Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception 9781501758171

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YANKEES IN PETROGRAD, BOLSHEVIKS IN NEW YORK

YANKEES IN PETROGRAD BOLSHEVIKS IN NEW YORK AMERICA AND AMERICANS IN RUSSIAN LITERARY PERCEPTION

MILLA FEDDRDVA NIU PRESS DeKalb,IL

© 2013 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern lllinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115 All Rights Reserved Design by Shaun Allshouse Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fedorova, Milia. Yankees in Petrograd, bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian literary perception I Milia Fedorova. pages; em Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978 0 87580 470 5 (cloth) - ISBN 978 1 60909 084 5 (e book) 1. United States-Description and travel-In literature. 2. Americans in literature. 3. Authors, Russian-Travel-United States. 4. Travelers' writings, Russian-19th century-History and criticism. 5. Travelers' writings, Russian-20th century-History and criticism. I. Title. PG2988.U6F43 2013 891.709'35873 dc23 2012046923

To my family: Victor Joukov, Maria Stoianova, Svetlana Fedorova, and Grigorii Fedorov with gratitude for their care and patience.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Citation

xi

INTRODUCTION 3

PART I

BOLSHEVIKS IN NEW YORK

I. Pre-Revolutionary Discoveries of America 25 Korolenko and Gorky

2. Post-Revolutionary Columbuses 52 Esenin and Mayakovsky

3. Automobile Journeys of the 1930s 73 Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov

PART II

THE AMERICAN TEXT OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

4. Recurrent Subtexts and Motifs in American Travelogues

PART Ill

YANKEES IN PETROGRAD

S. Reverse American Travelogues

193

CONCLUSION From Dante's Inferno to Odysseus's Ithaca Appendix 1 Lexical and Grammatical Neologisms in Pilniak's OK 227 Appendix2 The Transatlantic Journey Notes

235

Bibliography Index

291

273

233

218

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the help of many peoplecolleagues, teachers, students, and editors-to whom I am sincerely grateful. I am blessed with wonderful colleagues at the Department of Slavic Languages at Georgetown University-David Andrews, Svetlana Grenier, George Mihaychuk, Olga Meerson, and Marcia Morris, who were always there for me to discuss the ideas of the book, to read various parts of my manuscript, and to provide page-by-page insights. I thank, above all, Marcia Morris, who has been my guardian angel during the entire process of writing, the first reader of everything I have written, and strong supporter at every stage of my work. The input of my life-long teachers-Elena Vigdorova, Olga Sventsitskaia, Nadezhda Shapiro, and Sergei Kormilov-into my scholarly work has been invaluable. I am indebted to all my colleagues who generously provided scholarly feedback on the project. I am extremely grateful to Peter Rollberg and Deborah Martinsen for their incredible input into the book's content and style, and their interest in my concepts, as well as their attention to detail. I would like to thank Caryl Emerson for her encouragement and valuable advice on the manuscript in its early stages. Special thanks to Penelope Burt, who edited the first draft of the book. I am grateful to Ronald Meyer and Olga Nedelkovich for their support. In the process of writing, I was inspired by Olga Meerson's philosophy of various characters' points of view as the author's poetic means developed in her book Personalizm kak poetika, as well as her analysis of taboos in Dostoevsky"s novels (Dostoevsky's Taboos). Throughout the years of writing this book, I presented its various ideas at multiple conferences, and enjoyed the privilege of discussing them with scholars-colleagues and friends-whom I would like to thank for their inspiring observations: Carol Apollonio, Julia Vaingurt, Evgenia Ivanova, Anna Arustamova, Eugenia Afinoguenova, and Polina Barskova. My special thanks go to my friends and fellow-students who have been amazing interlocutors during my entire scholarly life: Elena Ostrovskaia, Yuri Kagarlitsky, and Leonid Zubarev. My book originated in two eponymous courses I taught at Georgetown University in Russian and in English, and my gratitude goes to my students for their engagement in discussions and their incisive comments. I am grateful to Georgetown University for awarding me a semester off teaching duties, in which

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote significant portions of my book, and for three summer grants given by the Graduate School and the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics. Special thanks are due to the excellent editors of Northern Illinois University Press, especially Amy Farranto who supported me throughout the publication process. The NIUP reviewers have been extremely knowledgeable and attentive. I am also grateful to the very helpful librarians and the staff of the Library of Congress, and the libraries and archives in which I worked in Moscow (the Russian State Library, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), and Mayakovsky Museum). My debts to my loving and patient family are very deep, since I have not always been there for them, while they always have been there for me. I am dedicating this book to them: my ever supportive husband and insightful interlocutor, Victor Joukov, my daughter and friend, Maria Stoianova, and my caring parents, Svetlana and Grigorii Fedorov.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, TRANSLATION, AND CITATION

