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C h apt e r T w o Post–-revolutionary Columbuses Esenin and Mayakovsky F o r 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, Post-revolutionary Columbuses 53 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 beforetheOctoberRevolutionwasconnectedwithRussianindustrialization, 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...

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