly random meetings and conversations, statistical data, newspaper articles, and surveys of historical events throughout the text. Thus, the novel should be analyzed from the point of view of both poetics and rhetoric. The scope of Pilniak’s American travelogue can be compared with that of his early novel Tret’ia stolitsa (Third Capital), about which Pilniak himself wrote: “The action takes place nowhere….The heroes are Russia, the world, faith, faithlessness.”16 We could similarly say of OK that the action takes place in America, Russia, the World, since the author compares everything he encounters in America with Russian phenomena, placing his observations into a universal context. Exploring America during the Great Depression, Pilniak interprets its crisis in a Spenglerian vein, as part of the decline of

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the West. For him, the United States is “the most Western West” (450), the epitome of an artificially encapsulated capitalism separated from other capitalist countries by an ocean. Unburdened by a feudalistic pre-history, America’s past is progressive, its history rooted in the principles of bourgeois democracy. But in the contemporary world, this pure capitalism has become the chief antagonist of socialism, which offers a new social formation whose victory is inevitable. Pilniak affirms de Tocqueville’s prophecy that Russia and America will become the two major world powers: “The USSR and the USA are playing the chess of humankind nowadays” (451). The travelogue’s timeline is not restricted to the short period of the writer’s American sojourn; as in his story “Rasplesnutoe vremia” (Spilled Time), he operates with world history. Pilniak understands history not merely as a succession of events but also as an ever-changing, sliding perspective on these events. As he claims, time is one of his novel’s heroes. The significance of historical phenomena can change with time; the present provides a new context for understanding the past. Pilniak opens and closes his novel with the same story, which gains the status of a parable: Betsy Ross passes the first American flag to the first president of the United States, and her granddaughter passes the red flag to the Detroit branch of the Communist Party. This succession of events proclaims the Socialist Revolution as the legitimate heir of the American Revolution: “Time had transformed [literally, “animated”] good living into dollars. Time had established the rules of pioneers: do what you want, do it how you want to, the only thing important is success. But time had also accomplished what had already been written earlier—Betsy Ross’s granddaughter passed the red flag” (611–612). Thus, time had turned in a spiral, just like Pilniak’s novel, which in the end returns to the same story on a new level, enriched by the experience of the entire American journey. According to Pilniak, with the emergence of the Soviet Union, man has ceased to be a passive object of history; now he actively changes the world, constructing history.17 Pilniak’s task as a writer is to find or build links between various events. Thus, he also functions as a “constructor of history” in a different sense, as a constructor of a new historical perspective. Such an attitude to the past contains a dangerous ambiguity; if the meaning of events is constantly reevaluated in the light of new realities, how can the final value of certain events be established?18 Pilniak’s claims to the effect that the Socialist Revolution had provided such an ultimate value seem unpersuasive in the context of his own historical concept. According to Pilniak, the title of the American Novel—the exclamation OK—conveys the essence of the American character. Its etymology demonstrates an officially acknowledged respect for ignorance—specifically,

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one folk etymology derives it from an error on the part of President Jackson, who allegedly misspelled the initial letters of the words “all correct.” Its popular usage reflects Americans’ optimistic acceptance of both good fortune and hardship: “An American goes bankrupt on the stock market— OK. An American crashes his automobile—OK. He is robbed by bandits— OK” (445). Pilniak’s attitude to this quality is ironic rather than respectful; for him, it is a manifestation of passivity, indifference, and an absence of deep, conscious understanding rather than a manifestation of strength of spirit.19 Similarly, Ilf and Petrov recurrently mock Americans’ optimistic laughter in their travelogue, but they also pay tribute to their perseverance. In his novel, Pilniak uses the word “o’kei” as a common noun,20 a paraphrase of his novel (“on the first pages of this American o’kei,” 635), calling himself “the author of ‘o’kei.’” The rather scanty scholarly literature discussing OK praises the novel for its detailed, critical overview of American life21 and criticizes it for its “haste, superficiality and the anecdotal nature of the approach.”22 Paradoxically, both characteristics are appropriate: the vast factual material that supports the author’s arguments is fragmented and scattered throughout the text; facts are juxtaposed with anecdotes; the profundity of Pilniak’s historical and social approach is fused with superficiality. Vehement criticism of capitalism is juxtaposed with acknowledgement of America’s high living standard; a haughty tone conceals the awe and reluctant admiration of the grandeur of American technology—an achievement that the writer immediately disparages as inhumane. On the one hand, Pilniak’s anti-capitalist sentiments were sincere: after all, he was an instinctive anarchist-revolutionary and wanted to be, like Esenin, a contemporary of his fellow-citizens. On the other hand, by the beginning of the 1930s it was vitally necessary for him to write an ideologically correct novel. In the early 1930s Pilniak’s status in writing circles was dangerously ambiguous; he had just recovered from a notorious literary scandal in 1929, a manhunt (travlia), an ideological campaign in the official press aimed at him and Zamiatin. The state, having seized control over the literary process, pointed its finger at Pilniak as a scapegoat for all fellow-travelers. Vera Reck, who discusses this campaign in detail in Boris Pil’niak: A Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State, observes that the campaign focused on the political inertia of many Soviet writers, who would shortly learn their lesson and clarify their attitude toward Soviet authority.23 The specific charges against Pilniak were both political and artistic. He was accused of “apoliticism,” because of his multiple statements that it was possible for a writer not to take sides in a state’s political life.24 As Reck points out, “apoliticism” at the end of

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the 1920s was a broader notion than merely political indifference; it became an offence against the State. The charges of “apoliticism” paradoxically embraced Pilniak’s ideological errors, his leftist anarchic sympathies. As Alexander Voronskii, an astute critic and the editor of Krasnaia nov’, noted, the Revolution had been a cleansing turmoil for Pilniak; he was enchanted by its wild drive rather than being focused on the process of building the socialist future.25 Stalin himself pointed to serious errors in his writings: the characters in his early works, “leather jackets,” were romantic orthodox Communists, ideologically harmful to the next stage of victorious socialism; their prototypes would be exiled and exterminated in the 1930s. Pilniak was also widely criticized for his ambivalent attitude toward machines and technology in general.26 After his 1923 journey to England, where he witnessed the achievements of Western technology, he declared that for the first time the Communist workers’ machine revolution “had sounded” (zazvuchala) for him. Nevertheless, he could never fully accept it. In his novel Mashiny i volki (Machines and Wolves), a character expresses a distrust toward machines that the author apparently shares; ultimately the character dies, pulled into the wheel of a factory machine.27 Many of Pilniak’s “errors” were stylistic rather than political, since style had become a political matter by the late 1920s and the 1930s. Pilniak’s ornamental prose, with its absence of a unifying plot, was disparaged as “Pilniakovism” (pilniakovshchina), and other writers—fellow-travelers in particular—were warned against it. Pilniak was temporarily spared in the early 1930s, since the purpose of the campaign was not to ruin him but, rather, to broadcast the state’s new expectation that writers would engage in the task of advancing class struggle. The very fact that Pilniak was chosen as an exemplar of the fellow-travelers was not necessarily fatal; the purges of unconventional writers, artists, and other cultural activists were yet to come. Pilniak was not only not arrested at this time but he continued to enjoy Soviet writers’ privileges, was still accepted in certain high party circles, and was even granted permission (in order to get it, he had to appeal to Stalin personally) to go abroad—to America and, later, to Japan. His arrest came some years later, after he had written and published OK and Stones and Roots, an account of his Japanese journey. Meanwhile, in 1931 Pilniak had yet to perform his penance and prove his trustworthiness by exposing Russia’s major political rival. The demonizing tradition of the American travelogue provided an appropriate frame for this task. In OK, perhaps more than in any other travelogue, the author’s personal experience is secondary to the superimposed political idea developed over

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the course of his text: capitalism is doomed, and the current crisis marks not its next cycle of development but, rather, its end. Pilniak buttresses this idea with historical, economic, and social analysis, and his personal observations illustrate and validate his theoretical conclusions. He juxtaposes this multifaceted analysis with mythological images of his own country. The Soviet Union, emanating light, is contrasted to a bleak America where advertisement is the only beacon: “While in the USSR one can spot the Polar Star whenever one looks at the sky, even during a blizzard; here, in the train windows, everywhere, different girl and boy advertisers stick out” (512). The very superficial inadequacy of this contrast points out the diverging scales of values in both countries. For Pilniak, the Polar star serves as the celestial representation of the Kremlin star, a Soviet analogue of the Nativity star.28 Pilniak’s narrator posits himself as an ideal Soviet citizen. Like Mayakovsky’s autobiographical traveler, he is his country’s plenipotentiary, and he operates with the clichés of Soviet propaganda in a manner that seems exaggerated and almost grotesque to a contemporary reader. The narrator switches from the first person to the third, occasionally referring to himself as “a Soviet citizen” and praising this citizen for his political consciousness. Pilniak’s idealized Soviet citizen is used to envisioning money in terms of goods for his country: “He knew that he had to go ‘to America’ but he also knew that his country had more need for American combines and thousand-ton presses than for his trip” (448). Yet, as Krystyna Pomorska notes, the major “ideological flaw” of Pilniak’s earlier works, the disdain for machines that he never overcame, continues to manifest itself in the American travelogue.29 But here the author puts it to ideological use, constructing the image of America as a hellish technological civilization; therefore, Pilniak’s archaism becomes a Soviet virtue. Pilniak’s infernal portrayal of New York builds on Gorky’s images, but now, in the 1930s, the urban Hell is overflowing with machines. In Pilniak’s apocalyptical picture, the monstrously exaggerated technological city annihilates itself: “The city is deafened with noise….The city is turned into a huge kerosene stove of soot and suffocation. It is a city that has gone mad and crept onto itself with its iron, concrete, stone and steel, and crushed itself. This is a city where man cannot live; one cannot drive an automobile in this city, since automobiles have to ride not along the streets but on top of each other” (498). The statement “man cannot live in the city” literally repeats Gorky’s lamentations in “City of the Yellow Devil”: “To a living person this wild wailing, screeching, roaring, this trembling of stone walls, this cowardly rattling of windowpanes—all this would bother him” (136).

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And as in Gorky’s and Mayakovsky’s New York, objects are shown as alive through personifying metaphors. For example, the narrator sees a cab—a virtual herald of Hell—carrying “on its back” (na spine) a poster: “Get on, dude, don’t you know that there is still vacant space in Hell?!” (602), thus ironically suggesting that there is a shortcut between the streets of New York and Hell. Even outside the city, Pilniak continues to portray the otherworldliness of America through technological imagery. He discovers not only a romantic urban Inferno, but also the Hell of an ultimate, machine-crafted uniformity.30 In OK, Pilniak represents America as one gigantic factory belt where everything is mechanized and mass-produced and is, therefore, indistinguishable. Not only man-produced objects but even small American towns are mere specks on this factory belt. Like their inhabitants’ views, beliefs and emotions, the towns lack individuality. Pilniak’s traveler observes an American paradox: American individualism easily coexists with almost universal mass-production. Despite Pilniak’s conscious striving for ideological correctness, his American novel still contains the “artistic fallacies” Soviet critics had discerned in his earlier works: “hysterical composition”; absence of a coherent plot; fragmented, repetitive narrative. Even the travelogue genre, which might have dictated a narrative linearity organized around the hero’s journey, failed to straighten Pilniak’s work. OK is a complex narrative combining the features of a political newspaper article, oral pamphlet, scientific study, and poetic text. Pilniak supplements Mayakovsky’s poetic passion with the credibility of a documentary. He involves the reader emotionally and at the same time attempts to convince him with facts, creating the sensation of subjective objectivity.31 At first, OK gives the impression of a spontaneous monologue, an accusatory, improvised public speech. The narrative is distorted, interrupted; sometimes phrases remain unfinished, as if the author had lost his train of thought. Often Pilniak begins a story, then diverges from it, only to pick up the topic much later; for example, he begins to tell about his encounter with a lady in Central Park but finishes several chapters later. The narrator (or speaker?) occasionally switches from polemical mode to a simple conversational tone and interweaves anecdotes and road stories into his passionate anti-capitalist pamphlet. But even in these stories he is only seemingly diverted from his major idea, for any given fact, which might appear neutral at first glance, may then be followed by political commentary, sometimes quite superficially. For example, in describing American eating habits, Pilniak mentions grapefruit, unknown at that time to his Russian readers, and immediately adds: “Burbank

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who, by the way, created this fruit, which people in three-quarters of the globe now eat, once had the misfortune to say that he did not believe in God, and he died, bullied by the American clergy” (446). By rhetorically addressing his implied audience, Pilniak enhances the monologic effect: “Workers from the American Labor Federation, have you read about it?!” (650); “Dear American individualists!” (503). Some of his addressees are allegorical: “Dear American liberty!” (503) and even “Dear Nietzschean dollar” (dorogoi nitssheanets dollar, 504). Here Pilniak creates an untranslatable pun: in Russian, “dorogoi” means both “dear” and “expensive.” In order to convey the illusion of oral speech, Pilniak stresses certain words, dividing them into syllables: “And the American philistine in the loneliness of democracy…wants to break-a-way from these standards!” (I amerikanskii obyvatel’ v odinochestve demokratii…khochet iz etikh standartov— vyr-vat’-sia! 597). His mocking use of exclamations (Akh, okh, ukh!) has been mentioned earlier. Pilniak likens some of the voices that break into his text to the hysterical voices of America herself: “More! More! More! Ten cents for a spoon, a notebook, a handkerchief, a stocking! Three hundred fifty dollars for a ‘Ford’! More! More! More!—American prosperities!” (611). These multiple voices, coming as if from the crowd, constitute the background of Pilniak’s monologue. The initial impression of spontaneity is, however, deceptive: Pilniak’s abundant factual material demonstrates that this “speech” has been thoroughly prepared. Pilniak refers to different sources/voices that support his narrative: he quotes Svinin, Lenin, and Engels and incorporates lengthy passages from Stuart Chase’s economic analyses into his text. He refers to R. M. Blank’s Amerika, published in Russian in Paris in 1928, and criticizes Descartes for his idealism (535). Near novel’s end, he gravitates more and more toward the use of the Other’s word and sets various sources in collision, as if allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions, even though these conclusions have already been predetermined. In order to strengthen his rhetorical point, he turns not only to pro-Communist sources but also to daily newspapers, whose headlines reflect the economic crisis and, therefore, serve as “the witnesses for the prosecution.” Arranging the novel’s fragments, Pilniak employs poetic means in order to achieve its rhetorical purpose—to show the global crisis of American capitalism. It is impossible to grasp the peculiarity of the travelogue if we leave aside its poetic nature. As with a poem, the succession of the travelogue’s elements is based on phonetic similarities, subtle semantic shifts, and associations of memory.32 Repetitions of lengthy passages, so unusual in a novel, become understandable as the mark of a poetic work.

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Poetic features recruited for rhetorical purposes manifest themselves on different levels of the text, and they often violate speech norms. Since this problem has not received scholarly attention before, I will provide representative examples of OK’s linguistic experiments in an appendix. Lexical and grammatical neologisms reflect neologisms on the level of composition—the aforementioned repetitions of paragraphs, fragmented narration, sudden interruption of narration. OK only seems to be a motley mosaic. On closer reading, we recognize the recurrent patterns and threads that disappear from the surface to be picked up again later. The author eventually returns to and finishes the sentences and stories broached in the beginning of the novel. An anecdote may be folded into a metaphor or metonymy: Pilniak often constructs idiosyncratic idioms that refer to representative episodes in the text, incomprehensible if the reader has missed the semantic link. For example, missis chertova mamasha (Mrs. Devil’s Mother) is recurrently mentioned in the narrative in the meaning of “layouts.” We can reconstruct the meaning of this expression through the derogatory idiom idi k chertovoi materi (literally, “go to Devil’s mother,” “go to Hell”). Pilniak’s seemingly random juxtaposition of passages not only serves the purpose of creating a wide, patchwork-like picture of American reality, but also works on the principle of “the poetics of omitted links”:33 the reader is invited to discover the implied connections. For example, Pilniak juxtaposes a passage about Americans’ piety, in which he describes the religious services that typically open political conventions, with a portrait of Al Capone and his racket (part 28). At the juncture of the two passages is the motif of a bridge: “A bridge much more grandiose than the Brooklyn Bridge was being built there, the bridge from “technological individualism” into gangsterism” (557). Various “invisible bridges,” logical and emotional, form recurrent motifs throughout the novel: “Is there no opportunity to build not only an emotional but a logical bridge between the airy ‘freedom’ of skyscrapers and the underground quiet work of hogs in Chicago?” (503).34 This image foregrounds the reader’s primary task: to see the invisible bridges between social phenomena of different planes, between different historical epochs, and to find connections among the different aspects of American life, as well as among the fragments of Pilniak’s own novel. But the freedom of interpretation that Pilniak offers to his reader is illusory: the author elicits a predetermined answer. Multiple voices and styles are orchestrated to create the image of America as a capitalist Hell on earth. The only travelogue that transcends this monological mode of the

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American narrative—insofar, at least, as this was even possible in the early Soviet era—is Ilf and Petrov’s Odnoetazhnaia Amerika.

Ilf and Petrov—An American Picaresque Ilf and Petrov’s narrative differs from those of their predecessors in many respects—in the breadth of the material covered, the authorial figure, the genre of the travelogue, the method of writing, and the general tone, as well as in the presentation of the authors’ American companion and their multiple American interlocutors. Their trip was the most extensive one undertaken by Russian writers since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it permitted the most comprehensive investigation of the country. Over the course of two months, Ilf and Petrov crossed the continent from New York to San Francisco, visited Los Angeles and returned via the Southern states; along their way they toured twenty-five states and covered approximately ten thousand miles. Traveling by automobile with their American companions—drivers, guides, and interpreters—Ilf and Petrov had many opportunities to communicate with Americans of various backgrounds and from different social strata, such as hitchhikers, motel owners, and city clerks, whose voices and stories they interweave into their authorial narrative. Moreover, Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue comprised not only text but also many photographs (they took more than a thousand), which significantly influenced their narrative. The travelogue first appeared as a series of short essays and photographs in Ogonek (starting in April 1936),35 was later published in installments (Znamia 10 and 11 [1936], and Roman-gazeta 4 and 5 [1937]), and was finally released as a book in 1937. One-Storied America builds on the authors’ personal letters, written during the journey, meticulously kept road diaries,36 and articles and photo-essays. In the final text, immediate impressions are balanced by generalizations, animated by feuilleton-like sketches,37 and organized around a single road plot. There is no significant difference between the tone of Ilf and Petrov’s book and that of their personal documents, such as we find in Gorky. The final result took the form of an ironic, picaresque, semi-fictional, semi-documentary road novel. Ilf and Petrov developed some parts of their American text into separate works, including the sketch “Chasy i liudi” (Hours and People) and the short story “Tonia.” They also wrote a feuilleton “Kolumb prichalivaet k beregu” (Columbus Approaches the Shore), an ironic fantasy about the effect Columbus’s arrival would have had in modern-day America, as well as the effect the modern America would have had on Columbus.

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One-Storied America shifts the paradigm of the Soviet-American text with a more nuanced mix of elements. While the journey to Hell still remains its underlying model, utopian features are reclaimed. As in Ilf and Petrov’s description of Chicago, “nowhere else…are heaven and hell so tightly interwoven” as in their One-Storied America. Additionally, happy adventures and personal misfortune both underlie the travelogue. The curious duo’s enthusiastic journey had a macabre downside, not reflected in their text: Ilf ’s health significantly deteriorated during the sojourn. Once Ilf discovered that he was seriously ill, the trip became a virtual journey to the Other World. One-Storied America was published a few days before his death. Given Ilf ’s illness, the process of composing the text was atypical for the famous satirical duo. In the summer of 1936, for the first time in their shared writing careers, Ilf and Petrov worked separately, each on his own chapters. However, upon showing the written chapters to each other, they were surprised to find out that, as a result of the years of communal work, they had worked out a common style that represented their mutual identity. As their contemporaries noted, Petrov’s mild humor complemented Ilf ’s dry, bitter satire.38 One-Storied America demonstrated that each had integrated the other’s viewpoint into his writing.39 This attention to the other’s perspective and acknowledgment of different ways of seeing was perhaps one of the factors that allowed them to create a uniquely multifaceted picture of America. In her insightful, cross-disciplinary article on perspective and the spatial structure of Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue, Anne Nesbet links Ilf and Petrov’s vision of America to Eisenstein’s theory of montage and his study of perspective in Griffith’s Intolerance. She examines the ironic tension between urban verticality and the “one-storied” horizontality of America, which constructs a paradox in the text.40 Nesbet analyzes the skyscraper in Odnoetazhnaia Amerika not only as a cityscape dominant, but also as a new optical device that offers the authors a multi-angled picture of the city from its window. The novelty of Ilf and Petrov’s perspective can be understood only in comparison with their predecessors’ treatment of verticality. We have had examples of observing and describing the city from on high in Gorky, Mayakovsky, and Pilniak. Such a location suited the Russian observer very well, since it coincided with the high moral stance he intended to demonstrate and allowed him to physically view America “from above” (svysoka). In Gorky, this point of view facilitates objectifying similes and metaphors: “The window of my room overlooks a square; all day long people pour into it from five streets very much like potatoes rolling out of sacks. They mill around and then scurry on, and again the

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streets suck them into their gullets. The square is round and filthy, like a pan long used for frying meat but never yet scoured.”41 In constructing his city perspective, Mayakovsky employs cinematographic methods: when he portrays the onset of the workday in New York, his artistic eye registers the movement of masses of people like a camera fixed in his hotel window, without shifting its focus or angle. The poem “Skyscraper in CrossSection” anticipates Eisenstein’s idea of a transparent skyscraper, which the director planned to realize in The Glass House, a film he conceived in 1927.42 Mayakovsky’s poem functions like Eisenstein’s elevator, moving up through the vertical construction and allowing a glimpse into the life of the building’s inhabitants. But Mayakovsky utilizes this elaborate technique for a straightforward purpose; sliding through the stories of the skyscraper, he visits different social strata and demonstrates the extremes of America’s social hierarchy. Thus, the building represents the structure of society in inverse: the lower stories are occupied by higher ranks, while the poorest are huddled at the top. Verticality is treated mono-dimensionally here. Similarly, Pilniak constructs his cityscape as an observation from the roof of a high-rise belonging to an acquaintance. And like Mayakovsky, he makes it a metaphor for social inequality. Looking down, he sees the roofs of the seven-storied houses of the poor, black with soot; raising his eyes, he observes the magnificent skyscrapers belonging to multi-millionaires who are richer than his host, and he “understands everything” about New York, a city that is excellent only for millionaires. Although Pilniak admits to being impressed with the picture of the “fantastical,” “biblical,” “ominous,” “grand” city from above, he abruptly shifts his perspective and immediately contrasts this view with scenes that a pedestrian might witness: “But if you walk along the streets of New York, it is a terrible city, the most terrible in the world” (498). Only Ilf and Petrov take advantage of the possibilities of the skyscraper as an optical device to create an in-depth, multi-planed, non-politicized picture. In order to see all the layers of the city, they change their position, even lean out the window: “New York opened at once on several planes. The upper plane was occupied by the tops of those skyscrapers that were higher than ours….On the next plane, open in its entirety to our gaze, in addition to stacks, skylights, and tomcats one could see flat roofs on which were small one-storied houses with gardens, skimpy trees, little brick paths, a small fountain, and even rattan chairs….That monstrosity [the elevated railway] was on the next plane of New York City….In order to see the last and fundamental plane, the plane of street, one had to bend out of the window and look down at a right angle. There, as in reversed binoculars,

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one could see a tiny crossing with tiny automobiles” (22–23).43 As Nesbet convincingly argues, this attention to perspective was apparently facilitated by the fact that, by the time of the duo’s American journey, Ilf had become a passionate photographer.44 Even though Alexander Rodchenko, a prominent constructivist photo-artist, criticized Ilf-as-photographer for the flatness of his unprofessional pictures in his review of the American photo-essays,45 the very habit of using different lenses contributed to the duo’s complex vision of America. Indeed, the use of the camera actually involved looking at the country rather than only reading it! Some of the scenes in One-Storied America represent, in fact, photographs made with words. The writers would “stop the moment” and describe certain scenes as shots, as if they had seen them through a camera lens. Apparently, the camera not only registered their experience for bookkeeping purposes (as per Rodchenko) but also actively shaped it: “And thus the Rocky Mountains remained in our memory: a bright and cold springlike day of late November, small compact clouds racing across a greenish and translucent sky, and over the edges of the plateau gray and blue cliffs as even as a fence” (195). Such verbal photo-sketches in the novel demonstrate how exactly Ilf and Petrov’s narrative “processes” visual image through words and conveys the depth and complexity lacking in their visual means. In the next sentence the writers radically shift the scale of the scene and universalize it, pushing the borders of the “photograph” so that it embraces the whole world before refocusing on the travelers. The writers find themselves not only at the ridge of the Rocky Mountains (the Continental Divide) but also in the universe as a whole. This infinitely broadening perspective recalls the finale of Gogol’s “A Terrible Revenge”: in Ilf and Petrov’s words, “Back of us, below, were Texas, Chicago, New York, the Atlantic Ocean, Europe. Ahead of us, below, were California, the Pacific Ocean, Japan, Siberia, Moscow. There we were ankledeep in icy slush, clumsily tugging the chains over the hard tires washed clean by the water” (195). The complexity of Ilf and Petrov’s picture of America is not, of course, exhausted by its multi-planed spatial perspective. Rather, the spatial perspective serves as a synecdoche for their overall vision of the country, reflecting, as if in a drop of water, the world of One-Storied America. While the main prism through which we see the country is that of the foreign narrators, Ilf and Petrov take the viewpoints of Americans into account to a greater degree than any other travelogue writers of the period. Their American guides and companions as well as multiple American interlocutors—from hitchhikers to prominent writers and engineers— provide the American perspective.

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The traveling duo, who functioned as a single author, appear as the travelogue’s joint narrator. Ilf and Petrov always refer to themselves as “we,” and that corporate subject almost never splits; if they wish to refer to only one of the duo they say “one of us.” Their Virgil is also realized as a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Adams. Mr. Adams, an engineer, was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and both he and his younger wife spoke excellent Russian. For the travelers, they became ideal companions, “a complex hybrid,” “a guidechauffeur-interpreter-altruist” (gido-shofero-perevodchiko-besserebrennik, 45). The Adamses ideally combine svoe and chuzhoe: not just foreign observers of the alien country, they are svoi for Americans; at the same time they are Communist-oriented and socially svoi for the travelers. Their inclusion enhances the travelogue’s persuasive power. Adams himself had had a vast experience of the Soviet Union. Ilf and Petrov’s description of his Soviet journey outlines an ideal that they themselves apparently aspired to in America: He had worked at Dneprostroi, in Stalingrad, Cheliabinsk. A knowledge of old Russia made it possible for him to understand the Soviet land as it is rarely understood by foreigners. He had traveled across the USSR in hard cars [railroad cars with wooden bench seating]. Entered into conversation with workers and farmers. He saw the country not only as it opened to his gaze, but he saw it as it had been yesterday and as it would become tomorrow. He saw it in motion. (133)

Criticism of the American economic system’s flaws as well as mockery of the details of American life are especially convincing when they come from an American. “It is very interesting when a heart fills with pride while the purse is emptied in proportion,” quips Mr. Adams, as he gazes at hotel signs that exhort travelers to “let their heart fill with pride when [they] utter the name of the hotel in which they stopped” (131). Serious and funny, intelligent and responsible, genuinely interested in people and making friends easily everywhere, the Adamses represent the best type of Americans according to Ilf and Petrov. However, one of Mr. Adams’s features is quite atypical for Americans: he has little reverence for money and treats it light-heartedly. Mr. Adams exemplifies hybridity. Although he has a real-life prototype, he is also a literary character loosely modeled on Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick— he himself even refers to Dickens in chapter 15.46 Like Pickwick, Adams visits distant rural areas of his own country in the company of friends. Also like Pickwick, Adams is a round-faced, plump, short man in spectacles. Both share common character traits: they are childish, absent-minded, kind,

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and noble. Mr. Adams’s absent-mindedness, however, is balanced by Mrs. Adams’s practicality. Moreover, as Ilf and Petrov insist, his is the passionate absent-mindedness of a person who becomes engaged in a conversation or a particular idea and forgets the entire world. The Adams couple’s comical features constantly enliven the narrative. As guides, Mr. and Mrs. Adams exhibit only one flaw—their passion for “getting information” about the road. But the more information they obtain, the more confused and uncertain they become, and the more misapprehensions occur to them. Mr. Adams’s absent-mindedness provides the travelogue with a recurrent comical sub-plot: he constantly forgets various objects (his hat, glasses, and watch) in hotels and asks to have them mailed to places scheduled for future visits, where the travelers will be able to pick them up. Thus, the journey across America becomes a race for Adams’s belongings. Sometimes the travelers are ahead of schedule, or their things have been misdirected. Almost invariably, they fail to arrive on time. Then the objects are re-sent, but again they miss the travelers, who have already left. Thus, the travelers lose their parts along the way, as it were; and meanwhile the parts move along independently, constantly trying—but failing—to catch up with their owners. This results in a degree of suspense. Only in New York, at journey’s end, are the Adamses reunited with their lost things—with Mr. Adams’s favorite hat and, most importantly, their chief “absent belonging,” their baby. Aided by Mr. Adams, the travelers communicate with other Americans, whose stories they integrate into their travelogue. As is quite natural for travelogues, many of these chance acquaintances appear in the third person, together with the authors’ interpretations and ideologically appropriate comments. It therefore comes as no surprise that the narrative, which was written in an era of ideological stringency but was nevertheless intended for publication, is biased. It is hard to disagree with Karen L. Ryan, who argues that the novel’s image of America is constructed as the ideological Other.47 But given the demonizing literary tradition of the American narrative, the writers’ belief in socialist ideals, and the requirements of the censorship, it is still surprising how many different American voices found their way into Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue and how broad a spectrum of worldviews it represents. The reaction of readers and critics, disturbed and puzzled by the paucity of accounts of oppressed workers, exploited blacks, and impoverished farmers,48 demonstrates how unusual the travelogue was. The narrators’ American interlocutors come in two major kinds: prominent figures (politicians, writers, engineers, to whom the Russian writers had letters of recommendation)49 and incidental acquaintances (owners of tourist

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houses, hitchhikers, salesmen). Both groups are welcoming toward Russians, but while the former are genuinely interested in the changes taking place in Russia, the latter willingly tell their own stories but ask no questions. The narrators conclude that “typical Americans” are incurious and self-centered. But at the same time, Ilf and Petrov acknowledge that Americans are good friends, attentive to others and ready to help strangers. The farther the travelers proceed into the depths of America, the more gloomy is their picture of America and the more evident is the devastation caused by the Great Depression. The narrators’ sincere admiration for the level of service, efficiency, organization, democracy, and disciplined work ethics is fused, on the one hand, with puzzlement in the face of obvious inconsistencies and, on the other, with rage and condemnation of the capitalism that has forced their interlocutors to leave their homes and wander in search of work. In One-Storied America, the chronotope of the road determines the heroes’ meetings with various native inhabitants. They move horizontally in space as well as vertically among different social strata, seeing through and mockingly unveiling society’s corruption. As in classical picaresque novels, society itself is in the process of change. Ironic observers, outsiders in the loci they visit, the travelers belong to “a plane, different than the entire other world, which gives them an opportunity to mock this world and undermine its institutions.”50 Their function is close to that of Bakhtin’s jester/fool— to lay bare the gloomy deception of a stagnant world.51 However, while One-Storied America contains certain undeniable features of the picaresque novel,52 the travelers epitomize the high end of the rogue’s image; the low one is absent. The travelers are not swindlers; they neither pursue material interests nor try to establish themselves in the society they explore. By the time of their American journey, Ilf and Petrov were the authors of two picaresque novels, which are considered Soviet exemplars of the genre. These two novels, The Twelve Chairs and The (Little) Golden Calf, are sometimes referred to as the “Bender saga” or the “Bender cycle,”53 since they are united by the image of the protagonist, Ostap Bender, who travels across post-revolutionary Russia. Charles Malamuth chose to title his English translation of One-Storied America “Little Golden America,” thereby pointing to the reign of “the golden calf ” in America, but also providing a link between the two types of picaresque journey, Bender’s and Ilf and Petrov’s. Indeed, the three novels echo each other at the level of detail: for example, Ilf and Petrov’s American car, the Little Ford or “Fordik” “of a noble mousegray color” (blagorodnogo myshinogo tsveta), which evoked a fierce personal attachment and pride in its owners, reminds us of the car christened “the

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Antelope” in The Golden Calf, which is also more of a character than a means of transportation. Ilf and Petrov’s readers occasionally suggested that the writers should have sent Ostap Bender himself abroad.54 However, there is a significant difference between One-Storied America and the Bender saga. First, as Ryan notes, the reality explored in the American travelogue was not the writers’ own, and mocking the Other is a less complex and noble task than ironically portraying oneself. Second— and related to the first—is the travelogue’s autobiographical character, the absence of the complex sliding lens provided by Bender. Analyzing the structure of The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, Shcheglov observes that these texts create a flickering (perelivaiushchiisia) effect: on the one hand, they belong to the tradition of high, idealized Soviet romanticism, and on the other, they present a harsh satire on Soviet daily life.55 In the American travelogues, by contrast, there is no ironic gap between the hero’s stance and the authorial position; the authors and the protagonist-narrators coincide. This determines the absence in One-Storied America of an “organic ambiguity,” which, according to Shcheglov, characterizes the world of the two earlier novels. As Zholkovsky observes, every episode of the Bender saga “combines the leitmotif of the itinerant hero with that of a typical specimen of the surrounding milieu.”56 Moreover, in the travelogue tradition, Bender’s “invariant behavior” consists of three elements: recognition, or the reduction of his new acquaintance “to a formula, identifying the appropriate set of clichés for manipulating him”; “parodic mimicry” of his enthusiasm and characteristic discourse; and cynical exploitation. While the third element is missing in One-Storied America, the first two are present in the treatment of Americans. As the authors of their own text, the travelers realize the picaro’s function of laying bare society’s deceptions through literary narrative rather than through actual interaction with their acquaintances. The “recognition” and the “reduction” of American acquaintances to an appropriate formula occur throughout Ilf and Petrov’s journey. Each interlocutor possesses a number of individual features, but these are overlaid with typical ones. Although Ilf and Petrov claim that they try to withhold generalizations, they eventually furnish the formulaic portrait of a typical American. Naïve and childlike, he dreams of getting rich and therefore supports adversarial political interests. Hence, the travelers conclude that the “typical American” is “one-storied,” or horizonless. In contrast to Bender, the autobiographical heroes do not try to adapt to their new surroundings but remain themselves, i.e., representatives of Soviet consciousness. But they do mimic the style of their collective “interlocutor,”

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America. In the style of advertisements, they recognize a “typically American” naïve and boastful desire to be “the largest, the best, the most effective,” and they reproduce this style in their own text in an ironic fashion: “In America, a customer is sold not a bed, but good repose” (210); “we were finally obliged to fill our hearts with pride and take rooms in a hotel” (160); “this made it [the Las Palmas Camp] resemble a hotel and justified the traveler’s filling his heart with pride” (327); “for twenty-five cents the photographed pedestrian may have a candid photograph of himself, a splendid photograph, in the uninhibited act of raising his leg” (25). Analyzing Ilf and Petrov’s earlier, non-American texts, Paul Klanderud demonstrates how, by making Bender mimic official formulas and ironically reproducing similar formulas in their feuilletons, they inculcate into their reader’s mind the potentially subversive concept of total linguistic control in a totalitarian state.57 In their American travelogue, they employ the word of the Other as their own and thereby demonstrate the linguistic control carried out by a capitalist state. But in this latter case, this feature is part of the overall critique of an alien ideology; we do not see a complex opposition between the reality they criticize and the ideal they glorify, as we do in the Bender cycle. In discussing the limitations of One-Storied America, we should not, however, forget that the border between svoi and chuzhoi in the travelogue is social rather than ethnically xenophobic; it separates not Russians and exotic Americans but Soviet-oriented characters and those who do not share socialist ideals. Shcheglov’s observation on the Bender saga applies equally to One-Storied America: “The criterion of belonging/non-belonging to the socialist world separates the ‘clean’ from ‘the unclean’ in Ilf and Petrov.”58 While one can find the chuzhoi in their Soviet picaresque, there is also plenty of “svoi” in their American text. Under the category of svoi we can include Upton Sinclair, who was popular in the Soviet Union; Lincoln Steffens, who was disappointed in the American social system; Rhys Williams, a friend of John Reed; and the engineer Thompson, who praised Soviet industrialization. When Ilf and Petrov narrate their meetings with these people, their tone is full of admiration, and the style is close to their ideal Soviet discourse. A highly romantic, mythologized image of the Soviet Union provides the ever-present background to Ilf and Petrov’s American text. As in the Bender saga, it serves as the ideal, the opposite of described reality. However, the authors’ attention to the details that can and should be borrowed from America provides a perspective on Russia, which is not always idealized. America never makes them doubt either their own ideals or Soviet ideology,

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but it does make them think about concrete flaws in Soviet life. For example, the travelers’ admiration for American service, organization, efficiency, cleanliness, and democratic working relations highlights the absence of all these qualities from Russian life. The lack of precisely these virtues had been the object of irony in the Bender cycle. And perhaps the most important quality that redeems the authors of OneStoried America is their self-irony. While irony and satire verging on solemn condemnation are ubiquitous in the American discourse, One-Storied America offers the first opportunity for travelers to treat themselves ironically. This is what makes Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue so outstanding; unlike all the previous writers in the tradition, Ilf and Petrov were able not only to observe alien reality but also to turn their optical instrument on themselves—aliens experiencing the otherness of America—and have the courage to make themselves objects of the reader’s humor. They confess their insecurities— especially, the fear of looking ridiculous in unfamiliar surroundings—and record embarrassing situations: “At first we were tormented by the thought that because of our inexperience we had got into the wrong taxi, into some antiquated vehicle, and that we were funny and provincial” (10). It is impossible to imagine such a self-ironic account in Gorky or Mayakovsky. Even when the latter does find himself in an embarrassing situation (for example, the one described in the sketch “How I Made Her Laugh,” or an episode where he was cheated at Coney Island), he immediately turns his narrative into a satirical pamphlet. Hence, Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue uniquely combines satire directed against the Other with self-irony; loyalty to Soviet ideals with attempts to grasp American reality from different angles; and condemnation of the capitalist system with high esteem for the organization of capitalist life. The America Ilf and Petrov observe—with all its splendor and misery, multi-storied cities and flat rural areas; magnificent technological achievements and the devastation caused by the Great Depression—enhances these ambiguities. As a result, Ilf and Petrov portray America as both Utopia and Hell. Although Ilf and Petrov consciously strive to provide an objective picture of America rather than to describe America as an Inferno, the paradigm of the journey through Hell pervades their portrayal of the capitalist state, and demonic images constantly impinge on the narrative. Nesbet observes that “the potential for hellishness” can be found “on both axes of the American landscape (the vertical of urban spaces and the horizontal of small-town repetitions).”59 We can add that Ilf and Petrov distribute devilishness stylistically between the “high” romantic, urban Demon and the petty rural Devil of indistinguishable elements and eternal repetitions. Their image of

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New York is full of traditionally romantic infernal associations inherited from Gorky: “From time to time something rumbled hellishly under our feet or something else thundered overhead” (11); “a considerable flame spouted out of one of the cans” (11); “the earth trembled underfoot. And through the grates in the sidewalk came a sudden gust of heat….Through vents placed in the pavement and covered with round metallic covers, steam broke out. For a long time we could not understand where that steam came from”(13). This Hell is operatic, however; the smoking vents in the streets make them expect the emergence of Mephistopheles: “Almost at any moment one expected the vents to open, Mephistopheles to spring out of one of them, and, after clearing his throat, begin to sing in deep bass, right out of Faust” (13). Chapter 5 of Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue, titled “We Seek an Angel without Wings,” relates their dream about an angel who would lead them out of the demonic city. In One-Storied America, urban Hell exists as one extreme on the spectrum “Hell–Paradise.” Ilf and Petrov write of Chicago: “Scarcely anywhere else in the world have heaven and hell intertwined so intimately as in Chicago” (136). The portrayal of Chicago, an epitome of the urban violation of nature, is even more harsh than the image of New York. The reason for this hellishness is obvious—capitalism. Infernal vocabulary appears as soon as Ilf and Petrov begin to analyze the social order in America: “The elevated [train] brings an income to certain companies; therefore, New Yorkers become martyrs. Along Broadway, through all the crowded traffic. With a hellish screeching, a streetcar hobbles along—only because it pays one man, the owner of an ancient streetcar company” (30–31). The other embodiment of capitalist Hell—the rural petty devil of indistinguishable small towns—does not evoke romantic associations. Eternal repetitions of one-storied America remind us of a bleak Hades rather than a vivid Inferno. Its boredom is inescapable. Portraying the deadness of small towns, Ilf and Petrov effectively invert similes. Instead of likening the towns to cemeteries, they choose a less straightforward technique; they liken the cemetery in New Orleans to a small town in rural America: “Its two-storied brick dullness makes the cemetery reminiscent of a small American town. It even had its Main Street” (354). While both the urban and the rural represent types of Hell in Ilf and Petrov’s American narrative, the urban violates the natural: “The earth gave man all that he could take from it. Man applied himself with admirable skill….Yet, on this amply fertilized soil, instead of gleaming palaces of joy, there sprang up, in defiance of all reason, a huge, ugly, poisonous fungus, the city of Chicago in the State of Illinois” (139). At the same time, the hellishness of American urbanism is not based on technology. In this

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respect, Ilf and Petrov differ from Korolenko and Gorky, for whom inhuman technology was an immanent characteristic of the monstrous city. Ilf and Petrov glorify the struggle of man with nature and man’s eventual victory; after all, the dream of gaining control over the material world inspired Soviets throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, the travelers enthusiastically praise the American materialization of the Soviet dream of harnessing nature. Viewing the achievements of American technology, they could have repeated with Mayakovsky: “I am proud of this mile of steel. My dreams have come alive in it.”60 Describing the construction of a bridge across the Mississippi, they claim: “American nature and American technology met in a contest of power” (353). Later they resume: “In the long battle between man and nature, man has come out the victor” (354). The wonders of technology provide much grist for Ilf and Petrov’s rhetorical mill. In the sphere of “non-urban” technology, the opposition of Hell–Paradise is reversible: Hell may be associated with the wild, archaic, unharnessed, and natural (in the negative sense), and Paradise with the civilized, technological, and man-made. Portraying the idyllic, irrigated valleys of California—formerly dessicated deserts—the writers stress that human labor has turned desert into Paradise: “California was not at all a paradise; it was a desert….In this paradise it is necessary to toil endlessly, uninterruptedly; otherwise it will turn into a hell” (326). Praising American roads, they write with nostalgia but also with pride: “Where the feathered arrow of the Indian had whistled stands a gasoline station, and the compressor breathes heavily, forcing the air into the automobile chamber…. And where the Spaniards, breathless under the weight of their leather and steel armor, dragged themselves along the scarcely noticeable trail now stretches the usual American highway, a road of high caliber” (327). While regretting the fate of the Native Americans, they cannot help but admire the achievements of American labor. Although they pay tribute to the Soviet discourse of man’s struggle against nature, Ilf and Petrov do not focus on this conflict. More often than not they try to overcome the binary opposition “technology–nature” by fusing the two: they note that American technology has already become the country’s landscape. They repeatedly describe American technology in terms of nature: “When we passed this desert we found ourselves in another one, where telegraph poles were grown and nothing else. Another day passed, and from the desert of telegraph poles we passed to a desert overgrown with advertisements, billboards, announcements, and all kinds of written, drawn, and printed pleadings” (329). Throughout the novel, they consistently develop the idea that, in America, nature and technology are

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phenomena of the same order. They compare caves with gigantic, manmade decorations, and they indicate that it is difficult to distinguish human artifacts from natural phenomena: “Right outside the city is a gigantic crater seemingly made by nature. As a matter of fact, it has been dug out by people” (329). They are fascinated by orange plantations near Los Angeles, which they juxtapose with oil derricks; a stove for warming the air near each of the orange trees surprises them as much as the orange trees themselves. They claim: “The Empire State Building, Niagara, the Ford plant, the Grand Canyon, Boulder Dam, sequoias and the suspension bridges of San Francisco—they were all phenomena of the same order. American nature and American technology not only supplement each other in order jointly to astonish the imagination of man, but to squelch him” (256). Ilf and Petrov portray the utopian pole of America as the harmony of nature perfectly organized by human effort and technology. Depicting technology as landscape, Ilf and Petrov demonstrate that Mayakovsky’s dream of a technology that would expunge the external manifestations of industry has, in fact, been realized in the America of the 1930s. But the travelers always remember and remind the reader that any American utopia is an illusion, a man-made Eden corrupted by capitalism. Under the guise of Paradise lurk hellish working conditions: “In this paradisiacal valley, where large pale grapefruit ripen, in the valley permeated throughout with the opiating odor of lemons and oranges, in this valley goes on the most cruel exploitation of Mexicans and Filipinos in the entire world. And more than for its lettuce and oranges, this valley is known for its brutish treatment of strikers” (327). This paradoxical, twofold image of the country is perhaps best of all summarized by Ilf and Petrov’s readers: “America would have been paradise if it had been socialist.”61 In their short story “Tonia,” the accents shift, and Ilf and Petrov demonstrate that America can be a real Hell for Soviet citizens stripped of their country and isolated from the Soviet collective and collective work. As does Korolenko in In a Strange Land, the writers portray America through a simple, natural character. (In “Columbus Approaches the Shore” they also employ this technique, but in an ironic vein: the fact that the naïve character—Columbus— is coming from a different era enhances defamiliarization.) Tonia, the young wife of an embassy clerk, Kostia, follows her husband to America, expecting to experience the greatest adventure of her life. Instead, her relationship with America is the story of a non-meeting and, later, a profound disillusionment. In contrast to Korolenko’s Dyma, who is shocked by a demonic New York immediately after disembarking from his ship, Tonia and Kostia do not even have the opportunity to see the city in the rush of their arrival: “Only half an

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hour later, already sitting in a Pullman car on the ‘New York–Washington’ train, did Tonia realize that she had passed the largest city in the world. But what kind of city it was she could not tell. In her memory, it remained only as a rumble, an ancient taxi where the radio was playing, the gloom and glitter of some unknown streets.”62 Their destination is the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Unlike the autobiographical, peripatetic narrators of OneStoried America, Tonia is confined to an isolated space. Time, which passes unnoticed for Kostia, who is occupied at the embassy, almost stops for Tonia. Like a prison inmate, she keeps track of the slowly passing days: “Sitting with her husband in the evening, Tonia used to say with surprise: ‘Do you know, Kostia, that we have lived here for twelve days already.’ ‘Is that really so?’— Kostia marveled, ‘and I haven’t noticed’” (466). The embassy is an island of normal Soviet life and work in the midst of a dreary hopeless country, but it is insufficient to make Tonia happy; deprived of connections with a larger community, she gradually withers. The situation is resolved by an abrupt “happy” ending: Tonia and her husband are unexpectedly ordered to return home. Taking into account the social climate of the 1930s, today’s reader cannot miss the dark irony of this ostensibly cheerful ending. The final scene of the story is ominous: “Tonia with a sinking heart…saw in the gloom of the winter night a wooden watchtower with a Red Army soldier dressed in a long guard’s coat and a helmet. For a minute, the lights of the train spotted him, the gun’s barrel glistened, and the tower slowly moved backward. The guard was covered with snow but, unmoving and imposing as a monument, he did not shake it off ” (498). Even though they remain faithful to the ideals of the Soviet system, Ilf and Petrov, perhaps unconsciously, portray the heroine’s return as an entry into another infernally enclosed space, the Soviet Union, which she considers to be a Paradise. The stunned reader recognizes the fusion of Heaven and Hell—which is characteristic of Ilf and Petrov’s image of America—in their home country. We are left with a paradox of projection, the ambiguous rhetorical task that has devolved onto Soviet travelers in the 1930s: they must search out the aspects of America worth borrowing, but, at the same time, they must also criticize capitalism as a system. Since the Soviet Union has now established itself in the world and has been recognized by the United States, the urgent need for denunciatory pamphlets, propagandist sketches and poems has ceded place to a serious, balanced critique of America. The theme of America as the Other World is still relevant, but it has become less explicit, existing as an undercurrent in the travelogues. Accordingly, both Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov distinguish between a romantic urban Hell and the mundane Hell of rural American routine.

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C h apt e r

F our

Recurrent Subtexts and Motifs in American Travelogues

p r e v i o u s c h apt e r s o f t h i s b o o k , I posited three periods in the evolution of Russian literary journeys to America and examined the travelogue writers’ shifting political and rhetorical goals, as well as their individual stylistic peculiarities within each of these periods. In this part, I will adopt a diachronic approach. I now turn to major shared features that show beyond doubt that Russian writers’ American travelogues do, indeed, constitute a single narrative—which I have called “the American text of Russian literature.” In examining shared features, we come up against the travelogues’ complex interweaving of reality and narration. Predecessors’ travelogues determine the itineraries of later travelers, who, for their part, face a choice: either to comply with their models and visit famous—and much described—places of interest and supply their own account of them; or to diverge from the tradition, experience new things, and propose new narrative themes. In this part, I will analyze a body of recurrent travelogue motifs, which I will account for, on the one hand, by the common physical realities experienced during each of the journeys but, on the other hand, by the narrative tradition of the Russian journey to America. The literary tradition filters reality; and reality, in turn, re-insinuates itself into literary accounts. Paradoxically, we see the workings of this dynamic particularly clearly in instances when writers do not visit a traditional point of interest. Having chosen to bypass a particular destination, the travelers nevertheless acknowledge their awareness of the “rules” of the American travelogue, which decree that they should have visited it. Pilniak, for example, admits that he did not see the Statue of Liberty “which always starts the description of America,” and yet he pays ironic tribute to the tradition by supplying a description of it (see the section in this chapter on the Statue of Liberty). In

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Just as crucial for creating the American text of Russian literature as recurrent motifs are shared subtexts. As I will show, Gogol and Dante underpin and inform each of the literary journeys, a phenomenon that I attribute both to the two authors’ direct impact on the traveling writers and to the Russian literary tradition of intertextuality.

Russian Travelers in the Infernal Land of Dead Souls —Dante and Gogol as Recurrent Subtexts As we have seen in earlier chapters, the descent into Hell serves as a template for Russian writers’ American journeys. Although we encounter direct references to The Divine Comedy somewhat infrequently, Dante’s epic nevertheless provides a particularly apposite background against which to read the travelogues. We know that Gogol was strongly drawn to Dante,1 and Gogol, in turn, served as a direct source for the allusions and techniques the travelers adopt in order to show America as the Other World. Similar to The Divine Comedy, both Dead Souls and the American travelogues feature a traveler who moves through a space that is represented by the author as the land of the dead. Gogol’s presence is often signaled through explicit textual references. These straightforward allusions, however, are merely the tip of the iceberg; more significant is the fact that, in the travelogues, Gogol becomes a prism for the Russian literary perception of America. Even when travelogues do not explicitly allude to Gogol’s texts, they employ his grotesque poetics to portray America as a land of dead souls. For example, New York’s literary space bears an uncanny resemblance to Gogol’s Mirgorod and St. Petersburg. Similarly, American travelogues borrow Dead Souls’ journey structure in order to show real life as Hell. When Ilf and Petrov visit San Francisco, they acknowledge their kinship with Dead Souls’ picaro-in-chief: “Like Chichikov, we paid a visit to the mayor of the city” (264). In a certain sense, Chichikov and the Russian travelers embark on the same mission, a quest for dead souls. But whereas Chichikov passes off dead serfs as live ones in order to mortgage them, Russian travel writers invert the process by seeking out the living and portraying them as dead in order to cast America as a capitalist Other World. Oddly enough, Gogol himself viewed America positively, very much in the vein of the early Herzen, who at first portrayed America as a liberal refuge. In his youth, Gogol envisioned America as an ideal faraway land, a symbol of the unknown. In his early years he romantically planned a voyage to America. This dream journey, as Yuri Mann suggests, is echoed in the first, uncensored version of Dead Souls, in the crucial episode of “The Tale of

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Captain Kopeikin.”2 Kopeikin is a one-armed, one-legged war veteran who rebels after the government refuses to help him. He then organizes a gang of robbers in the woods near Riazan’, intending to victimize government officials. In Gogol’s first version of the tale, America figures as the refuge to which Kopeikin eventually flees and from which he writes a letter to the tsar asking him to establish pensions for disabled veterans. Gogol creates a textual pattern that proves to be foundational for travelers to America: he applies grotesque techniques in order to reveal the infernal characteristics of space—which is to say, his own, Russian space, the world of svoe. Our travelers redirect and repurpose Gogol’s technique in order to demonize the Other, the chuzhoe. But, as I have argued in previous chapters, over the course of the entire time that Russians experience America, they simultaneously maintain an ideal of Russia firmly in mind. As a result, they navigate such a convoluted complex of projections that the borders between svoe and chuzhoe inevitably blur. Gogol’s play The Inspector General is perhaps the most obvious influence on Russian travelers’ perceptions of themselves (and, ironically, on their contemporaries’ perceptions of them as well). The figure of Khlestakov, the petty clerk whom corrupt provincial officials mistake for a high-ranking inspector and who embraces this role—all the while spinning the most improbable lies—virtually haunts Russian writers in America. One influential scholarly hypothesis proposes Pavel Svinin, the first Russian travelogue writer to America, as Khlestakov’s prototype.3 Svinin’s picturesque account of his journey, full of exoticism, sealed his reputation as a liar and unreliable narrator in the eyes of his literary contemporaries. Pushkin said of him: “Pavlushka was a neat, kind, diligent boy but he had one big flaw: he couldn’t say three words in a row without lying.”4 In fairness to Svinin, specialists in American history value him for his open-mindedness and attention to detail, and modern Russian literary scholars like Rezepin have tried to salvage his reputation. For our purposes, however, it is important to note that the very fact of going to America and writing about it seems to presuppose that a travelogue writer, even a trustworthy one like Svinin, must be some kind of Khlestakov. In fact, Svinin may have deserved this reputation less than some of his successors, particularly the authors we are studying here.5 In American travelogues, the dashing figure of Khlestakov undergoes a strange transformation and becomes a ubiquitous presence, casting its influence over the narrator, who begins to perceive himself as Khlestakov. It even impinges on the object of description, on America itself. Of course, America with its abundance of technological miracles and its penchant for self-aggrandizement and extravagant exaggeration could make any Russian

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traveler writer feel like a Khlestakov.The writers themselves suggest that there is something Khlestakov-like in America’s very nature, in its boastfulness, its vacuity, and its concern for superficiality and external effect (in order to express this boastful superficiality, they employ the word “khlestakovshchina,” or “khlestakovitis”). The implication is that the travelogue’s material chooses and forms its own narrator, and each writer must deal in his own way with the fact that America has imposed the role of Khlestakov on him. The first mention of Khlestakov in the American narrative appears in Mayakovsky’s poem “150,000,000.” Describing the grand scale of his imagined American city (Chicago), Mayakovsky exclaims: Courier outstrips courier at full career. You couldn’t count ’em all. Such a number would make the greenhorn Khlestakov gasp for breath. (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2: 133)

One Soviet critic has observed that the allusion emerges when the poem’s heroic energy is overshadowed by a fantastic satire based on hyperbolic and grotesque images. Moreover, the reference accompanies a shift in the narrative voice from that of the Soviet Poet, the representative of millions, to Khlestakov’s private casual tone.6 Many Soviet critics, however, have interpreted the allusion as a simple genre marker. Pertsov, for instance, writes that “the employment of the Gogolian image introduces a satirical tone into this picture of bourgeois bustle and advertising, khlestakovshchina,” thereby dismissing the causal connection between the object of description (khlestakovshchina) and the Khlestakov-like narrator. Rougle goes further, suggesting that when Mayakovsky states that his imaginary America is grander than Khlestakov’s wildest fantasies, he reveals a similarity in narrative stance between Gogol’s hero and his own. Both are ready to offer their audience a poeticized and exaggerated version of popular fantasies: “Both exaggerate to the point of falsehood, both claim to have had firsthand experience of ‘the big wide world,’ and both, in fact, presume fairly much the same values and ideas of that world on the part of their listeners–Petersburg/ Chicago is grand because the food there is marvelous, because the place is swarming with generals, etc.”7 Rougle sees Mayakovsky’s implication that the new proletarian audience is also petty and ignorant as a basis for Trotsky’s criticism of the poem. Trotsky’s touchiness draws our attention to the fact that khlestakovshchina, as a characterization of both the object of description and the narrator, is contagious and infects the image of the implied reader as well. The fact that Mayakovsky, having experienced America in person, feels

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justified in defending his early poem as true to the nation’s spirit confirms that a new Khlestakov, with a more vivid fancy than Gogol’s character, is indeed the only authentic narrator for the task of describing America. Even Gorky, despite his first-hand experience of the reality he described, was not immune from being perceived as a Khlestakov by his contemporaries. In his article “The End of Gorky,” Filosofov brands Gorky as a Khlestakov for describing Europe, and later America, as if he were the first traveler ever to write about them, even though he has no knowledge of the countries he visits and lacks the compassion that should ideally underpin a real travelogue.8 Filosofov targets Gorky’s didactic tone, his alleged ignorance, his readiness to judge what he does not understand, and his presumptuous statements, which are offered as a new word despite being well-worn. By showing Gorky up as a Khlestakov, Filosofov refuses to become a member of Khlestakov’s reverent audience. Allusions to The Inspector General appear again in the two travelogues of the 1930s. Pilniak feels like a Khlestakov when the journalists who greet him on his arrival in America pass around an informational flyer about him:9 “Some people I didn’t know were handing around to journalists a ‘statement’—some sort of Khlestakov document about me, telling all kinds of stories about how old I am, and who my dads are, and what kind of soand-so I am” (455). This torrent of self-advertisement—a routine part of standard American business behavior—seems like a weird kind of boasting to the Russian writer. He is annoyed that the Khlestakovian journalists try to turn him into a Khlestakov as well, and he rejects the role. Pilniak’s references to Khlestakov are purely satirical.10 America, as he sees it, is a country of Khlestakovs who perpetually show off and exaggerate. In portraying America, he invokes Gogol by regularly repeating a phrase that Khlestakov utters when he is completely carried away by his own embellished stories of life in St. Petersburg: “The banner is galloping off ” (shtandart skachet; an expression that has become proverbial in Russian). Pilniak invokes the phrase in order to point to the American passion for patriotic ostentation as evidenced by America’s ubiquitous banners and other national symbols. He also plays with a pun on “shtandart (banner)” vs. “standart (norm, standard)”: “The banner—and the standard—are racing!” (Shtandart—i standart—skachut! 508); “all of New York’s oohing and ahing is about national banners and standards…for those who have a checkbook in their pocket” (Ves’ akhovyi i okhovyi N’iu Iork v natsional’nykh shtandartakh i standartakh—dlia tekh, u kogo v karmane chekovaia knizhka; 501). Through this Gogolian allusion, Pilniak indicates that America is a country of slogans and stereotypes, obsessed with self-aggrandizement and mere display.

