Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York

America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception

Milla Fedorova

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780875804705
• eBook ISBN: 9781609090852
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York examines the myth of America as the Other World at the moment of transition from the Russian to the Soviet version. The material on which Milla Fedorova bases her 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, and the literary fruit of the pilgrimages.

Until now, the American travelogue has not been recognized and studied as a particular kind of narration with its own canons. Arguing that the primary cultural model for Russian writers' journey to America is Dante's descent into Hell, Federova ultimately reveals how America is represented as the country of "dead souls" where objects and machines have exchanged places with people, where relations between the living and the dead are inverted.

Part I

Bolsheviks in New York

Chapter One

Pre–-revolutionary Discoveries of America

Korolenko and Gorky

The genre of Russian 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 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 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 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 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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration, Translation,, and Citation
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I—Bolsheviks in New York
• 1—Pre-revolutionary Discoveries of America
• 2—Post-revolutionary Columbuses
• 3—Automobile Journeys of the 1930s
• Part II—The American Text of Russian Literature
• 4—Recurrent Subtexts and Motifs in American Travelogues
• Part III—Yankees in Petrograd
• 5—Reverse American Travelogues
• Conclusion—From Dante’s Inferno to Odysseus’s Ithaca
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Notes to Introduction
• Notes to Chapter 1—Pre-Revolutionary Discoveries of America
• Notes to Chapter 2—Post-Revolutionary Columbuses
• Notes to Chapter 3—Automobile Journeys of the 1930s
• Notes to Chapter 4—Recurrent Subtexts and Motifs in American Travelogues
• Notes to Chapter 5—Reverse American Travelogues
• Notes to Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index