In transliterating Cyrillic into Latin, I have followed the Library of Congress system, simplified form (as in SEE]). Soft signs in proper names have been omitted. I have used a modified transliteration system, reflecting common usage, for the names of well-known authors. Thus, Gor'kii appears as Gorky, Gogol' as Gogol, Maiakovskii as Mayakovsky, Trotskii as Trotsky, Pil'niak as Pilniak, Il'f as Ilf, etc. When quoting secondary sources, I use their transliteration. The references to Pilniak come from "O'kei: Amerikanskii roman," in Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976). Unless otherwise indicated, translations from the Russian are mine, although citations to Korolenko's, Bogoraz's, Gorky's, Esenin's and Mayakovsky's autobiographical travelogues come from America Through Russian Eyes, 1874-1926, edited and translated by Olga Peters Hasty and Susan Fusso (New Haven, London: Yale University, 1988); the references to Ilf and Petrov come from Little Golden America, translated from the Russian by Charles Malamuth (New York: Arno Press, 1974). These sources are quoted in the text parenthetically by page number.

YANKEES IN PETROGRAD, BOLSHEVIKS IN NEW YORK

INTRODUCTION

What Is to Be Done? one of the protagonists feigns suicide yet goes to America. Conversely, in Fedor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the antagonist, Svidrigailov, announces: "I'm going to America" yet commits suicide. When in America-"on the other shore," as Russians sometimes put itRussian emigre characters and writers often feel that, although they have now acquired a new life, this life approximates a posthumous experience. All their previous relationships and obligations seem irrelevant. When, for example, a merchant in Vladimir Bogoraz's novella Avdotia and Rivka (1902) tries to persuade Avdotia, an emigre, to marry him in New York even though she still has a husband back home, he argues: "Russia is there, and what's here is America. It's as if you had died and found yourself in the Other World." 1 Some eighty years later, the writer Sergei Dovlatov, an emigre himself, confesses that for him America offers the hope of a revitalized postmortem experience, i.e., of living in a new world without dying in the old one. These literary examples hail from different periods but share an identical symptomatic perception of America. Although the country across the ocean had already begun to acquire concrete historical features in the Russian mind by the last quarter of the eighteenth century/ connotations of the Other World, the land on the other side of earthly existence, still lurk in the background ofliterary texts about the New World. This mythological perception of the New World is not exclusively Russian. From the moment of its discovery, America has offered a universal object of projection for Europeans. A utopia finally located, it represents the materialization of mankind's dreams about the Golden Age and Paradise. There is, as Sigmund Skard notes, something fantastic about the image of America in different cultures, and utopian images like the "paradisiac city of Philadelphia" can be found, for example, in early English texts about I N N I K 0 LA I C H E R N Y S H E V S K Y ' S

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America. 3 But in Russia the mythological concept gained a specificity and a concrete form that persisted through many eras and appeared in the works of very different authors, and thus deserves special scholarly attention. As we know, each country, in conformity with its geographical location, cultural traditions and the demands of the historical moment, discovers its own New World. 4 Russia has always claimed a special association with America, a parallel recognized by other nations, because of the two countries' relative youth, rapid development over the last two centuries, vast territories, and social experimentation, not to mention the fact that Russia literally discovered America from the other side, by crossing the Bering Strait. Thus, we can view Peter the Great's words commanding discoverers to ascertain "whether Asia meets America" (skhoditsia li Aziia s Amerikoi) as a trope defining Russian-American cultural studies. Perhaps no other country has so often compared itself with and contrasted itself to America (and provoked other countries to make such comparisons) 5 as Russia. Indeed, Russians today still perceive the world primarily as bipolar and believe that its fate depends on Russian-American relations, even if for other countries-and for America herself-the situation might seem different. "The American text" of Russian literature, like "the Petersburg text" discussed by Vladimir Toporov, 6 exhibits two modes, one positive, one negative. The conception of America as the Other World in its idyllic, paradisal version is present, for example, in Alexander Herzen's early drama William Penn (1839), which refers to America as "the promised land." By contrast, the macabre otherworldliness of the proverbial "land beyond the ocean'' is made explicit in the titles of travelogues written by Russian radicals, such as Vladimir Korolenko's "Fabrika smerti" (Factory of Death) or Maxim Gorky's "Gorod zheltogo d'iavola" (City of the Yellow Devil). Significantly, the most influential literary texts of the nineteenth-early twentieth centuries belong to this second mode. As Hans Rogger notes: "Most of Russia's most important and influential thinkers and writersAlexander Pushkin, Alexander Herzen, and the Slavophiles; Populists and Marxists ... came to America, whether in thought or in person, with negative preconceptions or ready to be disenchanted." 7 The present book studies this myth of America as the Other World at the moment of transition from its Russian to its Soviet version. While in prerevolutionary texts America-in-opposition-to-Russia could appear as either utopian or dystopian, in Soviet times, the paradigm officially shifted toward a binary opposition: the Soviet Union as socialist Paradise vs. America as Hell. However, in popular thinking, the mass media and fiction, the positive mode still existed and, in the 1920s, paradoxically, even flourished.