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Although Khlestakov is not explicitly mentioned in Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue, they apparently have him in mind in their portrayal of the dashing Captain Trefiliev,11 whom they meet in Hollywood. When the Captain tells the travelers about his extraordinary adventures and his historic role in the Russian Civil War—delivering Denikin’s order to Kolchak—we easily recognize Khlestakov’s agitated manner of speech, which is full of grotesque exaggerations: “You see, I raced in express trains! From the train to the ship! From the ship to the train! Through Europe, the Atlantic, America, the Pacific, Japan, the Far East” (303).12 The crippled Captain Trefiliev evokes the figure of yet another of Gogol’s adventurers, the aforementioned Captain Kopeikin, who brings in train the aura of Dead Souls. It comes as no surprise that such a grotesque figure might appear on one of Hollywood’s movie sets, which Ilf and Petrov regarded as the essence of American illusion. Another explicit connection between Gogol and the American travelogue—a reference to Mirgorod—occurs in Esenin, who as a “peasant” poet is especially sensitive to the tensions between the archaic (the country) and the modern (the city). The combination of Old World and modern connotations in his text’s title, “An Iron Mirgorod,” recalls a scene in his poem “Sorokoust,” where Esenin writes sympathetically about a foal racing against the train: “Doesn’t he know that the steel cavalry triumphed over living horses?”13 Gogol’s Mirgorod is the epitome of a sleepy provincial town where life is almost immobile. Esenin refers to the Mirgorod cycle, in particular to “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” the story of a petty legal suit over an absurd trifle, to stress America’s social and intellectual provincialism: “The strength of reinforced concrete and the mass of the buildings have limited the American’s brain and narrowed his vision. The American’s manners recall the manners of Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich, of eternal Gogolian memory” (154). Thanks to Esenin, Mirgorod becomes a recurrent ironic symbol of American provincialism. In later travelogues, writers refer to Mirgorod when they wish to stress the coexistence of external, technological advancement and social backwardness. Pilniak finds this contrast typical for Russians in America. After visiting the Molokans, a religious sect of Russian origin, Pilniak provides an estranging description of their traditions. Everything archaic in their village reminds him of Gogol’s province, and a puddle in the center of the village immediately calls to mind a similar one in Mirgorod— one of the town’s major points of interest: “At the crossroad there is an orthodox—Lord forgive me!—puddle, like in Gogol, but above the puddle there is an American street lamp” (487).

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Esenin also invokes Gogol’s Mirgorod for the purpose of mocking American bureaucracy. The customs procedures at Ellis Island remind him of Mirgorod’s clerks; the bureaucracy reaches a Gogolian level of absurdity. But in the very absurdity of both Gogol’s sleepy and Esenin’s “iron” Mirgorod lies the hope for a miraculous escape—perhaps outside powers will serendipitously intervene to resolve all problems? In “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” the sudden interference of a pig, who gobbles up an essential document, brings the endless lawsuit to an end. In Esenin’s case, higher powers prevail: Duncan’s friends use their influence to lobby the president, and as a result, Esenin and Duncan are granted permission to enter the country. “Mirgorod! Oh, Mirgorod! A pig has saved the day!” Esenin exclaims (151). At first glance, it may strike the reader as counterintuitive that Esenin chooses the idyllic, innocent town of Mirgorod as an epitome for urban America. But is Gogol’s Mirgorod really all that innocent? The Mirgorod cycle provides a transition from the poetic world of the Dikanka tales, where the everyday and the phantasmagoric are distributed between two different types of chronotope,14 to the illusory space of the Petersburg tales, which efface the border between the normal and the surreal. Esenin’s essay emphasizes the fragmental, gloomy features of Gogol’s Mirgorod, stripping it of its shabby idyllic charms and turning it into a hostile “iron Mirgorod.” The attribute “iron” suggests “urban” (in the sense of the city’s building material), but it also invokes anxiety in its figurative meaning of “harsh,” “merciless.” In Gogol’s Mirgorod tale “Viy,” the adjective “iron” relates to the demonic and fantastic, since it defines the eponymous character, the monstrous Viy: “Horrified, Khoma noticed that he had a face of iron.” “‘There he is!’ cried Viy and pointed his iron finger at him” (italics mine).15 Thus, Esenin’s title suggests a connection with both “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” and “Viy,” the most morbid tale of the Mirgorod cycle, and infuses his image of America with undertones of the Other World. As Voronskii notes, “In ‘Viy’ the absurd, the dead, the otherworldly has conquered reality and has become a part of it (V “Vii” zaum’, mertvoe, nezhit’ pobedili iav’, sdelalis’ chast’iu ee).16 In Poetika Gogolia, Mann describes the Gogolian technique of the grotesque: “What’s needed is for the doll or the automaton to, as it were, replace the man, for the mask to coalesce with the human face, for the human body or its parts to be objectified, to become an inanimate thing.”17 Mann’s characterization of Gogol’s later style, where the fantastic is forced out from the plot level onto the stylistic one, works very well for the American travelogue, and Gorky’s pamphlets provide a clear example of

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this Dantesque/Gogolian technique. Gorky’s city is mythological in Dante’s manner—the author presents vivid pictures of Hell, which sometimes seem almost literally taken from The Divine Comedy. Yet Gorky’s task is to portray a real city, so the fantastic is restricted to the level of narrative style. By employing Gogol’s method of “non-fantastic fantasy” (Mann) or “romantic realism” (David Fanger),18 Gorky can portray New York as a real place where the demonic substance shows through the actual façade. All the travelogues in this study feature a similar Gogolian combination of the concrete and the inherently demonic. All of them abound in synecdoche (“the increasing number of synecdoches obscures living people”),19 a grotesque objectification of the living, and a personification of objects, resulting in multiple images of “automatic” people, which we have observed in Gorky.20 Mayakovsky, describing a day in New York, develops the motif of Gorky’s “Mob” and shows the movement of people along the streets as a flow of matter. This is no tempestuous movement of inspired revolutionary crowds, such as we find in a socialist realist novel like Gladkov’s Cement, with its association between the masses and natural forces, but rather a regular, precisely timed and lifeless process: “Below flows a solid human mass—first, before dawn, a blackish-purple mass of Negroes who accomplish the most difficult and depressing tasks. Later, toward seven—continuously whites” (171). At the same time, in the Gorkyesque/Gogolian manner, Mayakovsky portrays natural forces and objects as vividly animate: “A sort of adventurer-wind howls, tears off signs and rattles them, tries to knock you off your feet, and runs away unpunished….From the sides, the countless thin voices of narrow little streets howl along with the storm” (171). Ilf and Petrov mention “young manikins” in New York’s showcase windows. As I have already shown, Pilniak consistently develops the idea in OK that America is nothing but one gigantic factory belt writ large. The Russian association of America with advanced technology facilitates the proliferation of the grotesque in American travelogues. In “Factory of Death,” Korolenko mentions that, in contrast to the animals, people working in the slaughterhouse, be they clerks or workers, move with automatic precision and absence of emotion: “An elegantly dressed gentleman came out to meet us and, with the mechanical movements of an automaton, passed out printed cards to each of the arrivals” (87); “not far from the slope stands an almost naked, slippery, pale-skinned, and indifferent man with a thin knife in his hand. When the animal trundles past him, he performs a practiced downward gesture…. This man’s entire job consists exclusively of this one downward sweep of the knife” (90). In the later travelogues of Mayakovsky, Pilniak, and Ilf and Petrov,

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the images of machine-like people working on the assembly line, particularly at the Ford factory, become a sine qua non of factory descriptions. As a rule, Gorky, Esenin, and Mayakovsky draw more upon Gogol’s Mirgorod and St. Petersburg to construct New York’s city space, while Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov, who focus on the structural elements of the journey, rely on the distinctive features of Dead Souls for their American travelogues. The America of the travelogues is isolated from the wider world, which calls to mind both the Inferno and the space of Gogol’s town. Writing about the concentric realm of Mirgorod, Lotman stresses that “the most distinctive feature of this world is that it is enclosed. The concept of the border separating this (small) world from that one (the rest of the world) is definitively marked.”21 As opposed to America’s own positive view of itself as “exceptional,” a “city upon a hill,” the America of the travelogues is a “Petri dish where the bacteria of capitalism are stored in their purest form,” as Pilniak puts it (451). Most of the travelogues use the transatlantic voyage to represent the symbolic crossing of the border into the capitalist world. Upon reaching their destination, the travelers immediately start to feel that they are trapped, locked inside. Describing his first impressions, Gorky keeps underscoring the notion of New York as a confined space, discrediting, as Rougle notes,22 the common view of America as the land of freedom. Esenin and Ilf and Petrov also comment on how cramped and narrow the streets of New York are. Moreover, this sensation of imprisonment persists, regardless of the point of entry into America. In his poem “Mexico–New York,” Mayakovsky opposes the open space of the Mexican Laredo, where he had crossed the border, to the bars of an American cage, albeit a cage he has exerted much effort to enter: There [in Mexico] you have valor— they charge, wearing down their horses, and shoot straight through a nickel with their Colt revolver …And here the iron, you cannot loosen it! No freedom, no life, no nerve for you!” (“Meksika–Niu-Iork,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 53)

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In Gogol and Dante, the hero’s journey is organized as a set of encounters with inhabitants of the land of the dead. But while the central character is always on the move, his interlocutors are fixed in their niches. Among the Russian travelogue writers, this is especially true of Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov, whose picture of their narrators’ journey unfolds progressively. Gogol’s and Dante’s infernal worlds are hierarchical, and this hierarchy is reflected in the composition of their “poems.” The characters whom the traveler (and the reader) encounters are ranged in order of their appearance. In Dante, this progressive order is determined by the characters’ degree of guilt: the lower the circle, the graver the sin that is being punished. According to Mann, Gogol reverses Dante’s order. Chichikov’s interlocutors, like Dante’s transgressors, have committed a variety of sins, and we encounter them in decreasing order of their spiritual deadness or, alternately, in increasing order of their capacity for resurrection.23 Mann emphasizes that Gogol’s sinners, unlike most of Dante’s, are not villains; their infractions have been committed against their own souls. Similarly, Russian travelers’ American interlocutors are no villains; the ultimate evil in this world, “the Yellow Devil” of the Russian travelogues, is capitalism itself. The majority of Americans whom the writers meet are its victims, and their chief flaw is narrow-mindedness. Reflecting on Dead Souls’ spatial structure, Lotman points out yet another type of hierarchy, which is determined by point of view: “The characters, the reader, and the author belong to different types of that special space which is characterized by knowledge of the rules of life.”24 Whereas Gogol’s characters are earthbound and are limited by a narrow horizon, his readers’ broader point of view is located above the characters and entails knowledge of their past and future. The author, however, has the most broadly general view of the world and its moral rules. Although the American narrative does not contain a predetermined succession of encounters, it nevertheless features a Gogolian hierarchy of viewpoints. In the semi-autobiographical American travelogues, the traveling narrator’s picture of the world is close to the authorial one. The narrators observe much more broadly than their geographically bound American interlocutors and even than their traveling companions. Ultimately, Russian travel writers map out a spatial spectrum on which America and Russia occupy opposite ends. The travelogues maintain an insistent focus on this polarity, a technique that derives in part from the Inferno and in part from Dead Souls. Dante’s traveler traverses the lowest realms of existence in order to prepare himself for the attainment of higher spheres; he descends in order to rise. Similarly, in Soviet travelogues characters and readers experience the bleak territories of American Hell in order to appreciate the glories of Soviet Paradise. In the surviving volume of Dead

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Souls, Gogol, unlike Dante, portrays only Hell, since Paradise, the imagined Russia that Gogol intends to show in subsequent volumes, has not yet come into being. Like Gogol, Soviet-era travelogue writers filter the existing Hell (America) through the prism of an imaginary future Paradise (Russia). Thus, Russian travelogue writers’ debt to their two greatest interlocutors comes with an inflection; Dante’s essential insight into the polarity of spatial distribution is modulated by Gogol’s tension between the present and the imminent.

The Transatlantic Journey In order to reach the Other World, one must first cross a physical and symbolic border, the Atlantic Ocean. Until the second half of the twentieth century, all writers and their characters came to America aboard a steamship, and their accounts of their voyages became an indispensable part of the American travelogue.25 Among the major Russian travelogue authors who sailed to America, only Gorky omits an account of the voyage and starts off with the steamship’s arrival in New York, the gateway of the New World. (In “City of the Yellow Devil,” Gorky is probably following the example set by Bogoraz in “At the Entrance of the New World.”)26 I will refer to the discourse about the journey to America as the “transatlantic narrative” or “the narrative of the transatlantic journey.”27 In the travelogues, the journey across the ocean is not merely a geographical relocation; for the characters coming to America, it is a liminal existence, a transitional period between known and alien worlds. The traveler undergoes a process of initiation represented in the texts as a spiritual and/or intellectual journey that takes place in close proximity to death. The transatlantic journey can also include a shift in time (Mayakovsky’s voyage to the past; Columbus’s journey to the future in “Columbus Approaches the Shore”). In the narrative of the transatlantic journey, time and space are stripped of linearity. The chronotope is usually supplied in the musings of introspective characters who feel outside of time, in the middle of the universe: “Above me birds, under me fish, and around me—water.”28 Korolenko’s passengers, both fictional and autobiographical, find themselves not only between two worlds, their homeland and a mythical America, but also between two eternities, one beneath them and one above. Matvei Lozinskii (In a Strange Land) stares into the depths of the sea and becomes aware of the hidden mysteries of ocean life, which has continued for ages, independent of humanity. And he, “a huge heavy man,” wants to “rise up and fly and fly like the seagulls.”29 Mayakovsky feels keenly that his ship is washed by

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the same waves that saw Columbus (“Christopher Columbus”). He uses temporal characteristics instead of the anticipated spatial ones in order to create a picture of the eternal boundless ocean: the waves rise, “huge like years” (“The Atlantic Ocean”). In Mayakovsky’s letters to Lilia Brik, he fills in the sender’s address “The Atlantic Ocean.” Pilniak, who contemplates the scale of the universe and world history, writes: “Back of the stern was Europe. The stem was moving toward America” (449). The journey narrative revolves around two axes: the existential, which draws on the classical motif of human life as a sea journey,30 and the social, which is usually determined by the hierarchical class structure on board the steamship.31 Both existential and social aspects are usually present in every account, although each particular journey may gravitate toward one or the other of them.32 The American travelers’ ocean voyages can be traced to the nineteenthcentury literary tradition. Particularly important in this regard is Ivan Goncharov’s Fregat Pallada (Frigate Pallada, 1858), a semi-historical, semifictional account of the author’s journey around the world that focuses on social issues. During his voyage, Goncharov visited Japan and America (San Francisco, in particular). In his novel, he juxtaposes documentary information about the journey and life aboard the frigate with observations about foreign customs and analysis of the current political situation. According to Goncharov’s concept of history, America is now one of the preceptors of world civilization. But this civilizing function is ambiguous: Goncharov shows its destructive consequences for patriarchal life patterns and warns against the dangers of American world expansion. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Frigate Pallada, which represents the practical tradition of journeys to America, was considered to be useful and inspiring juvenile reading, similar to Jules Verne’s A Floating City (1871), another transatlantic narrative that was important for the Russian tradition. A Floating City discusses the organization of life on board an enormous steamship, the Great Eastern, and examines all its mechanical details. The ship is portrayed as a fusion of machine and city. Korolenko’s narratives of the transatlantic voyage, especially the novella In a Strange Land, represent another tradition. Korolenko focuses on the journey’s existential nature and likens it to man’s journey in the world. In his travelogues, man is a small grain of sand lost in the universe, and the motif of death accompanies the characters’ journey. In the novella, when the ship reaches the middle of the ocean, a man dies and is consigned to the waves. Everyone on the ship feels his death, and even the ship’s siren “groaned, as if bewailing the sad lot of man” (30). Korolenko represents this

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mid-ocean death as humanity’s common fate rather than one particular man’s tragedy. At one point, the ship narrowly escapes an iceberg, making the characters aware of their journey’s mortal danger. But the motif of death in Korolenko is inseparable from revelation; with death so near, the characters undergo an initiation into the Other World. Even a little man, like the uneducated peasant Matvei from Lozishchi village, gets a glimpse of something that never leaves him: “‘One thinks of many things when on the sea, many things about one’s self, God, earth and Heaven. Men think much on the ocean, yes, sir, much about life and about death.…’ And one saw in his eyes some unknown little light trying to break through to the surface from the unknown depth of his simple soul” (21–22). For Korolenko himself, the transatlantic voyage must have been the most striking part of the entire American experience: the accounts of it constitute the bulk of his autobiographical American texts.33 Korolenko attributes universal significance to the most pedestrian details of the journey, such as seasickness;34 the autobiographical narrator suggests that in order to avoid seasickness, a man should always keep in mind the center of everything— God. Korolenko verifies this philosophical discovery in the social sphere. Unlike the passengers, the sailors and the captain do not suffer from seasickness since they have to work. Their minds naturally cling to this work as a higher task, something outside their own selves. Korolenko activates the steamship’s potential as a plot vehicle. In his sketches, the ship is a natural crossroads for his characters. In its confined world, each character and his or her secrets can be gradually revealed. While Pilniak’s and Mayakovsky’s people mostly represent different classes, Korolenko’s people are individuals. In his unfinished texts, there are many mysterious picturesque figures among the passengers: a romantic female, a distinguished inventor, social reformers, and others. Korolenko offers sketches of mysterious romantic relations but never develops them. After 1912, the shadow of the Titanic hovers over the transatlantic narrative in the journey’s existential pathos and the associated overtones of doom. In Mandelstam’s poem “American Girl,” the heroine undertakes the transatlantic journey despite “the advice of the Titanic”: American, female, twenty years old, impelled to get to Egypt, forgetting the advice of the Titanic, where it sleeps darker than a crypt, deep in the ocean. (Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973], 62)

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Most of all, the tragedy of the Titanic influenced the apocalyptic image of the ship in Bunin’s story “Gospodin iz San-Frantsisko” (The Gentleman from San Francisco, 1915). The story serves as a classic example of a transatlantic narrative where the social analysis of the steamship passengers combines with the journey as a universal symbol. Pilniak calls “The Gentleman from San Francisco” a “model story about crossing the Atlantic” (445). The holiday journey of the main character, an American millionaire, who is so deprived of personhood that Bunin does not even give him a name, turns out to be a journey to his own death. In the story, Bunin makes symbolic connections between the Gentleman’s actual journey, the ship’s ominous journey as observed by the Devil from the rocks of Gibraltar, man’s journey to the grave, and mankind’s journey through history. Bunin emphasizes the story’s apocalyptic dimension with the epigraph “Woe unto thee, Babylon” (which he later eliminates).35 Bunin offers a vertical perspective of the ship, from the lower decks, the machines, and the baggage sections, to the luxurious upper cabins. Later, Mayakovsky appropriates this technique in his poem “Skyscraper in Cross-Section” but preserves only its social implications, leaving aside the biblical symbolism of Bunin’s picture. Bunin metaphorically relates the hierarchy of social classes on board the ship with Hell (the lower decks) and Paradise (the first-class cabins). At the same time, he exposes the illusory nature of this social hierarchy; the passengers who imagine that they are enjoying paradisal pleasures in the ship’s higher echelons can easily be transferred to its lowest stratum, as happens with the Gentleman’s corpse. But the truth about the ocean’s fatal dangers, the coffin on the baggage deck, as well as the actual relations between the pair of actors hired by the steamship company to reenact a love affair is available only to the author and, it is implied, to the Devil observing the ship. The main character, on his journey to death, understands nothing of this.36 Thus, in Bunin’s story it is the author and his readers—but not the passengers—who undertake the intellectual and spiritual journey. The eschatological motif associated with the Titanic is not popular in the Soviet travelogue, since the prevailing idea after the revolution is man’s victory over the natural elements. Esenin perceives the technological miracle of his steamship with a mixture of fear and admiration: “But if you look at it from the viewpoint of what man is capable of, then you may shrug your shoulders and say: How could you?” (148–149). Ilf and Petrov maintain that the battle between storm and steamship is a fight between equals (5). The catastrophe of the Titanic is only occasionally mentioned. For example, in Tageev’s Russian American the characters crossing the ocean learn that one of their sailors is the son of a sailor who served on the

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Titanic. But generally, the motif of death on the ocean decreases in postrevolutionary travelogues.37 After the Revolution, Soviet writers, like almost all Soviet citizens, sail to America on board European ships. The sole exception is Dobranitskii (the author of the non-fictional travelogue To America and Back Again, who claims that his ship, the Vatslav Vorovskii, which crossed the ocean in 1925, was the first to do so under the Soviet flag. The Vatslav Vorovskii was a commercial steamship, but its journey had a political significance, since in the 1920s commercial relations were a substitute for diplomatic ties. Thus, Dobranitskii’s ship and its crew were perceived by Americans and by the narrator himself as an ambassador from Soviet Russia. In the Soviet media of the 1920s and 1930s, Western steamships were treated with suspicion. The specialized technical magazines dedicated to ship engineering call for vigilance, arguing that every passenger ship is a potential battleship, since it can change its function very quickly.38 Many caricatures in the satirical magazine Krokodil warn against the American government’s secret maritime plots.39 Still, most post-revolutionary writers had to use these potentially hostile ships to travel to the other hemisphere, giving rise to a new ideological motif in travelogues: the Soviet citizen on board a steamship finds himself in a socially alien world. More than ever, the steamship represents for him the politically divided world in miniature. Consequently, the antagonism between him and other passengers increases. He is not merely a Russian but a Soviet abroad. Aboard ship he encounters his first Americans and faces the challenge of speaking a foreign language and functioning in American society. Ilf and Petrov can write ironically of the Soviet citizen in this situation. In “Tonia,” three young engineers often leave the table hungry because they cannot order a meal properly, and the heroine cannot manage to refuse to dance with a frightening old American. The other writers are much more solemn; their characternarrators are constantly aware of their mission to represent their country and, in Mayakovsky’s and Pilniak’s case, to judge the other passengers. With the exception of Esenin, all Soviet writers comment on the ship’s social hierarchy, addressing the disparity between the rights of passengers of different classes. Even when they do not focus on this issue, like Ilf and Petrov, they at least mention it. Pilniak’s third-person narrator even dreams of a revolution on board that would establish a just social order: “He [the exemplary Soviet citizen] would like to let the cramped space of the thirdclass underwater tin cans with their dire necessities—so well understood by Soviet citizens—break in upon these upper deck vastnesses” (448). The writers, however, as a new Soviet elite, do not have to expose themselves to

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the hardships of the lower classes. All of them make their voyages as firstclass passengers, even though in Mayakovsky’s and Pilniak’s case, money was in short supply.40 The distinguishing features of American travelogues are thus already outlined ahead of time in the description of the transatlantic journey. The journey is an initiation rite for the hero. Like the American travelogues, the transatlantic narratives are intertextual and often refer to previous literary journeys. Ilf and Petrov immediately recall Marshak’s poem “Mister Twister,” which is about an American visiting Russia (see chapter 5) as they read their ship’s passenger list. Pilniak explicitly evokes Bunin’s story “The Gentleman from San Francisco”: “The description of these oceanic leviathans given by Ivan Bunin in his story ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco,’ which seemed classical several years ago, is now outdated, almost like steamboats. Steamships like the Bremen cannot be compared with a district (uezdnyi) town—now you have to compare them to a county (gubernskii) town” (445).41 Although it may seem that Pilniak is using Bunin’s story as a point of departure, his manner of describing the ship demonstrates that the only thing “outdated” is the size of the steamship. Significantly, the return journey is almost never portrayed. The initiation has already taken place; it is the descent into Hell that interests the travelers. Thus, they conclude their travelogues with their departure from the United States, looking impatiently “homeward”—the title of Mayakovsky’s last poem in the Americas. Once having departed, the travelers actually begin to question America’s reality.

The Statue of Liberty Voyagers coming to the new world were confronted by an unexpected disjunction: they “migrated to a myth-enshrouded ‘America’ and found themselves in a political entity called the ‘U.S.A.’”42 Russian liberals and radicals as well as Soviet citizens visiting America located this disjunction in the allegorical figure of the Statue of Liberty, which came to represent the gap between the abstract principle of liberty and the actual realization of this principle in American political institutions. This gap is especially evident in Soviet political caricatures, which use the Statue as a satirical tool not only to represent America in general (along with an insincerely smiling Uncle Sam), but also to expose the hypocrisy of American political principles in both foreign and domestic affairs. A caricature in Krokodil, for example, mocks America for selling old dilapidated

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ships to other countries, who quickly discover that they are fit only to be scrapped.43 The Statue of Liberty advertises the sale, and the caption reveals her real intentions—to buy new ships (presumably battleships) for America with the ill-gotten gains: “Prodam igrushechnye,—kupliu nastoiashchie!” A more radical cartoon suggests that only the Soviet Union can return the Statue to its original glory and thus save it from hypocrisy, i.e., establish real democratic freedom in America. The cartoon is titled “The Liberation of the Statue of Liberty” and portrays the pilot of a Soviet plane handing a banner over to the Lady of Liberty with the motto “Proletarians of all countries, unite!”44 The cartoon thus implies that the Soviet Union is the ideal America, since it can accomplish what the United States has promised but failed to do, i.e., secure the people’s liberty. The French sculptor Bartholdi conceived and constructed the Statue of Liberty as a tribute both to particular historic milestones—the Declaration of Independence and the victory in the American War of Independence (in which France assisted the revolutionaries)—and to the general idea of political freedom dear to all nations struggling against tyranny. Conceptually combining the concrete and the abstract, Bartholdi intended the Statue to emphasize the connection between the ideals of the French and the American revolutions. Although inspired by the same ideals, the idea of Delacroix’s “La Liberté guidant le peuple,” as art historians have pointed out, contrasts with Bartholdi’s conception of the Statue of Liberty. While Delacroix’s Liberty is “a woman of the people in the midst of the armed revolt,”45 Bartholdi’s Statue is “the distant goddess.” For Americans, the Statue of Liberty became a symbol of national independence. Gradually, however, the Statue began to acquire new symbolic meaning for immigrants. Since most of them first landed in New York, the Statue was the country’s first ambassador. Immigrants thus identified it with the idea of America promising personal independence and material wealth for all refugees. Emma Lazarus’s famous poem “The New Colossus”46 expressed the significance of the Statue of Liberty for non-Americans: it epitomized America as “Mother of Exiles.” In his study of the Statue’s expanding symbolism, John Higham observes that, eventually, the Statue embraced both meanings: American national independence and the promise of personal independence for newcomers. Thus, the Statue became a symbol that emphasized the humanist principle uniting Americans as a nation: “The unquestioning enthusiasm for Emma Lazarus’s poem was closely entwined with an enormous growth in the popularity of the statue itself as a national symbol.”47 For Russian writers in America, the portrayal of the statue or, more accurately, the construction of its image, offers a chance to proclaim their

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expectations of the country, positive or negative, and it became a tradition to do so at the very beginning of the narrative. Russian writers who personally encountered the Statue of Liberty perceived this symbolic figure from different angles. On the one hand, they saw the Statue as the representative of a foreign, presumably hostile, state. On the other hand, many of them tried to reconstruct the prism of immigrants to America for whom the Statue of Liberty emblemized a new hope. The juxtaposition of these two perspectives added drama to the Statue’s literary image, as in Korolenko’s novella In a Strange Land and in Bogoraz’s and Gorky’s sketches. In Bogoraz’s “At the Entrance to the New World,” the perspective of the autobiographical narrator contrasts strikingly with that of his traveling companions: “Her torch seemed to stretch out to meet the restless children of the most unfortunate peoples, coming here from the four corners of the earth to seek new fortunes; but a mysterious stony expression was frozen on the goddess’s face and from her cold gaze it was impossible to tell what kind of liberty she represented….But the Jews and Italians did not ask themselves that question. They simply looked at the majestic statue and their faces brightened and they felt that the whole time-worn burden of old prejudices was now left behind them and that in America they would begin a new life—if America would let them.”48 In most travelogues the Statue sheds light on the writer’s future journey and provides a key to the travelogue. In this respect, any writing about the Statue of Liberty presents an anachronism. Although the Statue was usually the first American thing seen, most travelogues were composed or at least edited upon return. Hence, their later impressions must have affected their vision of the Statue and prompted the writers to project those largely negative views onto the emblem of America. In most cases, however, these later impressions would already have been determined by the writers’ preconceptions. Writers who, like Pilniak, failed to see the Statue of Liberty upon their arrival still felt obliged to add a description of it to their travelogues in tribute to the tradition. Mayakovsky, whose itinerary diverged from the usual one and whose American journey began in Cuba and passed through Mexico before finally entering the United States, still finds a prominent place for the Statue in his satiric verses. In his prose sketches, the Statue does not make its appearance in the usual place (the beginning) but in an equally significant one—the end, at the time of his departure. In the context of the American travelogue tradition, this compositional reversal is especially hostile. The Statue of Liberty does not greet the traveler but banishes him: “The American liberty-dame, hiding the prison of the Island of Tears with

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her backside, brandished her fist—the one with the torch” (Zamakhnulas’ kulakom s fakelom amerikanskaia baba-svoboda, prikryvshaia zadom tiur’mu Ostrova Slez [149]). In Russian and especially Soviet works, the Statue usually bears either ironic or negative connotations and inevitably provokes a feeling of disappointment. To understand the nature of Russian expectations about American freedom and their ensuing disenchantments, I will analyze the different connotations of the English words freedom/liberty and the Russian words svoboda/volia/vol’nost’ in Korolenko’s novella In a Strange Land. Anna Wierzbicka argues that the word freedom has somewhat different meanings in Latin, English, Russian, and Polish.49 By applying this insight to Korolenko’s text, I will both verify Wierzbicka’s theory and analyze the psychological and cultural problems of Russian pilgrims to the land of freedom. Reconstructing the view of the peasant, or “natural man,” Korolenko represents the collective unconscious, which makes his text indispensable for understanding how “freedom” functions in the Russian worldview. But we must also bear in mind that Korolenko’s own liberal ideas, typical of his intellectual circle, have already predetermined the view through which he reconstructs the peasant’s. In order to convey his idea of freedom to the reader, Korolenko sets up a psycholinguistic experiment, making his characters experience what freedom is not. He consistently casts doubt on all the definitions and manifestations of freedom they encounter. When Korolenko’s heroes Dyma and Matvei leave for America in search of a better life, among other things, the proud though long-forgotten ring of the word svoboda lures them on. Nobody in their native village remembers what it is; there are only rumors, recollections of some heroic past, vague semi-conscious images. The heroic svoboda of the past means, first of all, the ability to be one’s own man, not a slave. This connotation adheres to the Russian words volia /vol’nost’50 and, as Wierzbicka notes, to the Latin libertas. But Korolenko implies that libertas is insufficient for his characters. He claims that in recent village history there was a time when the pans’51 oppression (nevolia) gave way to times of liberty (volia) but “it sure seems like there has been no freedom” (No svobody vse kak budto ne bylo).52 However, the svoboda of the heroic past arouses heavy anxiety, evoking the memory of ruthless Cossack raids along the Dnepr, which involved bloody atrocities including murder and arson. These memories reflect the two connotations of freedom that Wierzbicka defines as specifically Russian: “boundless space” (raids along the Dnepr) and “full unbridled, arbitrary selfwill” (murders). Korolenko seems to have taken Matvei’s recollection of the

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old svoboda (“some open space, and some wild self-will” [kakoi-to prostor, i kakaia-to dikaia volia])53 directly from Dal’s dictionary. Remembering this kind of freedom, people make the sign of the cross and ask God to spare them. The only person in the village who ever exercised this kind of freedom, the hundred-year-old Lozinskii-Shuliak, has long since stopped telling his fierce stories and does nothing but pray and read the Bible. Hence the valence of the old svoboda is mixed, and Korolenko hints that the inclusion of willful atrocities in the traditional Russian idea of freedom makes the peasants’ attitude toward freedom highly anxiety-ridden and incompatible with religious faith. Korolenko is eager to stress that it is not this kind of freedom that attracts Matvei and Dyma; they are searching for a new kind of svoboda. Before embarking on the ship to America, Matvei asks a tavern keeper what the American freedom that people talk about means. The man offers his interpretation that freedom is the right “to tear at each other’s throats,” but the peasants do not believe him. They admit that people everywhere might tear at each other’s throats, but “freedom must be something else.” Significantly, they do not doubt that freedom exists, at least as an ideal with a proper definition: they simply have not found it yet. The tavern keeper’s understanding is closer to what Wierzbicka posits as a component of libertas: “When I do something I do it because I want to” (130). This definition is close to the Russian “volia,” meaning the willful absence of constraint, but without the Russian word’s spatial aspect. Wierzbicka observes that this component of libertas is close to the definition of liberty cultivated from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century: “If I want to do something, I can do it; I don’t have to think: someone can say: ‘I don’t want this’” (134).54 In New York the peasants experience exactly this negative side of American freedom. The boys in the street chase them and throw banana peels at them. “So here is what you call freedom (svoboda),” Dyma comments sarcastically, “the freedom to throw trash at people’s faces!”55 At the end of the novella, Matvei discovers that some of his dreams can be realized in America: he can marry; he can have his own house; he can have land to freely work upon; and he can even have freedom of religion (he enumerates all these things when trying to explain to Nilov why he crossed the ocean in the first place). All of this fits the Anglo-Saxon meaning of freedom, which is focused on “just leave me alone.” But Korolenko shows that these components fail to add up to what truly engages Matvei’s deeper feelings—his dream of a new kind of svoboda. By apophatically defining svoboda, Korolenko offers an ironic version. On board the steamship, the peasants meet an old Czech pilgrim who claims to know what freedom is—a huge bronze figure built on an island: “This

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figure stands higher than any house or church, one arm uplifted and bearing a torch. This torch is so large that its light is seen far off at sea. Inside the figure there is a staircase. And one can ascend into the head or hand or even the tip of the torch. At night her forehead and the torch are illuminated, and this illumination is brighter even than the moon.”56 Naturally, the travelers are confused and disappointed, and they refuse to believe that the statue is freedom itself. This crucial episode foreshadows future mythological interpretations of the Statue of Liberty in American travelogues and their identification of freedom with the Statue itself. There is only one episode in the novella where Matvei experiences a deep, strong, and elevating emotion that is at all close to what his vague dream of svoboda has aroused in him: during a workers’ demonstration, Matvei feels himself to be one of the poor, desperate protestors, and he understands them even without language. Thus, the liberal humanist Korolenko suggests that for the Russian soul, the ideal of freedom (svoboda) is inseparable from fraternity and justice. Since Matvei finds no justice and happiness for the majority of people in America, he cannot by definition find svoboda. The Russian spiritual striving for svoboda cannot be quenched by the abstract principle of political freedom or by the private freedom that America is able to offer. The Statue of Liberty thus inevitably disappoints the Russian traveler: what he expects is Svoboda and Statuia Svobody; what he gets instead is Liberty and the Statue of Liberty. The disillusionment of the liberal Russian traveler, determined by the semantic gap between the ideal Liberty and the Russian ideal svoboda, is projected onto the Statue of Liberty. It is easy to see that this humanist understanding of svoboda is based on the principles of the French Revolution—liberté, égalité, fraternité. Possibly the fact that the Statue of Liberty is of French origin, while the American Liberty that it symbolizes does not live up to the original aggregation of ideals, intensifies the Russian travelers’ ironic and negative perception of it. Bogoraz was especially conscious of the cultural specifics that the concept of liberty—and therefore the Statue—embodied for different groups. In his sketch “At the Entrance to the New World,” where he describes steamship passengers of various nationalities and classes, all contemplating and discussing freedom, he provides an exquisite socio-linguistic analysis. The sketch starts at voyage’s end, when the passengers catch a first glimpse of America—“our vast land,” “our own world,” as MacLeary, an American of Irish descent, exclaims. The possessive pronoun here highlights the original connotations of the Latin libertas: America is a country where “one is one’s own master and not a person under someone else’s control.”57 The author chooses this very moment to show the reader the almost symbolic

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but nevertheless impassable border that limits the freedom of the lower class passengers and reflects the hierarchical order of the lands they have left behind: “A barely visible thin rope separated them from us, but I’d had many opportunities to ascertain that this unobtrusive barrier was as strong as any iron fence or stone wall in old Europe” (99). While the poor are crammed together below deck, the first-class passengers enjoy more spatial freedom. They stand on their own spacious deck, surrounded by unoccupied (in the Russian original, “free” [svobodnoe]) space. The reader is invited to contemplate whether this barrier will remain relevant in the New World. In Bogoraz’s sketch, conversations taking place on the different decks demonstrate that the conceptions and expectations of freedom in America are socially determined. For the multi-national crowd of Italian miners, women workers from London, and poor Jewish families, America promises freedom “in the negative sense” (according to Wierzbicka): freedom from hunger, poverty, military reprisals. But it also promises happiness and work, which are inseparable in their minds. At the same time, a JewishAmerican businessman (identified only as the “hook-nose”), assumes that “American freedom” consists in an untrammeled freedom to make money that is violated by workers who “foment strikes, make trouble in the streets” (103). A wealthy farmer, however, suggests that freedom implies freedom of speech, freedom for everyone to defend their own rights: “Let them talk! You’re free, so let others be free too!” (105).58 Bogoraz thus gives voice to many different concepts of freedom, some of which seem mutually exclusive. The image of the Statue of Liberty, when it finally appears to the passengers, reflects this ambiguity. The Statue embodies contrasting characteristics: on the one hand, there is “something compelling” in her figure, “the expression of an enormous impulse of elemental force” (chto-to zovushchee, vyrazhenie ogromnogo i stikhiinogo poryva, 106). On the other hand, Bogoraz stresses the Statue’s inanimate, heavy features: “A mysterious stony expression was frozen on the goddess’s face and from her cold gaze it was impossible to tell what kind of liberty she represented, European, American, or some other kind” (106). The static Statue recalls a contrasting figure of freedom that appeared several paragraphs earlier in the sketch, the anarchist Emma Goldman giving a revolutionary speech on a London street corner to thousands of people while standing on a barrel (an analogue of the statue’s pedestal). While the passengers are discussing Emma (the wealthier ones, with fear and disdain), the narrator recollects the image of the slender woman he has seen in London and the irresistible effect of her “strong and noble” speech (104). Juxtaposed with Emma’s energetic figure, the Statue of Liberty looks ominously lifeless. Bogoraz ends the sketch

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on an ironic note: at the border, people become equal indeed, through the universal customs procedure to which everyone is subjected. “Fiscal vigilance had finally leveled rich and poor” (106). Russian writers coming to America tend to use the same trope as Korolenko’s pilgrim; they conflate the concept of American freedom with the Statue’s image. By replacing the signified by the signifier, the idea by its representation, they smuggle into the reader’s mind what Dyma and Matvei have refused to believe—that the Statue is indeed Liberty itself. They project their negative attitude toward America in general and toward its political institutions in particular onto the Statue. Travelogue writers thus tarnish the Statue in order to persuade the reader that there is no real freedom in America. Sergei Eisenstein’s image of the Statue illustrates the mechanics of this rhetorical technique. After a tour inside the figure, he summarizes his impressions: “Moving along the spiral staircase inside what looks, internally, like a leaden prison cell, you start to lose reverence for her….This frivolous action undermines respect for the symbol. Its hollowness makes one question its contents.”59 Simple strategies for discrediting the Statue abound in both literary and non-fictional accounts of American voyages. They include not noticing the Statue, reducing its scale, emphasizing its hollowness, shabbiness, and rust, and, of course, connecting it with Ellis Island. By conjoining Ellis Island, the site of customs procedures and detention, with the Statue of Liberty, Russian narratives create an oxymoron of liberty and prison that becomes part of the tradition. Gorky’s companion, Nikolai Burenin, makes a special note in his diary of how surprised he was to find that the Statue was surrounded by cannons. Mayakovsky declares that the Statue conceals a prison on Ellis Island. Writing with a film director’s eye, Eisenstein creates several perspectives on the statue. He describes it as it looks, much diminished in size, from an airplane: “Only from above, from the skies, from the wings of a free bird—the airplane—with the vastness of New York around, can you vividly see what a tiny and unimportant space in the scale of this gigantic city this toy statuette takes up—the neighbor of the ‘Island of Tears’—the American Statue of Freedom.”60 In another memoir, Eisenstein discredits the statue by reconstructing the perspective of a viewer looking at the Statue of Liberty through the bars of a prison on Ellis Island: “He is looking through the window grilles at the distant silhouette of New York, vertically cut by the Statue of Liberty, so suspiciously close to the ‘Island of Tears,’”61—a very cinematographic image, indeed. In Iakov Ilin’s Great Conveyor, Ignatov, an engineer who came to America to study at a factory, reports in his travelogue that his first view of New York was enveloped in

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fog, but then he remembers that he must also comment on the Statue: “The masses of the buildings barely showed through the damp and foggy veil, which was also hiding the Statue of Liberty.”62 Ilf and Petrov simply reduce the size of the statue, making it into a mildewed mediocrity: “On the left side was the small green statue of liberty” (9). Nikolai Burenin reports that in anticipation of Gorky’s visit, liberal American newspapers published a picture of the Statue of Liberty handing its torch to Gorky.63 This picture, which represented everything that he had expected from America and did not get, might have provoked Gorky, at least in part, to disparage the Statue in his essays. In order to compromise the American ideal of freedom, Gorky creates a whole system of statues, constructing complex relations between representation and meaning. In his “City of the Yellow Devil,” the Statue of Liberty is part of a complex system where people and objects exchange characteristics, and what is supposed to be dead or inanimate appears alive and vice versa. Like Bogoraz, Gorky stresses a contrast between the Statue’s motionlessness and some “enormous impulse” that her figure expresses. But he takes this contrast further, describing the majestic Statue as dead, yet waiting to come to life: “The massive figure of a bronze woman is covered from head to foot with green oxide. The cold face looks blindly through the fog into the ocean wasteland, as though the bronze were waiting for the sun to come and bring its dead eyes to life” (132). Here Gorky plays on the thin line between the metaphorical and the real, never totally crossing into the fantastic. He elaborates his vision, inducing the reader to forget that the Statue’s anticipated animation depends on the light of the sun: “It seems as if at any moment the torch in her firmly clasped fingers could blaze up brightly, disperse the gray smoke, and lavishly spill an ardent, joyful light on everything around” (132). However, this never happens; in the next lines Gorky turns to describing a hellish New York where many objects come to life, but the Statue is not among them. The author ensures that the reader will take the fact of its not coming to life as symbolic, as if there were no substance, no spirit that could manifest itself by animating the shell. After all, if the Statue of Liberty is liberty itself, it should be alive! In suggesting that the Statue will come to life, Gorky draws on a rich tradition in both world culture and Russian literature. His vision has two major sources: on the one hand, Gorky draws on Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great, which Pushkin animates in his narrative poem “The Bronze Horseman” in order to suggest the Statue as an emblematic representation of the State; on the other hand, he evokes Galatea, a statue-bride, to suggest a Beautiful Lady whom the narrator expects will come to life. In Pushkin’s

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works, the statue coming to life can be interpreted either as an embodiment of satanic forces64 or a symbol of God’s wrath.65 But in Gorky’s essay, the miracle of animation never happens; the narrator concedes that the Statue’s eyes will never sparkle. It is dead, and thus the ideal it symbolizes is dead, too. Therefore, reversing literary tradition, Gorky signals the presence of satanic forces in the “country of the Yellow Devil” by portraying a statue not coming to life when it is expected to. Several female images in Gorky’s essay mirror the motionless, emptyeyed Statue. An old dark-faced woman in the window “closed her leaden, dimmed eyes” (zakryla svintsovye, pogasshie glaza) and vanished from the narrator’s view (135). Another woman “stands as if made of stone and her eyes are as round as an owl’s—they look fixedly at a single point in front of her” (137–138). It seems that the ghost of the “dead” statue haunts the narrator of this American travelogue just as Peter the Great pursued Eugene in Pushkin’s Petersburg poem. But, paradoxically, it is the Statue’s immobility, her deadness that haunts him. In representing human doubles of the Statue, Gorky follows Bogoraz’s example. But while Bogoraz subliminally compromises the Statue by contrasting it to Emma Goldman, Gorky chooses to disparage her by a likeness that is unfavorable to both. As we shall see, Pilniak will pick up his technique of portraying a human double of the Statue. Besides Liberty as a general idea epitomized by the Statue of Liberty, Gorky also represents Liberty in the personalized form of monuments to freedom fighters. These monuments, standing in the streets of New York, are virtually invisible to its inhabitants, who are absorbed with their everyday lives: “These bronze people are lifeless and lonely in the network of many-storied houses; they seem like dwarfs in the black shadow of the high walls; having lost their way in the chaos of madness around them, they have stopped and, half-blinded, sadly, with pain in their hearts, they watch the greedy bustle of the people at their feet” (134). In contrast to his treatment of the Statue of Liberty, Gorky portrays the monuments as living people. He even predicts that one night the statues will quietly leave the city one by one and find shelter in the fields beyond. Here the statues’ animation is confined to the writer’s imagination, but it nevertheless takes place in his narrative. In order to come to life, a statue is traditionally provoked, or invited to do so, as in Pushkin’s “The Stone Guest” and “Bronze Horseman” or Mérimée’s “La Vénus d’Ille.” In Gorky’s essay, by contrast, the statues are not invited, but forgotten. Nobody notices them standing in the streets because the ideas they represent are dead. Thus, Gorky’s statues take their revenge either by not coming to life when they are supposed to (the Statue

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of Liberty) or by leaving the city (the monuments). Freedom in America is incapable of manifesting itself either as an abstract idea (embodied in the Statue of Liberty) or as a personified one (represented by the monuments). By creating a parallel between the Statue of Liberty and a miserable, bedridden old woman, Gorky establishes a new popular trend—expressing disillusionment and distrust of American freedom by humiliating the Statue of Liberty as a female body. While the motif of the statue coming to life disappears from later travelogue texts, the way the writers describe the Statue of Liberty reveals that they are mistreating her as a woman. Esenin, for example, condescendingly and ironically calls her “a poor old maid” (bednaia staraia devushka) in “An Iron Mirgorod.” He actually addresses the Statue and provokes her in public, both in real life and in his text. His entry into America, the temporary arrest and interrogation of Isadora Duncan, and his own conversation with immigration officials, became widely known public events. As the New York Herald reported, Esenin addressed the Statue with ironic reverence, claiming that he would like to pay tribute to her but the circumstances were not right for that.66 Since the Statue was an emblem of the writers’ overall impression of America and their journey, Esenin’s retrospective irony toward the Statue of Liberty, epitomizing the America that had failed to meet his expectations, also expresses his disillusionment with Isadora Duncan, another old girl who disenchanted him during this trip.67 In a photograph of Esenin and Duncan, taken upon their arrival in New York, Isadora imitates the Statue’s pose while pointing at her.68 Esenin might have projected Duncan onto the Statue, perceiving her as an old woman trying to look young, shamelessly exposing herself and making promises to him that she fails to fulfill. He constantly blamed his wife for evoking in him the hope for international acclaim that failed to materialize. As Irma Duncan demonstrates, Esenin’s and Isadora’s tour took on distinctive overtones of an uncrowning of false gods. In the Boston Theatre, Isadora stated that she represented the real beauty, freedom, and glory of the naked body, and she called upon her audience to break their plaster statues of the gods.69 According to art historians, the representation and animation of statues was one of Duncan’s favorite techniques: “Duncan actually incorporates poses directly from Rude’s sculpture of Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe and other postures suggestive of Marianne, the French symbol of war…her famous and controversial final pose was an evocation of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, which would also remind an American audience of the Statue of Liberty and the historical friendship with France.”70

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In contrast to Esenin, whose portrayal of the Statue implicates Isadora Duncan, a real woman who portrayed statues coming to life on stage, Mayakovsky literally replaces a “girlfriend” with a statue in his quasiautobiographical 1913 play Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. This play features a gigantic girlfriend (znakomaia), whom the audience expects to be a real woman. However, once uncovered, she turns out to be a huge manikin.71 Accordingly, when Mayakovsky represents the Statue of Liberty as a female in his American sketches, he writes in the spirit not only of the Russian writers’ American narrative but also of his own earlier work. In his American sketch, Mayakovsky humiliates the Statue as a “liberty-broad” (baba-svoboda), who is aggressive and treacherous and raises her torch in order to hide the prison on the Island of Tears behind her backside. In the poem “Poriadochnyi grazhdanin” (The Decent Citizen), initially titled “Statuia Svobody” (The Statue of Liberty), Mayakovsky chooses another strategy for compromising the statue and, through it, the idea of American liberty. The poem’s heroine is a working woman harassed by her boss. While the boss is justified by society, the working woman is disparaged as a prostitute and ostracized. In an interesting reversal, Mayakovsky associates the Statue with the boss, whose style of life Liberty protects, rather than with the girl. Apparently, the poem’s title was changed to prevent the reader’s linking the Statue to the girl rather than to the boss; the girl herself is shown as the victim of harsh social conditions, and the author sympathizes with her. But Mayakovsky casts compromising sexual innuendos on the Statue, which is shown to be a promoter of lechery (“guard of lust, cents, and grease”), and her outstretched arm imitates an obscene gesture. While svoboda (liberty) is written with a lowercase initial letter, the word statue is significantly omitted, demonstrating the familiar mythological identification of the discredited concept with the image: “Your liberty stretches its hand over the prison of Ellis Island” (pialit ruku vasha svoboda nad tiur’moiu Elis-Ailend).72 Boris Pilniak’s novel OK can be considered the apotheosis of the tradition of discrediting American liberty through compromising the Statue, even though Pilniak is the only writer who reports that he has not seen it. Nonetheless, he cannot miss a good chance to criticize America indirectly: “In order not to confuse future travelers to America, I have to report that in the head of this Liberty a whole apartment can fit, and in the rear side of her skirt, under the upper pleats, for a long time prison cells have been located” (453). Although he reports on the Statue’s size, his main emphasis, like Eisenstein’s, is on its hollowness; the Statue is a coverup for something that has been or could be inside it. Like Mayakovsky,

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Pilniak deliberately omits the word statue in his description, removing the link between the concept and its material representation and thereby discrediting the idea of liberty itself by allowing the reader to surmise that the imaginary apartment and the prison cells are actually located in liberty herself. Thus, the Statue turns into a paradox: liberty conceals a prison.73 Although Pilniak claims that he does not want to confuse future travelers, he nevertheless misleads them, since there has never been a prison inside the Statue.74 Pilniak thus carelessly humiliates a Statue he has never even seen. Informing the reader of a spurious prison, he virtually peeks under the statue’s skirt. In constructing his pejorative image, he flippantly switches between the symbolic and the literal: “When the steamship was entering the port, the abovementioned charms [prelesti] of the Statue of Liberty interested me less than my own liberty” (454). In Pilniak’s novel, as in Gorky’s essay, female images mirror the Statue. Later in the text, Pilniak introduces the reader to the unpleasant attractions of Coney Island and describes the nasty practical jokes that are played on women there: they are lured onstage, and a stream of air blows up their skirts, revealing their undergarments or the absence thereof. Pilniak juxtaposes this scene with his description of the Statue of Liberty so the reader cannot miss the parallel. The Russian writers’ reaction to the Statue is similar to that of a jealous lover whose feelings are not reciprocated. They fail to find the ideal svoboda in America, in part because Bartholdi’s distant goddess differs from Delacroix’s sensual revolutionary woman. Therefore, Korolenko, Bogoraz and, to some extent, Gorky emphasize the Statue’s indifferent, dispassionate features. Other writers animate the Statue while still contriving to objectify her, treating her as a female body and humiliating her as a woman. Gorky associates her with an ugly hag, Esenin and Mayakovsky disparage her, calling her a “poor old maid” and “a broad.” Pilniak commits the ultimate impudence by probing beneath her skirts.

American Technology—“Technology in the Hands of Capitalism is a Knife in the Hands of a Madman”75 At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Pavel Svinin voices admiration for the high level of American technological development and thereby sets a pattern that has persisted through to the present day.76 Although for nineteenth-century Russians Germany was the epitome of advanced technology, America appropriated this role by the early twentieth century. In

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the 1920s, the Russian industrial market gives explicit priority to American over German technologies. Even rampant opponents of the capitalist way of life acknowledge that America’s major advantage is technology. As Jeffrey Brooks demonstrates in his seminal article “The Press and Its Message: Images of America in the 1920s and 1930s,” the Soviet press popularized America as a paradigm of efficiency and rational organization even as it debunked it as the quintessence of capitalism. As we have seen in Ilf and Petrov, travelers to America often perceived technology as so intrinsic to America that they considered it part of the landscape. Among the country’s technological miracles, electricity and automobiles especially fascinated observers, as did the Ford factory that fused the two. These three phenomena will be the foci of my overview of the technology motif in Russian travelogues. All three were highly controversial for the Soviet traveler, and their appearance in travelogues required complex rhetorical negotiations. Since electricity became the symbol of Soviet power, representing both technological progress and the enlightenment brought by the Revolution (in Lenin’s famous formula, “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country”), Russian travelers to America were forced to come to grips with the fact that one of Communism’s prime driving forces also formed the basis of capitalist prosperity. The automobile, perceived as part of a complex infrastructure that included a system of roads, gas and service stations, as well as automobile factories, raised similar difficulties. The number of Soviet people interested in automobiles significantly exceeded the number of drivers. The magazine Za rulem (Behind the Wheel), the first issue of which was published in April, 1928, enjoyed immense popularity: it attained forty thousand readers in its first year. The scope of topics discussed in the magazine went far beyond technical issues, involving Russia’s modernization at large. In his wideranging study Cars for Comrades, Lewis Siegelbaum wittily demonstrates that, while the personal car, which ensured a high degree of individual independence, was not popularized in the Soviet Union, the development of automobile factories was acclaimed as a symbol of Soviet industrialization.77 Since Soviet Russia proposed to catch up with and surpass America in the sphere of technological production, writers had to balance Soviet process with American results. Korolenko and Gorky, our pre-Soviet travelers, sounded a warning against the inhumanness of radical technological advancement wherever it might occur. Soviet-era travelers, by contrast, faced a different task: they were required to deal with the uncomfortable fact that this advancement existed in a capitalist—and therefore socially backward—country. In tackling this

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conflict, they often dissociated the creators from their creation.78 Esenin and Mayakovsky praised the general phenomenon of technology, as was expected of them, but criticized its specifically American forms. Esenin, fascinated by the might of skyscrapers, nevertheless declares that they blind Americans. He also notes that American technology is not a product of the people as a whole, but rather of a tiny group of individuals, the inventor-geniuses: “The huge machine-culture that has created America’s glory is exclusively the result of the labor of the industrial masters and does not in the slightest resemble an organic manifestation of the genius of a people” (153–154). Esenin suggests that the Soviet Union’s creative power will spark even greater results. By contrast, Ilf and Petrov acknowledge that America’s genius—the spirit of the nation (narodnyi genii)—manifests itself above all in inventing and constructing machines, but they regret that America does not recognize the value of her actual inventors and engineers. Among these great men, Esenin and Ilf and Petrov particularly single out Thomas Edison, about whom they write with special reverence. Mayakovsky’s portrayal of American industry substantially diverges from the traditional image of America as the exemplar of efficiency and organization. He favors Germany’s “older technological culture” over American technology,79 which, according to him, is not fully perfected: it “gives the impression of something unfinished and temporary” (189). He focuses on Americans’ inattentiveness to quality, which he interprets as a consequence of the country’s aggressive, expansionist nature. Everything seems to be destined for almost instant obsolescence and demolition, including the wooden poles used for telegraph wires and trams and the hastily and repeatedly remodeled houses and factories. Both Esenin and Mayakovsky note that everything is “piled up” in America. The adventure of new construction—so positively charged in Soviet Russia—takes on a more ambiguous and ominous ambience in America. Mayakovsky suspects that buildings are demolished not because new ones are needed, but because a profit can be made: there is money in replacing ten-story houses with twenty-story buildings, twenty-story buildings with thirtystory ones, and so forth. At the same time, Mayakovsky cannot help being lured by the magical details of technological processes: “It is impossible to tear oneself away from this spectacle of cleverness and skill” (191). In general, he finds that American technology is ubiquitous but superficial, a “spectacle.” According to Mayakovsky, Russia would not be able to borrow American technological inventions and methods without properly adapting them, or, to use his favored metaphor, “translating” them into Russian.

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Alexander Etkind observes that Soviet critics simply dismiss the question of whether such rapid technological growth could be achieved outside the conditions of “political democracy, economic competition, personal freedom, the Protestant or Judaic ethic.”80 Instead, the travelers suggest that capitalism cannot harness its own creation. Mayakovsky declares that Americans do not live up to their technology, that “New York is a giant inadvertently created by children.”81 He likens capitalism to a magician “who has summoned up spirits but is unable to control them” (179). Ilf and Petrov warn about the danger of a new Luddism; many of the workers they meet blame their unemployment on machines and are ready to wreck them. Although laborers should by rights be the masters of these inventions, in a capitalist country machines merely enslave the workers. Like Mayakovsky, Ilf and Petrov stress that Americans are afraid of their own high technology and do not trust man’s power to operate it. They point out that even the most complex machines function very simply: there are only two buttons, on and off, and anyone can operate them. We can recognize in these anxious observations about the power of machines the seeds of future technological anti-utopias, created both in America and abroad, where machines have enslaved people. The image of the Brooklyn Bridge in the travelers’ texts serves as a litmus test for their attitude toward American technology and defines their ideological tasks. Esenin portrays it as an admirable achievement of the industrial revolution. Its magnificence justifies the cruelty involved in its construction, yet Esenin cannot avoid inflecting his description with anxietyridden overtones, praising its “merciless might of reinforced concrete” (152). Mayakovsky treats it as a living manifestation of futurist dreams yet adds a stanza at the end of his poem about “the jobless who throw themselves from the bridge into the Hudson.”82 He claims that an even greater bridge—an ideal bridge to Communism—will be built in Soviet Russia. Pilniak projects Mayakovsky’s socially symbolic bridge back onto the Brooklyn Bridge, disparaging it as a bridge into American banditry. As Etkind reformulates his attitude, “If the Brooklyn Bridge has been built thanks to the dollar, then Russia needs neither the former nor the latter.”83 Of all the Soviet travelers, Pilniak most fully acknowledges the inherent link between capitalism and technological miracles and thus treats these miracles with suspicion. The first factory described in an American travelogue, Korolenko’s “Factory of Death,” casts a persistent shadow over the portrayal of American industry. In the 1920s and even in the 1930s, Russians perceived the meat-packing factory as a paradigm of the American conveyer belt. Packing plants are frequently the first factories that visitors like the engineer Ilia Sheinman,

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the author of a documentary travelogue about his experience of American technology, observe in the country.84 For Pilniak, the only thing that is not mechanized in these factories is betrayal; he describes how specially trained slaughterhouse animals temporarily join the doomed animals in order to calm them and lead them to their death. Korolenko parallels the slaughterhouse with Pullman factories, based on their mechanized cruelty and oppression. Another paradigmatic American factory, Ford’s automobile plant, also shares the same negative features. Even when the process of production does not involve death, Soviet writers suggest that a slow killing is indeed taking place. They stress the inhuman nature of the production process in relation to workers, the chief victims of capital. Every American factory in Soviet travelogues is, to some extent, a factory of death.

