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5—Reverse American Travelogues
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C h apt e r F i v e 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 194 Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York 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...