“Westward Went I in Search of Romance”: The Transnational Reception of Thomas Mayne Reid’s Western Novels

“My steps then were not directed towards classic shores, but to lands of newer and more vigorous life. Westward went I in search of romance,” wrote Thomas Mayne Reid in The Quadroon (1856). While the trope of “renewal” through westward adventure is well established in American Romanticism, the strange afterlife of Reid’s fiction presents a unique perspective on the enduring transnational romanticism of the American West. Reid’s most faithful and grateful reader was Russia. The enormous popularity of his escapist adventure novels in Russia—and Eastern Europe via Russian translations—eclipsed their fleeting success in America. Today, Reid is largely forgotten by both American readers and scholars.

From the nineteenth century through to the Cold War era, and even beyond it, as the political relationship between Russia and the United States evolved, strained, and fractured, references to Reid’s novels abound in Russia. Czeslaw Milosz noted in 1981 that “Mayne Reid is the rather rare case of an author whose fame, short-lived where he could be read in the original, has survived thanks to translations” (145). The availability of excellent translations of Reid’s novels into Russian is one of the possible explanations for their transnational durability, but it is by far not the only one. Milosz also points out that the “romantic appeal of America” itself remained strong, not least thanks to Reid’s “significant contribution” (155). Reid’s greatest literary supporter, Vladimir Nabokov, who, in his memoir, Speak, Memory, wrote fondly of the “Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid” (332), actually named some of the most beloved spaces of his (Russian) childhood “America.” According to Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, “In Nabokov’s childhood, America had always seemed a fabulous, faraway place, the farthest place that one could think of” (331). This sense of fabulous remoteness, as many Nabokov scholars have noted, was “inspired by . . . Mayne Reid” (Sweeney 331). There may seem to be a paradox in the fact that a Russian émigré writer sentimentally labels the cherished land of his native childhood as “America,” but this paradox disappears when we consider that the young Nabokov’s vision of America derived almost exclusively from his fantasies of Reid’s distant, imaginary West. Indeed, as will be argued below, this act of territorial renaming actually fits with a little-studied comparative paradigm in which the American West was used to create a territory that we term conceptually the Russian “West.” Thomas Mayne Reid’s transnational reception is intimately connected to this project of cultural or territorial appropriation.

Reid produced tales of the American West that were ideally translatable into other cultural realities. American narratives of the West have always relied on what Richard White describes as the “master narrative of the West” (9), which “erased part of the larger, and more confusing and tangled, cultural story in order to deliver up a clean, dramatic, and compelling narrative” (11). Such master narratives were readily exported, making the American West, from its very inception, a transnational phenomenon. Not only did the “clean,” “untangled” Western narratives that came from the pens of Fenimore Cooper and Reid endure in Russia and the Soviet Union, but they also prospered on this new soil.

The cultural translation and reception of Reid’s Western adventures outside American borders provide an interesting paradigm for exploring the transnational West. As Neil Campbell suggests, the “application of . . . radical, outside perspectives drawn from beyond western studies” can be a way to “reposition the West within a more transnational, global matrix” (24). In Stuart Hall’s words, the West should be seen “as a meeting place, the location of . . . connections and interrelations, of influences and movements” (qtd. in Campbell 25). The key questions that this article wishes to address here are: in what ways did Reid’s West become such a “meeting place” for transnational “influences,” and how was the West repositioned and reconceptualized by America’s “Other,” (Soviet) Russia and Eastern Europe?

The Reception of Captain Mayne Reid in Russia: A Short Overview of a Long History

Whole generations...