Electricity

In “Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s,” Julia Bekman Chadaga traces the construction of the myth of Soviet electricity85 by building on Richard Stites’s study of “how the Bolsheviks plundered the symbolic treasure trove of both Russian Orthodoxy and pagan rites in creating Bolshevik rituals in the period immediately following the October Revolution.”86 Pushing this insight yet further, I will now show how the “electric” image of America was constructed against Soviet Russia’s new solar myth. Russian travelers are shocked by the abundance of electricity in New York, especially on Broadway, and feature it prominently in their texts.87 Esenin mentions the “sea” of electric signs, Ilf and Petrov write about the “cosmos” of electricity. In the poem “Broadway,” Mayakovsky creates a powerful image of electric lights “digging” the night. “You get dressed by electric light” (171), he writes in a prose sketch. This image of “getting dressed” by electric light in New York contrasts with the merciless light that strips people of all illusions in Gorky’s pamphlet “The Realm of Boredom.” Although the grand spectacle of Broadway with its myriad lights thrills the travelers and appeals to their aesthetic sensibilities, they usually perceive this ubiquity of light as redundant: “If anyone were to add one more little lamp the whole thing would blow up from excessive light, all of it would go to the devil’s dogs” (Ilf and Petrov, 14). Pilniak also exclaims: “Too much electricity!… Besides electricity, there is too much noise!” (469–470). The travelers’ social consciousness alerts them to America’s vanity in using so much electricity. At the same time that Soviet writers underscore the

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sacred nature of Soviet “Il’ich bulbs” (a Soviet lamp is “a heavenly object,” a star come down to earth), they explicitly portray capitalist lights as mundane. Like Il’ich bulbs in Soviet texts,88 the lights on Broadway can turn night into day. But whereas in Russia the nighttime presence of electric light facilitates work, in America it is explicitly superfluous and associated with leisure or advertising. Esenin likens electricity on Broadway to a circus jester: “Over there, at the height of the twentieth floor, gymnasts made of light bulbs do somersaults. Over there, from the thirtieth floor, an electric gent is smoking, exhaling an electric line of smoke that flows into various rings. Over there, opposite the theater, an electric Terpsichore dances on a revolving electric wheel; and so on, all in the same vein, right up to an electric newspaper whose lines run along the twentieth or twenty-fifth floor on the left, uninterrupted until the end of the issue” (152–153). Ilf and Petrov claim that Americans abuse electricity. They complain that it “has been brought down to the level of a trained circus animal” (13) and confess to feeling pity for this noble element, which is forced to entertain rather than to serve people. As Chadaga shows, the light captured in glass in Soviet Russia constitutes a miracle that replaces the biblical one. Like the Burning Bush, Soviet light can be extinguished neither by water nor by wind, and it burns without burning up. In America, by contrast, electricity implies an absence of freedom. American light in captivity lacks dignity: rather than human might, it signifies a human failure to manage science and technology. Russian writers emphasize that they are criticizing the abuse of electricity in capitalist society rather than electricity itself. However, occasional slips and logical failures indicate their anxiety about electricity per se. For instance, Esenin states: “In Russia our streets are too dark for us to understand what the electric light of Broadway is. We are used to living by the light of the moon, to burning candles before icons but never for man. In its heart America doesn’t believe in God. It has no time to bother with such nonsense. There light is for man…” (151). At first glance, Esenin seems to be praising technological progress, but he nevertheless later argues that American man is lost in his pursuit of efficiency and material goods. Despite Esenin’s explicit goal of enlightening and his enthusiastic support for the achievements of human genius, he apparently does not believe in the benefits of America’s godless technological miracles. He claims that light can be terrifying: “In New York the sea of light from Broadway illuminates crowds of venal and unprincipled journalists. In Russia we would not even let their kind cross the threshold, even though we live practically by kerosene lamplight and frequently without any light at all” (154). This ambivalent

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passage recalls more general problems connected with the representation of light in Soviet literature and, more broadly, in Russian literature as a whole. The motif of electric light coercing human behavior and revealing harsh truths appears in Zoshchenko’s story “Bednost’” (Poverty, 1925). Electricity installed in a communal apartment illuminates the despicable filth in which the inhabitants have been living unawares. The landlady, unwilling to see the poverty surrounding her and unable to change anything, chooses to cut the wires. Obviously, Esenin’s autobiographical hero has no problem coping with the harsh reality illuminated by American lights. But, paradoxically, he also hints here that these lights do not help Americans see the true nature of their journalists. This reminds us of Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect,” where “the devil himself lights the street lamps to show everything in false colors.”89 According to Gogol, artificial light illuminates the external but leaves the real nature of people and things in the dark. Indeed, it may even conceal it, blinding the viewer. According to Esenin, Russians neither need bright light to see the truth nor they are blinded by it.90 By contrast, Mayakovsky claims that the American bourgeoisie is afraid of electricity and actually prefers candlelight. Of course, the bourgeoisie does not have to confront the problems of poverty as do Zoshchenko’s characters, but Mayakovsky suggests that they suffer from a similar fear of reality. According to him, such an attitude toward electricity is one aspect of capitalism’s overall failure to master the technological powers it has brought to life. The travelers of the 1930s, Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov, cannot deny that electricity—both the electric light and electric-powered gadgets—has become a normal part of Americans’ daily life, but they mock the excessive quantity of mechanical gadgets Americans use. Ilf and Petrov visit Mr. Ripley’s electric house, which is both a scientific laboratory and an advertising project. Although their account of this visit is rather enthusiastic, they are surprised to find that there are machines for everything, even for the most routine functions, like peeling eggs. Pilniak in OK, as well as Sheinman in his documentary travelogue, form similar impressions: they reproachfully comment that in America everything is done by machines.91 The travelers also note a particularly gruesome use of electricity, instantiated in the electric chair. In his interview “The Lords of Life,” Gorky portrays a macabre parade of the dead. Acclaimed as great men, his famous dead are really false teachers who have distorted the development of humankind with their theories and inventions, particularly the electric chair. Mayakovsky implicitly refers to the electric chair when describing the electric-powered attractions of Coney-Island: “Others [hungry women] are seated on a chair with levers and electrified until sparks fly off them” (180).92

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Ilf and Petrov devote an entire chapter to the American penitentiary system and their visit to Sing-Sing, but they title this chapter “The Electric Chair.” At first the chair strikes them as perfectly normal. They can easily visualize it in a family dwelling, but then their imagination pictures the scenes of executions carried out in it. The chair reminds them that the power of electricity, even when it is seemingly domesticated, can nonetheless be fatal: “No doubt, Thomas Alva Edison never dreamed that his electricity would perform such depressing duties” (54).

Cars for Capitalists

When depicting cars, Mayakovsky, Pilniak, and Ilf and Petrov emphasize their social function and focus on their specifically American features. Mayakovsky stresses that, although workers may produce automobiles, it is the middle and upper classes that drive them. Pilniak echoes him, stating that the popular belief that most middle-class Americans, including workers, have personal automobiles, is simply an exaggeration. He comments extensively on the automobile’s role in social and economic life and claims that, in the wake of its initial inception as an essential means for achieving American prosperity, the automobile has now metamorphosed into a type of penal servitude (katorga) for Americans. Although most Soviet travelers occasionally mention that a worker who has purchased a car on credit becomes the hostage of a credit company or the factory, Pilniak is the most consistently negative in disparaging the social pathology of the automobile in America. In Mayakovsky’s and Pilniak’s texts we find a familiar dissatisfaction with the way in which Americans use their cars. Mayakovsky criticizes American automobilists for not being sportsmen—that is to say, for their ignorance of their cars’ mechanical operations. They neither know how their cars work nor are they able to fix them, so driving becomes something an automaton could do. Thus, for him, the automobile provides a case study for how Americans utilize technology but fail to master it fully: they can deal with a limited set of functions but not with underlying systems and principles.93 Given that Mayakovsky never learned to drive, this reproach does not sound very persuasive. Pilniak, who did drive but hit a woman with his car while in New York,94 echoes this disparagement of the American driver’s technical illiteracy: “The American [driver] needs to know only one thing—how to drive a car” (476). Only Ilf and Petrov are fascinated by the miracles of American auto-service—both its technical and personal components—and

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gratefully mention service stations where the necessary maintenance is done “quickly but without any fuss” (78). Soviet travelogue writers alternately associate cars with Eros and Thanatos. Disparaging the leisure use of cars, Mayakovsky draws his readers’ attention to their erotic function—offering a woman a ride in his own car raises a man’s prestige in her eyes.95 Ilf and Petrov emphasize the opposite aspect, suggesting that for those husbands who are unable to fulfill their wives’ dreams of a new car, “the marital couch will be transformed…into an Indian fakir’s couch covered with spikes” (69). Moreover, in describing the realities of driving in America, Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov conjure up the aura of death that surrounded the pre-revolutionary Russian literary image of the automobile. The travelers of the 1930s were acutely aware of the mortal dangers awaiting drivers on long journeys. Pilniak mentions the number of “automobile-human” (avtomobil’no-chelovecheskie) deaths on the roads and notes that in 1930 more Americans were killed in car accidents than in the World War (476). His text is littered with brokendown, smashed-up cars, roadside monuments to America’s superabundance of accidents. Ilf and Petrov write about road accidents they have heard of or witnessed. Frightened by the story of a family trapped in their car after a terrible accident and forced to listen while the radio kept playing cheerful music, they refuse to buy a car with a radio. Ilf and Petrov always emphasize the danger of crossing America in an automobile and the caution needed in order to return home safely. The travelers may have held diverse views concerning the wisdom of importing capitalist technology, but many of them nevertheless availed themselves of the opportunity to do so, bringing cars back to Russia with them. Mayakovsky, Pilniak, and Ilf and Petrov were all granted permission to keep personal automobiles in Russia. Ilf and Petrov even brought a second automobile for Kataev.96 Mayakovsky had already bought a car for himself and Lilia Brik while in France—not the Ford that Lilia had asked for, but a Renault (he had to hire drivers for Lilia and for himself ). As a result, the travelers faced severe criticism. Although automobiles were viewed as having “taken sides”97 in the class struggle after the Revolution and were seen to have provided indispensable service to the Bolsheviks, even in the 1920s and 1930s, they were widely associated with the indulgences of the parasitic classes. This was especially true of passenger cars. Nikolai Osinskii, a zealot in the cause of developing Soviet automobiles, tried to counter this negative view by arguing in his article “Amerikanskii avtomobil’ ili rossiiskaia telega” (The American Automobile or the Russian Cart) that cars were indeed useful for everyday life and that in America they were considered a tool of

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the working people.98 Mayakovsky tried to ward off criticism aimed against him in his poem “Otvet na budushchie spletni” (Answer to Future Gossip, 1928), where he mockingly asks forgiveness for bringing back not petty bourgeois items such as neckties and perfume, but a futuristic object, an automobile. But other writers enviously invoked the link between personal cars and the upper classes and disparaged Mayakovsky for not following proletarian ideals. Similarly, Pilniak’s car proved to be an ideologically dangerous indulgence. In Viacheslav Polonskii’s diary we read of the spite and envy other writers felt after Pilniak brought his car home; Polonskii concludes that Pilniak is a crafty property-holder (lovkach, chistoprobnyi sobstvennik) who is alien to the Revolution.99 Given the avalanche of criticism (not to mention the problems attendant on locating spare parts and maintenance),100 an American car transported from the Other World to the Soviet Union could easily turn into a curse for its owners.

Henry Ford and Ford’s Factory

The itinerary of Russian writers traveling to America in the 1920s and 1930s (Mayakovsky, Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov) usually included a visit to Henry Ford’s factory, a popular attraction for tourists and a mecca for Soviet workers and engineers. The American technology that the Soviet state intended to adopt and improve on was most often epitomized in the image of Henry Ford’s factory and his principles of labor organization. Therefore, the ideological programming of Ford’s image was especially complex and required the development of an appropriate rhetoric: some of Ford’s qualities were to be praised, and some to be denounced. In literary travelogues the attitude toward Ford ranged from Pilniak’s condemnation of him as an exceptionally cruel and hypocritical exploiter to Ilf and Petrov’s admiration of his genius. The two opposing tendencies in treating Ford and Fordism sometimes coexisted even within the same propagandistic text. The ambivalent image of Ford created in the travelogues contributed to “the legend of Henry Ford” or even “the mystery of Henry Ford,” a significant phenomenon in Soviet social consciousness at that time. When the Soviet Union launched its program of industrialization, Ford became immensely popular in Russia. In 1929 the Ford factory and the Nizhegorodsky Automobile Factory (NAZ, later GAZ) signed a cooperation treaty. In the 1930s, the first factories built in the Soviet Union were modeled after the Ford factory.101 Ford’s books were translated into Russian; his autobiography enjoyed nine republications during

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the 1920s and 1930s; and his biography appeared in the series “Lives of Extraordinary People.” In the 1930s, Russian children were even named after Ford’s tractor—“Fordzon.” Hundreds of young Soviet engineers went to American factories to learn from their rival. Many of them left accounts of their American experience as well as of their attempts to implement their American lessons in Soviet industry. One of the most typical narratives of this documentary kind is Sheinman’s previously mentioned travel diary, What I Saw in America, What I Did in the USSR. It is interesting to compare the rhetorical strategies that authors of documentary and semi-fictional travelogues developed to explain the dubious phenomenon of borrowing American technology and transferring it to the Soviet Union. Of course, even the travelogues that described visits to Ford’s factory were not based solely on first-hand experience. To a significant extent, they also reflected socio-economic theoretical works that were popularized in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. Even the writers who, like Mayakovsky, were trying to deconstruct the Ford legend contributed to it. And since the very process of compromising the legend required enumerating its major features, Soviet writers inevitably ended up replicating Ford’s image in their texts. Among popular Soviet socio-economic critiques of Fordism, German Genkel’s study Ford i fordizm. Vpechatleniia (Ford and Fordism: Impressions)102 is of special interest to us. Although the title suggests that the book is a summary of the author’s personal impressions, it is actually a “fictional” travelogue based on the multiple diaries and articles about Ford that invaded the Soviet press in the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, it demonstrates the most prominent features of the Ford factory narrative. Another important book, B. Starko’s Sud nad Fordom (Ford on Trial) belongs to a different genre—a mock trial scenario recommended for staging in Soviet factories.103 Ford and his theories had became so popular that the Soviet authorities deemed it necessary to remind workers that he was after all a capitalist, a natural enemy of the proletariat. As a modern scholar, S. Shvedov, points out, each nation chose its own way of receiving Ford, emphasizing certain features in his image and omitting others.104 The introduction to the 1927 Russian edition of Ford’s book Today and Tomorrow promotes the energetic capitalist Shtolts from Goncharov’s novel Oblomov as a cultural model for incorporating Ford’s methods into Russian culture.105 Shtolts was admittedly a German, but Americans had already begun to inherit features traditionally connected with the German character, such as rationalism, order, and efficiency, and Ford fit the paradigm perfectly. Shvedov notes that Russians, like Germans, admired him as the organizer of a system for the mass production of cheap

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cars, while Americans praised the fact that he had managed to become a millionaire. At the same time, the image of Ford as an employer with a human heart was relevant for Germany and America, but not for Soviet Russia, where relations between labor and capital were supposed to be a matter of the historic past. Ilf and Petrov mention that the Ford whom the Russians admired (the talented mechanic and father of the automobile) and the “American Henry Ford” (the prosperous capitalist and selfmade man) were two different people. Russian authors of both fictional and documentary portraits of Ford were constantly dealing with this gap between “our Ford” and “the American Ford.” Popular Soviet texts about Ford represented the socially determined ambivalence connected with his figure as a duality in his personality. Although their authors claim that it is Ford’s ambiguous attitude toward socialism that makes his image so complex, the opposite is more correct: Soviet Russia’s ambivalent goal of co-opting Ford’s inventions while simultaneously rejecting Ford himself as a capitalist dictated the ambiguous construction of his image. This duality was even projected onto his physical appearance: many popular books reproduced the description of Ford from The Peace Ship, written by Louis P. Lochner, the director of Ford’s Peace campaign: “If you take one of the recent portraits of Henry Ford en face and cover half of his face with a piece of paper it will turn out that his left side gives an image of an idealist, dreamer, and friend of the people whose eyes emanate kindness and benevolence….But if you turn to the other half, the cunning face of a businessman, reserved and slightly cynical, will look out at you.”106 A. Menshoi, a Soviet specialist on American ideological issues, interprets Ford’s duality not as hypocrisy but rather as unpredictability and eccentricity that reach the point of hysteria, so that even his closest co-workers cannot anticipate his next moves. Menshoi’s depiction of Ford recalls Leo Tolstoy: “Maybe he will become a Christian and give his estate [!—MF] to the poor, or maybe a socialist and give his factory to his workers.”107 Menshoi concludes that Ford is an exceptional phenomenon not fitting any rules. His spontaneity serves as an additional proof of his genius. Thus, Ford’s unpredictability had potential for invoking both positive and negative sides of his image, for representing him as a genius and a despot. As Shvedov and Etkind observe, one rhetorical strategy that made Ford acceptable was to familiarize him and represent him as svoi. For example, it was popular to examine Ford’s social roots. As a self-educated fellow from the lower classes, he was—at least by origin—not alien to the Soviet people, his background was “reliable.”108 Ilf and Petrov familiarize Ford by comparing

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him to a Russian peasant-inventor; Pilniak sees a similarity between Ford and a Russian factory owner, an Old Believer, whom he remembers from his childhood, and he even recurrently refers to Ford as “Arsentii Ivanovich Ford,” amalgamating in this name both Ford and the old Russian capitalist. But this tendency to familiarize Ford developed simultaneously with a countervailing tendency to defamiliarize him. We should note that all the Russian models for Ford are provincial and outdated. Ilf and Petrov mention that Ford cannot keep pace with his own inventions (he is a mere mechanic), while Pilniak’s Ford is a kind of feudal-tyrant, a samodur. This leads to an anachronism—Ford is recognized as svoi, but the essence of his familiarity derives from Russia’s past. Another split in Ford’s image was based on the disparity between his social theories and his technical principles of labor organization. The former were criticized as ignorant or hypocritical; in a public lecture, “The Legend of Henry Ford,” the economist O. A. Ermanskii, a founding father of Soviet management theory, disparages them as “Ford’s tall tales” (okhotnich’i rasskazy).109 His principles of labor organization, by contrast, could supposedly be borrowed with minimal changes as “our Soviet Fordism.”110 As Shvedov points out, Soviet ideologists never took seriously a significant part of Ford’s American image—the idea of his service to the people.111 The example they usually provide to reveal the hypocrisy of Ford’s concern for his workers is his hospitals. When Ford suggests that labor is therapeutic and encourages his workers to do some light work during their stay in the hospital, Russian observers interpret it as merciless exploitation of the sick. Ermanskii attacks Ford’s social theory from the Marxist point of view, arguing that Ford promises to resolve the problems of the capitalist system within that system, which is impossible. Ermanskii argues that Ford produces cars without realizing the limitation of his market and the inevitability of a crisis of over-production. The onset of the Great Depression made these ideas more plausible to Soviet citizens in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Thus, Ilf and Petrov’s glorification of Ford as an inventor and organizer of efficient labor coexisted with other writers’ denunciations of him as an exploiter and a benighted man who “could not pass a second grade exam in social economy.”112 By dissociating message from messenger, Mayakovsky and Pilniak in their travelogues and Starko in his mock trial scenario accepted the technological side of Fordism while rejecting Ford himself. It is not surprising that the travelers’ personal experience at the Ford factory dovetails with their preconceptions and expectations. Ilf and Petrov received exceptionally attentive treatment: they observed the factory from a car with a bear fur interior (this, they ironically suggest, was supposed to

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remind them of Russia). Mayakovsky and Pilniak, by contrast, had to walk— as Pilniak mentions, cars were intended for rich tourists. Mayakovsky is even annoyed by the fact that the tourist route at the factory is always the same, that there is “one and only one way through” (203). Ilf and Petrov emphasize that Ford has no special working place because he is constantly present everywhere, supervising all the workings of the factory. But according to Pilniak, Ford is a mystery man who shows up at his factories only once a year in order to create an illusion of democracy. He implies that Ford is a solitary figure who does not really take part in the process of production. Of all the authors of literary travelogues, only Ilf and Petrov met Ford personally, and in One-Storied America they provide an “actual” portrait, which is excessively sentimental. Their Ford is inquisitive, with a grandfatherly smile, an intelligent face, and a very positive attitude toward the Soviet Union. When Pilniak and Mayakovsky visited the factory they did not see its master; therefore, they construct their image of Ford on the basis of existing Soviet publications and their overall experience at the factory, including conversations with the workers. Their Ford is faceless. Mayakovsky does, however, mention his backside: “Mister Ford, for your shriveled backside aren’t two of the roomiest cars enough?” (Mister Ford, dlia vashego, dlia vysokhshego zada razve malo dvukh prostorneishikh mashin?).113 Pilniak also emphasizes Ford’s attachment to everything rational, dry, and lifeless. It is, of course, paradoxical that the Ford who is responsible for producing an abundance of goods every minute of the day is himself ascetic and “sterile,” a machine-producing machine.114 Russian non-fictional sources on Ford also stress his absence of human qualities, his transformation from a man into a machine. Genkel claims that by “leading his life among machines he has turned into a machine himself;”115 “the man has a heart of stone or, better to say, no heart at all—only his brain is working; he is called a monomaniac with the fantastic idea of covering the entire globe with his automobiles.”116 Discussing Ford’s impact on the world, the travelogues’ authors often invoke biblical images. “The Confusion of Tongues” at his factories—the inability of workers of different nationalities to communicate—protects him from a challenge to his authority, preventing strikes. Pilniak portrays Ford as the despotic God of his small world, his factories, and claims that he also dictates the entire country’s life style.117 He likens Ford’s books to a New Testament written in the Puritan vein. As one can easily see, all these biblical connotations are negative, in tune with Soviet anti-religious propaganda. Even Pilniak’s description of the factory as a “shrine of science and technology” (607) carries vague negative connotations, since the miracles taking place there border on witchcraft.

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Occasionally, the critical Soviet attitude toward Ford extends to the workers at his factories. On the one hand, workers are considered to be the oppressed party, the ones who suffer most in the process of production. For exploiting them, Ford is labeled the enemy of all working people (this is the judgment reached in Starko’s mock trial of Ford, a verdict that will resonate in the purge trials of the 1930s and later). On the other hand, theorists blame workers for their pursuit of wealth. Ermanskii claims that they are not “real Americans” but rather adventurers who came to the country in search of fast and easy money. He compares them with peasants, the less class-conscious segment of the population.118 Sometimes Ford narratives portray with ambivalence precisely those technical principles of production management that the Soviets were planning to borrow. Examples include the vertical organization of the enterprise as a whole (the division of the production process into parts that can proceed simultaneously and thus produce a finished product more quickly); mass production; standardization (interchangeable parts even for different models); the substitution of machines for people wherever possible; the division of labor; and cleanliness as part of the general no-waste policy. Soviet observers refuse to acknowledge that these principles are only viable in the aggregate and that picking and choosing among them would defeat the purpose of implementing the “Ford system” in Soviet Russia. Hence, like Ford himself, some principles of his factories are praised and accepted, while others are criticized. In both literary and documentary accounts, Soviet authors are generally impressed by the precisely automatized process of car production, which proceeds in a magnificently smooth and organized flow. Machine parts move steadily toward the point where the car is finally assembled. Even the skeptical Pilniak is impressed: “The Ford factory in Dearborn is no longer a thing but a circumstance” (fordovskii zavod v Dirborne uzhe ne veshch’, a obstoiatel’stvo, 605). Indeed, the Ford factory was more than a local phenomenon—it became a world-changing factor. The factory mechanism seems so tremendous, so precise, so smooth to the observers that it sometimes takes on the features of a force of nature or an organism in their texts. For instance, Genkel, who usually gravitates toward a documentary style, unexpectedly compares the flowing machine parts on the conveyer belt with a moving forest,119 and he later reiterates the image of the conveyer belt as an elemental, terrible force. Pilniak associates the end of the production cycle with a thunderstorm. Since Ford’s conveyer involved the coordinated work of machines and people, it might not seem surprising at first glance that its descriptions usually entail a combination of the mechanical and the natural.

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But people and machines in the Ford narratives can actually, grotesquely, change places. Following in the Gogolian/Gorkyesque tradition, machines are represented as living beings, while people behave like automatons. In Mayakovsky, for example, the unfinished automobiles “don’t have their pants yet” (203). In Ilf and Petrov, the automobile will “hatch” and run away (116), while the workers will remain in captivity. Pilniak’s picture is yet more hellish, taking in even the automobiles, since he pays attention not only to the birth of the machines but also to the automatized process of their death. Discrepancies in the image of the factory arise from the fact that the observers tend to distinguish between the process of production per se, which they admire, and the means of organizing this process, which they accept only in part. As a result, one and the same idea of precision and efficiency may appear both positive and negative: “The well-adjusted mechanism works with the precision of the best chronometer,” Genkel exclaims with delight.120 And yet, a few pages later, he bitterly remarks: “Here, at the factory, [employees] are machines, and machines only.”121 Thus, a closer analysis of the costs of Ford’s efficiency reveals that “a man here is regarded not as a man but merely as a supplement to the machine and to time.”122 The travelers are enchanted by the automatization of the process, but they cannot accept that automatization necessitates turning factory men into machines. The inhumane side of efficiency becomes especially evident in the diaries of the Soviet engineers who experienced the process not as observers but as participants. Sheinman, for example, complains that he nearly fainted after several hours of working at the factory. He confesses that the shorter day at Ford’s factory is more exhausting than the longer one at the Deere plant where he had also worked. Describing the daily life of Ford workers, he writes: “After a short period of rest the workers return to their hells.”123 The speed of the belt dictates the pace of work, which is generally so frantic that the workers “do not have time to wipe sweat off their foreheads,” a phrase that travels from one text to another—we find it in Genkel, Starko, and Sheinman. Ermanskii warns that the worker’s life is like a candle; it burns out fast at the factory where the worker intensively depletes his life force. In his fictional travelogue A Russian American, Tageev illustrates this claim by showing how the protagonist’s father dies of exhaustion at Ford’s factory. Soviet authors usually portray the division of labor and the reduction of the worker’s function in capitalist factories negatively. They claim that specialization turns people into machine levers.124 According to Mayakovsky, narrow specialization characterizes the American character in general: “If an American’s job is only to sharpen the points, he can do this better than

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anyone else in the world, but he may never hear a thing about the eye of the needle” (163). This narrowing reaches its ultimate form in the Ford factory, since the division of labor is an integral part of the principle of mass production. Each Ford worker performs only one tiny operation—all his movements are precisely calculated. He can master his operation in a very short time, which collapses the gap between worker and machine. Ilf and Petrov acknowledge that Ford’s worker has little prospect for professional growth, since his task is to repeat the same precise movement hundreds of times per hour. As Tageev notes, neither physical strength nor technical knowledge is needed.125 Ermanskii, however, finds the division of labor and the specialization of people and machines quite efficient. Although his description of the production process—“The man who nests the screw-bolt does not screw it” (20)—seems to echo Mayakovsky’s, Ermanskii intends this positively rather than ironically. Sheinman’s attitude to specialization is ambivalent; in the first, American, part of his travelogue, he mentions that workers from other factories despise Ford’s workers for their limited qualifications. However, in the second part, he lauds the implementation of mass production in the Soviet Union, even though old, qualified blacksmiths have to leave their factories when their skills become obsolete. Surprisingly, Soviet visitors criticize principles that we would regard quite positively today. An indispensable principle of Ford’s labor organization was his system of strict safety measures, which included the use of protective eyewear and special clothing suited to the work environment. Memoirs by Russian workers in America enthusiastically praise the safe and convenient working clothes. At the same time, however, their authors often report their own careless attitude toward safety measures. Sheinman for example, confesses that he was nearly fired for not wearing goggles. Mayakovsky manages to criticize the preoccupation with safety at the Ford factory as a byproduct of exploitation: the more injured workers there are, the more the management has to pay for insurance. Equally unexpected are the negative attitudes toward the cleanliness required at Ford’s factories. As Shvedov notes, Russian visitors rarely understood that cleanliness was part of the general principle of rationalism and efficiency.126 Often they associated it instead with Ford’s sterile Puritanism, which “inhibited” his exhausted workers: “After several years at the factory they all become impotent,” reports Mayakovsky (205).127 Additionally, Mayakovsky is displeased that there are no spittoons in the factories and that it is forbidden to spit on the floor. Cleanliness also comes in for criticism on a metaphorical level: Mayakovsky accuses Ford of tolerating “any sort of Whiteness” (202), implying that his support for members of the

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Russian White Guard is a sign of anti-Bolshevism. While former White Guard officers did indeed find jobs at Ford’s factories, Mayakovsky does not mention the fact that “Red” Soviet workers were also welcome to study the production process.128 Pilniak’s accusations require a similar metaphorical leap on the reader’s part. In his view, cleanliness is hypocrisy: “After all, America has not been built by people wearing white gloves” (622). The question that inevitably follows from these critical and ironic accounts of Ford’s factory is how the Soviet “scientific organizers of labor” would manage to avoid these pitfalls when Ford’s principles were transferred to Russia? In order to address this question, Soviet ideologists developed a particular strategy. Mayakovsky and Pilniak warn against blind borrowing from Ford, but most economists suggest that it is easy to adjust the system to the Soviet economy.129 Writers and engineers often mention that American principles of organization are in fact much more suited to the Soviet planned economy than to the capitalist one. Tal and Galin, the authors of the introduction to Sheinman’s book, insist that such giants as the Smith factory cannot be “digested” by capitalism and should have been built instead in the Soviet Union.130 Sometimes ideologists try to dissociate principles from their originator in order to smooth over the fact that they are engaged in borrowing Fordism. A characteristic example of this strategy can be found in Starko’s mock trial scenario. At one point, the witness Borisov, an engineer who has worked for two years at the Ford factory, explains to the judge and audience that Soviet factories implement not Fordism but the scientific organization of labor. This organization is based on principles that can only be connected with so-called “Fordism” in a vulgar and inaccurate way.131 He then adds rather illogically: “High efficiency: this is our Soviet Fordism.” Borisov argues that the mechanization of the production process will save workers from exhaustion. Whereas in America workers are not valued but exploited, in the Soviet Union concern for the people is a priority. Borisov appeals to the listeners’ common sense: a worker who is rested will be more productive than a wearied one. He promises that in Soviet factories physiologists will actively participate in setting an appropriate working load. In non-literary, theoretical texts, most of the recipes for adjusting Ford’s production methods to the Soviet system seem easy—since the movement of the conveyer belt dictates the pace of work in the factories, it should be slowed. Although each operation will take more time, it will be more efficient in the long run because the workers will not burn out. The problem of narrow specialization will be solved if factories rotate workers. But the factor that seems most crucial to the Soviet specialists, the one that will guarantee productivity without turning people into machine cogs, is the

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Soviet system of production itself. These specialists suggest humanizing the factory by developing workers’ self-consciousness, arguing that if the worker realizes he is the master, he cannot at the same time be an automaton. Thus, the same phenomena that are considered evil in capitalist America ostensibly turn into virtues in a country with a different socio-economic system. Soviet writers constantly disconnect form and content, reason and consequence, thereby exposing the rhetorical techniques and logical flaws of their discourse. Nowadays, Shvedov and Shpotov point out that labor productivity suffers greatly if only the externals of a technological system are transferred from one country to another. Shpotov points to accounts written by American engineers and managers who worked in the Soviet Union supervising the implementation of Ford’s technologies. These reports abound in examples of serious violations of Ford’s principles of coordination, planning, and nonwasteful technology. Charles Sorensen, one of Ford’s chief managers in the early twentieth century, reports that Soviet workers excel at performing operations on a high technological level but fail in strict discipline and assembly line work.132 Given that Soviet administrators loudly proclaim their concern for the workers’ health, Ford specialists are especially furious about the lack of safety measures in Soviet factories. The Americans suggest that Soviet production suffers from the “button syndrome” (sindrom knopki), whereby the Soviets try to borrow Ford’s methods only partially and superficially. This is as effective as installing a button without installing the mechanism that makes it work. A significant part of the “mechanism” that made the American Ford factories so productive was a new work ethic among workers, engineers, and management alike. Managers at Soviet factories claimed that they were nurturing a new type of worker, but their attempts failed in practice. Tal and Galin praised Sheinman for bringing a well-planned, non-stressful method of mass production to Russia, but in reality, the main model of production was Stakhanovite (stakhanovskii) heroic labor.133 Chaplin’s film Modern Times, which Ilf and Petrov were able to see in America, acknowledged the dangers of dehumanization in the process of factory production. In a famous scene, Chaplin’s character takes a break from the assembly line but continues to move like an automaton, involuntarily repeating his habitual movement of tightening two bolts. A conveyer belt sucks him into the innards of a gigantic machine. His entire body snakes around a set of enormous cogs, epitomizing what technology and technological society can do to a human being. Soviet critics praised this film as a satire on capitalism but did not see its broader significance.

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They attributed the shortcomings of factory production to the unjust system of relations between worker and capitalist, refusing to recognize that the Soviet system could also turn a man into a cog.134 Soviet ideologists hoped to borrow Ford’s methods of labor organization independently of the dehumanization they associated with Ford. Sadly, Ford’s methods never fully took root in Russia, while dehumanization very much did. The Soviet state’s gigantic repressive mechanism worked more efficiently and on a much greater scale than factory machines. In Ford’s American factories, workers were forbidden to communicate, but they nevertheless learned to speak without moving their lips. They contrived to conceal their emotions and even their speech by wearing a “frozen mask,” thereby engendering what became known as the “fordization of the face” and the “Ford whisper.” Mandelstam attests to a similar phenomenon in the Soviet Union, declaring in a famous anti-Stalin poem:135 “We live without feeling the land beneath us. Ten paces away you cannot hear our words.”136

The Racial Other Russian writers usually portray African Americans sympathetically, since they perceive them as an oppressed and suffering people. As Kiparsky explains in his chapter “The American Negro and the Red Indian,”137 progressive Russian authors “always sympathized with the ‘insulted and injured’ peoples of the world” (154). Nevertheless, he does not address the question why this human sympathy so often excludes Native Americans. My analysis builds on Kiparsky’s observations about people of color while focusing on aspects that he does not cover in any detail in his book. I will show that the literary treatment of other races in the American travelogue largely depends on traditions of projecting certain Russian national and social problems onto America. In these projections, African Americans are linked to Russian serfs, Russian peasants, the Russian proletariat in general, and Jews, while Native Americans correspond to Circassians and Gypsies. Since the literary tradition works in tandem with social change in Russia, shifts in Russian literary approaches to American minorities correspond to changes in the Russian social groups that are projected onto them. In Russian texts about America and Americans, African Americans and Native Americans are usually called “Negroes” and “Indians”; in contrast to Americans, Russians perceive these terms as neutral.138 The tradition of representing both black slaves and Native American Indians as oppressed peoples and victims of white Americans can be traced back to Alexander

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Sumarokov and Nikolai Novikov, but Alexander Radishchev provides the most famous example in a travelogue dedicated to the sufferings of Russian serfs, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow). Radishchev condemns white American conquerors: “having… sacrificed the Indians, the malicious Europeans…purchased new slaves (from Africa).”139 This emphasis on white Americans’ guilt remains a constant in the travelogues, even when the Native Americans themselves are not portrayed very sympathetically (the disparity is especially evident in Soviet literature, as we shall see). More than one hundred years after Radishchev, Korolenko points to slavery and the extermination of the Indians as America’s two greatest sins.140 However, while both African and Native Americans are oppressed in America, the sufferings of black slaves resonate more convincingly with the misery of Russian serfs.

The African American

The fact that both serfdom in Russia and slavery in America were officially abolished at about the same time is often seen as proof of the historical—or mystical—connection between the two countries. This equation of Russia with America enjoys a long life; apart from the well-known sources, we also find it in 1866 in speeches honoring the American delegation that came to Russia aboard the Navy monitor, the USS Miantonomoh,141 but also in a recent Russian-American travelogue, Igor Efimov’s Sed’maia zhena (The Seventh Wife, 1990). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russian humanists take the issue of slavery in America as an especially relevant, even personal matter. As Herzen writes with sad irony, “America is a fine country, only the serfs are black there; our black people are white— apparently, because of the snow.”142 Given the Russian censorship at the time, nineteenth-century liberals could more easily afford to sympathize with the fate of American slaves than with that of their own serfs, and as a result, they scathingly and publicly disparaged slave owners. “Readers, used to parables, knew that the slaves were not only American Negroes, and their tormenters lived not only in distant America. Thus, already by the end of the eighteenth century, America in the Russian press had become a cryptonym of Russia.”143 In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Decembrists often discussed the issue of American slavery in their political essays. And by mid-century, when serfdom became more and more urgent as a social issue, the number of Russian articles on the inhumanness of slavery in America radically increased.144 The translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a

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significant impact on Russian society. Eventually, as Bolkhovitinov points out, the parallel between the institutions of Russian serfdom and American slavery became so clear that censors only reluctantly permitted anti-slavery pamphlets on American material. For example, Mikhail Mikhailov’s translation of Longfellow’s “Poems on Slavery,” accompanied by Vladimir Obrushev’s article “Nevol’nichestvo v Severnoi Amerike” (Slavery in North America), could not appear in print until the Emancipation Manifesto of 1861 liberated the serfs (the translation and the Manifesto were actually both published in the same March issue of Sovremennik).145 African Americans as individuals (rather than abstract literary stereotypes) rarely appear in nineteenth-century Russian literature, which is quite understandable, given that Russians did not often meet them in real life. The exceptions are the infrequent cases when African Americans visited Russia or Russian travelers journeyed to America. A unique instance of a black man and former slave visiting Russia is Ira Aldridge, who performed Shakespeare on the Russian stage in the late 1850s and early 1860s. We find literary and documentary accounts of the impression his acting made on Russian audiences in the memoirs of Petr Boborykin, Anatoly Koni, and Mikhail Mikeshin (who relates the opinions of Taras Shevchenko).146 While Koni, Shchepkin (according to Koni) and especially Shevchenko admired Aldridge’s powerful, passionate acting, Boborykin is more reserved: in Aldridge’s performing he finds raw passion without subtlety or deep psychological insight. This emphasis on African Americans’ wild temperament and, especially, artistic talent will echo in Russian and Soviet perceptions of them in the twentieth century. An early travelogue encounter between a Russian and an African American takes place in Konstantin Staniukovich’s story “Maksimka” (1863), which forms part of the cycle Morskie rasskazy (Sea Tales). In contrast to The Adventures of a Sailor, in “Maksimka” it is not the Russian who is exposed to a foreign society but a black African boy, an American sea captain’s former slave who has been rescued from a shipwreck by Russian sailors. Staniukovich shows the humanity of the Russian common man, who is not only extraordinarily tolerant toward people of other colors, religions, and ways of life but is also capable of deep affection for weak and suffering others. The fact that the boy is not Christian seems to be more significant to his rescuers than his race, but the most important thing is that he is a child and a human being. When the sailor Luchkin, who gives the boy a name and takes care of him, brings him to the common table, he asks permission for Maksimka to join him because he is afraid that not everyone will be willing to share a meal with a non-Christian. But all the sailors sympathize

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with the boy and recognize what they have in common. Many of them remember their own serf past and perceive black slaves as “American serfs”; they care more about the scars on Maksimka’s skin than about its color. The encounter with the boy becomes a turning point in Luchkin’s own life: having accepted responsibility for another, he stops his heavy drinking and settles down. As long as Russian authors use black slaves to speak about their own domestic issues or to contemplate theoretical problems of humanity, they tend to idealize them. However, black people in American travelogues who are portrayed as individuals rather than as symbols are rendered less sentimentally. As Kiparsky points out, Svinin provides an unattractive portrayal of the African Americans he saw in an “African Methodist Church.”147 Observing the black congregation makes the narrator think of Pluto’s Kingdom and the horrors of Hades. The traveler to America must face a real encounter with black Americans, with their individual personalities and the different manifestations of these personalities, an encounter that can trigger the writer’s own hidden racism and reveal his sore spots. Bogoraz’s essay “Chernyi student” (The Black Student, 1899) paints a highly symptomatic psychological picture of this interaction with the racial Other, one that I will analyze in some depth. Bogoraz’s autobiographical narrator travels across America by train and observes various human types among the passengers and the mostly Negro servants in his car. He explains: “Americans gladly leave this kind of work to others—Negroes, Chinese, or greenhorns from Europe.”148 Here, he not only refers ironically to the white American point of view according to which only people of other races can and should be servants, but he also builds it into the very structure of his sentence: “Americans” stands for “white Americans,” which suggests that “others,” people of other races, are not Americans. The narrator explicitly censures the caste prejudices of the overly proud, white “American-born,” maintaining sarcastically that his sisters and daughters would go out on the street rather than, like African Americans, make up beds for others. Bogoraz raises the question of whether Negroes can be considered Americans in his sketch “At the Entrance to the New World.” One of his American steamship passengers provokes an outburst of laughter by jokingly suggesting that black people, not European immigrants, are the real Americans in New York. Alexander Lakier in 1857 contemplated the same question—What is an American?—during his transatlantic journey, but answered more seriously and quite differently: an American is “either an original native, whom the whites inappropriately call an Indian, or a European offspring born in the New World.”149 In the Soviet era, Mayakovsky also

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asks this same question quite seriously, yet he answers it contrarily: why shouldn’t we regard the African American as the typical American and not the white racist? (120). The narrator of “The Black Student” assumes the stance of a disinterested ethnographer in describing black servants as the exotic representatives of an unknown species: “Their expansive southern temperament contrasts sharply with the habitual reserve of the AngloSaxons. Upon receiving some abrupt order, they invariably repeated it aloud, then threw themselves into its execution at breakneck speed, moving their lips, apparently repeating the same words” (115). The narrator engages in a conversation with one black, who turns out to be a representative of the “new African American type”—not only a servant but also a medical student. In the course of their lengthy dialogue, the young Negro demonstrates such radically contrasting character features that the narrator concludes that he has several souls. His servant’s instincts and student’s pride alternate like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s personalities. He is equally proud that his parents have never been plantation slaves, that he is a good servant who always knows how to serve a gentleman, and that he is a medical student. Although at certain moments the two men speak as equal human beings, the narrator never even mentions the student’s name, thus hindering the reader from smoothing over the difference in their circumstances. The interlocutors’ usage of personal pronouns reveals the social groups with whom they identify themselves and each other and foregrounds the painful, tabooed issues connected with identity. The black student keeps referring to himself as one of the American colored people, the us, whom he distinguishes from foreigners, including black newcomers. He never uses the word black while talking about himself. Explaining the structure of the student body in his college, he names different groups of minorities: colored students from Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Virginia, young women, and foreigners from Santo Domingo, Brazil, and Africa. In the course of the conversation, the student tries to bridge the social gap between himself and the narrator. In a “familiar tone,” he asks whether his interlocutor is a foreigner himself and suggests that he might be a German. The narrator replies that he is Russian and, apparently offended at not being recognized as a distinct nationality, comments: “To this day, in many places in America, for all intents and purposes the concepts of foreigner and German coincide” (119), an ironic response given that Russians identify foreigners as Germans just as commonly as do Americans. Here the narrator has clearly projected his own concerns and stereotypes onto his interlocutor. He seems to forget that the black student has just demonstrated that he is perfectly aware that foreigners come from different places.

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The dialogue turns into a kind of duel with complex psychological undercurrents that the narrator only partially acknowledges.150 “‘You had slavery too,’ he [the student] reminded me, to demonstrate that the position of Russia in the civilized world was known to him” (119; italics are mine throughout). You is understood by both conversation partners as “Russians.” The narrator pretends to take the student’s words as showing off. But the word “reminded” reveals a sore spot—after all, he knows very well that among civilized countries Russia was once less civilized in this respect. The narrator is irritated that a Negro treats him as an equal and that he points out unpleasant things about his country. “‘But we abolished it,’ I retorted.” There is no reason to retort, since there is no contradiction; the student has not said that slavery still exists in Russia. The urge to object derives from shame—the narrator perceives the remark “you had slavery” as an accusation, since it originates with the suffering party, a descendant of slaves. “‘When we did,’ the Negro continued. We, of course, referred not to Negroes but to the United States in general. But surely the level of geographical knowledge of this black student was higher than that of the average American man in the street” (119). Here the narrator demonstrates his awareness of the change in his interlocutor’s self-identification. He pays tribute to him by recognizing him as an American for the first time in the narrative. “‘And how are they doing in your country now?’ the Negro asked abruptly with obvious curiosity. I felt that the question had touched his sore spot.”151 But it is obviously the narrator’s own sore spot as much as the student’s. “‘It varies,’ I replied evasively” (119). The student manifests his sore spot by using the word “they” but not “slaves,” in the same way that he never uses the word “black.” Here the narrator tries to hide his own pain behind the pain of the Other. The narrator then shifts topic and, for a while, redirects the conversation from his own sore spots to the student’s skin color. The narrator discovers that the black student’s feminine ideal is Desdemona, the white woman who loved a black man. This Shakespearean vision does not, however, demonstrate that the student believes in racial equality; rather, it is an ideal fostered by an external—“white”—system of values. As the narrator suspects, the student is simply ashamed of the black concept of beauty, which can be mocked by whites, and wants to distance himself from it. The narrator, apparently offended by his black interlocutor’s wild dream, humiliates him in the reader’s eyes, condescendingly calling him “this strange intellectual, the likes of whom I had never seen before…with skin as black as bootblacking.” He adds as an aside: “I don’t believe a white woman would have been very pleased with such an aspirer!” (120). And, indeed, over the entire course of the dialogue, he regularly takes advantage of his narratorial privilege to

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insinuate his subjective vision into the reader’s mind through similar asides. As the psychological duel between the narrator and the black student continues, the latter turns the conversation again in the direction of the narrator’s sore spots. Once again, he uses the third person pronoun to avoid naming the former slaves: “‘And what’s it like for them in Russia?’” The narrator does not understand him immediately, but on second thought he realizes that his interlocutor is interested in the prospect of marriage between former serfs and free people, and he makes the most grievous faux pas in the story. In the Hasty and Fusso translation this is rendered as “‘But they [ i.e., the serfs] are of the same race!’” (121). But in the Russian original, Bogoraz formulates it more bluntly and offensively: “‘But they are our compatriots!’” (nashi sootechestvenniki). Thus, he eliminates even the slightest illusion of equality in this dialogue. His response suggests that the Negro, far from being a compatriot of the white Americans he wants to compete with, is somebody like those “foreigners” whom the Negro has hitherto regarded as them. Thus, the narrator lines up with the whites, showing that the student is not equal to the former Russian slaves because the gap between black and white is much more substantial than that between slave and free. By making this remark, the narrator points out that the Russian and American systems are asymmetrical: us and them in Russia does not correspond to black America’s us and them; and your whites do not treat you the same way we treat our them. Then, tellingly, the narrator records: “The Negro paled, that is, his face took on a dirtyish cast” (121). The very necessity of this explanation captures the reader’s attention. While the narrator acknowledges the “imprudence” of his remark and is apparently ashamed of himself, he humiliates the student even further in this aside.152 Forestalling the reader’s possible identification of a black person who pales with a white one, the narrator reminds us that a pale Negro is a dirty Negro. The symbolic plane here intersects with the literal: the expression “a dirtyish cast” more clearly characterizes the narrator’s words than his interlocutor’s appearance. The next phrase, however, suggests that the narrator indeed knows how it feels to be in the Negro’s place: “This is, apropos, how some friends of mine at school looked when their classmates shouted after them, ‘Jew!’ [zhid]” (121). I have characterized the narrative voice in “The Black Student” as “autobiographical,” and with good reason: although Bogoraz never mentions it in the text, his contemporary readers would have known that he himself was of Jewish descent. Thus, the student’s humiliation backfires onto the narrator. The narrator’s silence regarding his own identity and his reference to his classmates’ reaction are psychologically very understandable—they signal once again that the dialogue between

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narrator and African American probes sore spots on both sides. Bogoraz demonstrates that Russia’s national problems and taboos encompass not only serfdom, the equivalent of America’s black slavery, but also racism in its guise of nationalism and anti-Semitism. Immediately after this episode, where so much more is implied than is actually stated, the author introduces a new character, a Jewish newspaper boy, in order to compare the status of Jew and Negro in America. The boy treats the black student with disdain, showing that a white Jewish boy selling newspapers feels significantly superior to a black porter, even if the latter is a medical student. The paper the boy is selling features a lynching story: two Negroes have been killed for attacking a white woman. This story, which echoes the black student’s dream about Desdemona, humiliates him yet further. The Jewish boy suggests: “‘They should all be shot.’” The boy apparently expects that he and the narrator understand each other as white people—as opposed to them, the blacks. At the same time, the boy tries to identify the narrator and asks if he is a foreigner. “This constant question of my American interlocutors had begun to irritate me” (122), the narrator confesses since, in his mind, the paper boy opposes the student and himself as Americans to the narrator as a foreigner. However, the boy suddenly finds something that he and the narrator share (another we), claiming that he is a Russian too, if only by descent. But the narrator refuses to recognize this we and tries to convey to the boy the difference between himself—a Russian— and the boy—a Jew. The boy, however, rebuffs him in turn, rejecting his own Jewishness since his parents came from Russia, not from Judea (“Russians come from Russia and Jews come from Jewia” [123]). But what is most important to the boy is to identify himself as a white American, which makes him superior both to the narrator as a foreigner and to the black student, his compatriot. He refuses to sit with them and leaves. The student’s last question to the narrator discloses his most desperate dream: in racist America he secretly longs to be white, so he asks whether there is some Russian chemical remedy for his blackness. In this story, where every character including the autobiographical narrator rejects or conceals certain aspects of his national or racial identity, the situation of the black student is the most tragic: he knows that despite the abolition of slavery and the educational opportunities available to colored people, his “identity” as a black man will always make him a pariah. The sketch ends with another condescending remark on the narrator’s part: “I set off for my berth to catch up on the hours I had lost” (126). But for all that Bogoraz’s narrator can be highly insensitive in his treatment of the Other, he at least recognizes African Americans as

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real human beings. Bogoraz’s black student’s complex and contradictory emotions contrast markedly with the portrayal of the racial Other as a depersonalized emblem of social injustice in later texts. Post-revolutionary and Soviet travelogue writers filter the racial problem through the lens of class struggle rather than recognizing it as a discrete issue. In the Soviet mind, African Americans are the exploited and oppressed working people. As early as 1906, Gorky states at a meeting at New York’s Grand Central Palace: “I do not believe in the enmity of nationalities and races. I see only one type of antagonism—the class one. I do not believe in a specific psychology that causes a natural hatred in a man of the white race toward a man of the black race.”153 Similarly, for Mayakovsky, the Ku Klux Klan is more an anti-proletarian than a racist organization (114). In Mayakovsky’s opinion, oppressed African Americans are already a revolutionary force: “The Negroes warmed over Texas bonfires provide sufficiently dry gunpowder for the explosions of revolution” (195). Curiously, although Soviet travelogues associate African Americans with the revolutionary proletariat, they preserve the older slavery discourse as well. In the 1920s, for example, Dobranitskii writes that in America seven million black people are in fact still slaves because they are not free to move, choose a job, or be in the same room with white Americans.154 Even Soviet articles of the 1950s and 1960s mention “millions of slaves”155 in the United States. Perhaps, in the image of the black American, Soviet ideologists found an ideal embodiment of a post-revolutionary cliché, the proletariat struggling to rid itself of its chains. Post-revolutionary travelogue authors usually draw a favorable contrast between the African American and the typical white American, in a sense demonstrating a kind of reverse racism. Indeed, the image—or, more accurately, the ideological construct—of a typical white American is hardly positive. Only Esenin, who is less politically conscious than the other travelers, diverges from this pattern. He portrays African Americans as primitive people “with very unrestrained manners.” In this respect, he considers their behavior to be no different from that of white Americans: “The Americans themselves are also a very primitive people when it comes to their own inner culture” (153). Paradoxically, by the very structure of this remark, which seemingly states the similarity of white and black Americans, Esenin, like Bogoraz, posits the two races as separate entities: he excludes African Americans from the category of Americans. More typically for the second and the third periods of the travelogue history, Mayakovsky, Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov demonstrate that, despite the inhuman conditions black people are forced to live in, they are much more human and natural than their white oppressors.

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In the Soviet era, visual arts such as animated films and political posters begin to have a significant influence on the literary imagery of the black, although the symbolism of white, red, and black in the 1920s and 1930s is sometimes ambiguous. On the one hand, white traditionally expresses the positive characteristics of virtue and spiritual purity.156 On the other hand, the post-revolutionary political opposition between the White and Red armies is reflected in Soviet art graphically, contrasting negative white and positive red or negative white and positive black. When the artists’ focus turns to the racial problem, as in Mayakovsky’s famous anti-racist poem “Black and White,” black is undoubtedly positive. As a propaganda artist, Mayakovsky employs the power of minimalist visual means in his verbal art. In “Black and White” he paints the vibrant scenery of exotic Havana, a Paradise of flowers, where the abundance of colors contrasts markedly with the “narrow bleak spectrum” of an African American’s joys.157 Mayakovsky’s contrast immediately diminishes the seeming complexity of his palette: the opposition of black (his Negro janitor Willy) and white (his cigar king) culminates in the emergence of red, the color of blood when the cigar king beats Willy. White emerges in negative opposition to both black and red. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amalrik’s 1932 animated film “Black and White” is based on this visual contrast between black and white, although it fails to introduce Mayakovsky’s third major element—red. Visual-verbal puns based on these same political associations of white, red, and black turn up in many propaganda posters of the 1920s. Early in that decade, Krokodil featured M. Cheremnykh’s poster “The Black Went Red.” The poster ridicules International Capital’s unsuccessful attempts to hire African Americans to replace striking workers in Germany’s Ruhr district. The poster’s caption reproduces a dialogue between a French general and his adjutant. The general declares: “There are two more perfectly black Negroes. Sign them up for the Ruhr.” But his adjutant objects: “My general! It is dangerous. You see, they are beginning to redden. And if so much as the Negro’s hair goes red, he is lost to us!”158 The same play on color appears in a second Cheremnykh poster “Let Black Be Red,” whose caption runs: “Peace to Uncle Tom’s Cabins, War to Harding’s Palaces.”159 Since Russians had no actual history of colonial relations with people of color, they could often seem insensitive to blacks’ potential sore spots. Adepts of internationalism, who vehemently scold American capitalists for treating black people like non-humans, Soviet authors sometimes admit indirect locutions such as metaphors and comparisons into their texts that can easily be interpreted as racist. In Mayakovsky’s poem “Six Nuns,”

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the author of the anti-racist “Black and White” compares the nuns’ black clothes with unwashed black skin: “They are darker than an unwashed Negro” (Chernei, chem negr, ne vidavshii ban’).160 However appalling this line may sound to a contemporary reader, we should nonetheless remember that in Mayakovsky—as in Soviet discourse at large—“uncleanness” is a positive attribute, a sign of belonging to the working people who are not afraid “to soil their hands” (zamarat’ ruki) doing hard work (in Russian, literally “black” work [chernaia rabota]).161 Thus, in the same poem, the nuns’ tidiness and sobriety are portrayed sarcastically. In Mayakovsky’s symbolic play Misteria-Buff (1918), a Revolutionary Flood engulfs the earth, and humans rush onto the Ark, where they are judged. The Clean—the representatives of the elite—are sentenced to imprisonment in Hell, while the Unclean enter the new world washed by the Revolution. Interestingly, among the passengers is a black man who belongs to the Clean, since he is an African Tsar—a rare example of a black who is an exploiter rather than an oppressed worker. His social status is more important than his color, so he does not belong to Mayakovsky’s prestigious group of the Unclean. A children’s poem translated into Russian by Sasha Chernyi,162 an author noted for his irony, links skin color with cleanliness. Little Bob suddenly turns into a little Negro “from head—alas!—to toe” but is miraculously restored to whiteness after a proper bath. (In reading the poem we should note that the poet has already demonstrated his sympathy with black by his choice of nom de plume—“Chernyi” means “black” in Russian). A similar association occurs in Alexandrov’s film Tsirk (Circus; analyzed in more detail in chapter 5). When the comic character Skameikin sees a black boy, apparently for the first time, he takes out his handkerchief and tries to wipe the boy’s cheek, exclaiming: “Look! How dirty you are!” Skameikin’s gesture is instinctive and justified by his naïveté—indeed, he has never seen a person of color. Alexandrov finds it absolutely appropriate to use this comic episode in his film about American racism and Soviet internationalism. For him, as for Mayakovsky, dirtiness is not a negative characteristic. On the contrary, as I have argued in my section on technology, Soviet writers perceive Henry Ford’s cleanliness and whiteness as suspicious and hypocritical and even associate it with the White Guard. Pilniak especially emphasizes the political contrast between black and white. He expands the signification of the two colors not only by associating white with the White Guard but also by linking it to fascists: “The Ku Klux Klan is no longer a quasi-mystical organization but simply a fascist one, existing not only for establishing ‘white’ supremacy over the Negroes but also as a White Guard at large” (552). However, some Russian writers seem to be attentive to the potentially

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offensive connotations of the equation “Negro—black—dirty.” In Olesha’s fairytale novella Tri tolstiaka (Three Fat Men, 1924), one of the central characters, the gymnast Tibul, disguises himself as a Negro by applying a magic potion to his skin,163 although Olesha invents a special means for him to restore his usual color. Tibul does not need to wash away his blackness; he simply has to apply a different potion. The difference between Soviet and racist connotations of black emerges clearly in Mayakovsky’s anti-colonial poem “Syphilis.” Here it is the evil Other who perceives black as unclean. Describing a ship coming to shore, Mayakovsky reconstructs this racist point of view: “On the deck there are 700 people, all the rest are Negroes.”164 The doctor in charge of certifying the passengers’ health sends black Tom into quarantine with the excuse that he is black and thus dirty, but he permits white, syphilitic Mr. Swift to leave the ship. As a result, Mr. Swift transmits his syphilis to Tom’s desperate wife (who has been forced to sell herself because she is dying of hunger) and, thus, eventually to Tom himself. The black family, contaminated by the “rotten,” white Mr. Swift, finally lives up to the whites’ worst expectations by becoming what they have always been considered to be: dirty, diseased, and rotten. The poem’s pastor condemns Tom and his wife as obvious exemplars of corruption. Mayakovsky, by contrast, indicates that the guilt should fall on the white Mr. Swift—as well as on the doctor, the pastor, and his congregation, in whose eyes black means dirty. In Mayakovsky’s prose sketches, his narrator sarcastically accepts responsibility for segregation, noting that train stations are strictly divided into two parts: one is “for us, whites,” the other for “blacks.” He is disgusted by the mirror America tries to make him see himself in. Like Mayakovsky, the travelogue writers of the 1930s, Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov, study African Americans through a double prism: they juxtapose white Americans’ perception of black people with Soviet perceptions. Thus, the writers not only offer a scathing indictment of white Americans’ racism but also reconstruct the way they see others. American racists’ deprecating attitude toward African Americans is the most effective index of their innate inhumanity. It follows logically that the Russian writers’ own ability to see the humanity of black people—and even to recognize a kinship with them—inevitably casts a positive light on the image of the Soviet Union. This contrast between the Russian traveler, who spends a night in the hut of black people listening to their singing, and the American racists, who treat African Americans as less than human, is especially evident in Pilniak. Ilf and Petrov reconstruct the Southern gentleman’s image of the African American, arguing that the latter has human qualities that the former hardly

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realizes he lacks. Like Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov create a collective portrait; individuals appear against a unified background as imperfect sketches. In the early photo-essay version of their travelogue, they devote an entire article to this typical portrait. Even when fleshed out as a book chapter with all the generic elements of a travel narrative, this article still stands apart from the overall journey by virtue of its overtly political agenda. Its paragraph structure is monotonous and formal, opening with an inventory of typical African American features (talented, sensitive, natural, expansive, curious) and then moving on to a discussion of how these features are perceived by whites. The authors also analyze how theater and film portray African Americans—as silly but kind-hearted comic heroes. Rather than proclaiming African Americans’ backwardness, like Esenin, Ilf and Petrov study the reasons for this backwardness, concluding that the crucial factor is African Americans’ lack of opportunity for development and growth. Among African Americans’ unique qualities, Soviet writers stress their artistic nature, especially their talent for music and dance. Esenin, Mayakovsky, Pilniak, and Ilf and Petrov all point out that America owes whatever is original in its culture to African American music. In the article “SSSR–SShA: imidzhi muzykal’noi kul’tury” (USSR–USA: Images of the Musical Culture), J. K. Mikhailov argues that, although jazz functions in travelogue texts as a general emblem of American music, this is more a stereotypical perception than an objective reflection of American musical culture in the 1920s and 1930s, which was hardly limited to jazz.165 The travelogues reflect the fact that, in early Soviet culture, American jazz is associated with its black folk roots and has not yet acquired the negative connotations that would later accrue to it, when it became stigmatized as the example par excellence of imperialist American music, “the music of the fat.” While Soviet ideologists assume that white Americans do not value art very highly, they represent the whites’ appreciation of African American music as a condescending indulgence on their part. N. Shestopalova’s Krokodil caricature “V strane Lincha” (In the Lynching Country),166 mocks this attitude: a plump, overdressed woman at the theater points to a black violinist and tells her husband: “Look, he plays the violin as well as you gamble on the stock exchange!”167 He answers: “Yes, he is a talented Negro. It would be good to hang him!” Ilf and Petrov explain “the gracious permission” granted to the black to perform for the whites in the following manner: “Evidently, when the black is on the stage and a white man in a balcony, the latter can look down on the black man, and his lordly pride does not suffer therefrom” (361).