INTRODUCTION

5

The material on which I base my study comprises a curious phenomenon of the waning nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-pilgrimages to America by prominent Russian writers who then created travelogues. The writers' missions usually consisted of two parts: the physical journey, which most of the writers considered as ideologically significant (except perhaps Korolenko ), and the literary fruit of the pilgrimages. Symptomatically, during this period America became an especially crucial point of attraction for Russians who played key roles in shaping the identity of the new Soviet state (Leon Trotsky, 8 Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky). It seems that it was the transadantic republic rather than the Old World that served as the crucial point of departure in this self-identification, or rather, this ideological creation of the self-identity of the Soviet state. 9 As Alexander Etkind notes, many Russians traveled to European countries like Germany, but they created nothing comparable in artistic significance to the literary accounts of American journeys. 10 While I concentrate my analysis on the most influential travelogues, I study them against the background oflesserknown texts dealing with the American theme. Russia's complex attitude to America is reflected in the spectrum of meanings conveyed by the expressions "the Russian America(n)" and "the American Russia(n)" in different periods. Following the expeditions of Bering and Chirikov, Russians christened their setdements in North America "Russian America." In 1799, Paul I issued a decree founding a monopolistic Russian-American company that would maintain a Russian presence in the Aleutian Islands and in North America. Some thirteen years later, Fort Ross was founded as an outpost of Russian trade in California. In 1867, the Russian-American company was liquidated, but Russian settlements, including various sects and utopian communities, still represented "Russia within America." "Russian Americans" was a common name for emigrants from Russia: before the October Revolution, they fled the autocratic tsarist regime; after 1917, they fled the new Soviet one. Boris Tageev's novel, simply tided Russkii amerikanets (A Russian American, 1926), tells the story of one such emigrant family. With the growth of industrialization in Russia, the desire to catch up with and surpass America, to learn from its experience and ''Americanize" production, "Russian Americans" became a new media cliche, commonly applied to the most efficient and disciplined workers and engineers. 11 This stereotype became so popular that satirical journals found it necessary to mock the excessive reverence for America: in a Krokodil sketch, for example, factory directors implement American methods by borrowing from the "capitalist lifestyle"-American shoes, a black chauffeur, coffee with

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condensed milk-and are quickly arrested by the Revolutionary Tribunal. 12 The revolutionary poet Mayakovsky's claim "I, the poet, am more American than the most American American" 13 demonstrates the ambiguity of associations connected with America during the mid-1920s. Over time, Russian and American relations underwent significant changes. At the end of the nineteenth century, opposition to the Russian autocracy and bureaucracy grew in the United States. 14 However, although in 1904 America welcomed the revolutionary radical Ekaterina BreshkoBreshkovskaia ("Grandmother of the Russian Revolution''), Gorky's mission in support of the Bolshevik party in 1906 turned into a disaster. By that time, Nicholas II's promise of constitutional changes had dampened American sympathy for the revolutionary movement. In 1911, the United States abrogated the 1832 trade treaty with Russia because of the latter's discrimination policy against the Jews. After the October Revolution, during Russia's Civil War, U.S. troops supported the White Army. For more than a decade, the United States refused to officially recognize the new Soviet Union, and there were no diplomatic relations. Nevertheless, the 1920s represented a period of"Soviet romance" with America. Commercial relations flourished, and Amtorg [abbreviation for ''American Trade"] represented the Soviet Union in America. In 1921-23, the American Relief Administration (ARA) organized extensive aid to Russian areas devastated by famine, which the Soviet Union distrustfully accepted. (The term ''American aid" has ironic connotations in Russia, and is used, for example, in the game of Preference when, in exchange for temporary aid, the "helpers" take all the cards of the one assisted.) While actively helping the "former" people, i.e., emigrants escaping from the new regime, America also welcomed many Soviet workers and engineers who wished to adopt its modern technologies for their own factories. However, by 1933, when diplomatic relations were finally established between the two countries, actual relations had begun to deteriorate, and the positive connotations of America in the Russian press radically dropped off. At the same time, the dizzying success of the first years of Soviet industrialization during the very period when the United States plunged into the Depression caused many in America to look for alternative economic methods. Throughout these transitional years, mutual visits by writers, critics, workers, and engineers continued and frequently produced travelogue texts. Scholars of the genre have noted that, because travel accounts compare and contrast the new reality with the familiar one left behind, the travelogue is as much an instrument for studying one's self as it is a prism for exploring the Other. 15 The distinguishing feature of American travelogues written by

