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4. Uncle Tom, Cold Warrior
- University of Wisconsin Press
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81 4 Uncle Tom, Cold War rior They were al ways abus ing each other’s opin ions and prac tices, and yet never a whit the less ab sorbed in each other’s so ci ety; in fact, the very contra riety seemed to unite them, like the at trac tion between op po site poles of the mag net. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (on St. Clare and his brother, Al fred) Kor nei Chu kov sky may not have even known about the edi tion of the 1941 trans la tion (to gether with his pref ace, much al tered) pub lished in Sverd lovsk in 1950. It is safe to say that he would not have been pleased. The orig i nal pref ace con tained a good deal about Stowe’s early life, but the later edi tion re moves vir tu ally all that ma te rial, ex cept the ref er ences to her pov erty, and all of Chukovsky’s com par i sons of Stowe’s novel with Rus sian lit er a ture are cut. Added are five par a graphs of a more po lit i cal na ture, fo cused en tirely on the con tem po rary American sit u a tion. Chu kov sky had con cluded his orig i nal essay with en tirely ac cu rate re marks on the post eman ci pa tion dis crim i na tion against and systemic ex ploi ta tion of blacks in the United States. The newly aug mented pref ace adds men tion of lynch ing and the ac tiv i ties of the Klan and white su prem a cists—but then it goes con sid er ably fur ther: Es pe cially today, when the United States is at such high speed be com ing the na tion of fas cism, the life of “free” blacks has be come heavy and tor ment ing, so that even the epoch of slav ery might seem hap pier to them. The kin dling of ra cial ha tred has reached unheard-of di men sions in Truman’s im pe ri al ist Amer ica, di men sions that Stowe could not have fore seen. . . . Con tem po rary Amer ica, under the power of the smart 82 Uncle Tom, Cold Warrior op er a tors of Wall Street, the Amer ica that has in sti gated a new war, has spawned a fas cis tic, bar baric re la tion ship to blacks. The most night mar ish pages from the past, as de scribed by Stowe, pale in com par i son to the suf fer ings under gone right now by the great-grandchildren of Uncle Tom.1 One need not, I think, be an apol o gist for the American ra cial order to find these com ments a tad hyper bolic. With the onset of the Cold War in 1946 (after a brief pe riod of warm Soviet-American re la tions dur ing the war), anti– United States rhet o ric be came one of the ex pected fea tures of any pref ace to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, al though the lan guage be came pro gres sively less shrill over time.2 A grim and re veal ing ex am ple of the uses made of Stowe under con di tions of late-Stalinist hys teria ap peared in a 1949 ad ap ta tion of the book by V. S. Val’dman.3 Al though more full than the 1920s edi tions, this ver sion marks some thing of a re turn to those more un in hib ited re work ings: in stead of the book end ing with Shelby ex hort ing the for mer slaves to re mem ber their free dom and “hon est” Uncle Tom, read ers are ex horted to strug gle (in cap i tal let ters) “for free dom and equal ity through out the world.” Its after word was writ ten by Efim Grig o rie vich Et kind (1918–99), at that time a young pro fes sor in Le nin grad and later fa mous both as a superb scholar of French lit er a ture and as a dis si dent who in 1974 had to leave the USSR per ma nently after being re moved from his teach ing post. What is sur pris...