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Pilniak overturns the racist worldview by stating that blacks do indeed differ from American whites for a variety of historical, social, and biological reasons (558). The word “American” is crucial here, since Pilniak declares that blacks share many common features with Russians. While he constructs the image of a typical American as Russia’s Other, the black American is svoi, “ours”—Russian in his soul and Soviet in his social instincts. African Americans possess an artistic sensibility, indifference to money, friendliness, openness, and joyfulness. Like Russians, they value good songs, conversations with friends, and magazine articles more than the “almighty” dollar. In contrast to the businesslike white Americans, they are disorderly in a good—Russian—sense of the word: “This one forgot something, that one was late, the third spent two days at his friend’s house engrossed in a book and neglecting everything else in the world for it” (559). Pilniak’s Harlem contrasts with his overall image of New York and reminds him more of Soviet cityscapes: “It is not so multistoried as the rest of New York, and not so lit up by the lights in its side streets,—it sings, laughs, rejoices, smokes cigarettes” (559). Pilniak praises blacks for being able, amid the hardships of segregation, to develop their culture; he focuses on the new generation, which is active and politically conscious, and which creates its own theater, poetry, and literary theory. His young and strong African Americans provide a positive image of struggling minorities, replacing the passive older generation—an image that, as Kiparsky argues, would become popular in later Soviet literature.168 Besides noting their developing social consciousness and the similarities in their characters, Mayakovsky and Pilniak identify another crucial link between Russians and African Americans: Pushkin, the iconic Russian “everything” (to use Apollon Grigoriev’s famous phrase), the brilliant Russian poet with African blood in his veins. In his essay “Koleblemyi trenozhnik” (The Shaken Tripod),169 the émigré poet Vladislav Khodasevich predicts that after the Revolution, in the coming twilight of Russian culture, the name of Pushkin will serve as a watchword to recognize svoi. But the official Soviet culture, which Khodasevich hoped to dissociate himself from, managed to appropriate Pushkin. The authors of Soviet travelogues use Pushkin’s name as a password to demonstrate that African Americans are svoi for the Soviets. It is not just Pushkin’s African descent that is crucial for establishing this link but the fact that black people know Pushkin and acknowledge their connection with him. Validating African Americans’ claim that Pushkin is their common poet, Pilniak closely follows the lines of Mayakovsky’s argument. Mayakovsky approvingly writes about successful attempts by African Americans to find their connections with

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world culture: Pushkin, Alexander Dumas, and Henry Ossawa Tanner are artists whom the blacks recognize as “laborers of their culture.” He reports that Caspar Holstein, a black publisher, announced a monetary prize “in the name of the greatest Negro poet, A. S. Pushkin, for the best Negro poem” (194). In the same vein, Pilniak states that, although Pushkin is not very well known in non-Russian literatures, there are two nations that recognize him as their national genius: the Russians and the Negroes (555).170 Both Mayakovsky and Pilniak agree that Pushkin is indeed African American because in contemporary America he would have shared all the sufferings of the blacks. Mayakovsky asks, “Why shouldn’t Negroes consider Pushkin one of their own writers? After all even now Pushkin would not be admitted into a single ‘decent’ hotel or living room in New York. After all Pushkin had kinky hair and a Negro bluishness under his nails” (194–195). Pilniak continues in the same vein: “If Pushkin were alive today and if he came to America, nobody would shake his hand, since a person whose grandfather was a Negro, according to the American idea, is not a human being!” (555). He follows this with the story of a black journalist who came to visit him at his New York hotel and was, indeed, not admitted. He thereby continues to invoke Mayakovsky’s depiction of the Pushkin who, supposedly, is not welcome at a hotel because of his skin color. By contrast, as we will see in chapter 5, intolerance to people of other races may prevent a visitor from being admitted to a Soviet hotel. But despite the anti-racist claims in Soviet texts, the individuality of African Americans is overshadowed by their authors’ political agendas. The political rivalry between Soviet internationalism and American racism leaves no place for a true psychological portrait of a black person. Paradoxically, the a priori sympathetic and positive attitude to all black people prevailing in Soviet official culture can itself be considered a kind of racism, since such an attitude ignores their individual differences.

The Native American

The American travelogue’s attitude to the Indian undergoes a transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What begins as an awe-inspired interest in the exotic inhabitants of the wilderness and a sympathy for their heroic battles against and eventual destruction by their oppressors alters over time to nostalgia for their lost glory. This nostalgia is often tarnished by disappointment and even disgust: how could a proud nation fall so low? The travelogue authors express their disillusionment by

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portraying present-day Indians as unnatural, artificial. Condemnation of their white conquerors, however, remains a constant. I have shown that Russian authors, for ideological reasons, generally fail to see African Americans as individuals. While the individuality of the Native American is also largely overlooked in the travelogues, the rationale is slightly different. It is rooted not merely in an ideological agenda but also, and to an even greater extent, in literary cliché. As mentioned before, nineteenth-century liberals traditionally linked black slaves and Indians as victims of white Americans and commonly associated them with Russian serfs, who were similarly deprived of basic human rights. At the same time, Russian literature also projected onto the Indians the image of their own domestic “savages,” the peoples of the Caucasus. Kiparsky notes that the story of Pocahontas (brought to Russia by Svinin), with its archetypical “Prisoner of the Mountains” plot, actually preceded Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s romantic poems. He also mentions that when the narrator of Tolstoy’s “Kazaki” (Cossacks) anticipates meeting a Caucasian abrek, he thinks of James Fenimore Cooper’s Pathfinder.171 Apparently, the Russian romantic exploration of Rousseau’s ideals based on Caucasian material concealed American Indians in its background. Although Russians encountered Native Americans even less frequently than African Americans, Indians were very popular with the reading public. Their early images came to Russian culture mostly through translations of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Mayne Reid, Gustave Aimard, and François Chateaubriand—the first two usually via prior French translations. Cooper was especially widely read.172 In his novels, Indians were divided into two groups: the bad and corrupt, who collaborated with the enemy French; and the allies of Englishmen, who were noble, stoic, and courageous. Allegedly, it was these noble Indians who were exterminated first, while those who sold their lands and services saved their lives and continued to exist in a shameful state. In other words, the savages enchanted European writers as long as they retained their guise of savages opposed to white intruders. In his 1836 review of A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, a real diary describing the daily life of the Indians, Pushkin expresses regret that the images of Indians ubiquitous in the translated novels of Cooper and Chateaubriand are artificially exoticized. He quotes Washington Irving’s remark that the savages in these novels “resemble real savages as little as idyllic shepherds do the real ones.”173 Pushkin valued the diary and translated portions of it from the French, adding a commentary, for his magazine Sovremennik.174 The Narrative tells the story of a white American,

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John Tanner, who had been kidnapped by Indians at the age of nine and brought up by them. After living with the tribe for thirty years, he finally returned to his white family. The contemporary American scholar Gordon Sayre calls the Narrative a story of “profound culture shock and dislocation” and argues that it provides a bridge between the “captivity narrative” and American Indian autobiography because of its hero’s double identity: Tanner first “assimilated into Indian society then repeated the feat of culture-crossing to move back into Anglo-America.”175 Pushkin must have recognized in the spirit of Tanner’s story an echo of the disappointment in Rousseau’s ideals so evident in his own poem “The Gypsies,” which is also a story of a “civilized” man who attempts to live according to the laws of a wild tribe. Pushkin points out the genuineness of Tanner’s voice and favorably contrasts his diary—a clear and simple “story of long days of hunting, semi-unconsciousness, ruthless fights”176—with the romantic stereotypes of European adventure novels. The images of Indians and the descriptions of their daily life and skirmishes that Pushkin selected for the Russian reader are tragic, brutal, and sometimes absurd. In the opening remarks to the diary he foreshadows the future fate of Native Americans, suggesting that Tanner’s book is one of the last accounts of a wild nation doomed to extinction. However, the exotic literary clichés that Pushkin criticizes in “John Tanner” were quite prevalent in the mass literature of the nineteenth century. The eminent literary critic Vissarion Belinskii apparently did not share Pushkin’s reservations. He praises Cooper for his artistic imagination177 and confesses that Cooper’s novels make him think of the “immense steppe covered with grass taller than the height of a man,—the steppe where herds of bison roam, and hide the red-skinned children of the Great Spirit, who fight fiercely with each other and with the pale-faced people who are overcoming them.”178 Lermontov shared Belinskii’s admiration for Cooper’s creative genius. Nabokov even suggests in the introduction to his English translation of A Hero of Our Time that it would be easy for American readers to confuse Lermontov’s Circassians with Cooper’s Indians.179 The Indians portrayed in V. I. Dal’s story “The Battle with Indians” are also quite similar to the cunning and treacherous characters—usually Huron Indians—that appear in Cooper. The heroic atmosphere of Dal’s story, too, is similar to the spirit of the frontier adventure novels.180 In the second half of the nineteenth century, M. L. Mikhailov’s translation of Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,”181 which provided a glimpse into Indian folklore, spawned a wave of interest in “real” Indians—Native Americans who were not merely the creations of the European literary imagination but

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the actual creators of their own culture. However, Cooper’s novels did not lose their attraction, but instead fueled a long-lasting Russian enthusiasm for the exotic Indian—particularly among Russian boys. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a special children’s edition of Cooper’s novels appeared.182 Many literary characters were inspired by children’s adventure literature about Indians, ranging from Chekhov’s Chechevitsyn (“The Boys”) to Kaverin’s Captain Tatarinov (Dva kapitana [The Two Captains]). Chekhov’s and Kaverin’s characters—the boy who plans to flee to America and the captain who discovers the Northern territories—both share the same nickname: Montigomo Hawk’s Claw. Romantic clichés even underpin the early travelogues’ real-life Indian encounters. Svinin, whose work hovers generically on the border between fiction and non-fiction, for example, tends to combine contrasting features as he constructs his image of Indians in a typically romantic manner: “The Red Indian combines the most cruel bestiality with magnanimity, greediness with generosity, sagacity and fantasy with low animality, ruthless murder with quiet obedience.”183 But the Indian depicted in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travelogues differs substantially from the literary ideal: the observed reality did not match the romantic clichés. Had travelogue writers read Pushkin’s warning against literary stereotypes more attentively, they might have been more tolerant and sympathetic to the Native Americans they met. Alas, the “real” Indian evokes only disappointment or even disdain in Russian travelers. Paradoxically, this arises as much from a lack of exoticism as from an exaggerated exoticism. When Lakier visits an Indian village at Niagara Falls—expecting exoticism à la Svinin—he is surprised and disappointed to see no savages in feathers: they have now “assimilated” and can hardly be distinguished from other Americans. But this scenario is a bit of an exception; in later texts, assimilated Indians usually do not attract much attention from travelers. Travel writers prefer, instead, to disparage those Natives, displaced and corrupted by whites, who are still marked by exotic ethnic attributes—feathers, tomahawks, etc. Bogoraz offers a characteristic portrayal of their pathetic state in “The Black Student”: “At the foot of the Rocky Mountains, we began to see Indians…scruffy, pitiful, barely covered by their wool blankets, and looking as coarse and red as saddle cloth. They smelled of vodka and cheap cigars and they stretched out their palms to beg from train passengers” (113). Travelers constantly stress contemporary Indians’ artificial, non-authentic character. Korolenko regrets that the poetry of Buffalo Bill’s Indian exploits (which he calls “a novel from Cooper or Mayne Reid”) has faded away and been “turned into a show” (sdana v balagan). He describes a vulgar Indian

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war dance with irony and disgust: “under the shed some loafer was sitting smeared with paint, positively an Indian but also positively acquainted with the underside of city life. He was striking a drum with a stick, and another disgusting character of the same kind was grimacing, crouching, dancing and scowling.” Later he reports that he had an opportunity to see “more ‘genuine’” Indians (the comparative degree here is by itself ironic): “I saw the rows of their wigwams…their cohorts, painted and tattooed for war… their chiefs with menacingly protruding eagles’ wings on their heads and behind their shoulders….Everything, certainly, was at the show.”184 By the beginning of the twentieth century, writers’ disappointment in the lack of heroic American Indians has become yet another travelogue stereotype. Now Russian writers associate Indians not with wild Circassians but with market Gypsies: Bogoraz’s narrator thinks that “the indigent gypsies” he saw at the Taganrog fair “looked cleaner and made a better appearance” (113–114). Pilniak’s later comparison between Indians and Gypsies is also quite typical: for him, both nationalities exploit their exotic stereotypes and therefore prompt disdain. Since the travelers usually had the opportunity to observe “the savages” strictly as tourist attractions, their complaints that the status of Indians has degraded to that of a show are not surprising. On the one hand, the showcase Indians whom the travelers meet contrast with existing stereotypes of wild, courageous heroes. On the other hand, those writers (Esenin and Pilniak, in particular) who suspected that the savages from children’s literature were fake, project their irritation at the artificial, second-rate literary Indian onto the actual Native Americans they see. Consequently, their texts feature grotesque parodies of literary clichés. Among the texts about American Indians written before the Russian Revolution, perhaps only Machtet’s story, ironically titled “Chernaia neblagodarnost’” (Grave Ingratitude, 1875), offers a glimpse of the tragedy of Indians being exploited as a tourist attraction. In this story, a captured Indian chief, who has been bought by a circus master and forced into show business, hurls his tomahawk and kills his “benefactor” while performing a ritual dance. He then commits suicide. Soviet-era travelers’ disappointment in Indians acquires political overtones. Their increasingly negative attitude toward Indians can be partially attributed to the fact that they do not identify them with proletarians. While African Americans are natural supporters of the militant proletarian cause, Native Americans, who are not associated with “people of labor,” have been defeated and corrupted. In their politically charged triad of white, black, and red, Soviet artists do not associate red with the “red” skin of the Native Americans, signaling that they do not consider them political “Reds.”

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Esenin in “An Iron Mirgorod” follows tradition by observing that the Indians who have survived in America are artificial, “kept by movie companies, carefully walled off from the civilized world” (152). However, he is unusual in drawing a parallel between Indians and Russian peasants, a parallel commonly reserved for African Americans. He reverses himself again, though, stating that the fate of the exterminated Indians pales by comparison with the magnificence of Manhattan. The “savages,” he claims, could never have achieved what “the white devil” did; they could never have built New York’s skyscrapers and bridges (152). Here we find a new kind of projection: Esenin implies that the October Revolution is as harsh in its methods as the colonization of America was. In order to justify the former’s inevitable cruelty, Esenin has to glorify the latter’s atrocities. Indians become the “collateral damage” in the process of American growth: they can be sacrificed in the same way that non-proletarian groups in Russia can be made to suffer for the sake of the Russian Revolution. What excuses this seeming cruelty and indifference, at least in part, is that, in this system of cross-cultural projections, Esenin, the renowned peasant poet, must have identified himself with the group he had agreed to sacrifice. “Poor Russian Hiawatha!” he exclaims, contemplating the fate of Russian peasants. Not they but we will perish by the iron hand of the new regime. As Rougle notes, Mayakovsky, while developing the same motifs as Esenin, is more politically mature in his literary treatment of other races.185 In his poem “I Witness” he, like Esenin, admires the terrible force and persistence of America’s white conquerors, but he nevertheless deplores what they have done. Mayakovsky admits that, although the current state of Indians is pathetic to such an extent that it verges on comic, the Indians still have an opportunity to raise their voices—at least, if they take advantage of the possibilities created by the October Revolution. He suggests that both African and Native Americans should turn to the example of the Soviet Union in order to resolve their racial problems. By the beginning of the third period in travelogue history, any hope that Native Americans might stage a revolutionary revolt fades. Pilniak’s attitude toward the Indians is disdainful. His travelogue passages about Indians combine antipathy to the white conquerors with disgust for their victims, who have cravenly come to terms with their condition. In his opinion, Native Americans cannot even be compared in their suffering with struggling blacks, who have managed to develop their consciousness despite the burden of slavery. He suggests that Indians, not African Americans, are naturally more suitable for slavery. He belittles Indians by his choice of tropes, describing his visits to the “zoological museums of the Indians”

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(zoomuzei indeitsev, 543). Pilniak refuses even to look at Indian dances, claiming that he can watch Gypsies do the same exact thing in Moscow. The fact that Indians sell their ethnic exoticism disgusts him. Ilf and Petrov are more merciful to Native Americans. They try to reconcile two images—the first drawn from the exotic adventure books of their childhood, and the second based on disenchanted, “real-life” observations of the present-day Indian Other. Unlike Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov are interested in the exotic. When they see a “civilized” Indian driving his wife into a nearby town to see a movie, they do not provide a full-scale portrait, but immediately latch onto typical “Native” attributes: a bright-red bandanna on the husband’s forehead and the wife’s white puttees. While visiting a Native American village, they are slightly taken aback by an Indian who is so debased that they at first take him for a woman. They are, however, pleased to report that he does not require money for his dancing and does it simply to entertain the guests: “Our redskin brothers regarded tourists without that commercial passion with which their white-faced brothers invest this business” (183). However, true to their quest for the “real” America, they do not lose hope of finding a more genuine Indian; and finally, in a remote Pueblo village, they meet a relic from the books of their childhood. Although this proud, wise Indian is dying—which is emblematic, to say the least—Ilf and Petrov can now testify that Mayne Reid, Gustav Aimard, and Cooper have not lied to them. With sympathy and interest, they record the comments of a school director who has devoted his life to the Native Americans: though the children of the tribe attend school and have an opportunity to go out into the world, only a very few choose to leave and “live in the modern world.” Ilf and Petrov perceive the village as a magnificent anachronism. Unlike Mayakovsky, who finds this exclusion from the historic process pathetic, they think that the Native Americans look very natural in this landscape and that their red skin resembles its ancient rocks. Andrei Platonov also recognizes the deep bond between Native Americans and the nature surrounding them, finding evidence for his views in the writings of Gray Owl, the Briton-turned-Ojibwe. In his 1939 essay “Novyi Russo” (The New Rousseau), devoted to Gray Owl’s life and literary work, Platonov evinces a great respect for and deep interest in Indians. He acknowledges their tragic and lonely fate without a whiff of the exoticism. In Gray Owl, Platonov recognizes an active, meaningful interconnection between people and nature, a unity of everything in the universe, which he calls the new Rousseauism and which constitutes the core of his own worldview. He quotes from Prishvin’s translation of Gray Owl: “The Indian, the animals and the mountains move to the same musical rhythm.”186

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As we have seen, travelogue writers portray Native Americans as people deprived of both their present and their future. Through no fault of their own, Native Americans have been ejected from history. By contrast with the travelers, Platonov does not objectify the Indians, attempting instead to understand them through the eyes of one of their own. He believes that Gray Owl has found a peaceful land of untouched nature, an ideal America of the imagination, and has at the same time managed to preserve a connection to people and history through his writings. Platonov, however, is the rare exception. He invokes the Russian humanist tradition of portraying the Other, of not merely seeing the Other but of understanding how the Other itself sees.187 Sadly, Soviet travelogues rarely replicate his humanist perspective.

Pleasures and Entertainments In their search for the real America, Russian writers attempted to experience genuinely American joy and mirth. Accounts of entertainments intended for the masses occupy a significant place in their travelogues: Gorky devotes one of his four American essays188 to Coney Island; Pilniak depicts Coney Island immediately after his initial arrival; and Ilf and Petrov also detail various kinds of entertainment in New York in the first chapters of One-Storied America. We might expect Soviet travelogue writers to portray Americans’ obsession with pleasure as infantile, but the travelers also stress the unnatural, forced, and tiresome character of the amusements and thus reveal the antinomic nature of America—childish, but also decrepit and morbid. The recurrent motif of entertainment paradoxically demonstrates the gap between Russian observer and observed American, only one of whom is having fun. What amuses the American seems pathetic, frightening, or boring to the Russian. “We had become saddened by New York happiness” (57), confess Ilf and Petrov. Mayakovsky, referring to the festivities on Coney Island, expresses the same attitude more radically: “I have never seen such filth elicit such rapture” (180). The travelogues tie the motif of entertainment to the theme of American boredom. Gorky’s sketch about the vulgar attractions on Coney Island, symptomatically titled “The Realm of Boredom,” creates an expressionist image of ennui, “whirling round and round in a slow agony” (23). This description of workers’ leisure time contributes to the difficulties for the interpretation of Gorky as a socialist: he shows that American working people know how to work but they do not know how to live, i.e., to fill their

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emptiness, when they are not working. Mayakovsky complains about the boredom of New York despite its vibrant appearance: “It is boring here.”189 But the most desperate victim of boredom is Ilf and Petrov’s Tonia, who suffers more than any character or narrator, being obliged to remain in America for several years. She passionately envies her girlfriends, who send her postcards from Moscow describing their Soviet entertainments—how they dance in the Theatre of People’s Art and participate in an excursion to the Crimea. Thus, the entertainment that Tonia strives for—a creative amusement shared with peers—can be found only in the Soviet Union.190 In Homo Ludens, a study of the function of play in human culture, Johan Huizinga identifies playing games—amusement—as a primary human need and one of those rare human activities not determined by any external demand, a kingdom of freedom.191 Russian travelogues demonstrate that in America entertainment has turned into its opposite: people force themselves to be amused. Instead of “free play,” amusement has become a compulsory activity. Quite typically, Ilf and Petrov note that the audiences at America’s excellent musical concerts are indifferent, as if they had come “not to hear remarkable music remarkably played, but rather to discharge a dull duty” (141). Russian travelogues offer two typical takes on American entertainment and often juxtapose them. In the first, Americans are so busy that a happy far niente is unknown to them: they are always in motion, unable to stop. In the second, Americans are like children in their striving for pleasure; their eagerness to be entertained at any cost becomes their characteristic feature. Combining both these takes yields the insight that entertainment is the American business par excellence. More and more areas of life are appropriated by this business: art, sports, and production. Inevitably, this leads to the nation’s total dependence—both spiritual and economic—on entertainment. Pilniak claims that the cinema, the radio, and even the automobile belong to the category of amusements (462). He is dismayed that, in times of crisis, entertainment becomes a major budgetary expenditure. Krokodil provides a typical example of the “economic” nature of American entertainment by reporting a new popular amusement in America—the “dance marathon.”192 The magazine alleges that a recent participant died of an embolism after eighty-seven hours of non-stop dancing. In a dialogue that follows, the audience tries to persuade the dancer to stop: “Doctors advise against dancing for more than 24 hours straight.” But the dancer brushes aside their objections: “Leave me alone! I’m being paid overtime!”193 The Krokodil satirists focus not on the social reasons for this cruel phenomenon but on the fact that Americans make

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money doing what is supposed to be an enjoyable activity, which they perceive as ironic. The travelogue writers suggest that Americans have entertainment but not culture and blame this on the American obsession with profit.194 This condemnation of money as a power that inhibits cultural growth carries over from one travelogue to the next. Gorky wishes that Americans would acquire “more and more interest in the matters of the mind and the spirit, in science and art,” and would develop “scorn for money.”195 He regrets that theaters in America are controlled by the corporations that own them and posits this as a reason why “the country which has excellent novelists has not produced a single eminent dramatist.”196 Thirty years later, Ilf and Petrov will complain that, although capitalism has appropriated the world’s best musicians, rich Americans are incapable of enjoying them: their concert halls are half-empty. Even a perfect performance, such as a concert by Kreisler, leaves the audience indifferent (141–146). The most popular entertainments, according to the Russian travelers, are those that appeal to the baser instincts. Newspaper articles provide cheap sensations. Gorky charges that “the first evidence of the absence of culture in the American is the interest he takes in stories and spectacles of cruelty.” He is embarrassed by the cool, calm tone of the attentive observer in articles about murders and other atrocities. Pilniak interprets the slapstick jokes in Sunday newspapers as evidence of an underdeveloped American sense of humor (468–469). Even the most morbid phenomena, like capital punishment or Chicago’s slaughterhouses, are turned into attractions. Korolenko’s narrator in “Factory of Death” is shocked when he sees a little girl enjoying the spectacle of the slaughterhouse. The girl watches the precise mechanics of death with an animalistic awe. The major attractions for Americans are grand spectacles, illusions— “idiotic wonders,” as Ilf and Petrov disparagingly call them (38). The attraction of Americans to illusion reflects the unreal, theatrical nature of the New World, which is realized neither by Americans themselves, nor by many people in Europe or even in Russia, who are still under the spell of the myth of America. The task of the Russian narrator is to dispel this illusion and, additionally, to reveal the illusions that enchant and enchain Americans themselves. Gorky insists that a man at Coney Island, overtaken by a grand illusion, loses self-awareness and behaves like a drunkard. He has to make a great effort “to find himself in this crowd, crushed by wonder in which there is no delight or joy” (21).197 However, Gorky’s vehement condemnation of illusion seems only partially sincere; a close reading of “The Realm of Boredom” uncovers certain inconsistencies in his rhetoric.198

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It reveals that what he really resents is the poor quality of the illusion rather than the fact of illusion itself. He laments that the electric lights lay bare “the harsh, boring scam” of the place. Such criticism of the phantom nature of entertainment says more about the observer’s perspective than about the entertainment itself. It is only natural that those who are inside a game accept it as a temporal reality; for them it is not an illusion, it is not false. But the Russian traveler does not enter into the world of the game, even if he attends the same places of entertainment as Americans. He prefers to remain an external observer in an alien world. On the level of literary technique, the observer’s refusal or inability to accept the conventions of the game is expressed through estrangement.199 While portraying erotic shows, for example, Soviet writers do not depict the women as erotic objects but objectify them nonetheless: the dancers merely serve as material for social commentary. The observers do not distinguish between them, referring to them in the plural. In Mayakovsky: “There are also hungry women here, constantly being replaced, hired for pennies, and stuffed into boxes for demonstrations of painless piercing by swords” (180). In Ilf and Petrov: “The faces of some of the dancers were stupid, others were pathetic, still others were cruel, but all were equally weary” (57). The word “cruel” strikes us as unexpected when applied to “weary” striptease dancers; apparently, the narrators project their own sense of guilt for attending a vulgar, abusive spectacle onto the objects of the abuse. With merciless irony, Ilf and Petrov depict the scene in the burlesque as a selfcontradicting combination of savage festival and mechanical assembly line: “It is pornography mechanized to such an extent that it acquires a kind of industrial and factory character” (39). This combination paradoxically represents America as an ultra-modern, archaic society. These descriptions estrange the entertainments and their target audiences equally. Gorky’s entertaining characters, for example, instead of smiling, “stretch the skin” on their cheeks.200 Appropriating the Gogolian grotesque, Russian writers demonstrate that the inhuman nature of the entertainments infects the audience. The American spectator, unable to maintain a critical distance on the show, appears as an animal or an automaton. Pilniak depicts an amusement show as a low, animalistic activity, metaphorically turning the audience into an beast: it “grunts, guffaws, shrieks, it wiggles and stamps its feet—indulges itself!” (466). In Ilf and Petrov’s portrayal of slot machine players, automatism characterizes both the entertainments and the players: “A clicking noise comes out of the large amusement stores. Here stand scores of pinball tables of all kinds….Americans spend hours in such lonely entertainments, in a concentrated, indifferent manner, without

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anger and without exultation” (36–37). This picture of unnatural, solitary play is especially morbid since the players themselves appear to be quite satisfied with their automatic existence. From all these examples we can see that American entertainments either take the form of mass entertainment, which turns groups of people into herds of animals, or solitary amusements, which demonstrate the isolation of each individual. None of these are the collective, joy-inspiring Soviet entertainments that Ilf and Petrov’s Tonia dreams of.

Coney Island

A typical embodiment of American illusion is the amusement park, most particularly Coney Island. For Gorky, Mayakovsky, and Pilniak, Coney Island represents the epitome of hypocrisy and bad taste, poshlost’. Mayakovsky ironically comments that for New Yorkers, the whole of life must seem just like this “idiotic carnival” (180). Gorky focuses more on the phenomenon’s aesthetic side, while Mayakovsky and especially Pilniak turn to class analysis, stressing the specifics of Coney Island as a cheap place for the lower classes. The writers portray Coney Island as an aggressive, superfluous mass action, torturing all the human senses. In order to enhance the effect of general confusion, they describe sensations that are experienced through one sense in terms of another: for example, they might convey the visual through the acoustic or the tactile. Gorky emphasizes the chaos of the amusement park: “They all [attractions] move, ablaze, and beckon to the people with the soundless shout of their cold lights.”201 Pilniak creates a similar synesthetic image: “These spectacles howl, whistle, rattle….These spectacles burn with spotlights, rockets, fireworks, all kinds of electric colors and pulsations” (463). From his very first lines, Gorky accentuates the illusionary character of Coney Island, juxtaposing its bi-dimensionality: viewed from a distance it looks like a town out of a fairy tale, but close up, it turns out to be the site of repulsive, inhumane amusements. Mayakovsky and Pilniak stress that the whole enterprise of Coney Island is literally based on cheating. Mayakovsky conveys this idea through an episode from his personal experience: at Coney Island, his narrator feels obliged to try at least one amusement, and chooses to throw rings. As a result, he is tricked by a concessionaire, who beguiles him into giving up all his money. Pilniak unfolds a broad critical panorama of the park, providing multiple examples of people being cheated and

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humiliated. For example, a labyrinth turns out to be a trap for the visitors: “Under the legs of those who have just left the labyrinth the compressed air starts to blow. Women’s skirts fly up, revealing what should be and should not be revealed” (466). Those who come to the park in order to be amused do not realize that they will be turned into entertainment themselves, made fun of, “blown up” (naduty). Through the pun podduvat’ / naduvat’ (in Russian, naduvat’ means “cheat”), Pilniak draws a parallel between cheating the workers at Coney Island, who pay money for their own humiliation, and the general deception of the working class by the capitalist system. The word podduvat’ occurs for the first time in the Coney Island episode, but it later becomes one of Pilniak’s recurrent motifs. While Gorky suggests that the amusement park represents America as “The Realm of Boredom” and even as Hell, Pilniak bases his generalization on social relations: Coney Island is a model for an entire country where workers are tricked and humiliated. Mayakovsky, as might be expected, stresses that amusements in America are subject to a social hierarchy: Coney Island and the cinema are thrown to the poor; theaters, concerts, and burlesque (an odd threesome indeed!) are intended for the rich. According to Mayakovsky, the bourgeoisie’s alleged disdain for the cinema is as antiquated as it is hypocritical. On the one hand, he interprets the fact that cinema is regarded as an entertainment for the plebs as proof that America does not live up to its own innovations, while, on the other hand, he maintains that the hierarchy is a pretense: it exists only nominally, for the sake of prestige. In reality, upper-class people do not have especially refined tastes and secretly go to the cinema.

The Cinema

The cinema is America’s ultimate illusion and thus functions as an epitome of the entire country.202 The writers’ rhetorical task in dealing with the cinema is a familiar one: to show the difference between American mass production—generally degraded, although technically masterful—and its progressive Russian equivalent. The latter is a consistent matter of pride: thus, after their arrival in New York, Ilf and Petrov take great satisfaction in noting that the latest Russian film, The New Gulliver (1935), is showing on Broadway screens. Soviet travelers denounce American cinema by criticizing both the films themselves and Hollywood as a place of production. Pilniak’s and Ilf and Petrov’s analyses of film genres are similar: Pilniak maintains that 50 percent of production is dedicated to action films with cowboys and robbers, while

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hypocritical moralistic films constitute the other 50 percent. Ilf and Petrov analyze four major types of films—musical comedies, historical dramas, gangster films, and opera films, claiming that most Hollywood productions fit into these patterns. But Ilf and Petrov develop more diverse strategies for debunking American cinematic production than does Pilniak. Pilniak judges the cinema from the point of view of his own working experience in Hollywood and relies on his authority as an insider, albeit a temporary one. Ilf and Petrov also refer to their own experience, but they focus on others’ perceptions of American cinema and create a system of prisms. In “Tonia” they construct a naïve view of American cinema: Tonia is at first enchanted by the films she sees in Washington, D.C., but soon finds them repetitive, and finally realizes that all of them are alike. In One-Storied America, Ilf and Petrov also allude to the opinion of the progressive American public, which is ashamed of its cinematographic production (“The cultured American does not recognize his native motion pictures as an art. More than that, he will tell you that the American motion picture is a moral epidemic” [294]). This opinion is shared by all sensible people working in Hollywood (“They curse their work, be they scenarists, directors, actors, or mere technicians” [300]). All travelers emphasize the contrast between mediocre American film content and advanced techniques of production and montage. Mayakovsky exclaims: “Take our ‘movies’ (films) and yours. We still have poor technique and dim lighting. Here—you have the last word in technology with limitless light; but everything of ours is saturated with the demolition of the old, everything is striving for the new—while here there is a rotten ‘moral,’ sentimental daubery, as if from a distant province, the Middle Ages.”203 Similarly, Ilf and Petrov complain: “There is nothing for you to do but to go to movie-pictures, to watch a beautifully photographed…motion picture, the contents of which befog your senses with its foolishness” (100). But Soviet travelers realize that since film’s task is to distract the audience from the real questions of life, and since money is paid for this entertainment, American cinema simply cannot be different from what it is. They blame American film for the same reason that Gorky blamed American theater: since the corporations own studios, art has to be profitable and therefore lacks depth. The majority of talented people in Hollywood are merely the “serfs” of the studio owners who, in turn, are ignorant moneybags plotting against the audience and befogging their heads. Ilf and Petrov exempt the films of the real masters of cinema like Milestone, Vidor, Mamoulian, Disney, and Chaplin from this criticism but stress that the proportion of such films is very small in relation to overall film production in America.

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The travelogue writers often claim that Hollywood is just as emblematic of America as is New York. For Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov, Hollywood reflects the mediocrity that characterizes the films produced there. Ilf and Petrov debunk the American myth of Hollywood—the dream of “thousands of girls from every end of the terrestrial globe”—disparaging it as one of the most boring places in America. They poke fun at it, insisting that a wide yawn can last a minute here. But the most paradoxical reason for which the writers condemn Hollywood is its inherently artificial nature. Pilniak, as well as Ilf and Petrov, comment on the fantastic mixture of different geographical sites and historical eras. For Ilf and Petrov, Hollywood is frightening because it is merely a collection of simulacra: every person they see on the street reminds them of somebody—and eventually they realize that everyone is a double of someone they have seen on the screen in multiple, indistinguishable films. They even suspect the sun in Hollywood of being fake—simply one more piece of unnatural cinematic lighting. Pilniak goes so far as to criticize the fact that the whole process of film production in the studios is merely a phantom. He disapprovingly notes that a film whose action is set in Paris can be shot right on the studio lot with cardboard props and backdrops. Although he expects cinema to be an illusion, he praises authentic Russian cinema where the actors have to master in real life the skills they demonstrate on screen. With verbose pathos he tells a story about a Russian actress who has been preparing to play the role of a Tajik Komsomol member: “According to the plot, she had to gallop among the rocks and above the abysses with a child in her arms. She had learned. She had fallen from the horse several times” (520). In contrast, Pilniak observes that in American cinema all the tricks are fake:204 “I did see a famous star riding behind the studio fence. Her horse was not a horse but an electric toy the size of a horse” (520). He suspects that the Soviet actress who had learned to ride in Pamir would have been fired in Hollywood for losing weight during her training. Ilf and Petrov compare American cinema to a monkey they saw in a Hollywood pet shop. The affection the animal showed for its offspring seemed disgusting to them. It closely resembled a human response and, thus, could be interpreted as a caricature of human parental love. They conclude that, in much the same way, an American motion picture looks like real art, “yet at the same time it is unendurably disgusting” (295). This satirical technique of drawing parallels between American life and animal existence would become popular in the Soviet propagandistic press, but even as early as Gorky’s pre-revolutionary “The Realm of Boredom” we already find the image of the monkey caressing and protecting its child. Gorky uses it, of course, to denounce Americans, but in his case the tableau shows that the

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animal is more human than the people observing it. Ilf and Petrov reuse Gorky’s example, but for them, as for Pilniak, the criterion of the genuine, the real, is not even life itself, but good—presumably Soviet—art. America, by contrast, is implied to be a shadowy copy of her own cinema. As Pilniak claims, “There are many cinema plots in America!” (538). In many respects, Soviet travelers treat American cinema like American technology—they hope to borrow its know-how and create new meaningful content with its help. Symptomatically, Pilniak, with his distrust of technology, has more reservations than the others about the value of the American production process. Contrastingly, Ilf and Petrov are sufficiently impressed by Hollywood’s technical means that they write a letter to Stalin justifying the necessity of building a Soviet film studio on the Black Sea that would be modeled after Hollywood.205

Sports

The travelers’ attitude toward American sports depends on whether they consider athletic activities an illusion or not. Mayakovsky’s word choice is symptomatic in this respect: “In general, I do not believe in American athletics” (178). As long as a particular sport occurs in the context of a real competition, it is less criticized in the travelogues, but the writers are quite sensitive to cases in which sports, like most other entertainments, turn into a commercial enterprise. Then, they portray sports as a pathetic show, yet another example of cheating. Mayakovsky focuses on the spectators rather than on the spectacle and suggests that Americans consume sports instead of engaging in them. Pilniak uses the word “sports” in the sense of “competition” and asserts that “everything in America is sports,” not just boxing, tennis, or golf. Competition can also revolve around automobiles or clothing. Thus, he identifies American sports with consumerism and capitalism: “Sports, high scores and Okay are equivalents” (482). Ilf and Petrov attempt to be objective, offering accounts of different kinds of sporting events but at the same time making it clear they do not approve of extreme competition. In their view, “an automobile race is an empty spectacle, dreary and morbid” (35), since it invokes dark animal instincts in the audience (only a catastrophe would have cheered the spectators up). They are ambiguous regarding boxing, finding it impressive, albeit fierce. They do, however, pay tribute to it as a real sport. But they despise American wrestling. For them wrestling, a fight with no discernable rules, is not only vulgar, but most importantly, “it is the silliest kind of sham,” a

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mere pretense of a real fight. Wrestling evokes a vision of the underworld: the fighters “snort, spit, scream, and in general carry on in a disgusting and shameless manner—like sinners in hell” (63). Here again, we recognize a gap between Russian and American observers: Ilf and Petrov are surprised that Americans take a genuine interest in such a spectacle and even, “like children, believe this naïve deception and are frantic with delight” (63).

Entertainment and Identity

In the sphere of amusement, only student sporting events and genuine folk competitions win praise. When Ilf and Petrov provide a detailed account of a student football match in San Francisco, they even go so far as to take sides. The pure passions inspired by this sporting event make them identify, albeit briefly, with American students: “Our grandstand was disgraced” (271), they report at the end of the match. They also regard the rodeo as genuine and uncorrupted and, accordingly, spare it their harshest satire. They describe it with enthusiasm and mild humor, admiring the artistry of cowboys who manage to lasso a calf and “transform it into a well-tied, albeit desperately bellowing, bundle” (64). Pilniak, however, does not believe in the rodeo’s authenticity, pointing out that the cowboys’ theatrical costumes, along with their Spanish saddles, are mass-produced and store-bought. He concludes that the rodeo is “one half theater” (541) and thus cannot even be compared with Central Asian equestrian competitions. The travelers usually treat African American entertainment with respect because they see no border between the artistic entertainment of black people and their daily life—art is in the black nature. Pilniak writes about a night spent listening to folksongs in an African American village in the Southern states and admits that he has never heard anything better (555). Ilf and Petrov admire the grace of a black Charleston girl who dances while walking, oblivious to the gaze of observers, and find that her dance is rhythmic and musical (361). Commendably, Ilf and Petrov not only estrange and judge American entertainments but also report ironically on stereotypical Russian ideas about them. In “Tonia,” Soviet engineers vainly attempt to experience “authentic American” pleasures, which they know to “be corrupt” (razlagat’sia). But their attempts to taste the forbidden fruit fail comically, and all they discover in place of the expected vice is boring routine. Although their more experienced guide (also a Russian) promises that in Harlem the atmosphere of vice is ubiquitous, they meet only respectable families on the

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streets. Eventually, they find a striptease bar. As in their autobiographical travelogue, Ilf and Petrov here employ an estranging language to describe their characters’ experience: they leave the bar embarrassed but with the sense of a duty fulfilled.206 Nothing repulses and embarrasses the Russian travelers as strongly as the recognition of their own negative features in the Other. Thus, they represent drinking, which is considered a stereotypical Russian activity both by Russians themselves and by other nations, as a disgusting orgy when it takes place in America. Pilniak raises drinking to a Rabelaisian level while describing the night preceding his disembarkation from the steamship in New York:207 “The scope is indeed enormous. They drink hideously, not only in the cabins, but on all the staircases and decks, sometimes crawling under the lifeboats for a more poetic experience. They drink without any discrimination by gender or age. This American all-steamship scale of drinking can be compared with Russian drinking only as a joke” (447). Curiously, Pilniak chooses drinking as an excuse to underscore the new Soviet citizen’s moral superiority: “From the point of view of the Soviet citizen and passenger…all this, even apart from the scale, seems beastly” (447). Thus, the motif of joy and mirth widens the gap between one’s own and the alien. In the American text, grief and suffering are a universal phenomenon. The travelers naturally sympathize with the downtrodden condition of the homeless, the unemployed and the impoverished whom they encounter— although this sympathy simultaneously furthers their own ideological agenda. But it is much harder to share the Other’s joy. Countering Tolstoy’s claim that it is unhappiness that distinguishes one group of people from another (“All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”), the travelers identify its obverse, happiness, as the chief discriminator between Russia and America. The American Paradise, as observed from the outside and described in travelogue literature, is hellish.

Alien Food In Russian fairy tales, when the traveling hero comes to the chicken-legged hut of Baba Yaga, she threatens to eat him. But the hero’s request—paradoxical at first glance—that she feed him instead not only saves his life but turns the grim Baba Yaga into his ally. As Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale and Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces have both shown, this archetypical folktale initiation plot represents the hero’s journey to the land of the ancestors, the realm of the dead. By accepting food from Baba

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Yaga, the guardian of the Other World, the hero participates in that world, even if only temporarily. By eating the food of the dead, he becomes one of them. Similarly, the Russian characters in American travelogues, whether autobiographical or not, must partake of the food of the Other World in order to remain in it. They cannot get used to what they eat and invariably represent the alien American food as tasteless and odorless, i.e., as a diet fit for the dead. This culinary stereotype of America is remarkably persistent.208 As a rule, alien American food fails to satiate the Russian.209 Writers both record their own impressions of unusual food and estrange Americans who are eating. Even when the latter indulge in the luxurious gastronomy of the wealthy, eating is not a free and joyful nourishing of the body but rather a duty or a ritual, similar to entertainment.210 For Russians, American cuisine can provide no satisfactory alimentation owing to its Otherness. The motif of non-nourishing American food is ubiquitous, appearing not only in literary travelogues but also in documents such as letters and diaries. Gorky’s companion Andreeva, for example, writes a letter informing her correspondent that, despite the abundant menu, one leaves an American table surprisingly still hungry: “Do you know the menu of an American dinner? 1) sweet orange and banana salad, 2) fried fish, or cutlets, or roast beef; once in a while turkey or lamb, 3) salad made of tomato, beets, onions and lettuce,211 4) creams, ice cream, muffins with jelly, and pies. It seems that there is a lot of everything but you get up from the table and think: it would be nice to eat.”212 She and Gorky dream of simple, traditional Russian cuisine—rye bread, cabbage soup (shchi), dumplings (pel’meni)—and believe that it would nourish them better than “salads and pies.” The Soviet engineers who studied at American factories—hardly refined gourmets—particularly complain about the excess of various relishes and root vegetables in their meals.213 Like many Russian travelers before them, Ilf and Petrov’s narrators realize that food in America is yet another illusion. The tortures that they endure in America are similar to those of Tantalus: they can gaze at viands but are unable to enjoy them. Ilf and Petrov even title their chapter introducing American cuisine “Appetite departs with eating,” in an ironic reversal of the French saying “Appetite comes with eating.” Tasty-looking dishes that whet the appetite actually banish it when sampled. The traveling duo acknowledge that American food is serviceable but complain that it cannot provide spiritual nourishment. Ilf and Petrov represent artificial edibles as the simulacra of natural, “real” food, employing passive participles to emphasize that American meals are processed, acted upon. They even suggest that these meals have passed through more than one life cycle: “We

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bought already prepackaged food—and already eaten cheese (at least, it looked that way)” (328–329). Ilf and Petrov amplify the “passivity” of the dishes, metaphorically implying that they should have been animated. For them, café fare seems dull and even lacks freedom: “Despite the shining glass and metal, the sausages and cutlets deprived of liberty somehow produce a strange impression. One pities them, like cats at a show” (28). Thus, food lacks not only the freshness but also the vitality that is presumably intrinsic to Soviet cuisine. Even the abundant ethnic alternatives to standard American “fast food” fail to please the travelers. Pilniak represents the variety of exotic restaurants as another American deficiency: having no culinary culture of its own, the country has to borrow it from other nations. He thus locates the essence of American diversity in its variety of national foods and liquors. But Ilf and Petrov’s narrators admit that you need to develop a taste for these foods. With self-irony, they tell the story of their visit to a Mexican restaurant, where their first taste of the spicy food sets their mouths on fire: “It is simply impossible to sit down to such a dinner without wearing a fireman’s helmet” (177). Humiliated, they return to a simple drugstore with its “centralized, standardized, and numbered food” (177). Food-related imagery in Korolenko’s and Gorky’s sketches provides direct associations with folk archetypes. In “The Factory of Death,” Korolenko likens the workers’ naked bodies to the bodies of the pigs they kill, discreetly suggesting a reciprocal comparison and adding a tinge of cannibalism to the process. Gorky borrows Korolenko’s motif of cannibalism and renders it more concretely and sensuously. In “City of the Yellow Devil,” man is the food devoured by that giant man-eating monster, New York, but in “Mob,” he turns into a cannibal himself. A popular Soviet cliché adopts the biblical principle that “he who does not work shall not eat.” Soviet travelers point to the injustice of America’s inverted food distribution system and link it to social antagonism.214 Naturally, they discover unjust and blatant disparities between the gluttony of America’s rich and the starvation of her poor. Observing rich passersby, Gorky’s hungry mob enviously imagines the luxurious, delicious meals they must regularly devour to be so good-looking. Mayakovsky creates graphic, propagandistic binary oppositions in his verse: “The white eats a ripe pineapple, the black—a rotten one, spoiled with mildew” (“Black and White”).215 However, some American travelogues provide an unusual take on the stereotypical connection between wealth and gluttony. In a fictional interview with an American millionaire, “One of the Kings of the Republic,” Gorky’s narrator ironically confesses that he (like the mob in the eponymous

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pamphlet) had expected that rich people would differ significantly from ordinary mortals. He imagined that a millionaire “must have at least three stomachs and about a hundred and fifty teeth,” and that he must eat “all day long without pause from six o’clock in the morning until midnight; that he [must] consume the most expensive foods: geese, turkeys, suckling pigs, radishes with butter, puddings, cakes and all sorts of other delicacies” (46).216 To the narrator’s great surprise, however, his vis-à-vis turns out to be an ascetic, lean old man who takes two moderate meals a day. He does not eat beef; his breakfast consists of a slice of orange, an egg, and a small cup of tea; and his dinner is only slightly more lavish.217 The contrast between the Rabelaisian image in the narrator’s imagination and the actual portrait of the millionaire is striking. It turns out that the rich are unable to appreciate the joy of their wealth. Hence, the American narrative often shows them as ascetic and impotent, in an emphatically anti-carnivalesque manner. In literary food studies, food imagery is traditionally connected with sex.218 Ronald Leblanc notes that, in classical Russian literature, food can either serve as a substitute for sex (Gogol) or combine with it in a sensual fusion (Tolstoy).219 Travelogue authors imply that in America, by contrast, neither food nor sex can be enjoyed. While sexual matters could not, of course, be discussed in the texts directly, we have, especially in Mayakovsky’s texts, a general picture of a national “impotence,” a deficiency that enables the poet’s lyrical hero to manifest his own potency, to “kiss—unlawfully—above the Hudson your long-legged wives” (“Vyzov” [Challenge]). In his prose sketches, Mayakovsky develops an elaborate taxonomy of eateries that the average American can afford. These establishments attract, depending on weekly income, “fifteen-dollar” people all the way up to “hundred-dollar” clientele. Although at first Mayakovsky claims that workers eat badly, in the next moment he surprises us with a paradox: those who are richer eat worse, since even in expensive restaurants food comes from cans. By contrast, those who are poorer eat better because they cook and eat at home. This last comment, as he notes, applies not to starving people but only to the marginally poor. Thus, even in America, an exotic land where good and bad have changed places, social hierarchies may be overturned. Justice occasionally prevails, albeit in a limited and convoluted way. Ilf and Petrov also provide a hierarchy of eating places, but they rank them according to their degree of automatization: chain restaurants, cafeterias, and automats. Of course, there is a correlation between their classification and Mayakovsky’s: the more automated the service, the cheaper and more affordable the place. Ilf and Petrov ironically emphasize the efficiency of the

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food-dispensing process, describing automats as instruments for “pushing food into American stomachs” (28). In “Tonia,” the narrators mention that it is atypical for Americans to spend time leisurely chatting in cafes; they perceive the American as the opposite of a decadent French gourmet. Strangely, however, the writers indicate that the American is even less a role model for the proper Soviet citizen than the Frenchman. The traveling duo defamiliarizes the process of service in an American cafeteria: “To the left of the entrance was the cashier’s booth. On the right was a metal stand with a small slot across the top as in a coin bank. From the opening emerged the end of a blue pasteboard stub. Those who entered tugged at this end. We also tugged. The melodic clang of a bell resounded. One stub was in our hand, and through the slot of the coin bank another blue stub popped out” (26–27). When the writers observed these automated food dispensers, they had not yet seen Chaplin’s Modern Times, with its famous Feeding Machine sequence. Toward the very end of their trip, however, they had the opportunity to see it, and they must have had its Feeding Machine in mind when, after their return, they described American cafeterias. For Ilf and Petrov, efficiency in food preparation and consumption constituted the ultimate dehumanization. For the travelogue writers, the mechanization of food consumption is a logical outcome of the conveyer-like character of food production and transportation. Pilniak pictures milking as an entirely automated action, a gigantic carousel. Untouched by human hands, facilitated only by machines, the milk goes “directly from the cow’s udder to the recipient’s mouth” (480)—hardly an appetizing image. He goes on to censure America’s food industry, claiming that inhuman, automatized farms coexist alongside primitive, ramshackle ones, which are “no cleaner than in Riazan” (480). Ilf and Petrov have no doubts regarding the global scale of the American food industry, describing it in epic phrases that alarmingly echo Babichev, the mighty boss of the food industry in Olesha’s Zavist’ (Envy). However, they blame the globalization of the American economy for the disappointing tastelessness of American products. “Somewhere in Chicago, in the slaughterhouses, they kill cattle and transport the meat throughout the country in frozen form. From somewhere in California they ship frozen chickens, and green tomatoes which are supposed to ripen in transit” (30). It is more profitable for certain regions to specialize in and transport particular goods than to grow a variety of products on small farms near big cities, even if taste disappears in the process. Curiously, when the travelers praise the productivity of Henry Ford’s automobile factories, they admire this very same principle of specialization.220 Apparently, they do not value efficiency

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in all production spheres equally and do not think that the Soviet food industry can gain from American experience. Unable to enjoy exotic foods and doomed to accept the dull products of standard American cuisine, Ilf and Petrov find consolation only in reading Mikoian’s speech about the Soviet food industry.221 Mayakovsky’s play Misteria-Buff, a symbolic travelogue in the form of a play, does not belong to the corpus of American texts yet it provides an accurate paradigm of their food-related motifs. When Mayakovsky’s starving working people (the “Unclean”) arrive in Hell, they find out that they are not the only hungry ones—the devils perceive them as food and attempt to eat them. But in Heaven, where the Unclean find themselves afterwards, they are also unable to satiate their hunger since the food there is artificial, illusionary. Only in their own world, cleansed and transformed by the Revolution, are they able to find sustenance. America, unable to provide “real” nourishment, combines the features of Mayakovsky’s Hell and Paradise: it either metaphorically devours people (Gorky’s “City of the Yellow Devil”) or offers illusionary, tasteless meals (Mayakovsky, Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov). The real provider of genuine food appears only in the travelers’ dreams: it is, of course, their distant homeland.

The Vice of Smoking—Pipe vs. Cigar In “Pravo kurit’” (The Right to Smoke), a study of the social history of smoking, Konstantin Bogdanov observes that Russia acquired tobacco secondhand, from Asia and Europe, and thus perceived it primarily as a foreign import associated with foreigners in general.222 However, in the nineteenthand twentieth-century Russian mind, America enjoyed the ambiguous fame of being the initial source of the sin of smoking. The idea of the New World corrupting the old one223—with tobacco as one of the corruptions—appears in the mid-1850s224 and coexists with its opposite, the view that America’s discovery by Europeans ruined its idyllic state of innocence. In Bulgarin’s mock pseudo-letter, written on behalf of government secretary Petushkov to Christopher Columbus, the narrator finds that the discovery of America has brought no benefit to Russia except chocolate, smoking, and some other unnecessary luxuries.225 Written about a century and a half later, the “Song of the Harm of Smoking” from the animated film Treasure Island takes up the theme from a different perspective and attempts to dissuade its audience from blaming Columbus, or by implication America, for the habit of smoking, since smoking is a personal choice. The song, utilizing the clichés

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of official state discourse (“on a world-wide scale”; “the Ministry of Public Health warns”226) ironically deconstructs the enduring official stereotype of America as a source and occasion of sin. Columbus discovered America— What a great sailor he was! But besides, he taught The whole world to smoke tobacco. The bad habit started with the pipe Smoked by the fire with an Indian Chief,— And spread on a world-wide scale. The Ministry of Public Health warns: Smoking is toxic. The Ministry of Public Health warns, The Ministry of Public Health warns, And Columbus is not guilty!