INTRODUCTION

7

Russians is the high degree of focus on the self: what the travelers look for, and inevitably find, is their own country. Perhaps most strikingly, most of these texts are stories of a non-meeting with America, of not seeing the New World for what it is. Instead, we find a literary model representing an ideological construct. Thus, I suggest that Russian travelogues about America can be seen as a particular type of narrative that ultimately owes less to firsthand impressions than to the framework imposed by literary tradition and its attendant rhetorical demands. In other words, the travelers read America rather than saw it. Ilf and Petrov, for example, write: "We glided over the country, as over the chapters of a long, entertaining novel, repressing in ourselves the legitimate desire of the impatient reader to take a look at the last page" (107). The America they observed must have seemed reminiscent of a literary America they already knew. Indeed, prerevolutionary and Soviet travelogues constitute a text replete with references to Hell and suspiciously reminiscent of Dante's Inferno. Such literary meditations of foreign reality are broadly characteristic for the Russian travel writer. As Orlando Figes observes, for example, the Europe described in Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler became a "mythical realm which later travelers, whose first encounter with Europe had been through reading his work, would look for but never really find." 16 As a consequence, several possible approaches for analyzing the American travelogue present themselves: one can study them within the broad generic context of literary travelogues, within the context of Russian travelogues abroad, or within the context of European travelogues about America. All these frameworks obtain. Indeed, Dostoevsky's "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" quickly became an exemplary Russian text about a journey abroad, in which Russia is both likened to and contrasted with foreign lands. Dickens's American Notes (1842) were widely known in Russia. Gorky compares his perception with Dickens's and refers to his "spitting Americans." The list of intertextual connections and echoes could be significantly extended. Knut Hamsun enjoyed immense popularity in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his book The Cultural Life ofModern America (1889), he expressed anti-American views that are very similar to those of Russian travelogues. Hamsun deplores the discrepancy between America's admirable social principles and her actual day-to-day practice, and he regrets that abstract liberty conduces to concrete liberties. He ascribes this gap to the nature of the American populace, which consists largely, in his view, of criminals and newcomers. Gorky considered Hamsun one of the greatest artists of his time, 17 and his impressions of America recall Hamsun's. Both Gorky and Hamsun are anti-urbanists. Even

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YANKEES IN PETROGRAD, BOLSHEVIKS IN NEW YORK

though they cannot help admiring American energy, they detect something suspiciously mechanistic in it. Similarly, Pilniak, who mocks American patriotism, equating it with ignorance and neglect of other regions of the world, seems to quote directly from Hamsun. Significantly, Hamsun himself was strongly influenced by Dostoevsky, so one may suspect that Dostoevsky's image of America as the Other World affected Hamsun and added retrospectively to his impressions of the country. This cycle of mutual influences, as well as Hamsun's importance in forming the Russian view of America, however, deserve their own discrete treatment, the more so as both America and Russia are significant loci in Hamsun's biography and writings. A student of the vast material on Russian writers' American journeys inevitably must choose a focus. Later in this introduction, I will offer a brief overview of important European texts that contributed to the earlier picture of America. But, as Olga Peters Hasty and Susanne Fusso confirm, by the end of the nineteenth century the Russian image of America had come to be based increasingly on Russian texts about America. 18 Therefore, in the main body of this book, I will focus on the phenomenon of Russian writers' American travelogues per se, with their invariants and modifications, and will draw on only the most crucial sub texts, such as Dante and Gogol, which are indispensable for understanding them. I claim that the American travelogues written by Russians, which I will henceforth call "American travelogues," constitute a distinct type of narrative. While it is impossible for a researcher of pre-Soviet and early Soviet literature to ignore writers' ideological determinism and censorship restrictions, the primary focus of this book will be on the literary representation of ideological matters. While the transformation of the American image in the Russian mind has attracted historians (for example, Frederick C. Barghoorn; in our days, Robert V. Allen and Norman E. Saul), 19 there is currently no literary study of the American travelogue narrative. There are, however, several important works that treat various aspects of the topic; these include Alexander Etkind's Tolkovanie puteshestvii. Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (The Interpretation of Journeys. Russia and America in Travelogues and Intertexts), Valentin Kiparsky's English and American Characters in Russian Fiction, and Charles Rougle's Three Russians Consider America: America in the works ifMaksim Gor'kij, Aleksandr Blok, and Vladimir Majakovskij. Etkind explores the mutual reception of America and Russia through numerous case studies, which he draws from a variety of epochs and which present a motley picture of the countries' mutual attraction. Kiparsky builds his research around English and American characters of

