True Songs of Freedom: Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russian Culture and Society

Coda: Tom, Meet Scarlett

93  Coda: Tom, Meet Scar­ lett A l­ though stan­ dard (i.e., con­ densed) Vol­ zhina ver­ sions are oc­ ca-­ sion­ ally re­ pub­ lished, and at least one en­ tirely new trans­ la­ tion has ap­ peared since 2000, re­ li­ gious pub­ lish­ ing ­ houses have begun re­ leas­ ing their own edi­ tions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, some­ times se­ lect­ ing from among the many pre­ rev­ o­ lu­ tion­ ary op­ tions, prop­ erly aware of the dis­ tor­ tions in the So­ viet edi­ tions.1 I tend to doubt, how­ ever, ­ whether the new (and far from uni­ ver­ sal) inter­ est in re­ li­ gion as­ sures the book much of a fu­ ture among Rus­ sian read­ ers. The ­ post-Soviet order has intro­ duced (among many other ­ things) a whole host of new cul­ tural com­ mod­ ities to the pub­ lic, in­ clud­ ing new rep­ re­ sen­ ta­ tions of the ­ United ­ States and of ­ African­ Americans; these last can only work to rel­ a­ tiv­ ize ­ Stowe’s par­ tic­ u­ lar vi­ sion, which is not a bad thing. More­ over, it may be that Rus­ sian im­ a­ gin­ ings of the pe­ riod and place de­ scribed by Stowe are now being ­ shaped by an­ other novel that has­ gained co­ los­ sal pop­ u­ lar­ ity and ac­ claim since ­ around 1989. Mar­ ga­ ret­ Mitchell’s 1936 Gone with the Wind, the ­ best-selling his­ tor­ i­ cal novel of all time, first ap­ peared in Rus­ sian trans­ la­ tion in the USSR in 1982, al­ though So­ viet cul­ tural au­ thor­ ities and prob­ ably many read­ ers knew of it long be­ fore.2 No doubt some com­ bi­ na­ tion of con­ tempt for the ­ novel’s ­ popfictional rep­ u­ ta­ tion and re­ jec­ tion of its fla­ grant ra­ cism and re­ ac­ tion­ ary pol­ i­ tics had pre­ vented a prior So­ viet ap­ pear­ ance (al­ though it is not en­ tirely clear why it was first pub­ lished in the ­ pre-glasnost year of 1982).3 The real Mitch­ ell boom began at ­ decade’s end: ­ between 1989 and 1993, at least ­ sixty-nine dif­ fer­ ent edi­ tions of Wind, pub­ lished every­ where in large print runs from Kiev to Vo­ logda and from Bri­ ansk to Tash­ kent, blew ­ across the ­ soon-to-be-former and for­ mer So­ viet Union. (Mean­ while, some­ where ­ around ten edi­ tions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin have been 94 Coda: Tom, Meet Scarlett pub­ lished in Rus­ sia since 1989.) Al­ though the pro­ life­ ra­ tion of edi­ tions fell off dras­ ti­ cally after 1993, “[Gone with the Wind] and the se­ quel to it writ­ ten by Alex­ an­ dra Ri­ pley [Scar­ lett, 1991],” as his­ to­ rian Ste­ phen Lo­ vell­ writes, “proved the great­ est suc­ cess story of ­ post-Soviet pub­ lish­ ing.”4 We might well ex­ pect that the Old South and ­ anti-Reconstruction my­ thol­ o­ gies pur­ veyed by ­ Mitchell’s novel would have an ef­ fect on Rus­ sian per­ cep­ tions of the ­ United ­ States and the US past (and per­ haps the Rus­ sian past as well)—un­ for­ tu­ nately. My own sense, how­ ever, is that the rea­ sons for its pop­ u­ lar­ ity are bet­ ter ­ sought in the twin, chang­ ing con­ texts of read­ er­ ship/pub­ lish­ ing, on the one hand, and ­ large-scale so­ ci­ etal break­ down, on the other. Gone with the Wind is a hy­ brid work that po­ ten­ tially func­ tions in a va­ riety of gen­ res and on a num­ ber of brow lev­ els si­ mul­ ta­ ne­ ously. It can thus be seen as an­ other “van­ ish­ ing me­ di­ a­ tor,” ­ rather like ­ Mitchell’s nem­ e­ sis Uncle Tom in this re­ spect, that at­ tracted au­ di­ ences who liked ad­ ven­ ture sto­ ries, who were com­ ing to like the rel­ a­ tively new ro­ mance genre—“in 1991, Bar­ bara Cart­ land over­ took Sta­ lin as the most pub­ lished au­ thor ever [in the So­ viet Union]”—and those who liked, or ­ thought they ­ should like, the se­ ri­ ous and pre­ stig­ ious form of...