America and Americans are strongly associated in Russian literature with both smoking and tobacco products.227 Mandelstam’s poem “The American Girl” brings together tobacco smoke and industrial smoke as symbols of America through its metaphor of chimneys’ smoked lips. The rhyme “truby—guby” (chimneys—lips) underscores the metaphor: Factory whistles sing, in America, And red skyscraper chimneys Surrender their smoked lips To cold clouds. (1913) (Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973], 62) V Amerike gudki poiut, I krasnykh neboskrebov truby Kholodnym tucham otdaiut Svoi prokopchennye guby. (Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov, vol. 1 [Moscow: Terra, 1991]: 32)

Mandelstam combines factory chimneys and—quite unusually—skyscrapers into a single image epitomizing urban America. American travelogue authors lavish particular attention on tobacco-related

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imagery.228 Among the characteristic images of New York, Esenin particularly mentions an advertisement featuring a smoking “electric gent” on Broadway “exhaling an electric line of smoke that flows into various rings” (153). A sarcastic metaphor of America as a smoker appears in the very last sentence of “An Iron Mirgorod,” one of the text’s most significant sections. Here, Esenin suggests that American civilization reuses Europe’s experience even as it manages to outrun it: “Europe smokes and throws away the butts; America picks up the butts, but out of them something magnificent is growing” (155). Mayakovsky reuses Esenin’s metaphor of reused cigarette butts by elaborating a picaresque story of a man heading to America with two vagabonds. The man manages to board a ship but, upon arrival, discovers that he is in England. In order to earn a living and pay for tickets to America, the three gather cigarette butts on the street to make new cigarettes, which they successfully sell: “In a few months the tobacco trade expanded beyond the limits of cigarette-butt cigarettes, the horizon expanded to comprehend the location of America” (166). Thus, Mayakovsky’s story materializes Esenin’s metaphor, and the butts that “Europe throws away” become a means of getting to America. The whole episode parodies the American entrepreneurial spirit possessed by those who wish to make it to America. In Bogoraz’s novella Avdotia and Rivka, a more traditional story of American immigration, the Jewish heroine, Rivka, considers cigar production a worthy American occupation. Unlike her Russian counterpart, Avdotia, who is ready to be a servant, Rivka dreams of the independent life that she has never had at home and hopes that a cigar factory will offer her the opportunity to achieve it. While Mayakovsky’s anecdote associates cigar production with cheating and recycling leftovers, Bogoraz makes it a respectable means of gaining independence. Ilf and Petrov consider smoking (together with drinking) to be the primary occupation of the inhabitants of small undistinguishable American towns where time has stopped. Smoking is one of the major means of “passing eternity”; it represents the epitome of a meaningless, motionless life. When the travelers arrive in Benson, a small Southern town, they wonder what people do there in order not to go mad. A resident answers: “You know what they do—they smoke Chesterfields, they drink Coca-Cola, they sit in the drugstore” (329). Here, perhaps unconsciously, Ilf and Petrov invoke a traditional image from the seventeenth century, the golden age of Dutch painting. Pipes and smoking function as an epitome of vanity, a reminder of time passing and vanishing like smoke. As Bogdanov notes, smoking in Russian culture is a socially conditioned topic, and images of smokers and smoking often help to differentiate between svoi and chuzhoi.229 Smokable items—pipes, cigarettes, cigars—

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indicate the smoker’s social status; they bear ideological significance and are, accordingly, emotionally charged. The pipe is generally a positive image, attributed to a literary Englishman or a German rather than to an American.230 A pipe in its American variant is, above all, a peace pipe. It is specifically Native American rather than American in the more generalized sense, and it can even function as an axis of opposition between Indians and Americans. In the nineteenth century, the peace pipe was an indispensable attribute of Russian literary Indians, a romantic stereotype popular among the readers of John Fenimore Cooper’s adventure novels, and it gained renewed popularity with the publication of excerpts from Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.” This iconic image became a trademark of the America young Russian readers craved. Ivan Shmelev, for example, refers to his encounter as a boy with the young Chekhov: Shmelev and his friends were playing Indians, and Chekhov joined the game, suggesting that his “redskin brothers” “smoke a peace pipe together.”231 Chekhov scholars suggest that this episode may have influenced his story “The Boys,”232 and although the peace pipe does not explicitly appear in “The Boys” it definitely belongs to the set of exotic American images—mosquitoes, pirates, Indians—that inspire the characters’ escape. Unlike the majority of smoking images, the peace pipe carries positive connotations even in Soviet children’s literature. It acquires political, antiracist overtones, since Soviet writers associate it with the extermination of Indians by their white oppressors. In a poem by Agnia Barto, a curious shift occurs: smoking the peace pipe is a Soviet game unknown to American children. When an American boy, a tourist “playing Indians” with Russian Young Pioneers, behaves violently, oppressing the “Indians,” the Pioneers teach him to smoke a peace pipe. He promises to take this game with him to the United States and teach everyone to play it.233 Non-Native-American pipe smokers are workers or, as we will see in Marshak’s poem “Mister Twister,” African Americans. By contrast, cigars and, to a lesser extent, cigarettes are tied more closely with a generalized image of America and often function as emblems of Americanism. If the cigarette is usually portrayed either neutrally or with mild irony, as a general attribute of the lower classes, the cigar is the American tobacco product par excellence. At the beginning of One-Storied America, Ilf and Petrov offer a detailed description of a New York shop’s cigars and cigarettes, including the color and price of different brands. On the one hand, the travelers pay a great deal of attention to the cigars since they are exotic to them, even if unexceptional to Americans. On the other hand, the assortment of cigars, with its hierarchy of prices, exemplifies financial inequality and represents

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a metaphorical social grid, similar to the distribution of classes aboard a steamship or Mayakovsky’s hierarchy of restaurants. In Ilf and Petrov’s story “Tonia,” two of the three young Soviet workers who have come to study at a factory become “Americanized” by the end of their stay: one of them has grown a mustache, another is smoking a cigar. However, we later discover that the smoker’s “Americanism” is just pretense, since he has never been able to finish a cigar. After all, in Soviet literature a Soviet worker who has come to America in pursuit of technical expertise is not supposed to become too American. In this episode, the cigar, since it is smoked by a Soviet citizen, appears in a mildly ironic context. But it turns up much more frequently in the American text as the quintessential mark of the American capitalist. Visual arts—posters, cartoons, as well as Soviet animated propaganda—also replicated the image of the typical American capitalist as wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. A particularly potent symbolic image of American capitalism—Uncle Sam—also occasionally smokes a cigar. Although the 1963 animated propaganda film Aktsionery (Shareholders; directed by Roman Davydov for Soiuzmul’tfil’m) was made after the period under discussion, it too repeats established clichés. The action of Shareholders takes place in America, and thus almost all its characters smoke. The central protagonist, Michael, a typical worker who smokes a pipe, is opposed to Pearson, a cigarsmoking tycoon, who, for the sake of capitalist propaganda, offers Michael a single share of his enterprise. However, this generous act does not save Michael from being fired. He joins the army of cigarette-smoking, jobless workers, but even in the most dire poverty does not abandon his dog and his pipe. Pearson, who never removes his cigar from his mouth, strips Michael not only of his job but also of his girlfriend, Jenny, a classic erotic, immoral female smoker. In a careless parting gesture toward Michael, Jenny throws her cigarette at Michael’s feet. Jenny’s gender contributes to the ugliness of the image: loyal women do not smoke; smoking women, by extension, are treacherous. Pearson’s car and the bombs produced at his factory are cigarshaped, which provides subliminal graphic links between cigar smoking and militarism. This visual connection is widely exploited in Soviet posters, where the mediating link—the factory—is not necessarily present. Similarly, in animation films and posters smoking factory chimneys, juxtaposed with cigar-smokers, function as interchangeable emblems of capitalism. The cigar has an unmistakable colonial flavor, serving as a trigger for social conflicts between rich and poor and, more especially, between black and white. Soviet authors occasionally unfold the racial conflict around the cigar, noting that cigars are usually produced by people of color who have no

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access to the final product. Thus, smoking in the American text becomes a political activity, the white man’s marked prerogative. In Mayakovsky’s poem “Black and White,” a cigar-smoking tycoon beats an African American janitor, Willy, because the latter naïvely suggests that a black cigar should be smoked by a black man but a white man should produce white sugar. While the image of a smoking capitalist is overtly negative, we observe a curious discrepancy in the case of Henry Ford, a known enemy of smoking, who prohibited smokers from entering his factories. In American travelogues, Ford is thus paradoxically blamed for non-smoking. In Mayakovsky and Pilniak, Ford’s abstinence represents the impotence and hypocrisy of capitalism. Pilniak sarcastically remarks “Misters Fords—both Henry and Edsel…do not even smoke, they are puritans, they only invent and improve” (502). In his numerous remarks on Ford’s Puritanism, Pilniak stresses that, while Ford does not smoke and cheat on his wife, he mercilessly exploits his workers. Pilniak plays on the traditional link between images of chimneys and portraits of their owners, which in Ford’s case takes an unexpected form. Pilniak notes that Ford’s smoking chimneys are repainted white every day. He considers this, together with Ford’s non-smoking, to be a sign of his Puritan hypocrisy: “The chimneys of ‘Highland Park,’ Ford’s major factory, are not marked with a single soot stain: they are painted every day, and are white like Ford’s hair and collar” (605). But, as Pilniak often claims, although the factory is so clean that you may wear white gloves there, America has not been built “by hands in white gloves”—in other words, by people with clean hands. By contrast, Mayakovsky and Pilniak condemn Ford for prohibiting smoking at his factories, which the traveling Soviet writers view as yet another means of exploitation. There are no spittoons for smokers, exclaims Mayakovsky when he describes the factory. Pilniak is outraged that Ford imposes his own whim on his workers: “Smoking is prohibited not only in Ford’s factories, but also on the shop floors and factory grounds, not only in Ford’s homes, offices, museums, and airfield, but also in Rouge-park. Ford does not smoke for health, Ford is against tobacco” (603). The narrator would understand if there were rational reasons for the prohibition—for example, if it were undertaken as a safety measure. But the concept of prohibiting smoking for health purposes, for people’s own good, agitates him, since it violates their freedom. “On Ford’s territory there is no smoking for your own health!” Pilniak exclaims, ironically maintaining the phrase’s ambiguity (603–604). Only after being fired can Ford’s workers enjoy the privilege of smoking. One of Pilniak’s fired acquaintances is partially compensated for his misfortune by this rediscovered freedom: “We used to sit with this buddy

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of mine under Detroit’s open sky in his apartment—and smoke” (502). A smoker himself, Pilniak personally suffers from Ford’s smoking prohibition; he is required to “stroll in Ford’s cleanlinesses and Puritanism and suffering from his smokeless condition” (611). The travelogues do not allow us to draw conclusions one way or the other regarding smoking in and of itself—the image of smoking may be either positively or negatively charged depending on the smoker’s social status. A cigar-smoking Soviet citizen strikes an ironic pose, while a cigar-smoking capitalist is overtly negative. However, a non-smoking, “sterile” tycoon is culpable precisely for not smoking, and most culpable of all is the capitalist exploiter who denies his workers the right to smoke. The Russian travelers, who strive valiantly throughout their American journeys to maintain a consistent ideological outlook, find themselves in the paradoxical position of having to create highly inconsistent smoking imagery. The Russian stereotype of a smoking American long outlived the actual popularity of smoking in the United States. Even now, when the antismoking campaign in America is in full swing, the stereotype of smoking cigarettes as an attribute of “real American life” is still very current.234 It paradoxically coexists with the concept of a healthy lifestyle, which is also linked in the Russian mind with the image of America, and is associated with American correctness and sterility. Both contemporary trends, as we have seen, can be traced to the earlier literary images.

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C h apt e r

F i ve

Reverse American Travelogues

A m e r i c a n c h a r a c t e r s app e a r in Russian literature not only as objects of observation for Russian travelers in America, but also as subjects of their own journeys to the other shore. After the October Revolution, many American visitors were attracted to Russia by a sincere interest in the country’s unprecedented social experiment (“fellow-travelers”1 and tourists) or by the vast opportunities for profit that this experiment might provide. In the late 1920s and 1930s, American engineers—“bourgeois specialists”— came to organize the production process at Russian factories that were modeled after American prototypes and to teach Russian workers how to operate the imported machinery.2 In their works, Russian writers treated the visitors from these different groups as literary types, based on existing stereotypes of Americans and molded according to the reigning ideological agenda. In Soviet literature of the 1920s and early 1930s, the American traveling to Russia is a slightly comical but generally positive figure, as long as he appreciates the social achievements of the truly New World. The most interesting group of works to represent Americans in Russia comprises travelogues that purport to show how things look through American visitors’ eyes. Marietta Shaginian’s novel Mess-mend, ili Ianki v Petrograde (Mess-Mend, or Yankees in Petrograd [1923–1924]), Lev Kuleshov’s film Neobychainye prikliucheniia mistera Vesta v strane bol’shevikov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, 1924), and Samuil Marshak’s poem “Mister Twister” (1933) feature not just an American character in the Soviet writer’s perception but the typical American’s perception of Russia as the Soviet writer imagines it. These travelogues thus function as an optical device with multiple prisms refracting multiple stereotypes. A study of these travelogues in the context of the American narrative yields curious results: they feature the same recurrent motifs found in the

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American travelogues of Russian writers but with the value and meaning reversed. In Soviet Russia, electricity drives socialism, automobile factories modeled after Ford’s are exceptionally humane, the food is natural and delicious, internationalism reigns supreme, cities are healthy and dynamic. The American minus in Russian eyes becomes the Soviet plus in American eyes—at least, in the eyes of the imaginary Americans of Soviet literature. In the American travelogues under study, a Russian hero travels to America in order to discover a New World and finds himself in Hell. While all writers were prepared to be disenchanted, which provides grounds to doubt the sincerity of their hopes, the motif of severe disillusionment appears in all the texts and is especially bold in the fictional ones. Dyma in Korolenko’s In a Strange Land, Petia’s father in Tageev’s Russian American, Tonia in Ilf and Petrov’s eponymous story—all these characters face the ominous dissociation between their imagined paradisal America and the hellish reality. Now I turn to what I have called “reverse” travelogues. For an American character in a Russian text, collision with Soviet reality provides the ultimate test: it either reveals the best in him and makes him sympathize with the Soviet cause—sometimes even against his will—or it demonstrates his insurmountable limitations and leads him into a deep crisis. In the “reverse” travelogues Mess-Mend or Yankees in Petrograd and The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, the American hero heading to Russia expects to find himself in Hell. But he benefits from the Soviet experience, his consciousness is awakened, and he happily realizes that Russia is the real Paradise. Despite an emerging skepticism toward Americans in the 1930s, a similar spiritual rebirth of the American character also occurs in the later film Circus (1936, directed by Grigorii Alexandrov). In the production novels featuring American specialists—Jimmy Clark in Bruno Jasienski’s Chelovek meniaet kozhu (A Man Changes His Skin, 1933–1934), engineer Stevenson in Iakov Ilin’s Great Conveyor (1934), and Brixby in Valentin Kataev’s Vremia, vpered! (Time, Forward! 1932)—the transformation is shown as a gradual process rather than a sudden revelation and is sometimes incomplete, depending on generic conventions. Nevertheless, Russian writers considered it important to show the transformation of the American’s beliefs when confronted with the glorious Soviet reality. Since America was both model and rival, recognition by an American testified to the young country’s success. Plot became propaganda. However, if an American character, not sufficiently socially conscious, is unable to appreciate the virtues of the multinational working family of Soviet peoples, he is doomed to a breakdown. In the midst of the collective

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happiness, he finds himself in a Hell determined not by the reality around him, but by his personal limitations—a self-created Hell à la Swedenborg. Marshak’s poem “Mister Twister,” for example, recreates, in satirical verse, the story of Bunin’s “Gentleman from San Francisco,” another transatlantic journey of a rich American tourist in search of amusement who meets doom instead. Travelogues about American characters of the 1920s enjoyed popularity with Soviet audiences and helped to establish the image of America and the American in the post-revolutionary arts. By reversing Russian stereotypes of America and projecting them onto Russia, they also promoted the concept of Soviet Russia as the ideal counterpart to America. In the early 1920s, ideologists of cinema as well as literature widely discussed the question: should mass art be primarily entertaining or enlightening? Since a single administrative platform for the cinema had not yet been established—no single institution was responsible for the cinema and no single authoritative directive had been issued—Sovkino and Glavpolitprosvet’s Cinema Section adopted opposing stances on this question. The advocates of entertainment, Lunacharsky and Ilia Trainin (Sovkino), argued that film production should be oriented toward the interests and tastes of the general audience, i.e., the urban middle classes, and thus create amusing lively movies. Yet, as film scholar Denise Youngblood writes, “These were exactly the kinds of movies Glavpolitprosvet’s Cinema Section hoped to purge from the repertory.”3 The two groups were also at loggerheads regarding foreign films.The enlighteners argued that Soviet films should be unique, mostly ideological, and must not even try to compete with American ones. The proponents of entertainment—usually Westernizers— suggested that Russian cinema should be oriented toward the American films flooding the market.4 In practice, many Russian films did emulate the most popular American ones; their titles reveal their sources—Amerikanka iz Bagdada (The American from Bagdad), Naezdnik iz Uailda vesta (The Horseman from the Wild West), and so forth. Appropriating the techniques of American films was more complex. Among the most successful examples of grafting American techniques onto Soviet cinema was Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West, which is both a Soviet Western and simultaneously a parody of the classic American Western. In tandem with the flourishing of Americanism (amerikanshchina)5 in cinema, literature of the 1920s developed Red Pinkertonism (krasnaia pinkertonovshchina). On the one hand, Soviet literary critics disparaged American popular art as intellectually and morally degrading, especially the series of Nat Pinkerton’s adventures, which were widely available in Russia before and after the Revolution.6 On the other hand, Soviet ideologists

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initially considered the series as a possible framework for developing Soviet popular culture. Writing for Pravda in 1923, Nikolai Bukharin formulated a “social order” for Russian writers. He coined the term “Red Pinkertonism” and called on writers to adapt Western techniques and popular plots to Soviet realities and ideological issues. Both Mess-Mend and The Extraordinary Adventures responded to the young Soviet state’s need for its own mass culture, one that would be both entertaining and ideologically enlightening. They both lean on American mass culture and travesty it. Like any parody, they reproduce American popular genres by using their techniques as building material, and at the same time they mock them, or at least mock their source—Western culture and America itself. Shaginian’s Mess-Mend or Yankees in Petrograd emerges from the traditions of the detective story, science fiction, and the cinema. The author explains her approach as follows: “Employing the usual Western European detective clichés I turned their sharp edge against the destructive forces of imperialism and fascism…and all the positive romanticism and happy magic of this work was used for glorifying the creative power of the working class of all countries and nations.”7 Although Shaginian’s “Red Pinkerton” cycle under the common name Mess-Mend comprises several novels—Yankees in Petrograd (1924), Lori Len, metallist (Laurie Lane, Metalworker; 1924), Doroga v Bagdad (The Road to Baghdad, 1925)—the name is usually associated with Yankees in Petrograd, a title that alludes to Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But while Twain’s hero finds himself in the past and is able to establish himself in medieval society due to his knowledge of the technological achievements of his own age, Shaginian’s character travels to a futuristic ideal Russia in which all his knowledge of technology and science proves to be pathetically outdated. Shaginian inverts not only Twain’s model but also Mayakovsky’s formula: “I strived for 7 thousand miles forward but found myself 7 years backward.”8 Indeed, her American character strives seven thousand miles forward and finds himself in a future century. In her novel, Shaginian not only models the viewpoint of an American character but also writes under the (fictitious) name of an American writer, Jim Dollar. Published in ten installments, the novel was promoted as a translation from the English,9 and a series of introductions written by Shaginian as well as by the Head of Gosizdat, Nikolai Meshcheriakov, orchestrated the literary mystification.10 In her introductory essay, Shaginian presented Dollar’s biography. Created according to the rules of a mystery story, it was full of suggestive blanks. A foundling discovered at a train station, and hence inherently connected with the road, Jim Dollar gets a significant

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sum of money from his unknown parents, which allows him to be a writer but does not subvert his proletarian views. Despite the fact that his name hints at the notorious connection between art and money in the capitalist world, Dollar’s prism is ideologically impeccable; a child of the New York streets, he is a true representative of proletarian art. Shaginian proposes Dollar the writer as a romantic and hopeful alternative to Upton Sinclair who, as a critic of capitalist society, was confined to the realm of realism and, therefore, pessimism. Jim Dollar’s traditions, claims Shaginian, should be traced to film rather than to literature.11 Despite all the alleged conventionality of his artistic world—“a screen world”—Dollar manages to grasp the essence of the October Revolution, due to his “deep admiration of and reverence for it.” Therefore, Dollar’s major ideological accomplishment is the “cheerful attitude of international proletarian resistance”12 captured in a dynamic detective novel. The novel’s plot is full of fantastical coincidences, mystifications, and sets of doubles, which mockingly exaggerate the techniques of popular detective stories. The Communist Vasilov has five doubles who impersonate him at different stages of the action. While the main villain appears in three different disguises, at the end his true nature is revealed: he is not a human being but a fascist wolf. The novel’s protagonist, Arthur Morlender, is the son of the chief engineer at the tycoon Kressling’s factory. Arthur believes that his father has been killed by the Bolsheviks during a business trip to Soviet Russia. Disguised as Vasilov, he embarks on his own journey to Russia in order to avenge himself on the Soviet assassins, bringing along poison and bombs to be detonated in the very heart of the villain state, Petrograd. The reader, however, knows that he is being manipulated by Kressling, the enemy of Soviet power. It was Kressling himself who kidnapped Arthur’s father, since the engineer had fallen under the spell of the tremendous spiritual energy of communal creativity while he was in Russia. Prepared by Kressling for the horrors awaiting him on the other shore, Arthur pictures the land of the Soviets in a hellish light. But just one day among the people of Petrograd— “brilliant and likeable people…with their noble faces, with their blazing eyes, with their cheerful smiles”13—is enough for him to fall in love with the country and abandon his terrorist plot. He reveals himself to the Bolsheviks when they are explaining to him the principles of the Soviet defense system, which harmlessly discharges enemy weapons when they come into contact with the electrically charged space of Petrograd. The same thing, as the reader sees, happens to Arthur—the human weapon/enemy turns into a friend. Like the Russian travelers who were amazed by the abundance of electric lights on the streets of New York, Arthur is astonished by the Soviet state’s electricity. While most of the Russian travelers believe that electricity is

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misused for commercial purposes and thus degraded in America, Arthur cannot help admiring the Soviet genius that makes the most of its potential. Electricity provides a shield, a perfect defensive weapon for a state surrounded by enemies. Like the skyscrapers in New York, magnificent electric towers dominate the cityscape. They are the first thing that a traveler sees upon arrival: “To the left and right of the stormy Moika ranged strange pyramids decorated on top with enormous porcelain cups that made them resemble candle-holders. A network of endless wires stretched from the pyramids over the entire city. ‘What is it?’ Vasilov blurted out. ‘These are electrical transformers of colossal powers,’ replied comrade Barfuss.14 ‘This is our pride and joy that you’re looking at’” (156). The electric power station is the most guarded object in Petrograd, literally the foundation of Soviet authority. The son of an engineer and an engineer himself, Arthur cannot help admiring the technological genius of these people, which is even greater since it is ultimately humane. He understands that his father could only have felt the same reverence for the Bolsheviks that he does, so they had no reason to murder him. The character Enno introduces Arthur to the Soviet factory and to the great One Method of Soviet production. Shaginian borrowed Enno’s name from Krasnaia Zvezda (Red Star), a pre-revolutionary utopian novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1908; reprinted in 1918). Bogdanov’s Enno was an astronaut who also served as the protagonist’s guide to the imaginary socialist world of Mars. By borrowing his name, Shaginian emphasizes that the utopias of the past are being materialized here on earth, in the Soviet state. “‘Utopia,’ Morlender (in the guise of Vasilov) sighed. ‘Exactly,’ Enno affirmed with enthusiasm: ‘We set ourselves the task of realizing a utopia’” (171)—words that echo the popular Soviet song and later Stalinist motto: “We were born so that the fairytale might become reality.” Shaginian paints a glowing picture on a magnificent scale of the achievements of Soviet industrialization. Indeed, it required the utopian genre, with some elements of science fiction thrown in, to make an American’s admiration for Soviet technology look convincing. While Soviet industry in the 1920s and 1930s adapts the principles of capitalist factories to Soviet production, Shaginian tests these principles, incorporating them into her utopian factory, just as she incorporates the techniques of Western popular culture into her writings. She constructs the image of a majestic Soviet plant according to the standardized principles of Ford’s factory but reverses features criticized as inhumane in the American text. From Ford, she borrows the principles of centralization of production, cleanliness, and maximum efficiency. All of Petrograd production is centralized. The gigantic factory in Mess-Mend is a vertically organized complex of factories

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that reminds Arthur of the World Exhibition. It unites the development of raw resources (first tier: with the help of electricity, they blast out mineral wealth and transport it to the next stage), the processing industry (second tier: “nature’s gifts are transformed into products for work”), and, finally, manufacturing and transportation (third tier: “the crown” of the entire industry, “which produces the manufactured goods from all this material and churns them out onto thousands of our elevated transport conveyors” [169]). From a distance one can see a multitude of factory chimneys, all extremely clean. But in contrast to the deceitful Ford factory, the chimneys are white not because they are repainted every day but because the smoke of Soviet factories is clean. No associations with tobacco products here—the chimneys do not smoke. On the contrary, their lips “breathe lightly.”15 Shaginian masterfully adapts Ford’s principle of economy of time. All workers conduct their morning exercises in the open air by working in fields and gardens. Over short spans, they try different kinds of physical labor involving different sets of muscles.16 By virtue of their fantastic system of transportation, they can move swiftly from field to factory. Thus, the union of industrial and agricultural labor is harmoniously achieved. Peasants, however, are ominously absent from Shaginian’s picture, since such an organization of labor makes them simply unnecessary. In radical contrast to the degrading specialization of Ford’s workers, Shaginian adopts the core humane principle of the Soviet factory, which aims for the universal competence of every worker. Everybody in the factory is supposed to master all types of operations. No one starts working until he understands the meaning and the technology of the entire process. There is “no apprentice who doesn’t work and no worker who doesn’t apprentice” (171). Productive labor and knowledge, so tragically dissociated under capitalism, are finally united in this utopian One Method.17 And although the coordinated, smooth movements of Soviet workers closely resemble those in capitalist factories, the workers do not seem like machines, because they move around from one operation to another. Instead of being a gigantic mechanism, the Soviet plant is an “orchestra”: everybody plays his part but can still hear the general symphony. Like Ford’s factories, Shaginian’s Soviet one is multinational. But while the American capitalist places workers of different nationalities next to each other to prevent them from organizing labor unions, in Russia the factory itself is a workers’ union and the labor process is accompanied by multilingual conversations. The land of socialism represents the world in miniature: in each field and factory shop, “representatives of all countries and nations” work together.

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Instead of false democratic relations between bosses and employees accepted at Ford’s factory, here everybody really feels equal. At first Arthur is slightly embarrassed that the workers treat him, an engineer, as an equal rather than a superior, but after a day of work at such a factory, he gets used to it and would be happy to spend twenty-four hours there. The director has to explain that a period of nightly rest is obligatory for everyone, since it ensures the efficiency of labor. Thus, the reader learns that interference in people’s private lives, so severely criticized by visitors to the Ford plants, can be justified even in a utopia—as long as it coincides with the interests of the Soviet state. While the novel implies that Soviet people have conquered hunger by growing enough food in the vast fields surrounding the cities, the familiar motif of unnatural American food also appears in Mess-Mend. We learn that “alien food”—“barrels of fat, compressed bales of corn and sugar, crates of canned milk, sacks of corn meal”—is now being loaded on ships in the port of New York to be transported to the Soviet state, all of it, as the author sarcastically remarks, a “surrogate” intended for the “intestines of the starving Russian people in order to raise them to the heights of the American civilization” (177). Shaginian interprets American participation in hunger relief (the ARA program) ironically and ungratefully, a typical Soviet attitude to American aid.18
Naturally, the reader is prepared for Arthur’s choice to stay in the land of Socialism. His decision receives the paternal blessing; Arthur’s father, appearing at novel’s end as the deus ex machina to unmask the plot of the Imperialist League, is fully on his side. Yankees in Petrograd was made into a three-part serial film in 1926 by Boris Barnet and Fedor Otsep. Obviously, it was one example of amerikanshchina in Russian cinema. While the creation of “pseudo-translated” American novels was an ironic phenomenon of the NEP era, making a “pseudo-American” film based on such a novel carried the parody to a higher degree. The book’s plot was significantly transformed during its transposition into film and the major foci of the novel shifted. The “Mess-Mend” of the novel’s title—a watchword of the workers’ union—was changed into “Miss Mend,” the name of the main heroine. The film’s detective plot and action suppress the book’s magical and utopian motifs. And although a journey to Petrograd does take place in the third part of the film, the city does not resemble Shaginian’s utopia, as the film-makers had little interest in an American view of Russia. Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (where Barnet stars as an actor, playing the cowboy Jeddy) is much more perceptive in this respect. Mr. West, the main hero, sets off to Russia with a preconception almost as strong as Arthur’s, although he has

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no personal reason to hate the Bolsheviks. He is terrified by the prospect of meeting the Soviet savages whom he visualizes as hairy, bloodthirsty monsters—as they are represented in New York’s illustrated magazines— but, as president of the YMCA, he has to go. Eventually, the hero of this satirical travelogue gets to know the real Russia the hard way. According to Soviet scholars, the film was conceived as a double-barreled pamphlet “on capitalist lies about Soviet society and an American citizen who believes in such propaganda as well as on the most popular genre of the bourgeois cinema, the detective film.”19 Indeed, Kuleshov’s film features such clichés of Western films as prolonged chases with acrobatic stunts, gunfire without any visible effect, bandit attacks and kidnappings, and heroic cowboys in hyper-exaggerated form. The film’s opening shot—Mr. West petting his pigeons—symbolically demonstrates the purity and naïveté of his soul, dangerous virtues that foreshadow his vulnerability to manipulation in both America and Russia. Assuming from popular stereotypes that it is cold in Russia, Mr. West arrives in a ridiculously voluminous fur coat. Immediately upon his arrival, he is separated from his faithful friend and assistant, the cowboy Jeddy, and is set upon by a gang of thieves. It is precisely Mr. West’s prejudices and his fear of Russia that make him a victim. Aware of his fears, the thieves mirror them: they create for him the very reality that he expects to find. Taking him to the outskirts of Moscow, they show him the purported devastation of the capital and claim that the Bolshoi Theatre has been demolished, as has the entire center of Moscow. Finally, they stage his kidnapping by wild Bolsheviks and demand money. Only the interference of the real Bolsheviks, the muchfeared Cheka, saves the naïve American. Mr. West is then happily reunited with Jeddy, who has already discovered the truth about Soviet Russia by himself. The “genuine” Bolsheviks are strikingly different from what Mr. West expects: they are civil, neatly shaved, dressed in uniforms, and friendly in a reserved way. They show Mr. West the “real” Moscow, a panoramic view that juxtaposes the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with factory chimneys. In non-filmic reality, the Cathedral will soon be demolished, in gruesomely ironic accord with Mr. West’s fears—the very fears that are debunked in the film. Petric suggests that on a subliminal level the film could produce a subversive effect on a perceptive viewer; after all, in real life, the monsters of the Cheka were also very close to what Mr. West anticipated, even if they look perfectly normal in the film. In the end, the American traveler admires the parade on the Red Square, which supposedly demonstrates the highest degree of civilization and organization. Grateful and enchanted, he sends a telegram to America

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instructing his wife to burn those lying New York magazines and hang Lenin’s portrait on the wall. The final scenes feature the glorious achievement of Soviet technology—Shukhov’s radio tower from which the truth about the new Russia will be broadcast to the world. Unmasking the enemy’s anti-Soviet propaganda was a popular subject in Soviet satire. In 1923, Krokodil published a feuilleton “The Adventures of Mr. Stupidhead in Russia” whose plot could well have influenced the creators of The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West. Going to Russia, Mr. Stupidhead’s expectations are very similar to those of Mr. West: “You cannot imagine with what horror I entered this barbaric Russia….I expected to see heartbreaking scenes, I brought with me in my trunks dried bread to distribute it among the starving natives, who, provoked by my look of well-fed satisfaction could have committed…I can hardly bear to say it—a homicide!”20 Mr. West finds the devastation he anticipates because the thieves have pulled the wool over his eyes. Mr. Stupidhead, by contrast, encounters no atrocities and therefore assumes that he has become the object of a deception. He believes that the Bolsheviks are mystifying him by building purely decorative façades to give the impression that the country is leading a normal life. As we can see, the motifs of the feuilleton are recombined and curiously inverted in the film. While Kuleshov’s obvious ideological task is to deconstruct foreign stereotypes of Russia, his film provides a wide perspective of Russian stereotypes of America and Americans. For example, Mr. West’s patriotism is shown ironically: not only does he passionately wave the American flag on a Moscow street, but even his socks feature its pattern. Several years later, Pilniak sarcastically comments on the ubiquity of the national flag in America, even in the most inappropriate places. For Pilniak, this is a manifestation of American hypocrisy and ostentation. But Kuleshov’s irony is sympathetic. It is Mr. West’s national pride that makes him behave with dignity in critical moments; in the hands of the “Bolsheviks” he is determined to fight “like a real American.” His chastity (another stereotypical American feature) is challenged by the Countess but he remains firm, apparently without any difficulty, since her advances frighten him. The way in which Kuleshov employs the technological means of cinema to show the perspective of his characters and to study the psychological mechanisms of mutual stereotypes sets this film apart from the usual propagandistic fare. In the course of the film, the viewer not only observes Mr. West but also is pulled into his point of view. One literally sees the room spinning when “everything starts spinning in Mr. West’s eyes.” The change that occurs within the cowboy Jeddy suggests an especially subtle take on the problem of mutual stereotypes. Jeddy appears in the film with

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exaggerated Western accessories: a cowboy hat, a huge pistol, and a lasso. Blinded by the allegedly frightening exoticism of the Russians, he himself is represented as a cliché. But as soon as he begins to understand the real Russia and rid himself of his preconceptions, his appearance changes. In the end we see him as an attractive character in ordinary clothing, without a trace of ridiculousness. Abandoning his stereotypes about Russia, he himself stops being a stereotype for the viewer. Thus, in mocking others’ clichéd viewpoints, the film makes us question the validity of the official clichés it conveys. The subversive effect of engaging in the Other’s point of view, compounded by employing the Other’s cinematic techniques, clearly put the critics on guard. Although audiences greeted The Extraordinary Adventures enthusiastically, critics disparaged Kuleshov for his insufficiently serious treatment of Nikolai Aseev’s propagandistic script and for the “Americanism” of his film. In general, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, the appropriation of the American rival’s techniques backfired; Americanism in general, and Pinkertonism in particular, were criticized for their alleged low artistic quality and condemned by official critics as “a weapon for bourgeois ascendancy over the remainder of the petty bourgeois masses… aimed at their demoralization.”21 The connection of Pinkertonism with the name of Bukharin, who was denounced for his deviation from the party line in 1928–1929 and later repressed and executed, also contributed to its demise. Even though the sympathies of the authors and film directors were revolutionary, the form itself—light, dynamic, ironic, fragmented, relying on the impossible plot twist—was treated by critics with deep suspicion. Satire proved to be a double-edged weapon. As Petric observes in his analysis of The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West: “Absurdity of dramatic conflicts and oddity of mise-en-scène are carried to the extreme that generates a distrust in the film’s primary signification. As a result, the manifest message becomes transparent, henceforth turning against the filmic text, in the process of which the film’s form dissociates itself from the plot, fostering its own import that subverts the intentionality of the narrative.”22 Therefore Kuleshov’s cinematographic discoveries—shooting from different angles, intricate shadow play, masterful montage—were interpreted as ideological flaws, “formalism,” an “obsession with the technical aspect of cinema.” The unintentionally subversive effect of the ironic works of the 1920s, with their idealized image of Russia, became even more evident in the 1930s, when reality diverged more and more from the one pictured on the screen. The film Circus, made in 1936, belongs to a new era in the history of Russian art for the masses. By that time, Soviet cinema was united on

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one ideological platform and under one administrative authority, headed by Boris Shumiatskii. Although Circus owes as much to the tradition of Hollywood musical comedies as Mess-Mend did to detective stories and The Extraordinary Adventures to Westerns, it is infused with straightforward ideology and follows the method of socialist realism in the genre of comedy.23 The director Alexandrov does not merely employ American techniques for Soviet propagandistic needs: he accomplishes the task of catching up with and surpassing America on the level of both the structure and the plot of his film. That is to say, the central motif of the Soviet musical comedy, which presumably outdoes the capitalist ones, is exceeding America. The first script for Circus was written by Ilf and Petrov in 1935, the year of their American journey.24 But in the final version, patriotic sentiment more or less smothered playful intrigue and emphasized the ideological conflict of the two worlds with their contrasting sets of values. In the film, the famous American circus artist Marion Dixon is invited to join the Soviet circus, along with her spectacular show, “Flight to the Moon,” in which Marion is shot from a gigantic cannon. For Marion, her visit to the Soviet Union has no special negative implications. On the contrary, in the film’s opening scene she is desperately running to catch her train, trying to escape from the rage of an American mob. The next scene takes place in the Soviet Union. Thus, viewers are compelled to surmise that the land of socialism is a refuge for the persecuted actress, although they do not yet know why she was being persecuted. However, even in the Soviet Union, the actress remains sad: she is living in a personal Hell, tortured by the shadows of the past and blackmailed by her demonic “protector,” the German entrepreneur Kneishitz. While Marion’s performances enjoy extraordinary success, the circus director and engineer Martynov are planning to build a cannon that is even bigger and better than the American one, capable of launching two people into an even longer and higher flight. Not only does the Soviet circus succeed in building a superior cannon, but Marion herself comes to understand the superior humanity of the Russian people through her love for the Soviet engineer— and pilot!—Martynov. The film masterfully realizes her moment of choice between light and darkness, the Soviet future and the capitalist past, as a literal choice between the white and the black. Marion falls in love with Martynov on seeing his photograph. While she gazes upon it, she unconsciously pulls her black wig from her naturally blond hair and, in a moment of hesitation, freezes with her head half-black, half-white. At the end of the scene the heroine resolutely takes off her wig and chooses her true nature—the pure one. Marion’s romance with Martynov progresses along with the growth of her social consciousness and her attachment to the land of the Soviets.

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Near film’s end, the evil Kneishitz reveals Marion’s “dark secret” to the circus people and the Circus audience: she has had a black lover and has mothered a black child. Marion is terrified, since she assumes that the Soviet people will be just as intolerant of her “racial crime” as the Americans were. Her moment of revelation comes when the circus audience welcomes her and her child. The child is then passed from one audience member to another, all of different nationalities and each one singing the child a lullaby in a different language. Marion joins the happy multinational Soviet family, choosing collectivism over individualism. Together with Martynov, she participates in a grand new show “Flight to the Universe.”25 Thus, the film reverses one of the recurrent motifs of the American travelogues—the oppression of the Racial Other: Alexandrov contrasts American racism26 with a loving and all-inclusive Soviet internationalism. Marion, who comes to the Soviet Union to work and decides to stay, having fallen in love with the country and its people, represents an ideal American “specialist” of the 1930s. Of course, the majority of the foreign specialists portrayed in Soviet art were technicians and usually appeared in a quite different genre—the production novel. The reasons prompting them to leave their own country were primarily economic—the Great Depression— and their embrace of Russia was not as consistent and absolute as Marion’s, since production novels’ conventions differed from film conventions. But the method of socialist realism, which dictated that the author should lead his characters along the path to socialism, when applied to the stereotype of an American, guaranteed a positive result in the 1930s.27 Having an American viewer as a major character gives the author an opportunity to put American attitudes toward work on trial and to contrast the Soviet and American ways of production. The portrayal of American technology in Russian writers’ American travelogues provides a crucial background for this contrast. While in Shaginian’s Mess-Mend the principles of the American factory serve as a background for stressing the humanity of an ideal, utopian Soviet enterprise, in socialist realist production novels the images of American engineers, who confront the realities of industrialization, help to emphasize the actual achievements of the Soviet state. However, the reader could easily ascertain that the difference between the Soviet literary utopia and the Soviet literary “reality” was not all that radical. The scale of Soviet construction in these novels is almost as grand as in Shaginian’s novel. The construction of the irrigation canal in Tajikistan in Jasienski’s A Man Changes His Skin or the building of the city of Magnitogorsk in Siberia in Kataev’s Time, Forward demonstrate Man’s triumphant battle over Nature and Time.28 The motif of living and working

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in post-revolutionary Soviet Russia as a journey to the future was popular in early Soviet literature, and juxtaposing it with the motif of an outmoded capitalist world, the world of the past, reinforced it. While in the 1920s Soviet writers could portray such a journey “literally,” by means of science fiction, as we see in Shaginian’s Mess-Mend or Mayakovsky’s Bania (Bathhouse), in the 1930s they convey it symbolically. Speeding up time, drawing the future closer can be achieved in real life by shock-work, such as completing a fiveyear plan in four years; this concept, also voiced in Bathhouse, underlies the industrial novels. In Kataev’s novel, it is emphasized by the futuristic title Time, Forward, borrowed from Mayakovsky. The novel opens with a scene where the protagonist “outruns” time by waking and getting up before his alarm clock goes off: “Margulies could not really have faith in so simple a mechanism as a timepiece; could not entrust to it so precious a thing as time” (3). At the novel’s beginning, one of the characters reads a radiogram— quotes from Stalin’s 1931 speech in which the leader called for speeding up work and completing the work of a century in ten years. This is the ultimate rejection of temporal constraints, according to Jeffrey Brooks, who has studied the process of sacralization of time in Stalin’s era.29 Suspense in Soviet production novels usually hinges on meeting impossible deadlines; the characters strive to achieve and overachieve impossible goals, pushing time forward. Building cities and factories, they materialize Mayakovsky’s dream—a Brooklyn Bridge to the Communist future. The author of Mess-Mend paradoxically revises the reasons why American specialists are still invited to Soviet factories, which, after all, are much more advanced in the Soviet utopia than the capitalist ones in the United States. Instead of imparting American experience and expertise, the American fixated on rational work methods is now supposed to serve as the measure of mediocrity, so that the Soviet specialist, in his striving for the impossible, does not completely lose touch with reality. As ironic and fantastic as it may sound, this reasoning foreshadows some motifs in the Soviet production novels where American technicians figure. As qualified specialists, they are usually taken aback by the “gambling spirit” of Soviet construction. They express skepticism about the heroic labor of Soviet workers—Stakhanovite methods and “socialist competition”—and call for a steady and reasonable pace of work. But Soviet workers refuse to heed this counsel and prove that they can work with increasing efficiency for as long as it takes. This is because of their mighty spirit, which the foreign specialists fail to take into account. American specialists are portrayed as naïve and limited, since everything they represent—logic and rationality—conflicts with the new sense of reality

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on which the heroic myth of the 1930s was built. Katerina Clark views the attacks on positivism and empirical truth in the literature of this period as a neo-Platonic element in Stalinist epistemology.30 Indeed, American specialists restricted themselves to the petty truth of statistical data, which was constantly challenged by the miraculous achievements of the bogatyr’like31 Soviet heroes with their knowledge of a higher truth. Paradoxically, Americans’ expertise often proved useless even when it concerned machines and not just “the human factor” (chelovecheskii faktor); Soviet engineers found original and unexpected solutions to a host of problems, eliminating conventional distinctions between the possible and the impossible. As the engineer Urtabaev condescendingly explains to the American specialist Clark in A Man Changes His Skin, Soviet specialists do with the imported machines things Americans could not even dream of in their companies. He then recombines the elements of different excavators to produce ones that can fulfill an emergency task. Machines are often positively personified in production novels,32 in contrast to the travelogues’ descriptions of American factories and cities with their gruesome images of living dead matter. The fusion of man with personified machine is part of the new heroic epos: the new bogatyr’ charges forward on a steel horse and operates a steel bird. Katerina Clark notes that such a “transposition of things pertaining to the modern world of technology into the epic tribal world of nature” is a quintessential feature of the mid-1930s.33 Inevitably, in the world of heroic labor where all the “laws” of production are broken, American specialists who preferred to rely on their technical manuals were doomed to function as a measure of mediocrity, of a standard that was being left behind in profane (non-utopian) reality. However, those specialists who demonstrated the capacity to overcome their limitations and embrace the new system of values could join in the heroic festival of Soviet labor. Vera Alexandrova notes that the two factors that “helped to reconcile the American engineers to the defects of Soviet construction which they realized so clearly”34 were the economic crisis in America and the companionship of the Russian people. These factors, while indeed significant for engineer Stevenson in Ilin’s novel The Great Conveyor, by themselves were insufficient for the Soviet writer. One should not underestimate the lure of the grandeur of construction and the spirit of labor for American engineers in Russian literature. One of the most vivid examples of an American specialist significantly influenced by the Soviet spirit is engineer Clark in the industrial novel A Man Changes His Skin, by Jasienski (Bruno Jasienski is the pen name of Wiktor Zysman, Polish and Russian Soviet writer, Communist and political activist,

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chief editor of the magazine International Literature, 1933–1937, and a member of the Writers’ Union Board beginning 1934, expelled in 1937 for counterrevolutionary activity and executed). A Man Changes His Skin stands apart from other works because the American engineer’s viewpoint is one of the central ones through which the reader sees the development of the Soviet economy. As the canons of socialist realism require, the concept of building the nation is demonstrated through a concrete example—in this case, the construction of an irrigation canal in Tajikistan. Usually, this process of construction is paralleled by the growth of the main character’s social consciousness. Here, the main character who is changing, compelled by the emotional excitement of the work, is the American engineer Clark. The concept of changing one’s skin broached in the novel’s title is ambiguous. In a positive sense, it alludes to a personal transformation, the shedding of an old, outgrown skin and the growth of a new one. But the events of the novel suggest another interpretation—the enemy of Soviet power can hide among decent citizens like a wolf in a sheep’s skin.35 One such changeling is another capitalist specialist, Murray, who tries to sabotage the construction. But as Kiparsky notes, Jasienski does not go against the generally positive stereotype of the American engineer: the enemy turns out to be a British spy posing as an American.36 Clark undergoes a true evolution. He comes to Soviet Russia to help maintain the excavators imported from the United States and to teach Soviet workers how to operate them. Although he, like his colleagues, is skeptical at first, the devotion of Soviet workers to the common cause makes Clark revise his system of beliefs about work. Even his instincts change: the climax of his evolution occurs when he spontaneously decides to take the place of an excavator operator who has suddenly fallen ill with an attack of malaria. For a qualified supervisor, such a flouting of the principles of specialization, rank, prestige, limited responsibility, and even common sense would violate the norms of the capitalist production process, but at that moment it seems to be the only ethical and natural thing to do. The reader observes this scene from two perspectives, Clark’s and that of the old conservative Russian specialist Andrei Savel’evich, who knows that for the typical American engineer, work is an objective, rational concept and that, as a foreigner, he can afford to scoff at “Bolshevik tricks” such as enthusiasm and socialist competition. When he sees that even an American engineer like Clark has been infected with enthusiasm, he also descends into the quarry and joins the workforce, an action that exceeds his official duties. Thus, Clark’s action contributes in its turn to the overall enthusiasm and energizes it; the foreign specialist turns into a Soviet one. As usual, a love affair with a devoted Communist—an interpreter—facilitates this evolution.

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In Time, Forward Kataev creates the image of an engineer who cannot keep pace with the rapidly changing times or share Soviet values. Therefore, although Thomas Brixby is a generally positive figure, Kataev pays significantly less attention to him than does Jasienski to his hero, and eventually leads him to catastrophe and death. Kataev demonstrates the virtues and limitations of the American engineer in a balanced manner. Even though Brixby had worked for five years in the Soviet Union at the most famous construction sites, learned to speak Russian and drink vodka in the Russian manner, and even acquired a Russian name, Foma Egorovich, he has not been radically transformed by the Soviet spirit. Lean and muscular, his steady, deep-set American eyes shine in his well-shaped American face, yet he is older than he looks. Although he likes his co-workers and is satisfied with his role at the Magnitogorsk construction site, and occasionally even spends up to forty-eight hours without sleeping, he retains his capitalist attitude toward work: who he is working for makes no real difference to him as long as he is paid. Brixby supports engineer Margulies’s decision to participate in the Soviet competition and to challenge another brigade, but immediately retorts when he is called an enthusiast: “I am an enthusiast? No, I am an American” (126). Kataev employs the figure of an American engineer to voice significant ideas about Soviet production as the successor to American technology. As we remember, Esenin was skeptical about America’s technological genius, claiming that only individuals like Edison deserve this reputation. Kataev addresses this reproach by projecting an inverted version onto Russia: there are multitudes of Edisons among Soviet engineers; and this is acknowledged by the Americans themselves. Brixby compares Margulies to Edison for developing a quick method for laying cement. He states that the Soviet people, with their “little Ilich’s lamps,”37 are the American inventor’s rightful heirs. Kataev makes sure that the reader will assume that such Edisons can be found on every site of heroic Soviet construction. But the dream that really inspires Brixby is to save up twenty thousand dollars and start his own business in America. Every evening, he succumbs to the lure of the ideal material world by studying the advertisements in American journals. At novel’s end, Brixby loses everything he had lived for in a single day, when the Chicago bank where he has kept all his savings collapses. Kataev’s message is clear: he who strives primarily for a material reward is condemned to catastrophe and death, made inevitable by the shortcomings of the American system and the character’s flawed world-view. Kataev portrays the bankruptcy as Brixby’s personal Hell: his Soviet interlocutors cannot even comprehend why such a thing could be so important. Mr. Adams in

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Ilf and Petrov’s American travelogue reports a similar event in his past: his bank investments were lost in an economic crisis. But he, as a conscientious socialist, expresses satisfaction with this loss—otherwise, he would have become a capitalist. But although an optimistic reader might have expected that Brixby would be equally consoled in his loss and would be drawn to socialist ideals, in the end, Brixby, who for a moment has realized the real values of life, perishes tragically in a fire. His death is juxtaposed with Margulies’s winning round in the Stakhanovite competition. In Time, Forward! Kataev portrays yet another typical American visitor to Soviet Russia: the rich American tourist Ray Roop. A shareholder in Magnitogorsk’s construction, he comes to see his money at work.38 Unlike poor Brixby, he is unaffected by bank collapses, since he keeps his money only “in reliable enterprises” (328). Such trust on the part of an experienced American businessman in the profitability of the Soviet economy looks like a convincing argument in its favor. But although Ray Roop is eager to see as much as possible, his interest is superficial; for him the Soviet Union with its industrialization is merely a curious exoticism. His speeches about Russia are full of the clichés that Kataev considers appropriate for a cultured American: “The Bolsheviks stand between two worlds, two cultures….Isn’t that sublime!” (87). Roop represents the American bourgeoisie, which, in Mayakovsky’s observation, is afraid of technology’s might—the jinn it has summoned but cannot control. Roop is a hypocrite: while reaping profits from Soviet industrialization, he is preparing an ideological attack against it: he is planning to write a pamphlet warning humanity about the destructive power of machines (“I may have the satisfaction of blowing it up…with my books,” 328). In Roop’s perception, Soviet construction is the ominous and doomed struggle of people with God. The author, however, demonstrates that Roop himself is doomed. “Woe unto thee, Babylon,” Roop sighs, echoing the epigraph of Bunin’s “The Gentleman from San Francisco.” As the novel progresses, Kataev stresses that Roop is an empty, tired old man who looks into the future with great foreboding: “He was frightened. Nowadays, he always experienced fear at night. It was a consciousness of inevitable, imminent death. Well, ten, fifteen years…perhaps seventeen! But then…” (323). What seems like the Apocalypse to a rich American tourist, for a Soviet reader— and participant in the construction—represents a new Creation. While Roop feels an existential anxiety when he observes the glorious Soviet industrialization, another rich tourist cannot accept Soviet internationalism, or rather cannot tolerate the practical implications that it has for him; this is Mister Twister, the eponymous hero of Samuil Marshak’s children’s poem, written in 1933 and reworked in 1952. Like Circus,

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“Mister Twister” hinges on the contrast between Soviet internationalism and American racism. Marshak’s poem is perhaps the most interesting projection of Russian writers’ American travelogues onto the journey of an American to Russia: the hero comes on a pleasure trip and finds himself in a private Hell that is supposed to be an international Paradise.39 The poem “Mister Twister” is based on a real story told by Marshak’s acquaintance Mushketov: an American capitalist who comes to Leningrad sees a black person staying in the same hotel; the capitalist racist leaves in anger but cannot find a single hotel vacancy in the whole city. Curiously, a similar but reversed episode can be found in Pilniak’s OK: the autobiographical narrator, approximately at the same time when Mister Twister visited Leningrad, also refused to stay in a prestigious hotel but for the opposite reason: his black friends, writers and journalists, were not permitted into the hotel to meet with him. Almost thirty years earlier, due to ideological and moral reasons, Gorky could not find a single hotel in New York that would accept him.40 The critic Boris Galanov calls the poem “the story of an evil spirit who loses his power and becomes weak and comical.” He mentions that Marshak chose the travelogue situation—an American racist in the Soviet Union—for propaganda purposes, in order to vividly contrast America and Russia: otherwise, “it would be hard to see white on white or black on black.”41 Mister Twister is not just an ordinary capitalist: he owns factories, newspapers, and steamships. Hence, he controls production, the media, and transport; he is the master of the capitalist world. Thus his journey to Soviet Russia represents a collision between two systems. Mister Twister travels for pleasure, as a private individual. Although he himself would have preferred a different destination, he simply cannot resist a whimsical demand from his daughter Suzy. Suzy’s expectations represent not American stereotypes of Russia, but rather a Russian stereotype of these stereotypes. In Suzy’s speech, “typically Russian” images are mixed together and seasoned with a Soviet flavor. She plans to ride in a troika on the banks of the Volga, fish for sturgeon, and run off to the kolkhoz for raspberries. Not only the clichés, but Suzy’s funny language mistakes are interesting here. Of course Suzy presumably speaks English to her father, but Marshak chooses to mock her Russian: she is going to fish for “live sturgeon-steaks” (zhivuiu lovit’ osetrinu).42 In fact, Marshak transposes Suzy’s joyful ignorance into its linguistic equivalent; she is unfamiliar with the Russian/Soviet language in a broader sense and so cannot get a feel for the country’s real life. This poetic travelogue starts, like other literary journeys to America, with the inevitable description of a steamship, thereby introducing the capitalist

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world’s social hierarchy. As we have seen, Russian travelers from Korolenko to Pilniak highlight the striking difference between the conditions of the first-, second-, and third-class passengers. This disparity anticipates the travelers’ future disenchantment with the (unrealized) ideals of American equality. In Marshak, rich and poor sail on different ships; while Mister Twister plays tennis, the poor multinational crowd suffers in a sweltering Hell: For Negroes, For Malays It’s muggy and hot. The waves are splashing, The engine is smoking.

While New York astonishes the Russian traveler with its skyscrapers, American travelers are greeted in Leningrad by the needle-spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral—a symbol of the historical past—and smoking factory chimneys—a sign of industrialization in progress. Marshak ironically describes Mister Twister’s first impressions, employing a play on words: Having evaluated The needle Of Peter and Paul, He haughtily Seats himself Into an automobile. Vot, otseniv Petropavlovskii Shpil’, Vazhno Saditsia V avtomobil’. (424)

The gerund otseniv can be read both as “having appreciated” and “having estimated the value of.” When it concerns Mister Twister, Marshak often puns on the clash between ethical values and economic ones, as we will see later. Immediately upon his arrival, Mister Twister becomes part of the conflict between black and white, which is triggered by the motif of smoking. In the corridor of his hotel he sees another patron—a black man! Marshak exaggerates the blackness and the size of the man: he is “black as the sky on a moonless

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night,” and he is of “gigantic stature.” What is even worse, this outrageous vision is reflected ad infinitum by the hotel mirrors. Marshak’s verses function like the mirrors; they too multiply the black figures by means of repetition: In the mirrors, All looking alike, The blacks Were walking, The blacks Were walking.

Mister Twister is especially outraged by the fact that the black man is smoking—not a capitalist cigar (Mister Twister himself has “a gold cigar”), but a pipe. As Mayakovsky established in the poem “Black and White,” where the matter of smoking initiated the conflict between the poor black worker Willy and the tobacco tycoon, smoking is a prerogative of the white man. In the Soviet Union, to the horror of Mister Twister, social and racial equality prevail. Mister Twister storms off and spends the whole day trying to find rooms at another hotel, but gets the same answer everywhere: “No vacancy” (Net, otvechaiut, v gostinitse mest).43 He even considers buying a house, but in the Soviet Union, he faces an absolutely alien system of values, where his power—the power of money—is ineffective. Finally, he has to return to the Hotel Angleterre, but now there are no vacancies there either. While spending a terrible night sleeping in a chair in the hotel lobby, Mr. Twister has a nightmare. He miraculously returns to America, but America greets him with the same phrase: “There are no vacancies in America” (Net, otvechaiut, v Amerike mest”). In the morning, Mr. Twister is glad to accept anything, even black people in all the neighboring hotel rooms. Marshak portrays the international friendship from which Mister Twister excludes himself through a rather grotesque trope: he describes the peaceful coexistence of shoes of all fashions and colors in the hotel corridor. Black, yellow, and red shoes stand side by side waiting for the bootblack to vivify their colors, making the white more white and the black more black. Only Mister Twister’s shoes are excluded from this idyllic parade: he has not taken them off because he is spending the night in a chair. This scene evokes the episode in Circus where the circus director explains to Marion that she and her Soviet love, Martynov, can have children of any color: black, yellow, even purple polka-dotted, thus paradoxically suggesting that Soviet people can be parents of different nations. The Soviet Union is portrayed here as an

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ideal version of multinational America, which promises but does not deliver equality to everyone. In the morning, two black children pity Mr. Twister: “Poor old man, he spends the night on a chair!” As Mikhail Gasparov ironically notes, in his anti-racist poem Marshak does not pay much attention to these black children; they are faceless, although they do have names.44 But the cleaner wittily teaches them a lesson in social vigilance; playing on the word “poor,” he transfers it from the ethical realm (the children are motivated by humanism and compassion) to the economic one: “He’s not a poor old man but a rich one!” (Eto ne bednyi starik, a bogatyi). For the “poor” Mister Twister and his family, the trip definitely turns into a hellish journey. But the poem suggests that it is his private Hell: all the other travelers (Chinese, Malays, Mongols, Creoles, etc.), saved from the hellish heat of the steamship, find their destination to be a dream Paradise of tolerance. Even on the grammatical level, they now become individual persons: in the Soviet Union they are mentioned in the singular “A Chinese, a Malay, a Mongol, a Mulatto, a Creole,” instead of “Negroes and Malays” on the steamship, although they still have neither names nor faces. Thus, the message of the poem’s narrative level is clear. However, on the subliminal level, the poem affects the reader quite differently. A closer analysis of the poem’s structure and a review of the changes Marshak made in writing it allow us to see that the picture of the international Soviet Paradise here is ambiguous. Galanov recalls that Marshak confessed that he had never spent so much time reworking a poem as he did on writing and rewriting “Mister Twister.” The evolution of Mister Twister’s name shows the movement from a maximalist black-and-white picture to a more positive image. Initially, the character—then the owner of a food enterprise—bore the name Mr. Pork. The carnal connotations of this name and the gruesomely detailed description of the ruthless transformation of bulls and cows into the canned soup that is the source of Mr. Pork’s wealth was too macabre a picture for a children’s poem: Somewhere in the prairies bulls are pastured, Their necks are like barrels, their horns like bayonets. They are pastured on the steppe by a hungry cowboy, Then they are taken to the slaughterhouse to be slaughtered. They are killed and thrust into an enormous pot, Their bones are dried and ground into powder. You put the meat powder into your bouillon, And the master puts into his pocket a million.