INTRODUCTION

9

various social strata and occupations in Russian literature. Rougle deals with images of America in the works of three famous Russians (Gorky, Blok, and Mayakovsky) and predicts the emergence of broader studies. 20 In addition, a recent study of the "American world" in nineteenth-century Russian literature (Anna Arustamova, Russko-amerikanskii dialog XIX veka: istorikoliteraturnyi aspekt [The Russian-American Dialogue of the Nineteenth Century: the Historic and Literary Aspect, 2008]) uncovers many lesserknown examples of earlier American texts. Comer Vann Woodward and Richard Ruland briefly discuss Russian travelogues in the context of European myth-making about America. 21 1he numerous articles and books devoted to particular writers' American experience will be referred to in the relevant chapters. Among the most recent and helpful publications is Anne Nesbet's "Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell: What Bulgakov and Eizenshtein Learned about Space from Il'f and Petrov's America." 22 For the purposes of this study, I posit three major stages in the development of the American travel narrative of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. First, we have Korolenko's and Gorky's early, prerevolutionary travelogues, which are characterized by the socialist-oriented travelers' disillusionment with the forms taken by American democracy in everyday life. This disillusionment, as I have indicated, was predetermined by the travelers' literary predecessors as well as by their own political views. During the second stage, immediately following the 1917 October Revolution, American travelogues are inspired both by attempts to establish a new Soviet identity vis-a-vis America-as-Other and by a search for what might be borrowed from America to build the new Soviet state. For Esenin and Mayakovsky, the most significant of the post-revolutionary travelers, the creation of the American text becomes, in part, a matter of literary rivalry between poets. Yet despite their differences in poetic vision, both writers do agree on the paradoxical backwardness and provincialism of America. They admire the externals of American technology but criticize the social order and narrow-mindedness that underlie this industrial advancement. They nonetheless believe that it would be beneficial to introduce machines into the human Soviet state, where there could be no danger of concomitantly introducing inhumanity. In the third stage, Pilniak's and Ilf and Petrov's 1930s travelogues are less rhetorical than earlier exemplars because Soviet ideology has already been stabilized back home in the Soviet Union. Accordingly, the revolutionary pathos evident in texts of the second stage has become milder. Third-stage travelers undertake the most extensive journeys, exploring America by automobile, and they create a wider, more analytical picture of America.

ID

YANKEES IN PETROGRAD, BOLSHEVIKS IN NEW YORK

Between the pre-revolutionary, post-revolutionary, and Soviet periods, a significant semantic shift occurs in the Russian perception of America. Korolenko and Gorky associate America with urbanism and search its cities for the genuine America. Esenin and Mayakovsky claim that American urbanism is provincial. Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov make the association between America and provincialism the focal point of their journey; they search for the real America beyond the urban realm in America's small "one-storied" towns and villages. Of course, neither Korolenko nor Gorky "discovered America" for the Russian reading public, and even their travelogues echo the previous tradition. As Rogger remarks, "By the late 1800s, it was virtually impossible for any well-read traveler to discover America afresh, to come to it without the baggage accumulated over the century by Western as well as Russian observers and critics."23 But other scholars have studied the nascent nineteenth-century perception of America as Russia's transatlantic counterpart/4 so I will review the question only cursorily. Both the positive and the negative images of America that we see in Russian texts are, to a great extent, determined by a search for the ideal. Even now, in the twenty-first century, Russia measures herself against America in terms of economic and social advancement. American culture serves as a source of intense borrowing in a wide range of genres, from Washington Irving's romantic novellas to Hollywood movies, even though American mass culture is often the object ofvehement high-brow criticism. 25 Traditionally, Russians have viewed American governmental institutions and American technological advancement as both blame- and praiseworthy. Russian thinkers widely discussed the liberal principles of American social life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, they shifted focus to practical implications, i.e., to the intensive industrialization fomented by an aggressive capitalism. In the texts of the late eighteenth century, Russians generally portrayed America in a positive light, as a young, rapidly developing country, and Russian enlighteners glorified the new republic as a beacon of liberty. Nonetheless, they criticized the persistence of slavery as well as expansionist violence against Native Americans. Chaadaev and Chernyshevsky continued to nurture these critiques in the nineteenth century, and similar denunciations survived well into Soviet times. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian views of America derived from European accounts of transatlantic journeys; from American literature in the original and in translation (especially Irving, Cooper, Stowe, and Whitman); and from discussions of America in the Russian

