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

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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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 15, 2013
ISBN9781609090852
Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception

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    Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York - Milla Fedorova

    FEDOROVA_jkt.jpg

    © 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

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Citation

    Introduction

    Part I Bolsheviks in New York

    1. Pre-Revolutionary Discoveries of America: Korolenko and Gorky

    2. Post-Revolutionary Columbuses : Esenin and Mayakovsky

    3. Automobile Journeys of the 1930s : Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov

    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 1Lexical and Grammatical Neologisms in Pilniak’s OK

    Appendix 2The Transatlantic Journey

    Notes to Introduction

    Notes to Chapter 1

    Notes to Chapter 2

    Notes to Chapter 3

    Notes to Chapter 4

    Notes to Chapter 5

    Notes to Conclusion

    Bibliography

    Index

    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 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.

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

    Introduction

    In Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 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 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.

    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 pre-revolutionary 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.

    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 lesser-known 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 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 American¹³ 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 Breshko-Breshkovskaia (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 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, pre-revolutionary 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 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 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: istoriko-literaturnyi aspekt [The Russian-American Dialogue of the Nineteenth Century: the Historic and Literary Aspect, 2008]) uncovers many lesser-known 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, pre-revolutionary 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.

    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 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 men-of-letters, inspired the Russian Decembrists.

    However, as Cunliffe aptly remarks, the positive aspects of the European-crafted 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.

    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 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. 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 self-identification 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 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

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