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V preriiakh gde-to pasutsia byki, Shei, kak bochki, roga, kak shtyki. Paset ikh v stepi golodnyi kovboi, Potom ikh na boiniu vedut na uboi. B’iut i kidaiut v ogromnyi gorshok, Kosti ikh sushat i trut v poroshok. Miasnoi poroshok vy kladete v bul’on, A khoziain v karman kladet million.

Besides, there was no point in sending a character without the slightest hint of an inner life to Soviet Russia; he would be incapable of understanding the significance of the glorious revolutionary country. The next version, Mister Blister, was still physically repulsive, and the mockery seemed too primitive. “Mister Prister” (referring to “priest”) was also discarded. The transformations of the name occurred in parallel with rhythmical changes. The dancing name of Mister Twister suited the light, jumping rhythm of a children’s poem and freed the main hero from many negative connotations. While creating the poem, Marshak was apparently under the influence of Korolenko’s American travelogue. The image of Mr. Pork as a typical American must have been inspired by Korolenko’s essay “Factory of Death” about Chicago’s famous slaughterhouse—the process of turning a bull into a food product is similarly described in both Korolenko’s essay and the early drafts of Marshak’s poem. Finally, the Mister Twister of the 1933 version became so childishly attractive that in 1952 Marshak had to add some unpleasantness, replacing his human qualities with social attributes. In 1933 the poem ran: The millionaire burst into laughter, half-awake, Clapped his hands like a lively kid Millioner zasmeialsia sprosonok, Khlopnul v ladoshi kak rezvyi rebenok

In 1952 the equivalent line reads: “He thrust his expensive cigar” (otshvyrnul doroguiu sigaru). But what most subverts Marshak’s propagandistic intentions is the structure of the world in the poem. Space, in the capitalist world, significantly differs from that in the Soviet world of Leningrad. Its structure is revealed through the hero’s movement through both worlds. The poem opens with the advertisement of Cook’s travel agency:

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If You Are worn out With boredom And would like To see the world— The Island of Tahiti, Paris and Pamir …Mountains and mines, North and South, Palms and cedars45 Will be shown to you by Cook.

The description of Cook’s company follows Korolenko’s sketch “To America” almost literally: “In our days, if you wish to cross the ocean, take a round trip across Europe, visit the Sandwich Isles, New Zealand, or Patagonia,— you have to ask for a preliminary blessing from Mr. Cook.”46 Korolenko’s Cook is a new Poseidon, a mighty ruler of the world, and in this capacity he steps into Marshak’s poem to share the world with Mister Twister. The advertisement, in Marshak’s favorite manner, structures the world, marking north and south, top (the mountains) and bottom (the mines), on the scale of an enormous universe. The main character is absolutely free, and the whole world is open to him. By contrast, when Mister Twister arrives in the Soviet Union, he finds himself in an isolated world. In the poem’s first part, his movement had purpose and direction. In the second, Soviet part, Twister’s trajectory becomes hellishly circular: he goes from one hotel to another until he finally returns to his starting point, the Hotel Angleterre. At the poem’s end, Marshak provides a model of the whole world with its “proper” dimensions again—left, right, top and bottom. But the scale is tiny: In the room on the right There is a Chinese, In the room on the left There is a Malay, In the suite above you There is a Mongol, In the one under you— A Mulatto and Creole.

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Here the reader is pulled into Mister Twister’s point of view, which is emulated by his interlocutor, the porter—after all, the national differences are crucial only for Twister.47 Hence, from the whole wide world offered to the traveler by Cook’s agency and characterized by directed movement, Mr. Twister is transported to an isolated place where his route is aimless and circular, the world is pressed into a caricature of itself, and there is no place for him there. In the early, 1933 version, Marshak motivated the scarcity of space in Leningrad by the conspiracy of a trickster, the hotel porter. Offended by Twister’s racial prejudice, the porter of the Hotel Angleterre telephones all the other porters in the city and asks them to tell Mr. Twister that there are no vacancies in their hotels. Thus, the conflict is one between two people. But in the final version, the author’s motivation changes: Marshak wants to demonstrate how popular the USSR is with other countries. An international congress is taking place in the city, and all the hotels are booked up. As a result, Mister Twister’s antagonist becomes faceless—it is the Soviet system itself. As Gasparov notes, the poem in its final version loses its playfulness. Trying to make the poem more ideologically correct, Marshak in fact makes the Soviet world scarier, and Mister Twister finds himself caught in a typical conflict between the individual and the system, in which he inevitably elicits more sympathy. We have observed that the American experience in the Russian travelogues becomes an occasion for the Soviet traveler to reevaluate his home country, to rediscover his own feeling of national identity (“the Soviets have their own pride,” proclaimed Mayakovsky).48 Mister Twister, according to this same canon, dreams about a safe and comfortable America, about returning home. Escape from the encapsulated space of the Soviet Union is conceivable only in a dream. But in his dream, Mr. Twister is rescued by Cook and brought home, only to realize that there are no vacancies in America either. Mister Twister’s experience in the Soviet Union is therefore projected onto the whole world, leaving the reader with the uneasy sensation that no jailbreak is possible. In choosing Mister Twister as his hero, Marshak perhaps unconsciously represents Soviet reality in terms of Hell. Drawing on the travelogue tradition of Russian writers who descended into the Hell of America, he allows his reader to catch some glimpses of the hellish nature of his own country and even to suspect that the Soviet Union might be not a family but a prison of nations. As in the case of The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West, satire combined with the main hero’s subjective prism demonstrates its subversive potential. On a larger scale, the reverse travelogues, as well as the American travelogues of Russian writers, pinpoint the pitfalls of the Soviet orientation toward America as an evil twin. A Paradise constructed by inverting the principles of Hell is doomed to preserve a generic resemblance with it.

Conclusion From Dante’s Inferno to Odysseus’s Ithaca

t h e p r e s e n t s t u d y I have restricted my material to the travelogues of writers for whom journeying to America was a free choice— in Soviet times even a privilege, since they were plenipotentiaries of their motherland. But although the choice to travel was free, the choice of what to write was not. By contrast, those on whom America was imposed— emigrants forced to flee to the New World—portrayed it from their own individual points of view. However, the disparity in degrees of artistic freedom is not as dramatic as it may seem: on the one hand, the travelogue writers often expressed their preconceived views sincerely; on the other, not all emigrants were totally free from ideological agendas, and none of them was free from the Russian literary context. The similarities and differences between the travelers’ and emigrants’ travelogues present a wide field for future researchers. Here, I will limit myself to mapping out an intriguing divergence in their paradigms, which we can read as the difference between Dante’s and Odysseus’s journeys. Russians’ mythological, “otherworldly” image of America preceded the Soviet Union and outlived it. The 2004 collection of essays Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States attests to the fact that the sensation of going to America as a journey to the Other World, the world of the dead, is still a recurring theme of traveling writers’ reflections.1 America is evasive, and Russian visitors can never fully believe in its existence. Ilf and Petrov, the most curious and detailed observers, who up until the final moment of their sojourn still hoped to understand what America was, describe their departure enigmatically: “A few hours later there was no trace left of America” (387), which is not the same as saying, for example, that “America has disappeared from sight.” The reader is left with a vague doubt—is there, indeed, any America out there? Valentin Kataev, Petrov’s brother, who described his

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visit to the United States in his novel Sviatoi kolodets (The Holy Well, 1968), argues that for Americans themselves America is an ideal illusion. Wherever Kataev’s narrator goes—to New York, to Washington, D.C., to California—he is told that “the real America,” the American promised land, is somewhere else, in a different state; and none of his informants acknowledges actually living there. Consciously or subconsciously, authors of later American travelogues build on the earlier literary tradition analyzed in this book. To a significant extent, they perceive America as a literary reality. The Brooklyn Bridge is “the famous Brooklyn Bridge once praised by Mayakovsky.”2 Odd and funny details immediately bring Ilf and Petrov to mind. Official Soviet writers demonize America-as-rival and claim to be, above all, the followers of Gorky and Ilf and Petrov, yet they disregard the positive aspect of the former’s travelogue. Dissidents attempt to reverse the poles in the official binary opposition “Paradise—Hell,” ascribing paradisiacal qualities to America in the manner of Korolenko’s pilgrims. The most astute of them— like Aksenov in the period of In Search of Melancholy Baby and New Sweet Style—realize that America cannot be understood within this black-andwhite picture and search for a broader palette. After World War II, as the United States became the USSR’s major political antagonist, prominent writers’ pilgrimages continued and even expanded in scope. In his American pamphlets (1947), Ehrenburg lists the major vices that we will see reproduced over and over in the years to come: the hideous disparities in distribution of wealth, the inhumane exploitation of workers, the hypocrisy of political principles, the shallow culture, the segregation of blacks. In the post-Stalinist era, a trip to America with a subsequent debunking of capitalist evils continues to be an enviable attribute of a writing career’s success. The travelogue authors insist on the value of personal witness and pretend to describe the genuine America; Sofronov, for example, titles his text “Amerika kak takovaia” (America As It Is). In reality, the travelers’ individual roles and the fictional elements of their text decrease as the genre crystallizes into a formula. Writers’ and journalists’ ideological pilgrimages to the United States become collective: Boris Polevoi, Victor Poltoratskii, Valentin Berezhkov, Aleksei Adzhubei, Boris Izakov, Anatolii Sofronov, and Nikolai Gribachev travel to America in 1955; a large group of writers accompany Khrushchev on his American tour in September 1959;3 Sofronov visits the United States for a second time in 1962 together with Nikolai Pogodin; Vasilii Peskov and Boris Strelnikov undertake an automobile journey in 1972; etc. The articles and books these travelers create represent very similar versions of the same

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events:4 Kennedy’s assassination, FBI surveillance, and students’ movements are added to the earlier corpus of recurrent travelogue motifs. The theme of inhuman technology becomes more threatening and global than ever, since technology has gained the power to destroy the world. Even the more moderate writers, like Grigorii Baklanov in his sympathetic account of a visit to the Spochel family, hints that Mr. Spochel’s conscience is not clear, since he works in a field “which presented a very real threat to the future of the human race.”5 Caring for his home and children, Mr. Spochel fails to take care of the world, the communal home. The Gogolian subtext can still be discerned in these later travelogues: for example, one of Adzhubei’s chapters is called “Nepropavshaia gramota” (The Non-lost Letter) after Gogol’s story from the Dikanka cycle (“The Lost Letter”), not to mention Gogolian grotesque and synecdoche. And during the Cold War, Gorky’s American pamphlets remain sacred. New York is invariably called “the City of the Yellow Devil,” and Gorky’s alimentary imagery also persists.6 In 1962, Pogodin claims that Gorky’s relevance is undiminished even though his text’s concrete, descriptive aspect is somewhat outdated. Pogodin especially praises Gorky’s image of a lump of gold, which works both centripetally and centrifugally.7 Apart from Gorky, official writers also claim Ilf and Petrov’s One-Storied America as a model. The delegation of writers and journalists who visit the United States in 1955 regret that “there was no question of repeating Ilf and Petrov’s famous journey,” since they were followed by American detectives and not allowed to meet common Americans. The new travelers gladly recognize in America what they have read about in Ilf and Petrov. For example, Boris Polevoi, describing his impressions of American speech, makes a special note that people often use “the prattling [zhurchashchee] word ‘surely’ that had charmed travelers across one-storied America.”8 Criticizing American advertising, Strelnikov and Shatunovskii refer to Ilf and Petrov’s ironic passage about the ubiquitous advertisements for Coca-Cola.9 Writers and journalists attempt to follow Ilf and Petrov’s route, and they borrow a list of topics from them (Mark Twain in Russia, a university soccer game in San Francisco, the hidden life of Hollywood, criticism of American movies; Native American schools and exploitation of their exoticism; etc.). However, they bypass the satirists’ self-irony, their nonideological descriptions of various aspects of life, and their attempts at a multi-angled-perspective—features that set One-Storied America apart from other travelogues. In a sense, these virtually indistinguishable and predictable post-war travelogues epitomize the Hell of eternal repetition that Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov discovered in America. A rare exception

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is Peskov and Strelnikov, whose travelogue Zemlia za okeanom (The Land beyond the Ocean), a moderately politicized account of their automobile journey, focuses on American geography, nature, and history.10 In a brief period during the Thaw, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Valentin Kataev, and Viktor Nekrasov portray America more personally and artistically, using bright, paradoxical imagery; Nekrasov’s Po obe storony okeana (Both Sides of the Ocean) is particularly sympathetic toward its subject matter. However, in a speech presaging the end of the Thaw (“Vyskokaia ideinost’ i khudozhestvennoe masterstvo—velikaia sila sovetskoi literatury i iskusstva,” March 8, 1963), Khrushchev criticizes all four writers for political immaturity and formal experimentation. Hans Rogger summarizes Nekrasov’s “shortcomings” as follows: “He…expressed enthusiasm for the grandeur and beauty of cities, skyscrapers, and bridges; delight in modern art and architecture; tolerance for Elvis Presley and a liking for Coca-Cola; gratitude for food he had received as a child from the American Relief Association in 1922 and for the tanks, planes, trucks, and canned pork supplied in World War II.”11 At the same time, he failed to demonstrate the hellish contrasts that existed within the cities, the suffering of the racial Other, the inhumaneness of technology. Consequently, he was denounced for what was absent from his account as much as for what was present in it. In a sense, the official tradition had determined the lacunae in his travelogues. In her study America in Contemporary Soviet Literature (1971), Alayne P. Reilly links the writers’ artistic talent to their more positive attitude to America. This leads her, on the one hand, to neglect the earlier travelogues’ artistic aspects, and on the other hand, to overestimate Yevtushenko’s, Voznesensky’s, and Kataev’s positive pictures of America. While their expressive images go far beyond the official rhetorical clichés, their texts fit the traditional paradigm of portraying America as the world of the dead. Older recurrent motifs gain new poetic form while preserving their ideological meaning. Voznesesnky’s America “reeks with darkness, camellias, and ammonium (“Vynuzhdennoe otstuplenie” [“Forced Distraction”]); its apocalyptic reality precipitates Marilyn Monroe’s suicide (“Marilyn Monroe”); machines make women give birth to other machines and eventually force them out of the cities (“Bunt mashin” [“The Revolt of the Machines”]). When a Soviet visitor leaves America, the FBI retains his dead doubles (his images) in the coffins of their archives (“Forced Distraction”). Yevtushenko goes further than his predecessors who explored the interior of the Statue of Liberty’s skirt, penning a poem “Pod kozhei statui Svobody” (Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty).12 He describes a visit inside the Statue as an unnatural process of reverse childbirth, claiming that the

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visitors, soiled with blood and villainy, do not deserve to be admitted to Liberty. The Statue of Liberty’s image in Yevtushenko is twofold: she is both an unfair bride (“Who will marry a statue if there are bullets in her dowry?” Kto zhe statuiu v zheny voz’met, esli puli v ee pridanom?)13 and, in a new twist on the tradition, an unhappy mother. Here Yevtushenko apparently projects onto the statue the Soviet image of Rodina-mat’ (Motherland). At the same time, however, he stresses the difference between America and Russia by suggesting that Americans who trample Martin Luther King’s and Kennedy’s bodies are not Liberty’s legitimate children. In fact, Liberty herself has not yet been born: recalling the history of the Statue’s construction, he states that even now it is not yet fully assembled, being merely an empty manikin without heart. Kataev, in his surreal, multi-layered Holy Well, portrays America as a dream on the verge of life and death: his autobiographical narrator recollects his American journey in an anesthetized delirium during surgery. Kataev juxtaposes American scenes with memories of his youth and intersperses quotes from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume” and Pushkin’s “Prophet,” together with snippets of his body on the operating table as seen from above. In tune with earlier travelogues, time stops during Kataev’s narrator’s transatlantic voyage, and he is caught in eternity. Unsurprisingly, we find references to Dante and Gogol everywhere. In Manhattan, the narrator moves automatically, despite the feeling that he is being lured into a trap; his intuition leads him to Dante’s statue, which “with all its circles of Hell… did not promise anything good.”14 In Gogolian manner, a suit, not a man, rides in a New York car and ascends hotel stairs, ignoring the people around him. Taking a closer look at the everyday life, the narrator confesses that he has fallen in love with America—not the official version, but the America of idealistic young people. This love, however, is sad and vulnerable, since the sensation of death permeates his American experience. In the second half of the twentieth century, the paradigm of the American travelogue shifts. The most influential autobiographical literary travelogues are created not by travelers who explore the alien world and then return to their own but by emigrants whose characters travel in search of a home (Aksenov, Dovlatov, Nabokov, Brodsky, and Efimov). Their model is no longer Dante’s descent into Hell but, rather, Odysseus’s journey home. The new myth does not totally break with the former one, since Hades was indeed one of the stops on Odysseus’s itinerary. Besides, the American home that the new travelers strive for is more an ideal than a real place—a nostalgic version of the Paradise they dream of regaining. Hence, they restore the positive mode of the American text.

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Aksenov’s case is particularly interesting, because he wrote his first American travelogue-novella Round The Clock Non-Stop after he visited the United States as a Soviet writer and published it in Novyi Mir in 1976. Later, as an emigrant, he penned a second travelogue, In Search of Melancholy Baby, which was not published in Russia until perestroika. Both travelogues juxtapose autobiographical narrative with surreal, fictional digressions, inspired by American pop culture. In In Search of Melancholy Baby, Aksenov critically reviews the tradition of early Russian travelogues about America15 and explicitly sets his text against them. By means of this polemic, he paradoxically demonstrates that a Russian writer in America cannot be free from his tradition: through disputing it, he recognizes it. Like the traveling writers under study, Aksenov uses a Gogolian prism: “Feast your eyes on the skyline—fantastic, isn’t it? Now look down at the street. All bumps, pits, and puddles. Add a couple of pigs and you’ve precisely got a Mirgorod.”16 Aksenov often reverses traditional travelogue themes: he portrays America not as an enclosed space but as a vast territory without borders. Acknowledging the connection between America and smoking, he focuses on the unofficial, 1960s image of America as a Russian youth’s idyllic dreamland. He mentions that Camels and Pall-Malls were among the fetishes of 1960s Russians; smoking American cigarettes constituted high chic for “the Shtatniki”—young people grasping for the shreds of American culture available in the Soviet Union. Most interesting are the instances when Aksenov reveals new approaches to familiar motifs, discovering vast territories between their two poles, as is particularly evident in his treatment of the racial Other. When Aksenov’s autobiographical narrator comes to America, he critically reevaluates Soviet propaganda, yet he still believes that all black people are good and kind. After a humiliating encounter with a black woman at a Social Security office, he discovers with surprise that he can be an object of racial hatred, that in reality black people can be rude, unsympathetic, and unjust.17 In other words, skin color determines neither the presence nor the absence of personal qualities. In Aksenov, the system of binary oppositions that Russians often apply to America does not work; nor does reversing the binaries bring one closer to understanding America. The only solution is to look for another set of tools. Black people are neither bad nor good by default: they are all individuals. As a contrast to the earlier grim images of food that fails to satiate Soviet travelers, Aksenov develops a paradigm of the various stages of emigrants’ culinary adaptations to America. At first, Soviet emigrants are fascinated by the assortment of food in American supermarkets.18 This does not mean that they immediately fall for gastronomic wonders; rather, the quantity and the

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Ya n k e e s in Petrogr ad, Bolsheviks in N ew York

quality of the food enchants them and makes them feel guilty vis-à-vis those who have remained in the Soviet Union. The second stage of adaptation is a nostalgic return to Russian culinary preferences, like farmer’s cheese and herring, which they consider more genuine. Finally, the emigrants become accustomed to the “healthy” American way of life: their menu is determined by its number of calories rather than by their real tastes. We find an early blueprint for this new paradigm—a journey to America as Odysseus’s return home—in Ilf and Petrov, who do not focus exclusively on the hellishness of America. Their image of a journey through America as an ocean voyage is complex and can be interpreted within both Dante’s and Homer’s paradigms: An automobile journey across America is like a journey across an ocean, monotonous and magnificent. Whenever you go out on deck, in the morning or in the evening, in a storm or a calm, on Monday or on Thursday, you will always find water, of which there is no end. Whenever you look out of the window of an automobile there will always be an excellent smooth road, with gasoline stations, tourist houses, and billboards on the sides. You saw all this yesterday and the day before, and you know that you will see the very same thing tomorrow and the day after. (89)

The description is hellish because of the eternal repetition of the elements, and yet it is epically magnificent. Grigorii Kruzhkov’s essay develops this theme within the context of Odysseus’s journey: “America looks like the Aegean Sea. In the West it is inhabited by tribes of bellicose Hollywood people. In the East there are trade cities of Phoenicians and New Yorkers. In the middle, there is a large Archipelago of universities and colleges….Islands differ. On this island you will find a wise Prospero, on the other island you will see Polyphemus seeing nothing behind his flock of sheep….”19 We have seen that, even in the early travelogues, America often evokes in Russian travelers a paradoxical sensation of recognition—sometimes, of Russian features that they consider outdated (Esenin: “Before your eyes pass plains with sparse forest and—alas, terribly reminiscent of Russia!— little wooden Negro villages” [153]; Mayakovsky: “The poor Jewish, Negro, and Italian districts on Second and Third Avenues between First and Thirteenth Streets—are even filthier than Minsk. Minsk is very dirty” [174]); sometimes of what they would like the new Russia to be (“After all, this street is ours too,” Esenin announces about Broadway [152]). The future Russia is supposed to embody a kind of ideal America. In the later émigré travelogues, this sensation of recognition is also present,20 but often

Conclusion

225

it transforms. Although a new Russian Odysseus moves toward a different home from the one he has left in Russia, at some point he suddenly finds the ideal home of his childhood dreams in the New World. Nabokov’s Pnin cherishes his tiny but spacious brick house, “something singularly delightful and amazingly satisfying to a weary old want of his innermost self, battered and stunned by thirty-five years of homelessness.” He thinks that if it had not been for the historical turmoil of the twentieth century, which caused him to wander the Earth for decades, “everything…could have been much the same…a suburban house such as this, old books within, late blooms without.”21 While Pnin is unable to retain his American dream house, Aksenov’s autobiographical hero in In Sea rch of Melancholy Baby does manage to organize an ideal private existence, unimaginable in the Soviet Union. After a “year of drift” around the country, he chooses to settle in Washington, D.C., where the cityscape not only reminds him of St. Petersburg but also happily blends in features of London and Paris.22 In New Sweet Style, Aksenov creates a mythological image of America fusing Dante, Homer, and Rabelais and develops his picaresque plot in the vein of commedia dell’arte. Aksenov’s protagonist, Alex Korbakh, enters the New World lonely and confused, and there he finds the love of his life, his Beatrice, and is reunited with the American members of his family, whom he had never heard of back in Russia. Dovlatov’s autobiographical character “transplants” his home—his family—to America. After his exile in 1972, Brodsky writes a poem “from Odysseus to Telemachus,” on behalf of the wandering hero who was lost on his way home. But eventually, the Russian Odysseus does come home—to the home he has never known but has always anticipated. He knows that he has always belonged to the “real” America, the America of the spirit. In the 1920s, Mayakovsky, who disparages contemporary America, nevertheless claims that he is not an alien in some ideal America of freedom: “I am more American than any American.” Brodsky, who finds peace in real America and for whom the ideal America comprises “American poetry and the spirit of American laws,” echoes him almost fifty years later: “My generation, the group of people with whom I was close when we were twenty, all of us were individualists. And our ideal in this respect was the United States: exactly because of the spirit of individualism. That is why, when some of us found ourselves here, we had the sensation that we had come home: we turned out to be more American than the locals.”23

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Appendix 1 Lexical and Grammatical Neologisms in Pilniak’s OK

Vocabulary In his ornamental prose, Pilniak experiments widely with word formation across various parts of speech. Most often he achieves poetic economy by contracting a syntagm into one word.

Nouns

kholostezh’ (604)—a hybrid, a substitute for the expression kholostaia molodezh’ [young bachelors] vziatkopiaterka (568)—a complex word Pilniak creates for a “five-dollarbribe” obligatsiederzhateli (508)—a Russian calque of the English noun “shareholder”

Adjectives

sonno-pushnoi [mister] (448)—sleepy man trading furs konfetno-iziashchnaia [bumazhka kablogrammy] (448)—candy-elegant [cablegram paper]

Adverbs

vdolepoperek, poperekovdol’—two interchangeable contractions of the idiomatic adverbial expression vdol’ i poperek [through the length and the breadth of ] Dorogi peresekli vsiu Ameriku vdol’, poperek, poperekovdol’, vdolepoperek (477) [The roads have crisscrossed and recrossed the length and the breadth of the whole of America]

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A ppe n d i x 1

Verbs

Pilniak creates new verbs and new aspectual forms more often than other parts of speech: razmillionit’sia—to become a millionaire Byt’ mozhet, razoriatsia, byt’ mozhet, razmillioniatsia! (599) [Maybe they will ruin themselves, maybe, they will become millionaires!] This verb is formed according to the same model as rasshirit’sia [broaden], razrastis’ [grow] where the prefix raz(s) has the meaning of expansion. Pilniak ironically juxtaposes it with the opposite meaning of the same prefix—rasprodat’ [to sell out] and razorit’sia1 [to go into bankruptcy]—thus linguistically emphasizing that it is a matter of sheer chance whether one becomes a millionaire or a beggar.

New verb forms

Idiosyncratic perfective aspectual forms: zaprikazyvat’—to start to give orders Papasha zaprikazyval ei tonom boga (553) [Father started to give her orders in the tone of God] Loading existing words with new meanings that point out their unexpected inner form: balovat’—to dance and to be naughty Posle obeda…polagalos’ balovat’ (ot slova bal) fokstrotami (446) [After dinner one was supposed to be naughty/indulge oneself dancing the foxtrot.] Here Pilniak employs several meanings of the verb balovat’— “to be naughty” and “to indulge oneself ” and suggests a new etymology of this verb as a derivative of the noun “ball.” Therefore, “naughty” lascivious behavior after the ball is even etymologically determined.

Participles

serdechno-edushchie—cordially going Kablogrammy dlia serdechno-edushchikh (446) [Cablegrams for the “cordially going,” i.e., apparently, for those “cordially anticipated”]. Inventing this complex adjective Pilniak employs a pun—edushchikh is close to ediashchikh [eating] making the reader suspect an adjective derived from the noun serdtseed [heart-eater]. poluprigashennyi—semi-half-extinguished

App endix 1

229

poluprigashennye pereulochki kaiut (446) [Dimly lighted (semi-halfextinguished) cabin alleys]. Pilniak’s new word formation is redundant rather than condensed: he emphasizes a certain quality aggregating morphemes with similar meanings.

Word-Groups and Sentences Non-standard word combinations abound in Pilniak’s travelogue.2 He returns to his favorite idiosyncratic constructions again and again, charting the novel’s recurrent motifs. Violating the norms of neutral speech, the author attracts the reader’s attention; such digressions create semantically loaded loci in the narrative. One of Pilniak’s most widely used metaphors, which entails unusual verb governance,3 is zabor dollara—“fence of the dollar,” which stresses the disjointed nature of the capital. [Bogatye amerikantsy] zalezli za zabory dollara (473) [(Rich Americans) climbed over the fence of the dollar] te, kto svalilsia s zabora dollara (501) [those who have fallen from the fence of the dollar (those who did not succeed)] Pilniak produces elliptical constructions based on this metaphor omitting the word “fence”: dlia zalezshikh za dollary (473) [for those who climbed over the dollars]. The metaphor “the fence of the dollar” also clarifies the meaning of such lexical neologisms as zazabornye chudesa (519) [overthe-fence miracles (miracles that can be observed behind the “fence” of Hollywood]; or zadollarovyi obyvatel’ (515) [over-the-dollar philistine, one who has surrounded himself with a fence of dollars]. Pilniak’s American narrative employs multiple oxymoronic expressions, stressing the presumed hypocrisy of the country, a gap between what it pretends to be and what it really is: dollarovoe teplo (446)—dollar warmth blagorodstvo zhul’nichestv (446)—nobility of tricks bednyi millioner (499)—poor millionaire Pilniak’s synecdoche helps to create pictures similar to Gorky’s: people disappear behind objects: opoennye tufli [shlepaiut po koridoru] (447)—drunk shoes [shuffle along the corridor] Among Pilniak’s grammatical diversions, non-standard governance is the most characteristic: for example, Pilniak uses the instrumental case instead of the prepositional construction blagodaria + dative case:

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A ppe n d i x 1

Etimi torgovliami on na pervom meste v mire (550) [He occupies the first place in the world because of these trades]

There is an additional digression in this example: the plural form of the abstract noun torgovlia (trade). Such usage of the plural number often has a disparaging effect in Pilniak’s narrative: see, for example, the metonymy khodit’ po fordovskim chistotam (611)—to walk along Ford’s cleanlinesses. Pilniak masterfully achieves a derogatory effect here: in Russian the plural form is reserved for the opposite of cleanliness—nechistoty (sewage); and the grammatical association immediately brings it to the reader’s mind. The plural of proper names—a technique widely practiced by Mayakovsky and, in general, in Soviet rhetoric—has the effect of diminishing the individuality of the subject (Fordy, Vanderbil’ty). Pilniak achieves a similar effect using collective nouns: poznakomili menia s desiatkom zvezd (521) [I was introduced to dozens of movie-stars]; in this case the plural would have been less compromising than the collective noun desiatok. Like Gorky, Pilniak creates lengthy passages repeating monotonous syntactic constructions, usually expressed in the genitive case: Tiker otmechaet na bumazhnoi lentochke temperaturu dollarov kapitalisticheskikh zhul’nichestv (445) [The stock ticker marks on the paper band the temperature of dollars of capitalist tricks] Dorogi vse v grafikakh “trafikov” pravil dvizheniia (475) [The highways are full of patterns of “traffics” of the rules of the road] The most characteristic feature of Pilniak’s style is his creation of extensive lists. Such lists of American phenomena gravitate towards nominative sentences, which are often exclamatory: Kacheli vsekh sortov! Karuseli vsekh sortov! Amerikanskie gory (kotorye v Amerike nazyvaiutsia russkimi)! Udovol’stviia! Naslazhden’ia! (464)— Swings of all kinds! Carousels of all kinds! “American Mountains” [roller coasters] (which in America are called “Russian Mountains”)! Pleasures! Entertainments!4 Very often Pilniak creates inconsistent lists where one verb or noun governs several incompatible nouns belonging to different semantic realms. Concrete nouns are juxtaposed with abstract: Zdanie velichestvennoe…vkhody eti podperty kolonnami ellinskikh traditsii, ravno kak traditsiiami…partii demokraticheskoi (567)— [The building is magnificent: the entrances lean at the columns in Hellenistic style (traditions), as well as at the traditions of the Democratic party]

Appendix 1

231

Here, at least, the author provides a link between concrete and abstract nouns, noting that the columns are made in the Hellenistic tradition. In most cases this link is absent: Zhilye pereulochki tonut v tsvetakh i prostitutsii (551) [The residential alleys are lost (drowned) in flowers and prostitution] Often these inconsistent lists are long: Koni-ailend gorit zarevami, fantastikoi, fantasmagoriei, obaldeniem elektrichestva (467) [Coney Island is illuminated by the glows, fantasy, phantasmagoria, dumbness of electricity] Pervyi klass…tiker, vodka, dereviannye skachki, gimnastika i tennis na verkhnei palube, “monkei biznes” (…to, chto iurkaet zhenskimi khalatikami na muzhskikh pereulkakh i shlepaet opoennymi tufliami na pereulkakh zhenskikh)—vse eto idealy (447) [The first class…the ticker, vodka, wooden races, gymnastics and tennis on the upper deck, ‘monkey business’ (…which flashes women’s robes in the men’s alleys and shuffles with drunk shoes in the women’s alleys)—all these are ideals] V Amerike—promyshlennaia svoboda i svoboda dlia promyshlennikov. Koka-kola, morozhenoe “eskimo,” Ford (617) [In America, there is freedom of manufacturing and freedom for manufacturers. Coca-cola, “Eskimo” ice cream, Ford] In Pilniak’s lists all the elements are equal and interchangeable; they are brushstrokes used to daub the picture of American social reality: I vse u amerikantsev—sport. Pri etom poniatiia—sport, record, o’kei—poniatiia ravnoznachashchie. Kostiumy u amerikantsev—sport (i record, i o’kei!). Avtomobili u amerikantsev—o’kei, sport (482) [For Americans everything is sport. At the same time, the concepts—sport, championship, OK—are equal concepts. Suits for Americans are sport (and championship, and OK!) Automobiles for Americans are OK, sport] Ford…nikak ne vypadaet iz amerikanskikh zakonov Vulvorta, koka-kola, “eskimosa,” mistera Kotofsona (610) [Ford does not stand apart from the American laws of Woolworth, Coca-Cola, “Eskimos,” Mr. Kotofson] Here Pilniak points out that while Americans indulge themselves with the ice cream, the country’s manufacturers exploit the image of the oppressed Eskimos “who had starved from his childhood.” (Expressing concern about the fate of Eskimos, in his texts, the author randomly uses the singular and plural number of the noun “Eskimo.”) All elements and aspects of American life are shown here as parts of one general phenomenon—capitalism. Therefore, the author’s criticism of each of these aspects turns into an invective against the entire social order, and vice versa, his generally negative attitude embraces even seemingly innocent attributes of American life.

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A ppe n d i x 1

Notes 1. According to Fasmer, the verb “razorit’” is derived from Old Slavonic “orit’.” 2. As Mikhail Gasparov observes, disagreement occurring on a semantic level produces metaphors, metonymies, and minor semantic shifts, and on a grammatical level: ellipses, non-standard verbal, and prepositional government (M. L. Gasparov, “‘Liudi v peizazhe’ B. Livshitsa,” in Izbrannye trudy. Vol. 2, O stikhakh [Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1997], 215). Discussing similar techniques in Mayakovsky, Gasparov interprets such “grammatical neologisms” as “something like syntactic neologisms, accompanying the lexical” (“Idiostil’ Maiakovskogo,” in ibid., 393). 3. By this I mean case governance, when the verb requires that a noun be in a specific case. 4. Unfortunately, Pilniak does not elaborate on this interesting mutual Russian– American stereotype.

Appendix 2 The Transatlantic Journey

Writer

Length

Steamship

of voyage

Korolenko

Gorky

August 5–

Aurania

1893

Line)

August 13,

March 23– 28, 1906

(Cunard

Kaiser

Wilhelm der

Place

Place

Return

of Departure

of Arrival

Steamship

Liverpool

New York

Atlantic

Cherbourg

New York

Princess Irene,

(North

(North

German

German

Lloyd)

Lloyd)

Esenin

Mayakovsky

Pilniak

September

Paris

1, 1923

Line)

25–October

(French

June 21–

Espagne

1925

Maritimes)

July 8,

4, 5 days, 1931

(Transports

Bremen (North

New York– Naples

Grosse

Le Havre

New York

George

Saint-

Veracruz,

Rochambeau

Nazaire

Mexico

Cherbourg

New York

Le Havre

New York

Washington

(French Line)

German Lloyd)

Ilf and Petrov

October 2– 7, 1935

La

Normandie (French Line)

Majestic

(White Star Line)

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Notes

Introduction 1. V. G. Bogoraz [Tan, pseud.], Sobranie sochinenii V. G. Tana, vol. 5 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia literaturnogo tovarishchestva “Prosveshchenie,” 1911), 106. 2. A. N. Nikoliukin, Literaturnye sviazi Rossii i SShA: Stanovlenie literaturnykh kontaktov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 25. 3. Sigmund Skard, The American Myth and the European Mind (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), 15. 4. See, for example, Abbot Gleason, “Republic of Humbug: The Russian Nativist Critique of the United States 1830–1930,” American Quarterly 44 (1992): 2. 5. Among the non-Russians who, at different historical moments, drew parallels between Russia and America, were de Crevecouer, de Tocqueville, Napoleon, Spengler, Toynbee, Whitman, Heidegger, and many others. 6. V. N. Toporov, “Peterburg i ‘peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury,’” in Mif. Ritual. Simvol. Obraz: Issledovaniia v oblasti mifopoeticheskogo; Izbrannoe (Moscow: Progress–Kul’tura, 1995), 259–367. 7. Hans Rogger, “America in the Russian Mind: or Russian Discoveries of America,” Pacific Historical Review 47 (1978): 29. 8. Since Trotsky did not leave a literary account of his journey, I do not focus on his American sojourn. 9. Vladimir Shlapentokh observes: “Russians have always singled out one Western country to be either a model for imitation or a model for rejection. In the late eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was, of course, France. In the next period up to the Revolution, it was England and to some degree Germany. Since the creation of the Soviet state, and especially after World War II, however, it has been the United States that has captured the imagination of the Soviet people and that has become the symbol of the West in the Soviet mind.” Shlapentokh, “The Changeable Soviet Image of America,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 497, Anti-Americanism: Origins and Context (May, 1988): 158–159. 10. Alexander Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii: Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Moscow: NLO, 2001), 143. 11. Jeffrey Brooks, in his analysis of the image of America in the postrevolutionary Russia, refers to “a whole range of articles about ‘Russian Americans’ that peppered the Soviet Press throughout the 1920s.” “The Press and Its Message: Images of America in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 241. 12. Krokodil 3 ( January 21, 1923): 539. 13. “100%,” in Vladimir Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 13 tomakh, vol. 7 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958), 79.

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No t e s t o pages 6–11

14. V. I. Zhuravleva gives an analysis of the changing American attitude to the 1905 Revolution in her article “Predel dopustimogo v revoliutsii: 1905 g. v Rossii v vospriiatii amerikantsev,” in Russkoe otkrytie Ameriki, ed. A. O. Chubarian (Moscow: IVI RAN, 2002), 292–301. 15. See, for example, Reuel K. Wilson, The Literary Travelogue: A Comparative Study with Special Relevance to Russian Literature from Fonvizin to Pushkin (The Hague: Nijhof, 1973), xi. 16. Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Picador, 2002), 62. 17. See, for example, Gorky’s essay “Knut Gamsun,” in Pereval: Literaturnokhudozhestvennyi al’manakh, sbornik 6 (Moscow, Leningrad: Gos. izd-vo, 1928), 365–369. 18. Olga Peters Hasty and Susan Fusso, trans., eds. America Through Russian Eyes, 1874–1926 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 9–10. Italics mine. 19. Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Image of the United States: A Study in Distortion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950); Robert V. Allen, Russia Looks at America: The View to 1917 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1988); Norman E. Saul, Distant Friends: The United States and Russia, 1763–1867 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991); Concord and Conflict: The United States and Russia, 1867–1914 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996); War and Revolution: The United States and Russia, 1917–1921 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); Friends or Foes? The United States and Russia, 1921–1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 20. Charles Rougle, Three Russians Consider America (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1976), 11. 21. Richard Ruland, America in Modern European Literature: From Image to Metaphor (New York: New York University Press, 1976); C. Vann Woodward, The Old World’s New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 22. Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 377–397. 23. Rogger, Review of Hasty and Fusso, trans. and eds., America Through Russian Eyes. Russian Review 48 (1989): 188. 24. See, for example, Gleason, “Republic of Humbug”; Rogger, “America in the Russian Mind”; D. Boden, Das Amerikabild im russischen Schrifttum bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Cram, De Gruyter, 1968); N. N. Bolkhovitinov, Rossiia otkryvaet Ameriku: 1732–1799 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1991); Nikoliukin, Literaturnye sviazi Rossii i SShA. 25. At the same time, it is precisely mass culture—the oral stories about America, Pinkerton crime mysteries, American movies—that makes the image of America so popular in the common people’s mind. As Alan M. Ball claims, in the twentieth century, “nothing in the era of European predominance approached the allure of American popular culture throughout the Russian population.” Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), xiii. 26. Characteristically, David Hecht notes that the accounts of Mikhail Bakunin’s short visit to America were much deeper than Nikolai Chaikovsky’s American writings, although Chaikovsky had spent more time in the country. Hecht assumes that neither work had been significantly influenced by actual experience. Russian Radicals Look to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), 217.

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27. As Condorcet claimed, “The rights of men are not only written in the books of philosophers and inscribed in the hearts of virtuous men. The weak and ignorant must be able to read them in the example of a great nation” (quoted in Ruland, America in Modern European Literature, 26). Only one country, centuries later, was associated by contemporaries with a fresh start for humanity and promised a society built on entirely new premises—Soviet Russia. 28. Marcus Cunliffe, “European Images of America,” in Paths of American Thought, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Morton White (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 494–500. 29. Ruland, America in Modern European Literature, 23. 30. See Lydia Elizabeth Wagner, “The Reserved Attitude of the Early German Romanticists toward America,” German Quarterly 16 (1943): 8–12. 31. For a detailed analysis of de Tocqueville’s reception in Russia, see Etkind, “Inaia svoboda: Pushkin i Tokvil’,” chapter 2 in Tolkovanie puteshestvii, 13–54. 32. Quoted in Rogger, “America in the Russian Mind,” 34. Rogger traces the further development of Herzen’s views on America: in the 1860s, while acknowledging America as a powerful and energetic country, capable of realizing republican ideas, he still believed that only Russia could implement the ideals of socialism in public life. 33. Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 21. 34. For a study of America’s perception by Russian radicals and the evolution of their views on this matter, see Hecht, Russian Radicals Look to America. 35. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (London: Longmans, Green, 1889), 335. 36. Rogger, “America in the Russian Mind,” 31. 37. I use this expression in the meaning Olga Meerson defined it in her book Dostoevsky’s Taboos: a topic of great significance and sensitivity for a person or collective that one either avoids mentioning—tabooing it—or turns into an important literary motif (Dresden: Dresden University Press, 1998), 12–20. 38. Opyt zhivopisnogo puteshestviia po Severnoi Amerike, 1815. See also his Amerikanskie dnevniki i pis’ma 1811–1813. (Moscow: Parad, 2005). 39. For a review of Poletika’s travelogue, see Robert V. Allen, Russia Looks at America, 17–20. 40. Literaturnaia gazeta 46, vol. 2 (August 14, 1830): 77. Quoted in Nikoliukin, Literaturnye sviazi Rossii i SShA, 153. 41. Lakier’s travelogue has been published in English: A Russian Looks at America: The Journey of Alexandr Borisovich Lakier in 1857, ed. and trans. Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). For a concise overview of his travelogue, see xv–xli. 42. Arustamova, Russko-amerikanskii dialog, 261–262. 43. As Etkind observes, “Each travelogue finds its own, always unstable and risky balance between two modes: dissimilative tropes cause the reader’s distrust, while assimilative tropes cause boredom.” Tolkovanie puteshestvii, 8. 44. See, for example, Allison Blakely’s review of America Through Russian Eyes in Journal of American History 75 (March 1989): 1339; and Hans Rogger’s review in Russian Review 48 (April 1989): 188–189. 45. For example, Gorky exclaimed in a letter from America: “What idiots are these Tverskois and other Russian authors like him who write about America!”

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Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vol. (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khud. lit-ry. 1949–1956), 28: 429. Rogger notes that here Gorky “echoed a complaint voiced more than thirty years earlier by Dostoevsky that Pavel Ogorodnikov was misleading readers with his sympathetic accounts of the ‘land of freedom.’” Rogger, review of “America Through Russian Eyes,” 188. 46. Hasty and Fusso, 192. 47. “The Black Student,” in Hasty and Fusso, 113. 48. As Wilson states, “Although the travelogue does permit a mixture of literary genres, it imposes some important technical limitations on the author. The narrative must be in the first person and the material must somehow relate to a journey (which, however, the author is at liberty to define in his own terms). Like the literary diary, the ‘journey’ usually implies an autobiographical account of the narrator’s experiences— the apparently spontaneous record of day-to-day observations and sensations. The narrative’s ‘spontaneity’ is, of course, often a purely literary device or convention used to dramatize a fictitious character who recounts a fictitious story that may or may not be based on the author’s real experience. The invented travel diary or memoir usually preserves, for the sake of verisimilitude, many autobiographical or descriptive elements proper to the ‘real’ counterpart.” The Literary Travelogue, p. x. 49. See, for example, Kiparsky’s analysis of a millionaire’s image in Gorky in English and American Characters (Berlin: Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1964), 120–122. Rougle also studies this motif: see Three Russians Consider America, 20–22. 50. Gorky, Pis’ma k Piatnitskomu in Arkhiv A. M. Gor’kogo, vol. 4 (Moscow: Izdvo AN SSSR, 1954), 203–205; letter 321: Adirondack, not later than Aug. 24, 1906. 51. “Miss Aisedora Dunkan,” Golos Rossii (Berlin) no. 1079. Quoted in Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva S. A. Esenina, vol. 3, 1921–1923, bk. 2 (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2008), 202. 52. According to Sol Hurok, Esenin and Duncan were temporarily sent to Ellis Island because the authorities could not immediately decide what measures should be taken regarding a woman with a “Bolshevik husband” and an American passport. The situation was complicated by a regulation according to which an American woman married to a foreigner automatically lost her citizenship. Impressario: A Memoir, in collaboration with Ruth Goode (London: Macdonald, 1947), 98.

1—Pre-Revolutionary Discoveries of America 1. Gorky came to accept Marxism after an initial Nietzschean period; he acquired his familiarity with Marxism through the prism of Alexander Bogdanov. As Paola Cioni rightly notes, Gorky’s American pamphlets are far from presenting a consistent Marxist critique. “M. Gor’kii v Amerike,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 20 (Spring 2007). 2. See, for example, Hasty and Fusso, 19. 3. Ocherki Severo-Amerikanskikh Soedinennykh Shtatov (St. Petersburg, Tipografiia I. N. Skorokhodova, 1895). 4. This perception of the gap between different generations is subjective: Ianzhul, a specialist in economics and statistics, belonged to Tverskoi’s generation. 5. Ivan Ianzhul, Promyslovye sindikaty ili predprinimatel’skie soiuzy dlia

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regulirovaniia proizvodstva preimushchestvenno v Soedinennykh Shtatakh Severnoi Ameriki (St. Petersburg, Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1895). 6. Ivan Ozerov, “Otchego Amerika tak bystro idet vpered,” in Iz zhizni truda (Moscow: Izd-vo D. S. Gorshkova, 1904), and Chemu uchit nas Amerika? (Moscow: Pol’za, 1908). 7. Rogger, “America in the Russian Mind,” 42. 8. Ibid., 40. 9. Pavel Ogorodnikov, Ot Niu-Iorka do San-Frantsisko i obratno v Rossiiu (St. Petersburg, Izd-vo F. Kolesova i F. Mikhina, 1872). The second version, published ten years later, in 1882, was titled V strane svobody (In the Land of Freedom). Ogorodnikov’s work appeared earlier in installments in Zaria 11, part 2 (1870). As A. S. Dolinin discovered, Shatov quotes from Ogorodnikov when he explains his reasons for going to America in Dostoevsky’s Devils: “to try for ourselves the life of the American worker and so through personal experience to examine the conditions of a man in the most difficult of social circumstances.” A. S. Dolinin, Poslednie romany Dostoevskogo (Moscow, Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963), 159–160. 10. According to the Julian calendar, on August 1. 11. It was a second daughter, who had remained in Russia with his relatives, who died unexpectedly. There is an error on this heading in Charles Moser’s article “Korolenko and America,” Russian Review 28 (1969): 36. 12. Korolenko protested against an unsubstantiated accusation of ritual murder by seven residents of the Viatka province in the so-called Multan case. This case resonated widely in Russian public life. 13. See letter to N. K. Mikhailovskii, February 16, 1885, in V. G. Korolenko, Polnoe posmertnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 17 (Khar’kov: Gos. izd. Ukrainy, 1923), 10–11. 14. Diary entry, February 15, 1885, ibid., 11. 15. “Khronika vnutrennei zhizni: Pereselenie dukhoborov v Ameriku,” Russkoe bogatstvo, February (1899): 160–174. 16. “V Ameriku,” Polnoe posmertnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 18: 17. The expression bez vida—literally, “without appearance,” “without sight”—anticipates word play in the title of Korolenko’s American novella Bez iazyka. 17. All of Korolenko’s American notes are full of such digressions, from his immediate observations to comparisons with Russia. Most of the notes, however, remained unfinished—in the form of excerpts. 18. In a Strange Land, trans. Gregory Zilboorg (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975). All citations of this work are given in the text. 19. Korolenko returned to this text several times, re-editing it so that it grew from a short anecdotal sketch into a lengthy, stylistically brilliant psychological story, ironic and nostalgic. There are accounts that he even tried to convert it into a film script. 20. Korolenko, “Factory of Death,” in Hasty and Fusso, 87. Further citations of this work are given in the text. 21. “Otryvok, ne ozaglavlennyi avtorom,” in Posmertnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 18, 62. 22. “V bor’be s diavolom,” in Posmertnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 17: 161. 23. See, for example, the stories “Paradoks” (Paradox), “Slepoi muzykant” (The Blind Musician), “Son Makara” (Makar’s Dream).

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24. The author added and underlined the title on his page proofs, so we can conclude that it was significant for him. RGALI archive, F. 234, op. 1 (n. 39), ed. khr. 20 (p. 1). 25. On this transformation of the fantastic in Gogol, see Yuri Mann, Poetika Gogolia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988), 80–101. 26. A similar concern is expressed later in Korolenko’s above-mentioned article, “The Resettlement of Dukhobors in America,” but in his capacity as journalist the author makes no firm predictions: “In a few decades, time will answer the question of whether Russian speech and the distinctive features of the Russian nationality will be preserved in the New World, will maybe even gain a footing; after the first groups others will follow, and the seed will thrive in the new soil. Or will, on the contrary, both Russian speech and Russian national features dissolve in the Anglo-Saxon?” (161). 27. De Tocqueville distinguished between political and social democracy, as Alexander Dolinin summarizes in his review of Etkind’s Tolkovanie puteshestvii (Novaia russkaia kniga 1 [2002]). The downside of egalitarianism, the “intolerable tyranny” of the semi-educated crowd over culture, must have alarmed Pushkin. Korolenko points out the contrast between political and social life but, being a Populist, attributes it to the lack of democracy in everyday life. 28. Letter from August 15, 1893, in Polnoe posmertnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 18: 11. 29. Consider, also, Sofron Ivanovich, a character from the unfinished story “Sofron Ivanovich” (1895). 30. See, for example, G. A. Bialyi, V. G. Korolenko (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1949), 222–236. 31. R. F. Christian, “V. G. Korolenko (1853–1921): A Centennial Appreciation,” Slavonic Review 32 (1954): 458. 32. Letter to E. L. Ulanovskaia in Polnoe posmertnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 18: 8–9. 33. Gorky chose the same last name for the revolutionary hero of his novel Mother, which was written in America. Pavel Nilov, however, hailed from the proletariat. 34. Bez iazyka in V. G. Korolenko, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, vol. 4 (Moscow: Pravda, 1971), 141–142. This phrase is omitted in the English translation. 35. Korolenko confessed that the main discovery he made in America was indeed to see Russia as one can only see it from a distance: “Only here does one feel with all one’s heart and grasp with one’s mind that our people, ignorant and constrained as it is, is still the best by nature of all peoples!” (Polnoe posmertnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 18: 11). Gorky, after his visit to the United States, expresses a similar concern: “The Russian peasant and worker cannot even be compared with the American.” 36. V. G. Korolenko, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khud. lit-ry, 1953–1956), vol. 10: 232. 37. The letters from Peshkov to Gorky were published by M. Parkhomovskii in Evrei v kul’ture russkogo zarubezh’ia, vol. 2 ( Jerusalem, 1993), 311–340. 38. The term was coined later, in 1932. 39. A. V. Lunacharskii, “O sotsialisticheskom realizme,” in Stati’i o sovetskoi literature (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1971), 202–205. 40. “The City of Mammon: My Impressions of America,” published in Appleton’s Magazine 8 (August 1906), 177.

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41. Compare this, for example, with Bogoraz, who refers to American cities as Babylons in an ironic rather than accusatory manner, demonstrating that the image has already become an urbanist cliché (and not an exclusively American one): “Another young woman…was moving from one American Babylon to the next” (“The Black Student,” in Hasty and Fusso, 114). 42. D. V. Filosofov, “Konets Gor’kogo,” in Maksim Gor’kii: Pro et Contra; Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo Maksima Gor’kogo v otsenke russkikh myslitelei i issledovatelei 1890–1910-e gg. Antologiia (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo RKhGI, 1997), 697–718. 43. Filia Holtzman, “A Mission that Failed: Gor’kij in America,” SEEJ 6 (1962): 227–235; L. J. Oliva, “Maxim Gorky Discovers America,” The New York Historical Society Quarterly 51 (1967): 45–60. In contemporary Russian Gorky studies, see L. V. Sumatokhina, “Vystupleniia Gor’kogo v Amerike” (the introductory article to the texts of the addresses), in Publitsistika M. Gor’kogo v kontekste istorii (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2007), 76. Many critics suggest that Gorky’s opinion of America was on the whole determined by his negative impressions stemming from this episode. See, for example, Irwin Weil, Maxim Gorky: His Literary Development and Influence on Soviet Intellectual Life; V. Ia. Orlova, “M. Gor’kii—uchastnik pervoi russkoi revoliutsii,” in M. Gor’kii v epokhu revoliutsii 1905–1907 godov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk, 1957), 165. 44. S. Ia. Brodskaia, “O deiatel’nosti M. Gor’kogo v Amerike v 1906 godu (po materialam amerikanskoi pechati),” in M. Gor’kii v epokhu revoliutsii, 392. 45. Tovah Yedlin, Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), 69. 46. “Smestit’ i pokarat’ Vitte,” in Publitsistika M. Gor’kogo v kontekste istorii, 78–79. 47. For concrete details of Gorky’s public activities, see S. Ia. Brodskaia, “O deiatel’nosti M. Gor’kogo v Amerike v 1906 godu,” 388–488. 48. Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 28: 421. 49. Gorky’s official wife, Peshkova, remained in Moscow. Relations between the ex-spouses were friendly—Gorky even asked Peshkova to write a letter in his defense to the American newspapers. Although he came to feel uneasy about this request, Peshkova did write the letter, which appeared on May 14, 1906, in the New York Herald. 50. Curiously, Marshak’s poem “Mister Twister,” about a reversed situation wherein an American could not find a room in the Soviet hotel, sounds like an echo of this episode, although it is questionable whether Marshak had Gorky’s infamous story in mind while writing it. 51. M. F. Andreeva, Perepiska. Vospominaniia. Stat’i. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia o M. F. Andreevoi (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963), 113–114, 117. 52. M. Gorky, The City of the Yellow Devil: Pamphlets, Articles and Letters about America (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 67. 53. Letter to Piatnitskii, May 1, 1906, in Gorky, The City of the Yellow Devil, 128. 54. Hasty and Fusso, 131. 55. A. I. Ovcharenko, “Publitsistika M. Gor’kogo (1905–1907), in M. Gor’kii v epohkhu revoliutsii, 323. 56. Orlova, “M. Gor’kii—uchastnik pervoi russkoi revoliutsii,” 162–163.

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57. “City of Mammon,” 181. 58. As Rougle remarks, in Gorky’s perception, the American city lacks old culture, which makes the European city tolerable (Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 52). Gorky, considered a savage by haughty critics, was full of reverence for culture and despised America for its spiritual emptiness. Instead of the art galleries of London, the point of attraction in New York is Coney Island, an ideal city of light that turns out to be an illusion, a Kingdom of Boredom. For Gorky, the American city is the opposite of both culture and nature; only outside it some peace can be found. 59. Although Yuri Mann suggests that in Gogol’s texts, such colloquial expressions lose their association with the demonic and become pedestrian (Poetika Gogolia, 82), this is disputable. In many cases, Gogol’s curses take on material existence, and the Devil, once having been summoned, appears in the flesh (see, for example, “The Portrait,” “Night Before Christmas,” etc.). In Gorky, in the context of the overall demonic image of America, these references are also significant. 60. Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 28 Pis’ma, telegrammy, nadpisi, 1889–1906 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1954), 420–430. 61. “City of the Yellow Devil,” in Hasty and Fusso, 137. Further citations of this work are given in the text. All citations of other pamphlets are given in the notes and come from The City of the Yellow Devil: Pamphlets, Articles and Letters about America. 62. Even their names reflect their difference: a colloquial “chert” in “Yet More about the Devil,” and a romantic “d’iavol” in “The Lords of Life.” 63. “The Lords of Life,” 84. 64. The publication of Sologub’s novel in periodical installments began in 1905 and must have influenced Gorky, who was acquainted with Sologub personally. 65. Several scholars have stressed these monotonous repetitions as characteristic features of Gorky’s American essays: see Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 16– 17. Rougle refers to L. J. Oliva, “Maxim Gorky Discovers America,” 57. 66. “Realm of Boredom,” 23. 67. Ibid., 24. 68. “The Mob,” 32. Gorky uses similar tropes in the beginning of Mother, describing workers hurrying to the factory. Apparently, this is characteristic of capitalism and industrialism, not of America per se, but America nevertheless is the embodiment of capitalism. 69. “The Mob,” 35. 70. See particularly Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect.” 71. “City of Mammon,” in Appleton’s Magazine, 182. 72. “Realm of Boredom,” 27. 73. Compare the monkey’s fingers to the “children’s paws” in “City of the Yellow Devil”! 74. Gorky, “V. G. Korolenko,” in Literaturnye portrety (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1963), 289. 75. S. Ia. Brodskaia, “O deiatel’nosti M. Gor’kogo v Amerike v 1906 godu,” 408. 76. See, for example, Paola Cioni, “M. Gor’kii v Amerike,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 20 (Spring 2007); and Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 52–58. 77. G. V. Plekhanov, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, vol. 3, O tak nazyvaemykh religioznykh iskaniiakh v Rossii (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1957), 396. 78. This religious understanding of socialism was the major reason that

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Plekhanov criticized his ideas. 79. Mayakovsky, contrastingly, is proud to be a tool of the Revolution. Shaginian, in the novel Mess-Mend (1923–1924), portrays a character named Mick Thingmaster who, by producing things, becomes their master. He makes the things become the tools of people’s liberation. 80. Burenin, “S Gor’kim v Amerike,” in M. Gor’kii v epokhu revoliutsii, 100. 81. One of the most appalling texts demonstrating that Gorky was no mere romantic dreamer but, rather, was fully aware of the realistic and bloody implications of the revolutions is his letter to Andreev, quoted by A. I. Ovcharenko in “Publitsistika M. Gor’kogo (1905–1907),” in M. Gor’kii v epokhu revoliutsii, 302–303. 82. According to Filosofov, Gorky’s America is a series of banal, shallow impressions of a tourist looking from a hotel and train window, who did not try to understand the spirit of Americans. 83. Rogger, “America in the Russian Mind,” 31.