INTRODUCTION

II

press and Russian literature. These textual sources determined Russians' own accounts of their American journeys to a greater degree than did their actual experience. 26 Various European portrayals of America have influenced both the positive and the negative modes of Russian literature's American narrative. The French Enlightenment contributed to the image of America as an idyllic land of noble savages. Rousseau admired the natural simplicity and purity of Native Americans; Montaigne claimed that a real Golden Age, surpassing even the virtues of Plato's Republic, could be found in America. Chateaubriand, who was much more influenced by this Enlightenment tradition than by his actual journey to America in 1791, shaped the romantic image of the noble savage for many countries, including Russia, for decades to come. While Europeans ultimately disposed ofNative Americans' Golden Age, the new American society, built on principles of freedom and mutual respect, 27 continued to be perceived as a fresh start for humankind. In a similar transmutation, the qualities of Native Americans as noble savages were partially transferred onto white setders. Marcus Cunliffe deftly summarizes the positive lineaments of the European construct of America: America as "Earthly Paradise"; America as "the Land of the Noble Savage"; America as "the Land of Liberty"; and America as "the Land of Democracy. "28 These images attracted German romanticists who, as Ruland remarks, "some time about 1815 turned to America as an example of the model commonwealth."29 Ludwig, Chamisso, and Len au, all of whom were known in Russia, contrasted a youthful America to an ossified Europe. Goethe, a writer essential for the Russian literary tradition, felt a similar pull from a vibrant young America whose destiny was not yet predetermined. However, although his Wilhelm Meister contemplates going to America in search of freedom and social activity, he ultimately remains in Germany, claiming-in ways that unexpectedly anticipate future Soviet travelers-that the real America can be found at home. These positive images, purveyed, on the one hand, by the French enlighteners and, on the other, by German menof-letters, inspired the Russian Decembrists. However, as Cunliffe aptly remarks, the positive aspects of the Europeancrafted American myth also had their antitheses. The downside of America's novelty and freshness was its alleged ignorance, its lack of a refined culture and a historical memory. The Land of Liberty was perceived as "the Land of Libertinism." Democracy led to the tyranny of the masses, as the purposeful and energetic character of Americans combined with their preoccupation with materiality. America's technological advancement suggested a mechanistic heart.

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These negative stereotypes also influenced Russians, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the rise of urbanism and industrialism amplified the ambiguity of the American image. But even earlier, during the Enlightenment, the Russian image of America was informed by sources such as the Abbe Raynal's A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, which condemned colonization and disparaged America's white settlers as barbarous. And although America embodied a dream destination for the late romantics' flight from Europe, their earlier confreres treated it with reservation, suspecting that it harbored a spiritual void. 30 Heine fretted about the tyranny of the populace, an aspect of American social life that also alarmed Pushkin. Tieck feared "the industrial spirit" of America. English writers popular in Russia often treated America ironically: Dickens, in the gruesome American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit ( 1843-1844) and American Notes, mocked American ignorance and materialism. Sometimes, the same writer contributed to both the positive and the negative mode. For example, Stendhal, who in his younger years enthusiastically supported the ideas of republicanism he associated with America, later condemned its commercialism and ignorance. Among the myriad European subtexts that informed Russian notions of America, the most influential was arguably Democracy in America (1835), 31 in which Alexis de Tocqueville formulated a crucial concept: the future of humankind will be decided by two nations, America and Russia. Although this idea had existed in the Russian mind before de Tocqueville (we see it, for example, in Pavel Svinin's Opyt zhivopisnogo puteshestviia po Severnoi Amerike [A Picturesque Voyage in North America, 1815], or in Vilgelm Kiukhelbeker's "Evropeiskie pis'ma" [European Letters, 1820]), the French intermediary was especially significant for Russian public discourse. Unfortunately, de Tocqueville's interpretation had an important side note that was often overlooked in Russia: while democracy and freedom guide America, tyranny and servitude dominate Russia. Etkind has demonstrated the paradoxical reception of de Tocqueville's formulations: interpreted in various ways by Russian thinkers of varying ideological persuasions, de Tocqueville was easily adapted to differing, and sometimes contrasting, rhetorical goals. The idea of a unique Russian destiny appealed to both Slavophiles and Westernizers. The Slavophiles believed that America was not destined to play a role in history similar to Russia's, even though both countries were young and rapidly developing. Peter Kireevskii based his denial of America's role on its remoteness, both geographical and political, from Europe and