2—Post-Revolutionary Columbuses 1. For a detailed analysis, see Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 59–96. 2. Pavel Nerler, “Mandel’shtam i ‘borisoglebskii soiuz’: Mandel’shtam i Amerika,” Novyi zhurnal 258 (2010): 99–119. In this article, Nerler traces the development of the American theme in Mandelstam’s works, as well as the history of their publication and study in the United States. Nerler emphasizes that Mandelstam’s identification with the European mind was deepened by his self-perception as a Russian; in this respect, Mandelstam felt himself an heir of Chaadaev, who conflated European culture with Russian inner freedom, freedom of choice. (Nerler refers to Mandelstam’s article “Petr Chaadaev,” 1915). However, Nerler notes, in his later years, Mandelstam did not insist on the traditional opposition between European culture and American civilization. 3. See Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 61–63. Rougle, however, underestimates the presence of this topic in Russian literature in the pre-revolutionary decade, even though he names Mandelstam and offers a comprehensive analysis of Blok’s “New America.” 4. Arkadii Averchenko, “Razgovor v shkole,” in Zapiski prostodushnogo (Moscow: a/o “Kniga i biznes,” 1992), 40. 5. Daniil Kharms, O tom, kak Kol’ka Pankin letal v Braziliiu, a Pet’ka Ershov nichemu ne veril (Moscow, Leningrad: Gos. izd-vo, 1929). 6. Perhaps here Kharms ironically refers to Heinrich Heine, “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam,” in Russian best known in Lermontov’s translation: “Na severe dikom stoit odinoko…” 7. L. S. Mitchel’, Kak Boria gulial po N’iu Iorku (Moscow, Leningrad: Gos. izdvo, 1927). 8. Dobranitskii, V Ameriku i obratno (Moscow, Leningrad: Gos. izd-vo, 1927), 17. For the Russian reader, it must have sounded ironic. 9. Ibid., 23. 10. Boris Tageev [Rustam Bek, pseud.], Russkii amerikanets (Moscow, Leningrad: Ob. gos. izd-vo, 1926). Tageev’s own life (1871–1937) reminds one of

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an adventure novel. He was arrested in 1906 for his democratic literary activity but managed to escape and flee Russia. For a time Tageev lived in China, Switzerland, and England; after World War I he moved to the United States, where he met with Ford. In 1919, he began to work for the weekly newspaper Soviet Russia and was an active propagandist for Soviet Russia. In 1921, Tageev returned to Russia, where he actively published his literary works until 1934. He was executed in 1937. 11. Mark Lipovetskii, in his witty article “Utopia svobodnoi marionetki, ili Kak sdelan arkhetip” (Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie 60 [2003]), demonstrates the transformation of Tolstoy’s conception from its earlier version as a novella to the play and filmscript. At the end of the novella, a rewriting of Collodi’s Pinocchio, the characters open their own puppet theater, which, according to Lipovetskii, reflects Tolstoy’s utopian desire to be “a free puppet” with his own theater in Stalin’s world. In the dramatized versions, this paradoxical dream is replaced by an ideological cliché: the happy opposite of the “Land of Fools” is the Soviet Land of Happiness. Lipovetskii notes that the landscapes of the “Land of Fools” are modeled on Soviet caricatures of the capitalist world. 12. Oleg Lekmanov and Mikhail Sverdlov, Sergei Esenin: Biografiia (St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2007), 336. 13. As a result of the poets’ polemics, critics in Russkii golos reproached Mayakovsky for factionalism (M. Draivert, “Dva Maiakovskikh [na nachalakh diskussii],” Russkii golos, August 20, 1925; A. Vetlugin, “Kruzhkovshchina v russkoi literature,” Russkii golos, September 1, 1925). During his first public reading, Mayakovsky claimed that Esenin did not represent any poetic current and that he himself was merely a current of vodka. Draivert criticized the joke for bad taste. Vetlugin, in his feuilleton, accused Mayakovsky of envying his rival, as the representative of a different trend. Cited in S. S. Kemrad, Maiakovskii v Amerike (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1970), 157–159. 14. Trotsky coined the term poputchiki to define a group of writers sympathetic to the Revolution but not fully engaged in it: “reflecting the interests of the bourgeois intelligentsia with its political hesitations, which, nevertheless, gravitated towards cooperation with the proletariat.” A. Selivanovskii, “Poputchiki,” in Literaturnaia entsiklopediia v 11 tomakh, vol. 9 (Moscow: OGIZ RSFSR, 1935), 142–152. 15. Trotsky’s article was mistakenly published under the title “Vneoktiabr’skaia literatura” (Extra-October Literature) in Pravda, no. 224, October 5, 1922. In no. 228, October 10, Trotsky made a special note that the title was a mistake, since Esenin and some other “fellow travelers” were “given birth to by October” as writers. See Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva S. A. Esenina, vol. 3, bk. 2: 203. 16. “An Iron Mirgorod,” in Hasty and Fusso, 149. Future citations of this work are given in the text. 17. Rougle argues that Trotsky’s and Voronskii’s criticism of “Mayakovsky’s defective class consciousness” as reflected in “150,000,000” rests on an accusation of lack of experience (Three Russians Consider America, 114–115). Discussing the personal, artistic and ideological motivations behind Mayakovsky’s American trip, Rougle points to Mayakovsky’s desire to verify his poetic vision against American reality. I would like to place this motive in a broader context and study how, after the journey to America, the major representatives of Futurism and Imaginism assess the ability of their respective trends—as well as their own—to serve the immediate task

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of the society, to express industrial modernity. 18. After his return he answered the question of why he went to America in the following way: “I went there as a poet preaching industrialization in order to get firsthand experience of the country where this industrialization had reached the highest stages of development.” Kemrad, Maiakovskii v Amerike, 17. 19. “Bruklinskii most,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 85. 20. Charles Moser states that in America Mayakovsky reevaluates Futurism, with its cult of technology, and almost loses his trust in the power of technical progress (“Mayakovsky and America,” The Russian Review 25 [1966]: 254). Rougle, however, convincingly argues that Mayakovsky’s criticism of America’s “uncultured” technology as the product of a particular social order does not contradict his overall admiration for industrial power (Three Russians Consider America, 131–136). 21. Gordon McVay, Isadora and Esenin (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), 150. 22. The genre of this drama is reminiscent of the picaresque. The main character, Nomakh, the leader of a counter-revolutionary gang in eastern Soviet Russia, outsmarts the Soviet authorities. America also appears in the drama in the context of trickery: one of the characters narrates an episode he witnessed in California during the gold rush. A venturesome American shoots gold dust into a hill with his pistol and sells the land to miners as a gold deposit. Curiously, both the plot and the title of this work echo A. Tolstoy’s “Land of Fools,” the epitome of capitalism in The Golden Key or the Adventures of Buratino. 23. Lola Kinel, Under Five Eagles: My Life in Russia, Poland, Austria, Germany and America, 1916–1936 (London: Putnam, 1937). 24. In Moscow, Duncan organized a dancing school for girls. While she was in America, Duncan was debunked for her Bolshevik sympathies, but her school received humanitarian help from ARA. 25. McVay, Isadora and Esenin, 148–149. 26. In a conversation with L. I. Povitskii. Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva Esenina, 288. 27. In the poem “Rus’ ukhodiashchaia,” 1924. 28. In the poem “Polnoch’ v Moskve. Roskoshno buddiiskoe leto,” 1931. 29. Letter to A. B. Kusikov, February 7, 1923. In Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva Esenina, 286–287. 30. Anatolii Mariengof, “Moi vek, moi druz’ia i podrugi,” in Bessmertnaia trilogiia (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 342. 31. Newspapers announcing Mayakovsky’s reading ran, “There is an urgent request for the steamships: not to moor to Mayakovsky!” (Novyi mir [New York], September 10, 1925. Quoted in Kemrad, Maiakovskii v Amerike, 151). 32. Hugh McLean notes “a peculiar sort of artistic economy” in Mayakovsky’s works in prose and poetry (“On Mr. Pont Kic, his Ruptured Russian, and Related Subjects,” in Festschrift for Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. Compiled by M. Halle [The Hague: Mouton, 1956], 337). 33. See Neil Cornwell, introduction to Vladimir Mayakovsky. My Discovery of America, trans. by Neil Cornwell (London: Hesperus Press, 2005), xiii–xiv. 34. These praises interestingly echo Burliuk’s expectations of Mayakovsky’s visit to America. But, apparently, the emigrant Burliuk, who expressed the assurance that Mayakovsky will “crack the nut of America better than Korolenko and Gorky” (Freiheit, August 16, 1925; quoted in Kemrad, Maiakovskii v Amerike, 134), was

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relying here on Mayakovsky’s Futurism rather than his class consciousness. 35. E. J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 289. 36. Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 134–135. 37. “My Discovery of America,” in Hasty and Fusso, 192. Future citations of this work are given in the text. 38. Being born in Bagdadi, Mayakovsky also had knowledge of Georgian—but that was not a great help during his American sojourn. 39. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 61. 40. “Svidetel’stvuiu,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 59. 41. McLean, “On Mr. Pont Kic,” 339. 42. “Baryshnia i Vul’vort,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 65. 43. According to some scholars, Bulgakov embodied in Sharikov some features of Mayakovsky and his lyrical hero (see, for example, Alexander Zholkovsky, “Dialog Bulgakova i Oleshi o kolbase, parade chuvstv i Golgofe,” Sintaksis 20 [1987]: 92). 44. Mayakovsky’s posters combined pictures with concise witty captions. The most famous of them, “Nigde krome kak v Mossel’prome” is mocked by the dog Sharik in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. The same motto is ironically played with in a Krokodil caricature in connection with Mayakovsky’s extensive travels abroad: Mayakovsky meets a peasant youth. “Who are you?” asks Mayakovsky. “I am a village correspondent (sel’kor). And who are you?” “I am a Moscow village correspondent (mossel’kor)” says Mayakovsky, and departs abroad (Krokodil 24 [November 30, 1924]: 11). 45. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10: 284. 46. Nakonets doma podymaiutsia kolodeznymi stenkami s kvadratami, kvadratikami i tochkami okon, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 298. 47. This aspect of Mayakovsky’s travelogue is studied in detail by Moser in “Mayakovsky and America,” 248–251. 48. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 66. 49. “Neboskreb v razreze,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 69. 50. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2: 134. 51. Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii, 153. 52. Kemrad, Maiakovskii v Amerike, 102. Kemrad quotes two versions of Sh. Epstein’s interview with Mayakovsky published in Fraigait, Aug. 14, 1925, and a later, revised one, from 1930. 53. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 56.

3—Automobile Journeys of the 1930s 1. For a detailed analysis of Soviet-American relations in the 1930s, see Norman E. Saul, Friends or Foes? The United States and Russia, 1921–1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). For a brief overview, see D. G. Nadzhafarov, “Peripetii sovetsko-amerikanskikh otnoshenii 1933–1939 gg,” in Russkoe otkrytie Ameriki, 328–338. 2. Ibid., 333.

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3. “The Press and Its Message: Images of America in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 244 and 246. 4. “Soviet Schizophrenia and the American Skyscraper,” in Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts, ed. Rosalind P. Blakesley, Susan E. Reid (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 156. 5. See S. Dementeva, “Vzaimovliianie sovetskoi sotsialisticheskoi i demokraticheskoi progressivnoi kul’tury SShA v predvoennye gody,” in Vzaimodeistvie kul’tur SSSR i SShA XVIII–XX vv, ed. O. E. Tuganova (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 38. 6. Hoisington surveys the architects’ journey in “Soviet Schizophrenia and the American Skyscraper,” 159–163. 7. See Maia Turovskaia, “Gollivud v Moskve, ili sovetskoe i amerikanskoe kino 30-kh–40-kh godov,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 97 (2010): 51–63. 8. His work on the cinematic adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (he had a contract with Paramount) failed. 9. S. M. Eisenstein, “My vstrechalis’,” in Memuary, vol. 2. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo gazety “Trud,” Muzei kino, 1997), 349–357. 10. Nilsen and Shumiatskii’s book Amerikanskaia kinematografiia (American cinematography), written after this visit, remained unpublished. 11. Ilf and Petrov, Little Golden America, trans. Charles Malamuth (New York: Arno Press, 1974). Further citations of this work are given in the text. 12. Ilf and Petrov often mock alternative utopian plans of the socio-economic reforms suggested by their interlocutors in their novel, such as Ford’s idea to create small farms for workers and turn them from proletarians into land-owners, or Taundsen’s utopia. 13. Anne Nesbet observes that this image has demonic connotations in “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell: What Bulgakov and Eisenstein Learned about Space from Il’f and Petrov’s America,” Slavic Review 2 (Summer 2010): 382–383. 14. “O’kei: Amerikanskii roman,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976), 485–486. All further citations of this work are given in the text. 15. Mary A. Nicholas in her article “Boris Pil’niak and Modernism: Redefining the Self,” (Slavic Review 50, no. 2 [Summer 1991]: 410–421) discusses the importance of analyzing Pilniak in the context of modernism and notes that his place in this context is often overlooked by researchers. After Pilniak’s rehabilitation, Soviet scholars focused on his transformation from a modernist writer into a realist. Russian post-Soviet Pilniak studies pay considerable attention to Pilniak as modernist. See, for example, the collection of articles Boris Pil’niak: opyt segodniashnego prochteniia (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995). 16. “Tret’ia stolitsa,” in Krug: Al’manakh arteli pisatelei (Moscow, Petrograd: Krug, 1926), 206. 17. “History does not occur any longer, it is being constructed” (450; the author’s italics).

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18. Pilniak’s own creative process demonstrates constant reevaluation not only of history but also of his own literature: he repeatedly assembles and disassembles his texts, rearranging their fragments according to his changing perspective, refusing to finalize a particular point of view. For example, he reworks his novel Krasnoe derevo (Mahogany) into the production novel Volga vpadaet v Kaspiiskoe more (The Volga Falls into the Caspian Sea); Kamni i korni (Stones and Roots) is a revised version of his first Japanese travelogue Korni iaponskogo solntsa (Roots of the Japanese Sun). Of course, some of these changes can be explained by the requirements of censorship, but not all of them: reusing his own fragments in later works, constructing the new from the old is Pilniak’s signature technique; according to Nicholas, it is an act of permanent self-definition (“Boris Pil’niak and Modernism,” 415–416); according to A. P. Auer, “the writer’s credo, aesthetical theory and the law of life” (“O poetike Borisa Pil’niaka,” in Pilniak B. A. Issledovaniia i materialy, iss. 1 [Kolomna, 1991], 5). Pilniak himself confessed: “What I want to say is more important for me than my own works, and I will sacrifice the old labor if it comes to my aid” (“Materialy k romanu,” Krasnaia nov’ 1 [18], 1924: 3). 19. Mayakovsky repeatedly uses “all right” in his poem “100%” to convey a similar message. 20. For the status of the word “OK” in modern Russian, see I. B. Levontina, Russkii so slovarem (Moscow: Azbukovnik, 2010), 159–161. Levontina, like Pilniak, ironically declines this word in Russian (159). 21. Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii, 159. 22. Gary Browning quotes this observation of an early Soviet reviewer (Val. Serebriakov, review of O’Kei, Literaturnyi sovremennik 5 (May 1933): 152–155) and agrees with it. Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), 56. 23. Vera T. Reck, Boris Pil’niak: A Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State (Montreal, London: McGill: Queen University Press, 1975), 141. 24. In particular, Pilniak formulated this idea in the opinion column in the Writer’s Forum in Literaturnaia gazeta, April 22, 1929. 25. A. K. Voronskii, “Boris Pil’niak,” in Iskusstvo videt’ mir: Portrety, stat’i (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), 237. 26. The relationship between nature and technological civilization in Pilniak’s works is studied in P. A. Jensen, Nature as Code: The Achievements of Boris Pilniak, 1915–1924 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1979). 27. This scene anticipates a similar episode in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (for its detailed discussion, see the section on technology in chapter 4). But while Soviet ideologists could dismiss Chaplin’s satire as targeted at American factories, they were concerned about Pilniak’s disparagement of machines at home. 28. Compare this with the image of the “star of a New America” that appears in Blok’s pre-revolutionary poem “Novaia Amerika” in the Nativity context (Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 66–67). 29. Krystyna Pomorska, “A Vision of America in Early Soviet Literature,” The Slavic and East European Journal 11, no. 4 (Winter 1967): 396. Pomorska generally denies Pilniak’s travelogue any originality with respect to its description of America. 30. This coexistence of two images of Hell in America is developed later by Ilf and Petrov.

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31. This paradox is typical for Pilniak’s previous writings: it can be found, for example, in Mashiny i volki. This combination of the objective and the subjective had met different attitudes on the critics’ part: Viktor Gofman accused him for making a mix of disjointed facts and emotions, which could hardly be digested by the reader (“Mesto Pil’niaka,” in Boris Pil’niak: Stat’i i materialy. Letchworth: Prideaux, 1977). Voronskii, by contrast, praised Pilniak for recognizing the general tendencies behind the concrete events and found his diversions refreshing and energetic (“Boris Pilniak”). 32. Many Pilniak scholars have observed that this recurrent feature of his style developed under the influence of Andrei Belyi. See, for example, Browning, Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter, 2, and M. Iu. Liubimova, “O peterburgskikh povestiakh Borisa Pil’niaka,” in Boris Pil’niak: Opyt segodniashnego prochteniia, 59–60. 33. This is M. L. Gasparov’s definition of Mandelstam’s late poetry. 34. Here Pilniak refers to the role that trained hogs played in Chicago slaughterhouses: see chapter 4, the section on technology. 35. Separate sketches were published in Pravda while the duo was still traveling: six more appeared during 1936. On this, see A. Ilf, “Stalin posylaet Il’fa i Petrova v stranu koka-koly,” in Ilf and Petrov, Odnoetazhnaia Amerika. Pis’ma iz Ameriki, ed. and introd. Aleksandra Ilf (Moscow: Tekst, 2007), 6. 36.The journey’s careful, sustained work was not reflected in the actual travelogue; we only glimpse it when reading Mr. Adams’s recurring advice, “Gentlemen, register this in your notebook!” 37. See, for example, their sketch about the New York automobile exhibition in chapter 9. 38. “They, so to say, complemented each other: Ilf ’s biting satire was good condiment to Petrov’s humor.” I. G. Ehrenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn’, bk. 4, part 2 (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990). First published in Novyi mir, 1962. 39. In his notebooks, Petrov reports that a bright literary critic, who tried to guess which chapter had been written by whom, was mistaken in all cases. 40. Anne Nesbet, “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell,” 377–397. 41. Gorky, “The Mob,” in The City of the Yellow Devil, 32. 42. Eisenstein visualized a glass building with the elevator as a “central artery of the whole building,” “the all-seeing eye.” Oksana Bulgakova, ed., Eisenstein und Deutschland: Texte, Dokumente, Briefe (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1988), note dated September 18, 1927. Quoted in Nesbet, “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell,” 394. Bulgakova emphasizes that Eisenstein’s project “was also a sarcastic response to the Utopian Glass House theories of Constructivist and Functionalist architects.” Bulgakova, “Eisenstein, the Glass House and the Spherical Book,” Rouge 7 (2005). 43. Discussing the multiple planes of the city in this description, Nesbet emphasizes that “no single point of view can encompass all of these planes at once.” Nesbet, “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell,” 386. 44. See particularly chapter 3 in One-Storied America titled “What Can Be Seen from the Hotel Window.” 45. “One striking peculiarity of Ilf ’s American photographs is that they lack the ironic, sharp eye that characterizes Ilf and Petrov’s writing. There is no satire, no humor. I explain this as a function of the fact that Ilf photographed life in America

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as material for recollection, as documentary observation for the writer’s notebook.” (A. M. Rodchenko, “Ilya Ilf ’s American Photographs,” in Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, ed. Erika Wolf [New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007], 149). The phenomenon of photographer-writers was rather popular in the 1930s. Rodchenko suggests that Ilf should develop a new emblematic genre, where the caption and the image would complement each other—photographs with captions, compensating for the lack of visual irony. 46. “‘On just such a day,’ said Mr. Adams, turning to us, ‘a certain gentleman, as Dickens tells it, put on his top hat as usual and departed for his office. I must tell you that the business affairs of this gentleman were in excellent order. He had a beautiful wife and blue-eyed children, and he was making a lot of money. That was evident at least from the fact that he wore a top hat. Not every man in England goes to work in a silk hat. Yet suddenly, one day, while passing the bridge across the Thames, the gentleman silently jumped into the water and drowned. Gentlemen, you must understand this: A happy man on the way to his office throws himself into the water! Don’t you think that in Dearborn one is also inclined to put on his top hat?’” (114). 47. “Imagining America: Il’f and Petrov’s Odnoetazhnaia Amerika and ideological alterity,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 44, no. 3/4 (September–December 2002): 263–277. 48. See, for example, the notorious review by Vladimir Prosin, “Razvesistye neboskreby,” published in Izvestia, March 21 (1937), or the letters from S. M. Zemsky and S. Stupak in Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, 500, 504. 49. Among these were Sorensen, the principal of the Ford Motor Company; Ford himself; Thompson, the engineer of Boulder Dam; the writers Rhys Williams and Lincoln Steffens; and the poet Witter Bynner. 50. This is how Shcheglov, paraphrasing Bakhtin, describes the rogue figure. Iu. K. Shcheglov, “Tri fragmenta poetiki Il’fa i Petrova (mir sotsializma; obraz Bendera; mifologizm romanov),” in A. K. Zholkovsky, Iu. Shcheglov, Mir avtora i struktura teksta: Stat’i o russkoi literature (Tenafly, NJ: Ermitazh, 1986), 93. 51. M. M. Bakhtin, “Funktsii pluta, shuta, duraka v romane,” in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975). 52. See, for example, John Leslie Wright, “Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf and the Picaresque Tradition” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973); Karen L. Ryan, “Imagining America.” 53. A. K. Zholkovsky, “Dreaming Right and Reading Right: Five Keys to One of Il’f and Petrov’s Ridiculous Men,” Slavic Review 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 36–53; Shcheglov, “Tri fragmenta poetiki Il’fa i Petrova.” 54. Letters of the readers to Petrov. F. 1821, opis’ 1, ed. khr. 168. Artiukhov V. N. Letter from September 12, 1937. 55. Shcheglov, “Tri fragmenta poetiki Il’fa i Petrova,” 86. 56. Zholkovsky, “Dreaming Right and Reading Right,” 36. 57. Paul Klanderud, “Language Control and Dehumanization in Il’f and Petrov’s Poetic World,” Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 442–457. 58. Shcheglov, “Tri fragmenta poetiki Il’fa i Petrova,” 92. 59. Nesbet, “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell,” 396–397. 60. “Bruklinskii most,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 85.

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61. A. Ilf used this phrase as a subtitle to the section “Readers’ letters” in her edition of Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, 497. 62. I. Il’f, E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khud. lit-ry, 1961), 460.

4—Recurrent Subtexts and Motifs in American Travelogues 1. The connections between The Divine Comedy and Dead Souls—Dante’s poem as the conceptual and generic model for Gogol, as well as readers’ perception of Dead Souls in the context of Dante—have been thoroughly studied by scholars. Yuri Mann observes that the likeness between the two “poems” was noticed already by Gogol’s contemporaries Herzen and Viazemsky, and he lists the scholars who also wrote about this likeness, in general: A. N. Veselovsky, D. E. Tamarchenko, and N. L. Stepanov. Mann stresses that these connections help to illuminate the generic structure of Dead Souls; however, one should keep in mind that Dante’s tradition was also revised by Gogol and integrated into the new whole (Poetika Gogolia, 354). The elements of The Divine Comedy were transformed in the course of its “adaptation” to Gogol’s task, time, and Russian ambience. While the direct references to The Divine Comedy appear in Dead Souls in a markedly “low” context (for example, the clerk who leads Chichikov to the office in the seventh chapter is compared to Virgil), Gogol’s task in this first volume was on a grand Dantesque scale—to show contemporary Russia as an Inferno. Gogol’s surviving notes allow us to reconstruct his plan to show Purgatory and Paradise, the path to Russia’s resurrection. 2. Yu. V. Mann, “Skvoz’ vidnyi miru smekh…”: Zhizn’ N. V. Gogolia, 1809– 1835 (Moscow, Moskovskii inst-t razvitiia obrazovat. sistem, 1994), 153. Quoted in Arustamova, Russko-amerikanskii dialog XIX veka, 278. Arustamova discusses in detail America’s role in Gogol’s life and writings. Ibid., 272–282. 3. See P. P. Rezepin, “Kakov Svinin,” in Pavel Svinin, Amerikanskie dnevniki i pis’ma 1811–1813 (Moscow: Parad, 2005), 37–45; and Vera Milchina’s concise review of the book: “Chestnyi lzhets (P. P. Svinin, Amerikanskie dnevniki i pis’ma 1811–1813),” Otechestvennye zapiski 5 (2005). 4. A. S. Pushkin, “Detskaia knizhka,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 16 tomakh, vol. 11 (Moscow, Leningrad: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk, 1949), 101. Quoted in Milchina’s review. 5. Besides Svinin, Russian history knew other figures similar to Khlestakov. Lotman analyzes Khlestakov’s character as a typological phenomenon of the early nineteenth century. He studies the biography of Dmitrii Zavalishin, a participant of the Decembrist movement, who was also connected with America. Traveler, adventurer, and bold liar, at the age of twenty Zavalishin proposed to the authorities a plan to organize a state subordinate to the Russian Empire in California. Yuri Lotman, “O Khlestakove,” in V shkole poeticheskogo slova: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol’ (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1988), 296–297. 6. V. Trenin, “K istorii poemy 150,000,000,” in Mayakovsky. Materialy i issledovaniia, ed. V. O. Pertsov and M. I. Serebriansky (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1940), 437. Quoted in Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 109. 7. Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 111–112.

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8. “Konets Gor’kogo,” 707. 9. He faces a problem of cultural differences known to many Russian visitors and émigrés to America: in Russia it was not habitual to praise oneself openly, to list one’s achievements; that is why the need to write a CV or a statement of purpose caused excruciating inconvenience–see, for example, in Vasilii Aksenov’s Novyi sladostnyi stil’ (Moscow: Izograf, EKSMO-Press), 221. 10. Hence Pertsov’s observations about the role of the allusions to The Inspector General in Mayakovsky’s “150,000,000” seem more pertinent to Pilniak’s OK. 11. “Ivanov” in the translation Little Golden America (302). 12. In Russian the express trains (kur’erskie) in Trefiliev’s story resonate with thirty-five thousand couriers (tridtsat’ piat’ tysiach odnikh kur’erov) from Khlestakov’s monologue. In his narration, Trefiliev appropriates not only Khlestakov’s desire to establish his importance, but also some features of the couriers and even the soup that arrived from Paris, which appear in Khlestakov’s fantasies. 13. Italics mine. “Sorokoust,” in S. A. Esenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 7 tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Nauka, Golos, 1997), 83. 14. See Lotman, “Khudozhestvennoe prostranstvo v proze Gogolia,” in V shkole poeticheskogo slova. Pushkin, Lermontov. Gogol’ (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1988), 251– 253. Lotman demonstrates that magical events take place in the space (or segments of space) typologically different from that of the everyday life of the village. Ibid., 259. 15. Nikolai Gogol, Mirgorod, trans. with an introduction by David Magarshack (New York: Minerva Press, 1968, c1962), 218. 16. Voronskii, “Mirgorod,” in Iskusstvo videt’ mir (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), 607. 17. Mann, Poetika Gogolia, 290–291. 18. David Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). Chapter 4, “Gogol: The Apotheosis of Grotesque” is especially relevant for my study. 19. Mann, Poetika Gogolia, 292. 20. Strangely enough, it is the one travelogue author who does not explicitly allude to Gogol—Gorky—who uses this Gogolian device most boldly. 21. Lotman, “Khudozhestvennoe prostranstvo v proze Gogolia,” 267. Gogol’s space as enclosure is studied by R. Maguire in Exploring Gogol. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 67–81. 22. “The impression of having entered a prison or a slave colony makes itself felt almost immediately upon the narrator’s arrival in the New York harbor.” Rougle, Three Russians Consider America, 30. 23. According to a popular theory, each gentry member that Chichikov meets is more spiritually dead than the previous one, as in Dante’s progression. But Mann argues that the starting point of Chichikov’s journey is absolute deadness: the indifference to good and evil represented by Manilov. The analogy is to Dante’s first circle where the inhabitants “wander without passion.” In contrast, the last land-owner, Pliushkin, as grotesque as he is, demonstrates a capacity for inner monologue that signals that his soul is not entirely dead. See Poetika Gogolia, 357–361. 24. “Khudozhestvennoe prostranstvo v proze Gogolia,” 292. 25. We might even mark the border between the earlier travelogues and the

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later ones (those from the second half of the twentieth century) by noting how the ocean crossing was made: aboard a ship or a plane. If later travelers, for any reason, choose a steamship, they revert to the traditional narrative. For example, Aleksei Adzhubei, the author of the fictionalized documentary novel Serebrianaia koshka (The Silver Cat, 1956), who went to America aboard the steamship Île de France together with a group of writers and journalists, explicitly goes back to Ilf and Petrov’s tradition of narrating the journey. In general, when the airplane becomes the primary means of transportation, the journey itself loses its prominence in the travelogue. Journeys by plane, apparently due to their relative shortness, are often narrated in a manner that Aksenov later formulated as “Let’s go to America—and we are in America already” (Nu v Ameriku—i my uzhe v Amerike). Joseph Brodsky’s poetic journey aboard an airplane differs, however: he revives the tradition of the transatlantic voyage as initiation, as a journey through time and space by fusing the motifs of flying and sailing: Like a snake charmer, like the Pied Piper of old, playing my flute I passed the green janissaries, my testes sensing their poleaxe’s sinister cold, as when one wades into water. And then with the brine of sea-water sharpness filling, flooding the mouth, I crossed the line And sailed into muttony clouds. (“Lullaby of Cape Cod,” in A Part of Speech [New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980], 108) 26. In the sketch “At the Entrance of the New World” Bogoraz gives a detailed description of the passengers’ last evening on board the ship—their expectations and the conflicts between them. But he also gives a more traditional narrative of the journey in the novella Avdotia and Rivka. 27. Information about the steamships and the itineraries of the writers can be found in the appendix. 28. Mayakovsky, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 4 (Moscow: Pravda, Ogonek, 1968), 399. 29. In a Strange Land, 22. 30. As early as 1844, in his poem “Piroskaf,” Evgenii Baratynskii creates the image of a steamship voyage as the lyrical hero’s actual trip and a symbolic journey through life. 31. In the travelogues, the ocean steamship is occasionally called “leviathan.” The name not only alludes to the biblical sea monster but reflects a reality: one transatlantic steamship was actually named “Leviathan” after that sea monster (Boris Akunin’s recent hermetic mystery novel, set in the nineteenth century aboard the ship Leviathan has this eponymous title). In the context of social discussion of the voyage, the name “leviathan” points to the philosophical tradition behind the analysis of the steamship hierarchy: Hobbes’s treatise Leviathan (translated into Russian in 1868), which is devoted to the origins and the structure of the state. 32. Even the mostly ideological Soviet writers pay their tribute to the ocean’s grand scale. In Mayakovsky, for example, the existential mode manifests itself in the universal scope that the social acquires: he perceives the ocean as a metaphor of the Revolution. Pilniak states that the ocean’s magnificence determines the scale of

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his thought and turns to the history of world civilizations in narrating his journey. Like Mayakovsky, he unites existential and social and uses the image of the ocean to criticize the wealthy: he unfolds a picture of first-class passengers’ petty and luxurious pastimes against the ocean’s vast existential backdrop. 33. See the sketches “Draka v dome” (Fight in the House), “Na ‘Uranii’” (On Board the Urania), “The Opinion of the American Jackson on the Jewish Question,” and the untitled excerpts (Posmertnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 17, 60–79, 88–90). 34. Indeed, it is hard to agree with Charles Moser, who dismisses Korolenko’s accounts of his journey and sickness as merely pedestrian (“Korolenko and America,” 307). 35. According to M. V. Mikhailova, Bunin eliminated the epigraph because it made the meaning of the story too obvious and didactic. M. V. Mikhailova, “‘Gospodin iz San-Frantsisko’: sud’ba mira i tsivilizatsii,” http://www.portal-slovo.ru/ philology/37264.php 36. In this aspect, the death of the Gentleman from San Francisco is the antithesis of the death of Ivan Il’ich in Tolstoy’s eponymous story, as Carl Proffer points out in From Karamzin to Bunin: An Anthology of Russian Short Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 44. Bunin does not grant his character any revelation or catharsis. But, as Mikhailova observes, Bunin shows the cathartic effect of his death on the world, on nature. 37. In Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs, “Titanik” appears in an ironic context: as a name of the hair dye that ruins Ippolit Matveevich’s hair color. 38. For example, Morskoe sudostroenie writes: “It is appropriate to point out the characteristics that the largest liners meet in the conditions of their usage for military causes (the power of their machinery, insubmersibility). The Soviet Union cannot be indifferent to the growth of hidden weapons in the capitalist countries. That is why our special media, and the shipbuilding press in particular, should be assigned the task of timely detection and publishing all methods for increasing the number of weapons that are being practiced by the capitalist states.” N. I. Olchi-Oglu, “Novyi krupneishii v mire lainer Normandiia,” Morskoe sudostroenie 2 (February 1933): 35–36. 39. See, for example, the caricature “Slovo i delo,” Krokodil 16 (1923): 745. The inscription reads: “It smells like underwater massacre.” 40. In non-literary accounts, such as the travel notes of Soviet engineers, this motif of disparity is also present, but from the point of view of the least privileged passengers: for example, in Iakov Ilin’s travelogue Bol’shoi konveier (The Great Conveyor) an engineer, Sakhno, who wanders without thinking into the first class living room is escorted off the premises in a polite but scornful manner (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1934), 85. 41. Pavel Svinin was the first to describe American steamboats in a travelogue. 42. Dirk Hoerder, “German Immigrant Workers’ Views of ‘America’ in the 1880s,” in In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880–1920, ed. Marianne Debouzy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 8–9. 43. “I kapital priobresti, i nevinnost’ sobliusti,” Krokodil 41 (November 7, 1923): 1158. 44. “Osvobozhdenie statui Svobody,” Krokodil 27 ( July 15, 1923): 932. 45. J. B. Bell and R. I. Abrams, In Search of Liberty: The Story of the Statue of

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Liberty and Ellis Island (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 108. 46. Russia played a grim role in the genesis of Lazarus’s poem: her rage and sorrow at the ruthless anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia were driving forces behind the writing of “The New Colossus.” 47. John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 86. 48. In Hasty and Fusso, 106. 49. “Lexicon as a Key to Ethno-Philosophy, History, and Politics: ‘Freedom’ in Latin, English, Russian, and Polish,” in Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 125–155. Future citations of this work are given in the text. 50. See, for instance, Radishchev’s and Pushkin’s odes to “Vol’nost.’” 51. The Polish nobility 52. “Bez iazyka,” in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, vol. 4 (Moscow: Pravda, 1971), 23. I am not using here the English translation In a Strange Land, since all the details of the usage of svoboda and volia in the original are crucial to my argument. 53. Ibid. 54. Wierzbicka distinguishes between this older definition and the current one, enriched by moral connotations: “Liberty in its present usage does not refer to a person’s ability to act as they please with respect to anything whatsoever, no matter how trivial or selfish.” This present meaning of liberty, “a liberty to do that only which is good, just, and honest” (136) might have satisfied Matvei. 55. “Bez iazyka,” 31. 56. In a Strange Land, Greenwood Press edition (1975), 28. 57. See Wierzbicka, 128. 58. Bogoraz’s farmer voices a concept encoded, according to Wierzbicka, in the English word “freedom”: “being able to do things that one wants to do without interference from other people” (129). But in the businessman’s opinion, his right to develop his business is violated by the workers’ freedom of speech and association. 59. Eisenstein, “My vstrechalis’,” 351. 60. Ibid. 61. “Otto Ech i artishoki,” in Memuary, vol.1: 40–41. The temporary “prisoner” of Ellis Island was another famous Soviet film director, Grigorii Aleksandrov, who was released immediately after Eisenstein’s intervention. 62. Bol’shoi konveier, 127. 63. Burenin, “Poezdka v Ameriku v 1906 godu,” in M. Gor’kii v gody revoliutsii, 97. 64. R. O. Iakobson, “Statuia v poeticheskoi mifologii Pushkina,” in Raboty po poetike, comp. and ed. M. L. Gasparov (Moscow: Progress, 1987), 173. 65. A. A. Dolinin, “‘Pir vo vremia chumy’ i problema edinstva,” in Pushkin i Angliia (Moscow: NLO, 2007), 125. 66. October 3, 1922. Quoted in Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva Esenina, 187. 67. There are accounts that Esenin was ashamed of his older wife, and even used to insult Duncan in public, pointing out that her age was incompatible with her occupation. See for example, Lekmanov and Sverdlov, Sergei Esenin, 400. The authors refer, among other sources, to Lola Kinel, Under Five Eagles. 68. Gordon McVay, Isadora and Esenin, illustrated supplement after page 252: photograph “Isadora and Esenin, New York, October 2 (?), 1922.”

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69. See Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva Esenina, 209–211. 70. Carrie J. Preston. “The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan and Modernist Performance,” Modernism/modernity 12, no. 2 (April 2005): 278. 71. For a detailed analysis of living statues in art and the representation of the female body, see Katherine Lahti, “On Living Statues and Pandora, Kamennye baby and Futurist Aesthetics: The Female Body in Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy,” The Russian Review 58 ( July 1999): 432–455. 72. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 72. 73. The ambiguous image of the Statue hiding something evil under her skirt— and, presumably, even giving birth to it—circulated in visual art even much later: Sergei Vasil’ev and Mark Abramov’s anti-American collection of poems and pictures opens with a picture of the Statue of Liberty, whose skirt in its lower part turns into the hoods of concealed Ku Klux Klan members who are hiding there. S. A. Vasil’ev and M. A. Abramov, Odinochestvo v miru. Litso i iznanka SShA (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia,1969), 3. 74. Projects for placing newcomers to America in quarantine on Liberty Island were discussed at some point, but the American public vehemently protested. 75. Ilf and Petrov, 139. 76. Vasilii Aksenov mentions that this connection is present even in obscene folk verses: “America has always been connected with something revolving and springy.” In Search of Melancholy Baby (New York: Random House, 1987), 15. 77. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 5–7. In his book, Siegelbaum analyzes the suppression of the very idea of personal automobile ownership in the Soviet consciousness. The image of a car owner was villainized until the 1960s. Additionally, owing to the absence of infrastructure, maintaining a car was an extremely complicated matter. 78. This strategy, as we will see, was also critical for constructing Henry Ford’s image in the travelogues. 79. Mayakovsky writes: “Technology here is more widespread than the comprehensive technology in Germany, but it lacks an older technological culture” (190). Dobranitskii, the author of To America and Back Again, also compares German and American technology and methods of labor organization, favoring the former. He disagrees with Mayakovsky that industrial progress in America is widespread: “In the South all of us had to be disappointed in ‘American technology.’ As a matter of fact, we did not visit the first-class ports but a relatively small one—the agricultural South rather than the industrial north. Nevertheless, in small German ports, they have cranes, steam, electricity, stone quays. And here there are wooden quays falling into pieces, no cranes; they work with winches, and, most of all, with people” (15). 80. Tolkovanie puteshestvii, 154–155. 81. In an interview with M. Gold published in New York World, August 9, 1925. See V. A. Katanian, V. Maiakovskii. Khronika zhizni i deiatel’nosti (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1985), 306. 82. In his notebook, Mayakovsky wrote the final stanza of “The Brooklyn Bridge” with a different ink from the one he used for the main text. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, this addition was in response to workers’ reactions during a public reading. On this, see Kemrad, Maiakovskii v Amerike, 191–193. The “Hudson” into which Mayakovsky’s unemployed throw themselves is one of his most notorious errors.

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83. Tolkovanie puteshestvii, 159. 84. Chto ia videl v Amerike. Chto ia sdelal v SSSR (Moscow: Sovetskaia literatura, 1934), 58–59. Sheinman, however, does not emphasize the cruelty of the meatproducing factory. In his description, it is neat and clean—and the factory reminds him of a bakery. 85. Julia Bekman Chadaga, “Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s,” Slavic Review 66 (1) Spring 2007: 82–105. 86. Richard Stites, “The Origins of Soviet Ritual Style,” in Symbols of Power: The Esthetics of Political Legitimation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, ed. Claes Arvidsson and Lars Erik Blomqvist (Stockholm, 1987). Quoted in Chadaga, 83. 87. Broadway thus functions as a synecdoche of New York in the same way that New York is traditionally recognized as the quintessence of America. Ilf and Petrov write that Broadway appeared before them “just as unexpectedly as New York itself rears up out of the boundless emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean” (13). 88. Chadaga compares Platonov’s story, initially titled “About the Extinguished Lenin Lamp,” with the testimony of a peasant from Kashino village. “Light in Captivity,” 87 and 92. 89. The Collected Tales and Plays of Nikolai Gogol, ed. Leonard J. Kent (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 452. Bulgakov develops Gogol’s concept in The Master and Margarita, building a system of seemingly contrasting concepts among which there are two types of light: the cruel sunlight and the merciful moonlight that reveals the truth. But in Bulgakov the moonlight is controversially associated with the Devil. 90. As Chadaga shows, though the adjective “blinding” (oslepitel’nyi) applied to the Soviet electric light is often used in a positive context, Zoshchenko’s story “Malen’kaia khitrost’” (A Clever Little Trick) suggests that there can indeed be too much electric light—extremely powerful bulbs in the toilet and the corridor are quite unnecessary. “Light in Captivity,” 91. 91. OK, 469–470; Chto ia videl v Amerike, 59. 92. Mayakovsky also mentions the “electrification” of death in America, referring to another of Edison’s inventions, the tram: he describes funeral processions in Mexico that often include trams, thus providing another connection between electricity and death. 93. Throughout the entire Soviet era, by contrast, Russian drivers were required to demonstrate a knowledge of auto mechanics in order to obtain a driver’s license. This is, however, hardly surprising, given that there were very few automobile repair facilities until late in the Soviet period, so a driver’s ability to fix a car was a vital necessity. 94. The police cleared him, since it was the woman, not Pilniak, who broke the rules of the road. 95. This aspect had a personal relevance to Mayakovsky: Lilia Brik pleaded with him to bring a new auto home from his voyage. 96. Valentin Kataev, a prominent Russian and Soviet writer, was Petrov’s brother. 97. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 180. 98. N. Osinskii, Amerikanskii avtomobil’ ili rossiiskaia telega. Stat’i (Deshevaia biblioteka gosizdata, 1930), 154–155. 99. Viacheslav Polonskii “Moia bor’ba na literaturnom fronte,” (Dnevnik. Mai 1920–ianvar’ 1932), Novyi mir 5 (2008). 100. After their return to Russia, Ilf and Petrov corresponded with Mr. Throne

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about sending needed automobile parts and ways of paying for them. Throne discusses these matters in his letter to Ilf and Petrov of November 29, 1936. RGALI, F. 1821, opis’ 1, ed. khr. 146. 101. For a discussion of adapting Ford’s principles at Soviet factories, see B. M. Shpotov, “‘Bolezni rosta’ ili ‘sindrom knopki’: kak prizhivalis’ v SSSR amerikanskie promyshlennye tekhnologii v gody pervoi piatiletki,” in Russkoe otkrytie Ameriki, 319–327. 102. German Genkel, Ford i fordizm. Vpechatleniia (Leningrad: Kubuch, 1925). 103. B. Starko, Sud nad Fordom (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1928). 104. S. Shvedov, “Obraz Genri Forda v sovetskoi publitsistike 1920–1930-kh godov: vospriiatie i transformatsiia tsennostei chuzhoi kul’tury,” in Vzaimodeistvie kul’tur, 133. 105. D. I. Zaslavskii, “Dva Forda,” introduction to Henry [Genri] Ford, Segodnia i zavtra (Leningrad: Vremia, 1927), 4. 106. In Russian: L. P. Lokner. Genri Ford i ego “Korabl’ mira”: Vospominaniia, trans. V. A. Zorgenfrei (Leningrad: Vremia, 1925), 21. 107. A. Menshoi, Anglo-amerikanskie portrety (Leningrad: Kubuch, 1925), 149. 108. See, for example, O. A. Ermanskii, Legenda o Forde (Moscow, Leningrad, 1926), 5. 109. Ibid., 41. 110. Starko, Sud nad Fordom, 34. 111. Shvedov, “Obraz Genri Forda,” 140. 112. Ermanskii, Legenda o Forde, 12. 113. “Kemp Nit Gedaige,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 90. 114. By contrast, machines in Soviet art can represent fertility. In Eisenstein’s film General’naia liniia (The General Line, 1929), the Fordson tractor [Fordzon] is a symbol of masculinity, successfully replacing the collective farm bull, and its very presence causes people and animals to proliferate. 115. Ford i fordizm, 63. 116. Ibid., 64. 117. The same concept of Ford-Lord is mocked in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. 118. Legenda o Forde, 28. 119. “The forest of iron and the steel grove—everything moved somewhere” (Genkel, Ford i fordizm, 23). This image may have emerged under the influence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. 120. Ford i fordizm, 9. 121. Ibid., 13. 122. Pilniak, OK, 607. 123. Chto ia videl v Amerike, 78. 124. Genkel, Ford i fordizm, 18. 125. Tageev, Russkii amerikanets, 184. 126. Shvedov, “Obraz Genri Forda,” 138. 127. This image contributes to his overall concept of a “sterile,” impotent America. 128. A bright example of a similar hypocritical accusation against Ford can be found in Starko’s Sud nad Fordom. Ford is being accused of “participating in a struggle against the Soviet Republic.” The accusations are startling: “Did you not provide

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material help to the former land-owners and merchants of tsarist Russia? Didn’t you subsidize the wife of the former Grand Prince Cyril Romanov?” Ford tries to justify himself on the grounds of his compassion for the unhappy woman. The chairman objects: “We are compassionate to the multimillion masses of working women” (46– 47) and assumes that Ford is guilty. 129. See, for example, Ermanskii, Legenda o Forde, Starko, Sud nad Fordom, and the introduction by Tal and Galin to Sheinman’s Chto ia videl v Amerike, 9–19. 130. Sheinman, Chto ia videl v Amerike, 14. 131. Similarly, when Galin and Tal proudly state, “The Soviet country is rapidly progressing, courageously mastering the heights of world industry, combining the last word in capitalist technology with the socialist organi zation of labor” (Introduction to Sheinman, Chto ia videl v Amerike, 10), they ignore the fact that the principles of labor organization were also borrowed from America. 132. Charles E. Sorensen, My Forty Years with Ford (New York: Norton, 1956), 202–203. Quoted in Shpotov, “Bolezni rosta’ ili ‘sindrom knopki,’” 326. 133. Fedor Gladkov’s “production” novel Cement foregrounds the opposition between a planned, capitalist mode of production and its antithesis, the heroic mode. The old specialist Kleist, who is recruited by the cement factory to organize its production process, pits himself against Gleb, the novel’s protagonist. Kleist insists that it is impossible to organize a stable work process through exhausting bursts of extraordinary efforts. The course of events, however, proves that the workers’ revolutionary self-consciousness inspires them to work every day to the limit of their abilities, thereby surpassing the rational capitalist process of production. 134. Moreover, artists who advocated biomechanics considered Chaplin to be a teacher of new, precise movements. They proposed a new theater that would teach workers to move rationally, in Chaplin’s manner. On this, see Yuri Tsivian, “O Charli Chapline i zakonakh sluchainogo v iskusstve,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 81 (2006). 135. On Mandelstam as Chaplin’s Russian counterpart, see Yurii Tsivian, ibid. 136. English translation by W. S. Merwin. 137. Valentin Kiparsky, English and American Characters in Russian Fiction, 154–161. 138. In Aleksei Balabanov’s recent film Brother-2 (2000), for example, a Russian immigrant girl in Chicago tries to warn the main character Danila Bagrov, a visitor in America, that he should not call African Americans “Negroes.” Since for a Russian there is nothing discriminatory or derogatory in the term “Negro,” he does not understand. 139. Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Leningrad: Goslitizdat, 1938), 209–210. 140. In a letter to his wife (Chicago, August 24), Korolenko writes of “slavery and the extermination of the Indians—two such episodes which must have left—and certainly have left—their mark on the very character of the American people, which will have to be taken into consideration for a long time.” Polnoe posmertnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 17: 87. 141. S. P. Iakovlev provides a detailed description of the greeting ceremonies and speeches in Chrezvychainoe Amerikanskoe posol’stvo v Moskve. Podrobnoe opisanie priema, okazannogo drevneiu stolitseiu posol’stvu G. Foksa i prazdnikov, ustroennykh v chest’ zaatlanticheskikh druzei-gostei (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1866). 142. A. I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1954– 1956), vol. 25: 24. Quoted in N. N. Bolkhovitinov, Istoriia SShA (Moscow: Nauka,

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1983), vol.1. 143. Nikoliukin, Literaturnye sviazi Rossi i SShA, 69. 144. The magazines that paid special attention to these issues in the middle of the century are Sovremennik, Russkii vestnik, and Syn otechestva. On the Russian publications on black slavery, see Bolkhovitinov, Istoriia SShA, vol. 1. 145. M. Ia. Blinchevskaia, “Iz arkhiva N. G. Chernyshevskogo (Ob odnom perevode M. L. Mikhailova),” Voprosy literatury 3 (1965): 251–252. 146. P. D. Boborykin, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), chap. 6; A. F. Koni, “Po povodu dramaticheskikh proizvedenii Tolstogo,” in Vospominaniia o pisateliakh (Moscow: Pravda, 1989); M. O. Mikeshin, “Vospominaniia o Shevchenko,” in Vospominaniia o Tarase Shevchenko (Kiev: Dnipro, 1988), 396–400. 147. English and American Characters, 154. 148. In Hasty and Fusso, 115. Further citations of this work are given in the text. 149. A. B. Lakier, A Russian Looks at America, 8–9. 150. The reader, nevertheless, can be sure that Bogoraz was fully aware of the various ways in which sore spots, especially national ones, can manifest themselves. In “Entrance to the New World” he openly discusses these psychological mechanisms. Describing a steamship passenger who looked Jewish himself yet made anti-Semitic remarks, he writes: “Perhaps he vented such abuse on Russian-Jewish immigrants precisely because they reminded him of what he had been trying to forget his whole life” (Hasty and Fusso, 103). 151. Hasty’s and Fusso’s translation is modified here. The original reads “Ia pochuvstvoval, chto vopros zadel ego za bol’noe mesto.” (In Hasty and Fusso, “I felt that the question had touched a sore spot,” 121). 152. Olga Meerson demonstrates a similar example when a character projects his dissatisfaction with himself onto another in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Miusov meets Zosima and immediately dislikes him, and in the next sentence the narrator remarks: “Altogether Miusov was very unsatisfied with himself.” 153. “Vystupleniia M. Gor’kogo v Amerike,” in Publitsistika M. Gor’kogo v kontekste istorii, 82. 154. Dobranitskii, V Ameriku i obratno, 20–21. 155. The fact that slavery lasted for dozens of years after its official abolition adds to the paradoxical concept of America as a country out of time, a land where time has stopped. For example, Vasiliev describing Georgia in 1969 (!) writes: “Here it is, the notorious land with the remnants of real slavery! Years, dozens of years, pass but the picture does not change: it is painful to look at the black in the state of Georgia.” Vasiliev and Abramov, Odinichestvo na miru, 86. 156. See, for example, the mutiny scene in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). The director powerfully employs the contrast between the officers’ black uniforms and the sailors’ white ones, representing the sailors as the victims of dark tsarist forces. Though the film is in black and white, the director adds a powerful third color at the end: a hand-painted red flag. 157. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 21. 158. Krokodil 15 (1923): 728–729. 159. Krokodil 24 (1923): 891. 160. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 9.

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161. I am thankful to Yuri Kagarlitskii who brought the positive associations of the color black in Soviet art to my attention. 162. Gildebrandt, Prikliucheniia Boba, trans. Sasha Chernyi (Berlin, 1924). I am grateful to Elena Ostrovskaia, who brought this poem to my attention. 163. Olesha’s potion seems to be the “blackening” counterpart of the whitening remedy of which Bogoraz’s student dreams. 164. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 24. 165. In Vzaimodeistvie kul’tur SSSR i SShA, 224–225. 166. Krokodil 11 ( June 15, 1924): 11. 167. In the Russian original, there is a pun, since the same Russian verb igrat’ (“to play”) is used for “to play [the violin]” and “to gamble.” 168. English and American Characters, 161. 169. Initially, a speech at a literary gathering in honor of Pushkin (1921). 170. Interestingly, Pilniak refers to “the Negroes” as a nation, rather than a race. 171. English and American Characters, 155–156. 172. For a list of Cooper’s most popular novels in translation, see, for example, I. Kashkin, “Kuper,” in Literaturnaia entsiklopediia v 11 tomakh (Moscow: Izd-vo Kom. Akad., 1929–1939), vol. 5: 737–743. 173. Pushkin, “Dzhon Tenner,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, vol. 7 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), 298–322. For an English translation, see Pushkin on Literature, trans. and ed. Tatiana Wolff and John Bayley, 411. The source of this reference was discovered by B. M. Marianov in Washington Irving’s sketch “A Tour on the Prairie” (1835). B. M. Marianov. “Ob odnom primechanii k statie A. S. Pushkina ‘Dzhon Tenner,’” Russkaia literatura 1 (1962): 64–67. 174. Pushkin used the French translation and the introduction: M. E. de Blosseville, Mémoires de John Tanner, ou trente années dans les déserts de l’Amérique du Nord, traduits sur l’édition original, publiée á New York (Paris, 1835). M. P. Alekseev offers a valuable textological commentary on Pushkin’s article in “K statie Pushkina ‘Dzhon Tenner’” in Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, 1966 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1969), 50–56. 175. G. M. Sayre, “Abridging between Two Worlds: John Tanner as American Indian Biographer,” American Literary History 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 481. 176. Curiously, Sayre refers to Pushkin’s article in order to illustrate his claim that Tanner’s diary is a page-turner full of action, obviously misinterpreting Pushkin’s main idea. 177. Belinskii calls Cooper’s Pathfinder a “Shakespearean drama in the form of a novel—a unique creation in this respect to which there is nothing equal, a triumph of the new epic poetry.” “Razdelenie poezii na rody i vidy,” in Sobranie sochinenii v 3 tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: OGIZ, GIKhL, 1948). 178. “Putevoditel’ v pustyne, ili ozero-more,” in Sobranie sochinenii v 9 tomakh, vol. 3. (Moscow: Khud lit-ra, 1976). 179. V. V. Nabokov, introduction to Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time, trans. Vladimir Nabokov with Dmitri Nabokov (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958). 180. V. I. Dal, “Bitva s indeitsami,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii V. I. Dalia, vol. 6 (Moscow, St. Petersburg: Izd-vo M. O. Vol’f, 1897), 343–347. 181. Sovremennik 4 (1866). Bunin’s later translation (1896) became even more popular.

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182. For a bibliography of the most popular children’s adaptations of Cooper, see Kashkin, “Kuper.” Beginning with the 1830s, Cooper’s novels and their adaptations were listed as recommended for studying at schools. See A. Arustamova, “Poniat’ drugogo: Amerika v russkikh uchebnikakh slovesnosti vtoroi poloviny XIX–nachala XX vv,” in Ia i Drugoi v prostranstve teksta. Mezhvuzovskii sbornik nauchnykh trudov, iss. 2. (Perm, Ljubljana: 2009), 232–241. 183. Quoted in Kiparsky, English and American Characters, 155. This portrait, chronologically preceding Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, might remind the later reader of Pechorin. 184. Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 17, 84–85. 185. Three Russians Consider America, 123. 186. Platonov, “Novyi Russo,” in Razmyshleniia chitatelia. Statii (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1970), 131. Excerpts from Gray Owl, with Prishvin’s foreword, were published in M. Prishvin, Seraia sova (Moscow, Leningrad: Detgiz, 1939). The article “Novyi Russo” was not published during Platonov’s life. 187. Olga Meerson studies this tradition in her book Personalizm kak poetika (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii dom, 2009). 188. The fourth, “Charlie Man,” was first published as part of the cycle “In America.” 189. “Iz besedy s redaktorom gazety ‘Fraigait,’” in Mayakovsky ob Amerike, 42. 190. While Ilf and Petrov portray the cheerful New Year’s ball at the Russian consulate in New York as the apex of healthy Soviet family entertainment, contemporaries perceived the extravagant parties in the residence of William Bullitt, the first American ambassador to Moscow, as demonic. For example, a famous spring ball in Spaso House in 1935, in which some Soviet officials and writers participated, inspired certain scenes from the Devil’s grand ball in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. See, for example, Leonid Parshin, Chertovshchina v Amerikanskom posol’stve v Moskve, ili 13 zagadok Mikhaila Bulgakova (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1991), and Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii, 225–238. 191. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture (London: Routledge, 2000). 192. Modern American readers learned of this cruel phenomenon from Horace McCoy’s novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which was turned into a 1969 film of the same name, set during a Depression-era dance marathon. 193. “Ne zhalei laptei,” Krokodil 21 (1923): 807. The sketch, accompanied by D. Mel’nikov’s picture, is curiously titled “Do not bother about lapti.” Here, lapti, a type of traditional Russian peasant footwear, are ascribed to an American dancer. Similarly, the narrator in Zoshchenko’s “Bathhouse” does not doubt that there are bathhouses in America. 194. Peter Chaikovsky, touring America, voices a contrary opinion in a letter to E. Napravnik: “Although profit is the main interest in the native life, nevertheless, Americans are very attentive to the arts as well.” Vzgliad v istoriiu—vzgliad v budushchee. Comp., comment. A. N. Nikoliukin (Moscow: Progress, 1987), 313. 195. “City of Mammon,” 182. 196. Ibid., 179. 197. “Realm of Boredom,” in The City of the Yellow Devil, 21. 198. In America, Gorky wrote his famous play Na dne (The Lower Depths),

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in which he demonstrated that there is no binary opposition between truth and lie: the alternative to the plain truth of facts may also be hope, or faith, or artistic inspiration. For a detailed analysis, both literary and psychological, of Gorky’s attitude to illusion and plain truth, see V. Khodasevich’s essay “Gorky” in the cycle Nekropol’ (Necropolis). 199. Symptomatically, Shklovsky introduces the term “estrangement” (ostranenie) as he analyses an entertainment scene in War and Peace—Natasha Rostova at the opera. The description of the opera seems appallingly artificial from the point of view of Natasha, who is engulfed in a “real” feeling, love. 200. “Realm of Boredom,” 22–23. 201. “Realm of Boredom,” 23. 202. In this section, I focus on the writers’ perspective on American cinematography. The broader topic of Soviet film specialists’ American experience deserves a special monograph. 203. Interview with Mayakovsky, “S Maiakovskim po 5-i aveniu,” Fraigait (New York), August 14, 1925. Quoted in Kemrad, Maiakovskii v Amerike, 44. 204. Commenting on the suddenly changing scales of objects and scenes in Hollywood studios, he writes disapprovingly: “In a bowl of water the storms would take place and the dreadnoughts would sink, making the audience tremble” (520)— apparently unaware that Eisenstein, who had also visited Hollywood, used the same technique for long distance shots in Battleship Potemkin. 205. This project was broadly debated and supported by many leaders of Soviet cinematography who visited Hollywood in the 1930s. 206. Note the similar sense of a duty to experience American entertainment in Mayakovsky’s travelogue; it might have significantly contributed to the boredom the travelers were experiencing. 207. Pilniak came to America in 1931 when Prohibition was still in force. 208. Interestingly, the authors in question do not make a particularly significant use of food in their non-American works. The only possible exceptions are Ilf and Petrov, whose satiric conflicts are often built around food—for example, the famous story of Vasisualii Lokhankin from The Golden Calf, who declares a hunger strike to avoid being banished from his wife’s apartment but is caught in the act of devouring some meat from a pot of soup. But the food that the ironic pair describes is usually the poor diet of Soviet citizens, such as the assortment available in a vegetarian café, mocked both in The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf. Nevertheless, the seemingly varied material for the depiction of food that America offers is treated by all the writers with cautious reservation or disdain. 209. American bread, sent as humanitarian aid to Russia, caused much surprise among those who had the opportunity to try it. For example, in the 1960s, Andrei Siniavsky (Abram Tertz), a Gulag inmate, describes it as some kind of “angelic” food: the inmates’ stomachs digested it entirely; at the same time Siniavsky acknowledges that the bread saved many lives. 210. See my section on pleasures and entertainments. 211. This salad recipe does not look very American—especially the beet, which is a distinctly Russian vegetable. But it is not the only example of assimilation in the descriptions of American cuisine. For example, Gorky portrays radish with butter as a luxurious meal in the “King of the Republic.”

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212. M. F. Andreeva. Perepiska. Vospominaniia. Stat’i. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia o M. F. Andreevoi (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963), 112. 213. See, for example, Sheinman, Chto ia videl v Amerike, 52. 214. One of the most powerful examples that was chronologically close to Mayakovsky’s voyage is Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” where mutiny breaks out because the officers deny the sailors a basic necessity, edible food. One of the sailors reads with rage the words of a prayer written on his plate: “Give us our daily bread.” 215. In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 21–22. 216. Andrew M. Hanfman analyzes Gorky’s American pamphlets as the models for villainous characters in the post-war Soviet drama (“The American Villain on the Soviet Stage,” The Russian Review 10 [April 1951]: 131–145). Kiparsky, who refers to Hanfman (English and American Characters, 120–122), points out that Gorky’s millionaire had also shaped earlier images of capitalists in Mayakovsky, Ehrenburg, and Aleksei Tolstoy. I would like to stress that a similar tradition of portraying the capitalist also thrived in the graphic arts—posters, caricatures, animation (see, for example, Dziga Vertov’s propagandistic animated film Mezhplanetnaia revoliutsiia, 1924). Apparently, the tradition is not determined in its entirety by Gorky. Besides, one should not forget that in the same “interview,” Gorky reveals that this stereotype of a gluttonous millionaire is false. 217. Rougle notes that this portrait is modeled after John D. Rockefeller, “whose ascetic habits, weak stomach, and diet of soft-boiled eggs and oranges had by this time become legend” (Three Russians Consider America, 40). Rougle discusses the combination of childlike and moribund features in the millionaire’s portrait, building on Kiparsky’s observation that the character’s physical weakness provides a contrast to the exploited millions of full-blooded healthy people. Later, as we have seen, Ford became the embodiment of the ascetic millionaire stereotype. 218. See, for example, Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A FeministVegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1990); Helena Goscilo, “Tolstoyan Fare: Credo à la Carte,” Slavonic and East European Review 62, no. 4 (1984): 481–495; Ronald D. LeBlanc, Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009). 219. Ronald LeBlanc, “Unpalatable Pleasures: Tolstoy, Food, and Sex,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 6 (1993): 1. 220. Paradoxically, the travelers who visit Ford’s factory find that eating is the least organized part of the otherwise precise industry. Mayakovsky, Pilniak, and Ilf and Petrov note that there is no place to eat in the factory, that the workers have to sit on the floor and consume their tasteless meals. 221. Mikoian was the head of the Soviet food industry and procurement in the 1930s. Bolkhovitinov ironically remarks: “Recalling the ‘rhetoric skills’ of our minister, a reader may think that the famous satirists are scoffing. But alas, they were serious.” “Obraz Ameriki v Rossii,” in Russkoe otkrytie Ameriki, 441. 222. Konstantin Bogdanov, “‘Pravo kurit’: K sotsial’noi istorii kureniia v XX veke,” in Povsednevnost’ i mifologiia (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2001), 320. 223. This idea is present not only in the Russian or Soviet mind. Marcy Norton, in the introduction to her research on the history and role of chocolate and tobacco in Europe, claims, not without irony: “[N]ative Americans (and

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enslaved Africans), though they suffered greatly as a consequence of European conquests and colonial systems, were not passive victims.… The history of tobacco and chocolate reveals that this was a phenomenon with repercussions for the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Like its American counterparts, European society was profoundly affected by the new era inaugurated in 1492.” Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: a History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2008), 4. 224. Arustamova discusses the motif of America’s “reverse expansion” in nineteenth-century Russian thought (Russko-amerikanskii dialog, 121). 225. “Am I happier, smarter, kinder because of drinking chocolate, smoking tobacco, wearing clothing painted with American dyes, wearing the skin of an American animal on my shoulders, and sitting in redwood chairs?... In the first place, bribes appeared. Scribes started to smoke tobacco, sniff it out of golden snuffboxes, and drink punch—another American invention.” Elaborating on the vanity of American gifts, Petushkov acquires the tone of Ecclesiastes: “People started to trade in fire, water, air, time.” F. V. Bulgarin, “Poslanie gubernskogo sekretaria Petushkova k Khristoforu Kolumbu, admiralu ispanskoi sluzhby i kavaleru,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 8, otd.1 (1835): 84–93. 226. This warning was first printed on packs of Javas, one of the most popular brands of Soviet cigarettes in 1971, and was inseparable from all advertisements for cigars and anti-smoking posters. Aksenov, in his novel Round the Clock, Non-Stop (1976) parodying a similar warning from “the Surgeon General” on an American cigarette pack, apparently does not keep this parallel in mind. 227. The Jewish tradition makes a similar connection between smoking and America: Mottel, the eleven-year old protagonist of Sholem Aleichem’s novella Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son (1907), decides that in order to go to America and be accepted there he must learn to write and smoke. Of course, in this example, smoking and writing signify the maturity necessary for such a transition. However, it is meaningful that the initiation and loss of innocence connect America and smoking. 228. Pilniak, Gorky, Esenin, and Mayakovsky were smokers, and their portraits with smoking accessories—Gorky and Esenin with pipes and Mayakovsky with a cigarette—are very famous. Once, Mayakovsky’s and Esenin’s famous rivalry took the form of a public scandal over a cigarette: in a restaurant, Esenin asked Mayakovsky for a cigarette. Mayakovsky at first offered him his cigarette case but then suddenly changed his mind and withdrew it. A witness, N. D. Volpin, reports that Esenin felt deeply offended (RGALI Archive, manuscripts section, F. 190, op. 4, ed. khr. 131). There is no particular evidence that their American experience changed their smoking habits or somehow influenced their self-perception as smokers with the exception of Pilniak, who, as we will see later, suffered from abstinence at Ford’s factory. From a textual perspective, each of them recurrently provides the connection between America and the concept of smoking. 229. Bogdanov, “Pravo kurit’,” 306–307, 348–349. 230. For example, Sherlock Holmes or Kaspar Shlikh in Kharms’s poem “Plikh i Plukh” (Splash and Splish). 231. I. S. Shmelev. “Kak ia vstrechalsia s Chekhovym,” in Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1960).

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232. A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30 tomakh, vol.6 (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 699. 233. “Krasnokozhie,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1983), 104–109. 234. Russian health specialists are concerned that TV commercials “encourage people to smoke Lucky Strikes (because they represent the true America), invite viewers to ‘go and see Marlboro-land,’ and urge them to ‘test the West’”—all without appropriate health warnings. G. Kholmogorova, A. Prokhorov, “West Goes East: The New Tobacco Situation in Russia,” Tobacco Control 3 (1994): 146.

5—Reverse American Travelogues 1. The leftist American fellow-travelers should be distinguished from Soviet fellow-travelers—poputchiki. As Etkind notes, “Crossing the ocean, tropes change their meaning” (Tolkovanie puteshestvii, 142). 2. Various types of American characters in Russia are studied in Kiparsky’s English and American Characters; however, Kiparsky does not discuss their perception of the Soviet country as a special topic. 3. Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 43. 4. According to Youngblood, “foreign films accounted for almost two-thirds of the titles screened in the 1920s. American films alone amounted to 35 percent of the total, scarcely less than the Soviet percentage.” Movies for the Masses, 51. 5. This was the title of Lev Kuleshov’s article about foreign films on the Russian market; despite the derogatory suffix of the word, which was usual for Soviet official critical language, Kuleshov acknowledged the superiority of American films over Russian ones in the 1920s. 6. See Kornei Chukovsky’s article “Nat Pinkerton i sovremennaia literatura,” 1908. 7. M. S. Shaginian, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 7. 8. Although Shaginian wrote the novel in 1923–1924, she significantly reworked it in 1954 and could therefore use the material of the later American travelogues. 9. Maria Malikova discusses Shaginian’s novel in the context of pseudotranslated novels of NEP (Zhorzh Delarm’s [Yuri Slezkin’s] Kto smeetsia poslednim, P’er Dium’el’s [S. Zaiaitskii’s] Krasavitsa s ostrova LiuLiu, Rene Kadu’s [O. Savich’s and V. Korvin-Piotrovskii’s] Atlantida pod vodoi, etc.). According to Malikova, Mess-Mend represents this phenomenon par excellence. “Khalturovedenie: sovetskii psevdoperevodnoi roman perioda NEPa,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 103 (2010). 10. Constructing her multi-layered mystification, Shaginian even remarks about the untranslatable wordplay in the footnotes to the text. For example, she writes that the antagonist, the vicious tycoon Jack Kressling, is a well-educated man, unlike the majority of capitalists who cannot “tell Coleridge from porridge.” In Russian, the pun is nonexistent: “otlichat’ poeta Kolridzha ot ovsianki” (Izbrannye proizvedeniia vol. 2: 19). In Cioran’s English translation (Mess-Mend: Yankees in Petrograd [Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1991]) the note is, naturally, absent. Meshcheriakov

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in his introduction supports the game by commenting on the funny errors that the American writer, unaware of Russian realities, makes: for example, he renders a character’s name as “Katia Ivanovna” instead of “Ekaterina Ivanovna.” (In Russian the patronymic is accompanied by the full first name [Ekaterina], not the diminutive [Katia]. The combination that Meshcheriakov discusses is indeed very common in “foreign” works about Russia, for example, “Misha Borisovich Vainberg” in the 2006 novel by Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan). 11. This is another one of Shaginian’s mystifications; her novel owes at least as much to literature—Nat Pinkerton’s series and American travelogues—as it does to cinema. 12. S. D. Cioran, introduction to Mess-Mend, 16. 13. Mess-Mend, 173. All further citations of this work are given in the text. 14. The last name “Barfuss” (“barefoot”) is apparently rendered in accordance with the model of “the insulted and humiliated” revolutionary pennames of Russian writers—“Gor’kii” (Bitter), “Bednyi” (Poor), “Golodnyi” (Hungry). 15. The familiar association “chimneys—lips” can be traced back to Mandelstam’s rhyme “truby—guby” in “The American Girl.” 16. The description of workers’ “morning exercises” in the fields (chapter 36) is omitted in Cioran’s translation. 17. In Cioran’s translation, “the method of economic indivisibility.” 18. See, for example, the feuilleton “ARA” in Krokodil 11 (1923): 667. A character traveling to the Caucasus hears the word “Ara” everywhere, since in Georgian it means “No,” and assumes that “the cursed Americans have appropriated everything, there is no life for a Russian man.” Although the feuilleton mocks the illiterate main character, it voices the fear of the general population that Americans will require “everything” in exchange for their help. 19. N. A. Lebedev, Ocherk istorii kino SSSR: Nemoe kino (1918–1934) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965), 219. The quote from Lebedev appears in Vlada Petric’s insightful “A subtextual reading of Kuleshov’s Mr. West,” in Inside Soviet Film Satire, ed. A. Horton (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) in a curiously changed way: “the pamphlet on the capitalist’s lies…conceived and executed in the style of the most popular genre of the bourgeois cinema—the detective film” (68). This definition, attributed to Lebedev, apparently belongs to Petric himself: it highlights the essential paradox of the Westernizer’s relations with American popular art (using and mocking it simultaneously). Lebedev’s idea here is much more straightforward: Kuleshov intended to mock both the ideology and content of bourgeois cinema. 20. Krokodil 38 (1923): 1107. 21. P. Kaletskii, “Pinkertonovshchina,” in Literaturnaia entsiklopedia, col. 645– 649. Quoted in Cioran’s introduction to Mess-Mend, 20. 22. Inside Soviet Film Satire, 70. 23. On Circus as an exemplary work of socialist realism, see Moira Ratchford, “Circus of 1936: Ideology and Entertainment under the Big Top,” in Inside Soviet Film Satire, 83–93. The stylistic demands of socialist realism in film were “clearly constructed plots, understandable characters, and conventional montage,” as formulated in Shumiatskii’s decree ‘Movies for the Millions’” (85). 24. It was titled Pod kupolom tsirka (Under the Big Top) and based on Ilf and Petrov’s eponymous play written for the Moscow Music Hall in 1934.

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25. In this show the actors shot from the Russian cannon fly not to the Moon but to the “Universe.” Rejecting the decadent aesthetics of the American individual performance, the participants in the collective “Flight to the Universe” are dressed in sleek white pilot costumes. Apparently, flights to the moon in 1936 belonged to the realm of fantasy, “daydreaming,” which was criticized in Iakov Protazanov’s science fiction film Aelita (1924), where the main character eventually abandons his dreams of interplanetary flights for the sake of real work on earth. In the 1930s, the airplane flights of “Stalin’s Hawks” indeed were perceived as real heroic deeds–a miracle of science and human courage. 26. The film points to the connection between American racism shown at its beginning and the Nazi ideology emblematized by Kneishitz’s figure. 27. Vera Alexandrova observes that the characters of German specialists of the same era are depicted only as caricatures. Americans are much more positive and usually demonstrate the capacity for development; the major reason for their visit is “a vivid and sincere desire to see for themselves the new experiment.” “America and Americans in Soviet Literature,” Russian Review 2, no. 2 (Spring 1943): 22. 28. In Time, Forward this idea is articulated literally. Of the construction of an artificial lake in winter, Kataev says: “It was a battle of man against nature, and Man won.” Trans. Charles Malamuth (Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, 1976), 183. All further citations of this work are given in the text. 29. Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). See especially chapter 3, “The Performance Begins,” 80. 30. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 141–145. 31. Mighty hero of Slavic folklore. 32. For example, in A Man Changes His Skin, chapter 8, excavators “look into the quarry with curiosity, stretching their necks,” and “obediently turn their heads and freeze, in the intense anticipation.” 33. The Soviet Novel, 138. 34. Alexandrova, “America and Americans in Soviet Literature,” 24. 35. It looks especially ominous against the background of Shaginian’s image of the fascist wolf with multiple skins. 36. Kiparsky, English and American Characters, 139. 37. This is what, after the success of Soviet electrification in the early 1920s, electric bulbs were called. As Nina Tumarkin observes, “The mythical Lenin was a dynamo of power and energy.” Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, enlarged edition, 1997), 131. 38. As Alexandrova observes, in the 1930s Americans “went to Russia not in search of ‘revolution’ as did their predecessors, but in order to see with their own eyes the experiment in progress.” (“America and Americans in Soviet Literature,” 22). 39. I presented my analysis of Mister Twister’s journey as a reversed travelogue and of Twister’s evolving image in the poem’s different versions at the AAASS Conference in 2008 in the paper “Mister Twister: There and Back Again” (panel “The Foreigner in Russia”). Yuri Leving also interprets Marshak’s poem in the context of American travelogues of Russian writers in his article “Mister Twister in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Sketching Laughter in Marshak’s Poem,” Slavic Review

Notes to pages 211–20

70 (Summer 2011): 279–306. Leving uses the term “inverted travelogue” to define a genre where “the writer presents himself as a visiting foreigner from far away who observes and describes the local customs with a humorous amazement, tempered by disgust” (283). My study not only considers the satirical potential of such an inverted presentation of the writer’s own homeland as essential, but also stresses the fact that the major recurrent motifs of Russian writers making an American journey are reversed in such travelogues. 40. For the details of this public scandal, see chapter 1. 41. B. E. Galanov, “Mister Blister i Mister Tvister,” in Knizhka pro knizhki (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1970), 10. 42. All references to “Mister Twister” come from S. Ia. Marshak, Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1968): 419–436. 43. The scarcity of living space, and in particular the absence of vacancies in hotels, is the trigger for numerous literary and filmic conflicts in the Soviet Union— from Zoshchenko’s “Nervous People” and Abram Room’s Tretiia Meshchanskaia (Bed and Sofa, 1927) to Georgii Danelia’s Mimino (1977) and Eldar Riazanov’s Vokzal dlia dvoikh (Railway Station for Two, 1982). 44. M. L. Gasparov, “Marshak i vremia,” in O russkoi poezii (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2001), 421. 45. An allusion to Heinrich Heine’s poem “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam,” probably in Fet’s translation: “Na severe kedr odinokii.” 46. Korolenko, Polnoe posmertnoe sobranie, vol. 18: 60. Marshak could have been simply referring to a similar advertisement by the same travel agency, but since the motifs of “Factory of Death” were present in the earliest version of the poem, it is quite possible that it was Korolenko’s travelogue that influenced Marshak’s image of Cook’s company. 47. This image also echoes a scene in Mayakovsky’s “My Discovery of America”: “But I can’t live here,” Miss Vanderbilt said capriciously, selling her palace on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-third Street for six million dollars. “I can’t live here when there’s a Childs on the other side of the street from me, a bakery to the right, and a hairdresser to the left” (179). 48. “Broadway,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 57.

Conclusion 1. The most vivid example is Oleg Dark’s essay “Otherworldly America,” in Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, 28–33. 2. Kataev, Sviatoi kolodets. Trava zabveniia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1969), 63. 3. After this journey, A. Adzhubei, V. Matveev, V. Orlov, A. Shevchenko, G. Zhukov, L. Il’ichev, V. Lebedev, E. Litoshko, P. Satiukov, O. Troianovskii, and G. Shuiskii write a collective oeuvre, Face to Face with America (Litsom k litsu s Amerikoi, 1960); the authors apparently disregard Esenin’s poetic formula: “Face to face, you cannot see another’s face. The grand requires a distance” (Litsom k litsu litsa ne uvidat’. Bol’shoe viditsia na rasstoian’i). 4. Compare, for example, Adzhubei’s Serebrianaia koshka (1956) and Sofronov’s “Amerika kak takovaia” (1956): both writers meticulously describe the same events

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and interpret them similarly. The differences are minimal. Adzhubei’s composition is slightly more artistic: he uses the image of a silver cat—the journalists’ emblem— as a unifying motif of his travelogue and uses flash forwards (meeting with Lilian Voynich), while Sofronov’s narrative is absolutely linear. 5. Grigorii Baklanov, “The Spochel Family, Two Generations,” in Soviet Writers Look at America (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 45–46. See also Grigori Baklanov, Temp vechnoi pogoni (Mesiats v Amerike) (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1972). 6. For example, Adzhubei writes: “Broadway roars at night—the main street of the ‘City of the Yellow Devil,’—insatiable, expensive, devouring thousands and thousands of green dollar bills from the full purses of the prosperous public.” Serebrianaia koshka (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1956), 31. 7. “The essence of Gorky’s sketch is not in its descriptive part. The essence is different: it is its disparaging of the cursed pursuit of profit, damned desire to make money at any cost, the cult of a huge lump of gold that acts centrifugally and centripetally. Therefore, Gorky was right when he was writing: ‘The lump of gold is the heart of the city. In its pulsation is the entire life.’” “Poezdka v Ameriku,” In Vzgliad v istoriiu—vzgliad v budushchee, comp. A. Nikoliukin (Moscow: Progress, 1987), 450. 8. Boris Polevoi, “Amerikanskie dnevniki,” in Vzgliad v istoriiu, 438–439. 9. Strelnikov and Shatunovskii, “Pharmacist Pemberton’s Mixture,” in Soviet Writers Look at America, 139–140. 10. One-Storied America preserves its status of the travelogue par excellence even today. In 2008 Vladimir Pozner and Ivan Urgant, accompanied by the American Brian Kahn, undertake an automobile trip through America, following Ilf and Petrov’s itinerary. The outcome of this journey—a multi-series film and a book titled “Odnoetazhnaia Amerika” (One-Storied America; in quotation marks) is explicitly posited as derived from Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue. Pozner, Urgant, and Kahn’s text juxtaposes excerpts from the original One-Storied America with their own observations of the same places. The eponymous film includes documentary reels from the 1930s, Ilf and Petrov’s pictures, and new footage (the travelers were accompanied by a film crew). 11. Rogger, “How the Soviets See Us,” in Shared Destiny: Fifty Years of SovietAmerican Relations, ed. Mark Garisson and Abbott Gleason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 131. 12. The Taganka Theatre staged a play, “Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty,” based on Yevtushenko’s poem. 13. Pervoe sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 3 (Moscow: Neva group, 2000), 383. 14. Sviatoi kolodets, 51. 15. Aksenov writes about Gorky’s “terrible irritation,” Pilniak’s “disgust” (“Pilnyak’s anti-Americanism must have been the envy of many an Agitprop hack”), Mayakovsky’s clash between futuristic delight and leftist revolutionary hostility, and notes that Ilf and Petrov seconded Mayakovsky’s view of the United States as “the last bastion of capitalism.” Aksenov suggests that the reason for the Soviet writers’ hatred was America’s total indifference to the major event of their own life—the Socialist Revolution—which is a disputable matter: America had its own romance with the Russian Revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, as the phenomenon of American “fellow travelers” shows.

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16. V. Aksenov, In Search of Melancholy Baby (New York: Random House, 1985), 23. The Gogolian image emerges in the text as the word of the Other (of the narrator’s interlocutor, a Russian emigrant), but it is essential that it manifests the presence of the tradition. Interestingly, in his sketch of the Russian tradition of the American travelogue, with references to “Mirgorod,” Aksenov does not mention Esenin, the author of “An Iron Mirgorod.” 17. In Search of Melancholy Baby, 98–114. 18. We should take into consideration that the novel was written about secondwave emigrants and for a non-Soviet audience (and above all, non-Soviet censorship), which means that he could afford to offer a more objective picture. Most of the emigrants of the first wave still remembered the pre-revolutionary assortment of food and were not shocked by its quality and quantity. 19. “‘Mew’ instead of ‘Moo,’” in Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, 87. 20. See for example, Aksenov: “And doesn’t a taxi ride down Seventh bring back the mud paths of Ryazan you wrote about in Surplussed Barrel-ware? [Aksenov’s short story, written in 1968]. Though in Ryazan you didn’t have to put up with noxious fumes.” In Search of Melancholy Baby, 23. 21. Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 107. 22. Aksenov, V poiskakh grustnogo bebi (New York: Liberty Publishing House, 1987), 31. This excerpt is absent from the translation in In Search of Melancholy Baby. 23. I. A. Brodsky, Bol’shaia kniga interv’iu, comp. V. Polukhina (Moscow: Zakharov, 2000), 665.

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Wright, John Leslie. “Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf and the Picaresque Tradition.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973. Yedlin, Tovah. Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Youngblood, Denise. Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Zholkovsky, Alexander. “Dialog Bulgakova i Oleshi o kolbase, parade chuvstv i Golgofe.” Sintaksis 20 (1987). ———. “Dreaming Right and Reading Right: Five Keys to One of Il’f and Petrov’s Ridiculous Men.” Slavic Review 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 36–53. Zhuravleva, V. I. “Predel dopustimogo v revoliutsii: 1905 g. v Rossii v vospriiatii amerikantsev.” In Russkoe otkrytie Ameriki: Sbornik statei, edited by A. O. Chubarian et al., 292–301.

Archival Materials Korolenko, Vladimir. “Zaarestovannyi golos,” Russkoe bogatstvo. RGALI. F. 234, op. 1 (n39), ed. khr. 20 (p 1). Letters of the readers to Evgenii Petrov. RGALI. F. 1821, op. 1, ed. khr. 168. Artiukhov V. N. Letter from 9.12, 1937 Letter of Ilf and Petrov to Throne from Nov. 29, 1936. RGALI. F. 1821, op. 1 ed. khr. 146. Volpin, N.D. RGALI, manuscripts section. F. 190, op. 4, ed. khr. 131.

Short Anonymous or/and Untitled Articles and Illustrations in Soviet Periodicals Krokodil 3 (1923): 539. Krokodil 11 (1923): 667 (“Ara”). Krokodil 15 (1923): 728–729. Krokodil 16 (1923): 745 (“Slovo i delo”). Krokodil 21 (1923): 807 (“Ne zhalei laptei”). Krokodil 24 (1923): 891. Krokodil 27 (1923): 932 (“Osvobozhdenie statui Svobody”). Krokodil 38 (1923): 1107 (“Prikliucheniia mistera Stupidheda v Rossii”). Krokodil 41 (1923): 1158 (“I kapital priobresti, i nevinnost’ sobliusti”). Krokodil 11 ( June 15, 1924): 11. Krokodil 24 (24): 11 (“Nigde krome kak v Mossel’prome”).

Films Aleksandrov, Grigorii. Tsirk, 1936. Balabanov, Aleksei. Brat-2, 2000. Barnet, Boris, and Fedor Otsep. Miss-Mend, 1926. Chaplin, Charlie. Modern Times, 1936.

Bibliogr ap hy

Cherkasskii, David. Ostrov sokrovishch, 1988. Danelia, Georgii. Mimino, 1977. Davydov, Roman. Aktsionery. Soiuzmul’tfil’m, 1963. Eisenstein, Sergei. Bronenosets Potemkin. 1925. ———. General’naia liniia, 1929. Ivanov-Vano, Ivan, and L. Amalrik. Black and White, 1932. Kuleshov, Lev. Neobychainye prikliucheniia mistera Vesta v strane bol’shevikov, 1924. Protazanov, Iakov. Aelita, 1924. Ptushko, Aleksandr. Novyi Gulliver, 1935. ———. Zolotoi kliuchik, 1939. Riazanov, Eldar. Vokzal dlia dvoikh, 1982. Room, Abram. Tret’ia meshchanskaia, 1927. Slavinskii, Evgenii, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Baryshnia i khuligan, 1918. Vertov, Dziga. Mezhplanetnaia revoliutsiia, 1924.

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Index

1905 Revolution, the, 27, 37, 236n14 1861 Emancipation Manifesto, 149, 152 Abramov, Mark, 256n73, 260n155 Adams, Mr. and Mrs. 76, 88–89, 209– 10, 249n36, 250n46. See also Thrones, Solomon and Florence advertisement, 65, 71, 80, 88, 92, 95, 105, 133, 185, 215–16, 220, 265n226 Adzhubei, Aleksei, 219, 220, 252n25, 270n6 African Americans, 108, 147–61, 177–78, 186, 188, 259n138. See also racism, criticism of Aimard, Gustave, 162, 167 Aksakov, Ivan, 13, 26 Aksakov, Konstantin, 13 Aksenov, Vasili, 219, 222–25, 251n9, 253n25, 256n76, 265n226 Aldridge, Ira, 149 Aleichem, Sholem, 16, 265n227 Alexandrov, Grigorii, 255n61; Tsirk (Circus), 157, 203–5, 210–11, 213 Alexandrova, Vera, 207, 268n27 America as illusion or theater, 30, 43, 53, 96, 106, 130, 168–77, 179, 183, 219, 242n58 “American aid,” 6 American Revolutionary War, the, 117 amerikanshchina (Americanism), 195–96, 203. See also Pinkertonism Amtorg (American Trade), 6 Andreeva, Maria, 21, 37–38, 60, 179 ARA (American Relief Administration), 6, 200, 221, 245n24, 267n18 Arkhitektura SSSR, 74 Arustamova, Anna, 9, 15, 251n2, 265n224 Asch, Sholem, 16 Aseev, Nikolai, 203 automobile, 9, 18, 56, 75–76, 78, 80,

82, 84, 87, 90–91, 93, 95, 129, 132, 135–37, 139, 142–43, 169, 176, 182, 219, 222. See also Ford, Henry Averchenko, Arkadii, 54–55 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 90, 250n50 Bakunin, Mikhail, 236n26 Baklanov, Grigorii, 220 Balabanov, Aleksei: Brother-2, 259n138 Ball, Alan M., 55, 236n25 Bancroft, George, 15 Baratynskii, Evgenii, 253n30 Barnet, Boris, 200 Bartholdi, 117, 128 Barto, Agnia, 186 Bekman Chadaga, Julia, 132–33 Belinskii, Vissarion, 163 Berezhkov, Valentin, 219 Bez iazyka. See Korolenko, Vladimir Bible, the; biblical, 36, 86, 114, 120, 133, 141, 180, 210, 253n31 Blank, R. M., 82 Blok, Alexander, 9, 52, 68 Bodisko, V. K., 15 Bogdanov, Alexander, 198, 238n1 Bogdanov, Konstantin: “Pravo kurit’” (The Right to Smoke), 183, 185–86 Bogoraz, Vladimir (Tan), 25–26, 241n41, 253n26, 260n150; Avdotia and Rivka, 3, 25, 185, 253n26; “Chernyi student” (The Black Student), 18, 150–55, 164, 165; “U vkhoda v Novyi Svet” (At the Entrance of the New World), 111, 118, 121–23, 125, 150, 253n26; on the Statue of Liberty, 118, 121–23, 125 Bolkhovitinov, Nikolai, 149, 264n221 Booth, William, 31 Boulder Dam, 96, 250n49 Breshko-Breshkovskaia, Ekaterina, 6 Brik, Lilia, 56, 112, 136, 257n95 Broadway, 69, 71, 94, 132–33, 173, 185,

292

In d e x

224, 257n87. See also Mayakovsky, Vladimir: “Broadway” Brodsky, Joseph, 225, 253n25 Brooks, Jeffrey, 73–74, 129, 206, 235n11 Brooklyn Bridge, the, 58, 68, 69–70, 83, 131, 206, 219. See also Mayakovsky, Vladimir: “The Brooklyn Bridge” Brother-2 (Aleksei Balabanov), 259n138 Brown, Edward, 63 Buffalo Bill, 164 Bukharin, Nikolai, 196, 203 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 28, 41–42, 58, 65, 246n43, 246n44, 257n89, 262n190 Bulgarin, Faddei, 183–84 Bullitt, William, 262n190 Bunin, Ivan, 114, 116, 195, 210 Burbank, Luther, 81–82 Burenin, Nikolai, 36, 50, 123 burlesque, 171, 173, 177–78 Burliuk, David, 62, 245n34 Bynner, Witter, 250n49 California, 5, 18, 75, 87, 95, 182, 219, 245n22, 251n5. See also Los Angeles, San Francisco Campbell, Joseph: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 178–79 Capone, Al, 83 Chaadaev, Peter, 10, 243n2 Chaikovsky, Nikolai, 236n26 Chaikovsky, Peter, 262n194 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 11, 28, 32 Chaplin, Charlie, 146–47, 174, 182, 248n27, 259n134 Chase, Stuart, 82 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 11, 162 Cheremnykh, M., 156 Chernyi, Sasha, 157 Chekhov, Anton, 54, 164, 186 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 3, 10, 14 Chicago, 18, 29, 38, 57, 58, 62, 85, 94, 104; slaughterhouses, 18, 29–30, 75, 83, 170, 182, 215, 249n34; World’s Fair, 27, 28 Chikhachev, Platon, 15 Cioni, Paola, 48, 238n1 Circassians, 147, 162–63, 165

Circus (film). See Alexandrov, Grigorii “City of the Yellow Devil, The.” See Gorky, Maxim Civil War: American, 13; Russian, 6, 106 Clark, Katerina, 207 Cold War, the, 220 Columbus, Christopher, 53, 56, 57, 84, 96, 111, 183–84. See also Ilf, Ilia and Petrov, Evgenii: “Kolumb prichalivaet k beregu” (Columbus Approaches the Shore); Mayakovsky, Vladimir, “Khristofor Kolomb” (Christopher Columbus) Communist Party of America, 73, 76, 77, 82 Condorcet, Marquis de, 237n27 Coney Island, 43, 93, 128, 134, 168, 170–73, 242n58 Cooper, Fenimore, 10, 162–64, 167, 186 Cornwell, Neil, 245n33 Cuba, 118, 156 Cunliffe, Marcus, 11 Dal, Vladimir, 120, 163 Dante, 7, 19, 20, 21, 71, 102, 108–11, 218, 222, 224–25, 251n1 Davydov, Roman: Aktsionery (Shareholders), 187 Decembrists, 11, 148. See also, Turgenev, Nikolai; Zavalishin, Dmitrii Declaration of Independence, the, 117 Deere plant, 143 defamiliarization. See estrangement Delacroix, Eugène 117, 126, 128 Delvig, Anton, 15 Depression, the Great, 6, 74, 75, 76, 90, 93, 140, 205, 207 Dickens, Charles, 7, 12, 67, 88–89, 250n46 dissidents, 219, 221 Dobranitskii, Kazimir, 55–56, 115, 155, 256n79 Dollar, Jim, 196–97. See also Shaginian, Marietta Dostoevsky, Fedor, 14, 25, 26, 41, 42, 238n45; The Brothers Karamazov, 260n152; Crime and Punishment, 3,

INDEX

71; The Devils, 239n9; “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” 7; and Hamsun, 8 Dovlatov, Sergei, 3, 222, 225 Dukhobors, 28, 240n26 Duma, the State, 37, 38 Dumas, Alexander, 161 Duncan, Irma, 126 Duncan, Isadora, 20, 21, 59–61, 126–27, 245n24 Edison, Thomas, 130, 135, 209, 257n92 Eisenstein, Sergei, 74, 75, 85, 86, 123, 127, 249n42, 258n114, 260n156, 263n214 Efimov, Igor, 148, 222 Ehrenburg, Ilia, 219, 249n38, 264n216 electric chair, the, 42, 134–35 Ellis Island, 20, 107, 118–19, 123, 127–28, 238n52. See also Statue of Liberty, the Emancipation Manifesto of 1861, the, 149, 152 Engels, Friedrich, 82 Enlightenment, 11, 12. See also Condorcet, Marquis de; Rousseau, Jean-Jacque Ermanskii, O. A., 140, 142, 144 Ermler, Fridrikh, 74 Esenin, Sergei, 30, 57, 59–63, 78, 106, 130–31, 132–34, 224; and Gogol, 106–7; and Mayakovsky, 9, 10, 17, 19, 20, 56–72, 265n228; on the racial Other, 155, 166; on smoking, 185; the transatlantic narrative of, 114; the Statue of Liberty in, 126–28 estrangement (defamiliarization), 27–28, 43, 45, 96, 140, 171, 177–79, 182, 262n199 Etkind, Alexander, 5, 8, 12, 18, 55, 57, 131, 139, 240n27, 266n1 European (non-Russian) images of America, 3–4, 7–8, 10, 11–12, 52–53, 70. See also Tocqueville, de, Alexis Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, The. See Kuleshov, Lev

293

“Factory of Death.” See Korolenko, Vladimir Fanger, David, 108 fascism, 157, 197, 268n35 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 220, 221 fellow-travelers, 57, 79, 193, 244n14, 266n1 Figes, Orlando, 7 Filosofov, Dmitrii, 37, 40, 48–51, 105 Ford, Henry, 137–47, 157, 188–89, 243n10, 250n49; factories, 56, 64, 96, 75, 109, 129, 132, 137–47, 132, 182, 188–89, 194, 198–200 Fort Ross, 5 Freeman, Joseph ( Joe), 76 French Revolution, the, 117, 121, 126 Fusso, Susanne, 8, 16, 38–39, 153 Futurism, 57–59, 62, 137, 244n17, 245n20, 245n34. See also Imaginism Galanov, Boris, 211, 214 Galin, B., and B. Tal, 145–46, 259n131 Gasparov, Mikhail, 214, 217, 232, 249n33 GAZ (Gorky Automobile Factory), 137 Gelfreikh, Vladimir, 74 Genkel, German, 138, 141–43 Gladkov, Fedor, 108, 259n133 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 11, 41 Gogol, Nikolai, 8, 19, 21, 33, 43, 46, 67, 87, 102–11, 143, 171, 181, 220, 222, 242n59, 257n89; The Inspector General, 103–6; Mirgorod, 106–7, 109, 223; “Nevsky Prospect,” 46, 134; Dead Souls, 43, 102–3, 109–11, 251n1 Goldman, Emma, 122, 125 Goncharov, Ivan, 112, 138 Gorky, Maxim, 5, 6, 9, 10, 18, 19–21, 27, 31, 35–51, 60, 63, 66, 67, 71, 84–86, 93, 95, 105, 111, 129, 143, 179, 211, 220; “Charlie Man,” 19, 46–47; “The City of Mammon,” 38, 40, 49, 50, 170; “Gorod zheltogo d’iavola” (The City of the Yellow Devil), 4, 27, 40, 41, 44–46, 47, 50, 63, 80, 111, 123–26, 180, 183; “Khoziaeva

294

In d e x

zhizni” (The Lords of Life), 41–42, 134; “The Mob,” 45, 50, 108, 180; Mother, 36, 49, 50, 240n33; “Odin iz korolei respubliki” (One of the Kings of the Republic), 180–81, 263n211; “Tsarstvo skuki” (The Realm of Boredom), 43, 46–48, 132, 168, 170–71, 173, 175–76; “Zhrets morali” (A Priest of Morality), 38, 41; and anarchism, 49–50; on entertainments, 168, 170–73, 174–76; on food, 180–81, 183; and Gogol, 105, 107–8; and Hamsun, 7–8; and Marxism, 25, 27, 48–50, 238n1; on the racial Other, 155; on the Statue of Liberty, 123–26, 128; the transatlantic journey of, 111 Grand Canyon, 18, 75, 96 Gray Owl, 167–68 Gribachev, Nikolai, 219 Gumilev, Nikolai, 53 Gypsies, 147, 163, 165, 167 Hamsun, Knut, 7–8 Hasty, Olga Peters, 8, 16, 38–39, 153 Hearst Foundation, 75 Heine, Heinrich, 12, 243n6, 269n45 Hecht, David, 236n26 Herzen, Alexander, 4, 13, 102, 148, 237n32, 251n1 Hoisington, Sonia, 73–74, 247n6 Hollywood, 10, 18, 74, 75, 76, 106, 173–76, 204, 220, 247n7 Holstein, Caspar, 161 Homer, 224. See also Odysseus Huizinga, Johan: Homo Ludens, 169 Huxley, Aldous, 258n117 Ianzhul, Ivan, 15, 26, 238n4 Ilf, Ilia and Petrov, Evgenii, 7, 9, 10, 17–21, 74–76, 84–97, 129–33, 134, 204, 218–20, 263n208; “Kolumb prichalivaet k beregu” (Columbus Approaches the Shore), 84, 96, 111; Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (OneStoried America; translated into English as Little Golden America),

17–21, 74–76, 84–97; Ostap Bender, 90–93; “Tonia,” 19, 84, 96–97, 115, 169, 172, 174, 177–78, 182, 187; on automobiles, 135–37; on entertainments, 168–78; on food, 179–83; on Ford, Henry, 137, 139–41, 143, 146; and Gogol, 106, 108–10, 194; on the racial Other, 155, 158–59, 167; on smoking, 185, 186–87; on the Statue of Liberty, 124; the transatlantic narrative of, 113–16 Ilf, Alexandra (daughter of Ilia Ilf ), 21, 250n61 Ilin, Iakov, 123–24, 194, 207, 254n40 Imaginism, 57, 58, 61, 244n17. See also Futurism Independence, the American War of, 117 Industrialization, 10, 55, 61–62, 69, 72, 94–96, 128–47; 182–83, 244n18; Russian, 6, 9, 53, 205–10, 212 Inostrannaia kniga, 74 Iofan, Boris, 74 “Iron Mirgorod, An.” See Esenin, Sergei Irving, Washington, 10, 162, 261n173 Isidor (Pilniak’s companion), 76 Izakov, Boris, 219 Jackson, Andrew (President), 78 Jasienski, Bruno (Wiktor Zysman), 194, 205, 207–9 Jewish, Jews, 6, 16, 25, 34–35, 118, 122, 131, 147, 153–54, 224, 240n37, 260n150, 265n227 Jones, Elli, 20, 62 jazz, 159 Karamzin, Nikolai, 7 Kataev, Valentin, 136, 194, 218–19, 221, 222; Time, Forward, 205–6, 209–10, 268n28 Kaverin, Veniamin, 164 Kemrad, Semen 244n13, 244n18, 245n31, 245n34, 246n52 Kennedy, John F., 220, 222 Kharms, Daniil, 54

INDEX

khlestakovshchina (khlestakovitis), 103–6 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 62, 160, 262n198 Khrushchev, Nikita, 219, 221 Kinel, Lora, 59, 255n67 King, Martin Luther, 222 Kiparsky, Valentin, 8–9, 147, 150, 160, 162, 208, 238n49, 264n216, 264n217, 266n2 Kireevskii, Peter, 12, 13 Kiukhelbeker, Vilgelm, 12 Klanderud, Paul, 92 Korolenko, Vladimir 9, 10, 19, 20, 25–35, 39, 48, 51, 55, 63, 66, 71, 95, 129, 219, 240n27, 240n35; Bez iazyka (In a Strange Land), 16, 28, 30–35, 41, 96, 112–13, 118, 119–21, 123, 194; “Fabrika smerti” (Factory of Death), 4, 27, 29–30, 41, 108, 131–32, 170, 180, 215; “Mnenie amerikantsa Dzhaksona o evreiskom voprose” (The Opinion of Mr. Jackson, the American, on the Jewish Issues), 34–35; on entertainments, 170; the racial Other in, 148, 164–65; on the Statue of Liberty, 118–21, 123, 128; the transatlantic narrative of, 111–13, 212 Krasin, Boris, 38 Krasnaia nov’, 74, 79 Krokodil, 5–6, 115, 116–17, 156, 159, 169–70, 202, 246n44, 254n39, 267n18 Kruzhkov, Grigorii, 224 Ku Klux Klan, 155, 157, 256n73 Kuleshov, Lev, 193–95, 200–203, 217, 266n5 Lahti, Katherine, 255n71 Lakier, Alexander, 15, 150, 164, 237n41 Lavrov, Peter, 13, 26 Lazarus, Emma, 117 Leblanc, Ronald, 181 Lekmanov, Oleg, 57, 255n67 Lenin, Vladimir, 36, 82, 129, 202; “Il’ich bulbs,” 133, 209 Lermontov, Mikhail, 162, 163 Levontina, Irina, 248

295

Liberty, the Statue of. See Statue of Liberty, the Lipovetskii, Mark, 244n11 Little Golden America. See Ilf, Ilia and Petrov, Evgenii Litvinov, Maxim, 73 Lochner, Louis P., 139 London, Jack, 52–53, Longfellow, Henry, 149, 163–64, 186 Los Angeles, 84, 96 Lotman, Yuri, 109, 110, 251n5 Lunacharskii, Anatolii, 36, 195 Machtet, Grigorii, 25–26, 165 Malamuth, Charles, 90 Mandelstam, Osip, 52, 61, 70, 113, 147, 184, 243n2, 249n33, 267n15 Mann, Yuri, 102, 107–8, 110, 240n25, 242n59, 251n1, 252n23 Mariengof, Anatolii, 62 Marshak, Samuil, 17, 116, 186, 193, 195, 210–17, 241n50 Martin, John and Prestonia, 38 Marxism, Marxists, 4, 13, 14, 48, 67, 140. See also Gorky and Marxism Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 5, 6, 9, 10, 16–20, 30, 53, 56–72, 80, 81, 85, 86, 93, 95, 96, 104, 130–31, 134, 206, 210, 219, 224, 232, 246n44. See also Esenin, Sergei and; “150,000,000,” 57, 58, 68, 104, 108, 244n17; “100%,” 248n19; “Baryshnia i Vul’vort” (The Lady and Woolworth’s), 64–65; “Black and White,” 156, 180, 188, 213; “Broadway,” 71, 132, 217; “The Brooklyn Bridge,” 58, 68, 70, 131, 256n82; “Kemp Nit gedaige” (Camp Nit Gedaiget), 69–70, 141; “Khristofor Kolomb” (Christopher Columbus), 111–12; “Mexico– New York,” 109; Misteria-Buff, 157, 183; “Neboskreb v razreze” (A Skyscraper in Cross Section), 67, 114, 196; “Poriadochnyi grazhdanin” (The Decent Citizen), 127; “Shest’ monakhin’” (Six Nuns), 156–57; “Sifilis” (Syphilis), 158;

296

In d e x

“Svidetel’stvuiu” (I Witness), 64, 166; “Vyzov” (Challenge), 181; on automobiles, 135–37; daughter of (Patricia Thompson), 20; on entertainments, 168–69, 171–74, 176; on food, 180–81, 183; on Ford, Henry, 137, 138, 140–45; and Gogol, 104, 108; on the racial Other, 150–51, 156–58, 160–61, 166–67; on smoking, 185, 187–88; on the Statue of Liberty, 118–19, 123, 127, 128; the transatlantic narrative of, 111–12, 113, 115, 116 McCoy, Horace, 262n192 McLean, Hugh, 65, 245n32 McVay, Gordon, 59 Meerson, Olga, 237n37, 260n152, 262n187 Menshoi, A., 139 Mérimée, Prosper, 125 Meshcheriakov, Nikolai (the Head of Gosizdat), 196 Mess-Mend, or Yankees in Petrograd. See Shaginian, Marietta Mexico, Mexican, 58, 74, 109, 118, 180, 257n92 Miantonomoh, 148 Mikhailova, Maria, 254n35, 254n36 Mikhailov, Mikhail, 149, 163–64 Mikoian, Anastas, 183 Miss-Mend (film), 200 “Mister Twister.” See Marshak, Samuil Mitchel, Lucy Sprague, 54–55 Molokans, 75, 106 Montaigne, Michel de, 11 Monroe, Marilyn, 221 Morskoe sudostroenie, 254n38 Moser, Charles, 239n11, 245n20, 246n47, 254n34 Multan case. See Votiaks Nabokov, Vladimir, 163, 222, 225 Nadzhafarov, D. G., 73, 246n1 Native Americans, 10, 11, 17, 54, 61, 70–71, 95, 147–48, 161–68, 186, 220 NAZ (Nizhegorodsky Automobile Factory), 137

Nekrasov, Viktor, 221 NEP (New Economic Policy), 74, 200 Nerler, Pavel, 243n2 Nesbet, Anne, 9, 85, 87, 93, 247n13, 249n43 New Masses, The, 76 New York, 17, 18, 54–55, 61–64, 66–71, 74–75, 80–81, 102, 117, 123, 131–33, 175, 198, 212, 219, 222, 224; and Esenin, 61–62, 68–69, 109, 133, 165–66, 185; and Gorky, 36, 40–41, 44–46, 48, 108–9, 111, 124, 126, 155, 180, 211; and Ilf and Petrov, 84, 86–89, 94, 102, 109, 168, 168; and Korolenko, 27, 31–32, 96, 120; and Mayakovsky, 17, 63–64, 66–71, 86, 108–9, 131, 169, 172; and Pilniak, 80–81, 86, 105, 135, 161. See also Broadway; Brooklyn Bridge, the New York Herald, 126 Niagara Waterfall, 15, 18, 27, 96, 164 Nicholas II, 6 Nicholas, Mary A., 247n15 Nietzschean, 53, 61, 82 Nilsen, Vladimir, 74, 247n10 Nit Gedaiget, 62, 69–70. See also Mayakovsky, “Kemp Nit Gedaige” Norton, Marcy, 264n223 Novikov, Nikolai, 148 Obruchev, Vladimir, 149 Odnoetazhnaia Amerika. See Ilf, Ilia and Petrov, Evgenii Odysseus, 218, 222–25 Ogonek, 74, 84 Ogorodnikov, Pavel, 15, 26, 237n45, 239n9 O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), 66 OK, See Pilniak, Boris Olesha, Yury, 158, 182 One-Storied America. See Ilf, Ilia and Petrov, Evgenii Osinskii, Nikolai, 136–37 Otsep, Fedor, 200 Ovcharenko, Alexander, 39 Ozerov, Ivan, 15, 26

INDEX

Paul I, 5 Pertsov, V. O., 104, 252n10 Peshkova, Ekaterina, 20, 241n49 Peskov, Vasilii, 219, 221 Peshkov, Zinovii, 35–36 Peter the Great, 4, 124–25 Petric, Vlada, 203, 267n19 picaresque, 75, 84, 90, 225, 245n22 Pilniak, Boris, 8, 9, 10, 17–19, 21, 74–86, 131–34, 202, 220, 228–32; on automobiles, 135–37; on entertainments, 168–70, 172–78; on food, 180, 182–83; on Ford, Henry, 137, 140–45, 157; and Gogol, 105, 106, 108–10; on the racial Other, 155, 157, 158–61, 165–67, 211; on smoking, 188–89; the Statue of Liberty in, 111, 118, 125, 127–28; the transatlantic narrative of, 112, 113, 114, 115–16, 212 Pinkerton, Nat; Red Pinkertonism (krasnaia pinkertonovshchina), 195–96, 203, 236n25 Platonov, Andrei: “Novyi Russo” (The New Rousseau), 167–68 Pnin, 225. See also Nabokov, Vladimir Pocahontas, 162 Poe, Edgar Allan, 40, 222 Pogodin, Nikolai, 219, 220 Poletika, Peter, 15, 237n39 Polevoi, Boris, 219, 220 Polonskii, Viacheslav, 137 Poltoratskii, Victor, 219 Pomorska, Krystyna, 80, 248n29 Populism, Populists, 4, 13, 25–27, 36. See also Bogoraz, Vladimir; Chernyshevsky, Nikolai; Lavrov, Peter; Machtet, Grigorii; Korolenko, Vladimir poputchiki. See fellow-travelers Pozner, Vladimir, 270n10 Pravda, 196, 249n35 Presley, Elvis, 221 Prohibition, 178, 263n207 Propp, Vladimir: Morphology of the Folktale, 178–79 Prosin, Vladimir, 250n47

297

Puritan, Puritanism, 37, 76, 141, 144–45, 188–89 Pushkin, Alexander, 4, 103, 124–25, 160–61, 162, 222, 240n27, 255n50; “John Tanner,” 162–64 Racism, criticism of, 17, 42, 64, 147–61, 188, 204–5, 210–17, 223. See also African Americans Radischev, Alexander, 148, 255n50 Raynal, Abbé, 12 Reck, Vera, 78 Reed, John, 92 Reid, Mayne, 162, 164, 167 Reilly, Alayne P., 221 Rezepin, P. P., 103 Rodchenko, Alexander, 87, 249n45 Rogger, Hans, 4, 10, 14, 26, 51, 221, 237n32, 237n45 Romanticism, 10, 11, 12, 32, 49, 55, 108, 162, 164, 196, 237n30. See also Chateaubriand, François-René de; Tieck, Ludwig; Heine, Heinrich Roosevelt, Theodore, 37, 38 Ross, Betsy, 77 Rougle, Charles, 8, 9, 13, 40–41, 48, 63, 104, 109, 166, 238n49, 242n58, 243n1, 243n3, 244n17, 245n20, 264n217 Rousseau, Jean-Jacque; Rousseauian, 11, 54, 163, 167–68 Rozhdestvenskii, Vsevolod, 59 Ruland, Richard, 9, 11 Russian-American Company, 5 Russkii golos, 244n13 Russkii vestnik, 259n144 Russkoe bogatstvo, 28, 33, 35 Ryan, Karen L., 89, 91 Sandburg, Carl, 58 San Francisco, 84, 102, 112, 177, 220 Saul, Norman E., 8, 246 Sayre, Gordon, 163 serfdom, 14, 102, 147–50, 153–54, 162, 174 Shaginian, Marietta, 21, 193–200, 204–6, 243n79

298

In d e x

Shakespeare, William, 149, 152, 258n119 Shatunovskii, Ilia, 220 Shcheglov, Yuri, 91, 250n50 Shchuko, Vladimir, 74 Sheinman, Ilia, 131–32, 134, 138, 143–46 Shklovsky, Victor, 262n199 Shmelev, Ivan, 186 Shpotov, Boris, 146, 257n101 Shtatniki, the, 223 Shumiatskii, Boris, 74, 203–4, 247n10, 267n23 Shvedov, S., 138–40, 144, 146 Siegelbaum, Lewis, 129 Sinclair, Upton, 92, 197 Skard, Sigmund, 3–4 slaughterhouse, 18, 29–30, 41, 75, 83, 131–32, 214–15, 249n34. See also Chicago slaughterhouses Slavophiles, 4, 36; and Westernizers, 12–13, 29. See also Aksakov, Ivan; Aksakov, Konstantin; Kireevskii, Peter socialist realism, 36, 48, 108, 204, 205, 208, 267n23 Sofronov, Anatolii, 219 Sologub, Fedor, 42 “Song of Hiawatha.” See Longfellow, Henry Sorensen, Charles, 146, 250n49 Sovremennik, 149, 259n144 Stakhanovite (stakhanovskoe) movement, 146, 206, 209, 210 Stalin, Joseph, 75, 147, 176, 198, 206, 207, 244n11, 249n35 Staniukovich, Konstantin, 26–27, 149–50 Starko, B., 138, 140, 142–43, 145, 258n128 Statue of Liberty, the, 30, 101, 116–28, 221–22 steamship. See Transatlantic journey Steffens, Lincoln, 92, 250n49 Stendhal, 12 Stites, Richard, 132 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 10, 148–49

Strelnikov, Boris, 219–21 Sumarokov, Alexander, 147–48 Sverdlov, Mikhail, 57, 255n67 Svinin, Pavel, 12, 14–15, 69, 82, 103, 128, 150, 162, 164, 254n41 Syn otechestva, 259n144 Tageev, Boris (Rustam Bek) 243n10; Russkii amerikanets (A Russian American), 5, 56, 114–15, 144, 194 Tal, B., 145–46, 259n131 Tammany Hall, 34 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 161 Tanner, John, 162–64 Tan, Vladimir. See Bogoraz, Vladimir Thompson, Patricia, 20 Thaw, the, 221 Thrones, Solomon and Florence, 76, 84, 257n100. See also Adams, Mr. and Mrs. Tieck, Ludwig, 12 Time, Forward. See Kataev, Valentin Titanic, 52, 113–15 Tocqueville, de, Alexis, 12–15, 77, 237n31, 240n27 Tolstoy, Aleksei, 56, 244n11, 245n22 Tolstoy, Leo, 29, 50, 139, 162, 178, 181, 254n36, 262n199, 264n216 Toporov, Vladimir, 4 Tower of Babel, the, 64 Trade Treaty, Russian-American of 1832; 6 Trainin, Ilia (Sovkino), 195 transatlantic journey, 17, 18, 30–31, 56, 58, 111–16, 178, 195, 212, 222, 233 Trotsky, Leon, 5, 57, 61, 62, 104, 244n14, 244n17 Tsimmerman, Eduard, 15 Turgenev, Nikolai, 14 Tverskoi, Peter, 15, 26, 237n45, 238n4 Twain, Mark, 21, 37, 68, 196, 220 Uncle Sam, 116, 187 Urbanism, 10, 12, 31–32, 36, 40–41, 44–47, 52, 58, 59, 61, 80, 81, 85–86, 93–94, 107–8, 241n41, 242n58. See also Chicago, New York

INDEX

Urgant, Ivan, 270n10 Utopian images of America, 3–4, 11, 15–16, 54, 55, 85, 93, 95, 96, 97 Vasil’ev, Sergei, 256n73, 260n155 Vatslav Vorovskii, 115 Verne, Jules, 112 Vertov, Dziga, 264n216 Vetlugin, Voldemar (A. Vetlugin, Vladimir Ryndziun), 60, 244n13 Voronskii, Alexander, 79, 107, 244n17 Votiaks case (Multan case), 28, 238n12 Voznesensky, Andrei, 221 Washington, D.C., 97, 174, 219, 225 Wells, Herbert, 37 Westernizers, 12–13, 26, 29. See also Slavophiles and Whiman, Walt (Walter), 10, 60 White movement, the, 6, 56, 144–45, 156, 157

299

Wierzbicka, Anna, 119–22 Williams, Albert Rhys, 92, 250n49 Wilson, Reuel, 238n48 Wilson, Woodrow, 68 Witte, Sergei, 37 Woodward, Comer Vann, 9 Woolworth’s, 64–65 World War I, 52, 136, 243n10 World War II, 219, 221, 235n9 Yedlin, Tovah, 37, 38–39 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 221–22 Youngblood, Denise, 195 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 78 Za rulem, 129 Zavalishin, Dmitrii, 251n5 Zholkovsky, Alexander, 91, 246n43 Zoschenko, Mikhail, 53, 134, 257n90, 262n193, 269n43