INTRODUCTION

13

on the limitations of a culture built on the supremacy of individualism. Konstantin Aksakov anchored his objections in the sheer existence of the political institution of a state invented by humans (as opposed to a divinely imposed autocracy). Ivan Aksakov developed his brother's ideas and interpreted the American Civil War as a cruel demonstration of the tragic political extremes that obtain even in a democratic state. The Slavophiles opposed American urbanism to the organic character of the Russian village, American individualism to Russian natural collectivism (sobornost'), American rationality, practicality, and secularism to Orthodox Christianity's spirituality. Although such negativism is to be expected from the Slavophiles, it is surprising how writers and social thinkers who held very different positions from the Slavophiles seem to echo their view of America. Both Slavophiles and Westernizers, who were philosophical opponents, were equally critical of America's relationship to Europe and Russia. The Slavophiles saw America as the crown of European civilization, evidence of what Kireevskii deemed to be the Western model of development's failed social experiment. In the Westernizers'view, young America did not possess the essential positive qualities of old European civilizations, although it retained and developed the materialism and egoism so characteristic of them. For example, Herzen, a Westernizer of the older generation who in his early years had associated America with his hopes for an idyllic social organization, later warned against the social despotism of the new nation. His resentment of de Tocqueville for lumping Russia and America together in terms of their similar roles might have come from a Slavophile: "Where in America is the start of a future evolution to be found? It is a cold and calculating country. Russia's future, however, is without limit-! believe in her progressiveness."32 Indeed, Herzen's famous remark about Slavophiles and Westernizers-"Like ... a two-headed eagle [the Russian national emblem], we looked in different directions, while a single heart beat within us"-is especially true, when the heart in question represents Russian interests and when both Slavophile and Westernizer heads look in the same direction-toward America. As Rougle has pointed out, by the end of the nineteenth century, America "survived as an ideal in more moderate political groups." 33 But Russian radicals-populists and, later, Marxists-inherited the Slavophiles' nationalistic enthusiasms. 34 Peter Lavrov, one of the most prominent Populists, disparaged the United States as "the Republic of Humbug" and condemned its governmental institutions. Russian radicals, many of whom were agrarian socialists, demonized America's increasing pace of industrialization and the growth of capitalism as signs of its materialism.

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There were only rare exceptions to the radicals' negative views, such as Nikolai Turgenev's glorification of America and Chernyshevsky's later utopian visions. Even if Russians acknowledged the value of some American principles, such as the liberalism of its social life, they criticized their concrete implementation, and usually dismissed the possibility of transferring them to Russia. De Tocqueville himself advised exactly such a cautious manner of learning from America, suggesting that European countries should borrow its democratic principles rather than "copy the means which [America] has employed to attend its ends." 35 Interestingly, during the early Soviet period, Russia's intention was to follow the reverse scenario-to take America's concrete features and technologies without borrowing her principles. "The Russia of the mind, whether constructed by Slavophiles or Dostoevsky, Marxists or Korolenko, was bound to be more beautiful, harmonious, and humane than the trans-Atlantic republic," 36 as Rogger observed. Russian critics projected onto America the concept of the ideal society they strove to see in Russia but then were forced to recognize that America's reality did not necessarily correspond to that ideal. Russians thus used the contrast with America to define themselves through dissociation. But it is also important to remember that this dissociation was constructed on the basis of association, since the evils of America that were most roundly condemned, such as slavery or bureaucracy, were Russia's very own sore spots, 37 even though the native serfs were not black. This negative selfidentification produced the following paradox: Russians defined svoi (one's own) through contrast with chuzhoi (alien), but at the same time they read chuzhoi in terms of svoi-and sometimes even used chuzhoi to mean svoi. Most of the above-mentioned writers and social critics had never been to America. Those who actually crossed the ocean created a number of non-fictional travelogues that shaped a somewhat different assessment of America's relation to Russia. Their texts show a general curiosity about and sympathy for America and a particular interest in concrete social institutions and technological inventions.These often dissimilar travelogues nevertheless represent another type of projection of Russian interests and needs onto American reality: the search for what could be learned and borrowed. One of the first Russian travelers who took a genuine interest in America and described the country in a literary text was Pavel Svinin, the diplomat and artist. His travelogue uniquely combines romantic fictional elements and detailed documentary information,38 thus anticipating the accounts that constitute my primary object of analysis. Svinin admired the rapid growth of American cities and, foreshadowing de Tocqueville, pointed out

INTRODUCTION

IS

the equally intensive development of Russian ones. His interests were broad: he wrote articles on technological achievements and analyzed the state of the American visual arts (meanwhile creating his own series of watercolors while in the United States). The value of Svinin's travelogue lies in his vivid descriptions rather than in deep analysis. He underestimated the seriousness of the slavery issue and believed that it would be easily and quickly solved. However, in his narrative we see motifs that become proverbial in the later image of America: an almost religious attitude toward money and an advancement of technology in stark contrast with the poor condition of the arts. According to Svinin, it was nature that provided the most magnificent "objects of art" in America ("No object of art can compare with the Niagara Waterfall," he exclaims). An analytical travelogue written in 1822 by Peter Poletika, Svinin's successor at his diplomatic post, is more documentary in tone and contains plenty of factual data. Poletika viewed America as an old civilization planted on new soil. He accounted for America's rapid and extensive economic growth at the expense of the arts and sciences as a result of the confluence of its vast territory and scarce population. 39 Although only a fragment from Poletika's work was published in Literaturnaia gazeta, Delvig, the editor, acknowledged its contribution to the Russian understanding of America and valued it more highly than Svinin's picturesque description. 40 Other significant representatives of positive analytical travelogues include early travelers such as Platon Chikhachev, Eduard Tsimmerman, and later travelers such as Alexander Lakier, Peter Tverskoi, Pavel Ogorodnikov, Ivan Ozerov, and Ivan Ianzhul. Lakier set out to identify the reasons for American technological and social success. Like Svinin's travelogue, his was intended to educate the Russian reader, but its scope was much broader. Lakier interposed descriptions of his journey with long passages from documentary sources such as Bancroft's History if the United States. 41 Arustamova notes that both Lakier and Bodisko made the significant discovery that "America" was not homogeneous: they focused on the specificity of different states, foregrounding the West as the quintessence of the American dream. 42 Both claimed that California symbolized for Americans what America itself symbolized for emigrants: the actual, final promised land. Unlike Svinin, but still in the vein of de Tocqueville's side note, they focused not on the similarity between young and swiftly growing American and Russian cities but on the differences in their origins: in America freedom and efficient commerce spawned cities, while in Russia government or church authorities did so. In the nineteenth-century Russian mind, the utopian blended with the practical. America-that marginal space beyond the ocean on the outskirts

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of the known world-promised adventure as well as hope for personal liberty and material gain. But these very practical dreams often acquired a utopian coloring, as we see in Korolenko's novella Bez iazyka (Without a Tongue). Jewish travel literature also produced a similar image of America as a promised land where a traveler could expect to find independence and wealth, and the motif of disenchantment in utopia unites Korolenko, Sholem Asch, and Sholem Aleichem. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a new genre of American travel narrative develops: autobiographical narratives that blend the fictional and the non-fictional. After the October Revolution, this becomes the most influential kind of American text. In these travelogues we can easily recognize the familiar projections: a combination of dissimilation and assimilation, 43 comprising an enthusiasm for self-identification by contrast as well as a search for elements to borrow. The blend of Russianness and Americanness in the Russian mind is so peculiar that, on the one hand, not everything that Russian travelers expect from or observe in America is perceived as distinctly and exclusively American. On the other hand, not everything that is considered truly American can be found here. Matvei Lozinskii, the hero of Korolenko's novella Bez iazyka, expects to find an ideal Russia in America. What he finds instead, at least initially, is the exact opposite. Mayakovsky believes that America is not American enough and that the ideal Russia of the future will be the ideal America. Hasty and Fusso have collected and translated the major pre-revolutionary and early post-revolutionary travelogues in their book America Through Russian Eyes, 1874-1926.Although critics have suggested that the collection demonstrates only the populist tradition of viewing America rather than giving the full picture, 44 the book accurately represents the literary construct of the American image that underpins all three stages of the development of the twentieth-century travelogue tradition. As a matter of fact, there is no American travelogue with a fictional element written by a prominent Russian writer in the waning nineteenth and early twentieth century that breaks with this radical/socialist/Bolshevik tradition. These texts were officially sponsored to inform readers about the capitalist counterpart of the Soviet state in an ideologically correct manner, that is, to represent it as the Other World. But this image was also self-selected by the authors: the prominent Soviet writers sent or allowed to go abroad (which by itself was a sign of their loyalty to the regime) chose to follow in Korolenko and Gorky's footsteps and to show America as a kind of Inferno. Moreover, to a great extent, they were influenced by the radical tradition, which was much better articulated and more powerful than the positive, "practical,"

INTRODUCTION

17

documentary trend. Nevertheless, one can find traces of the positive mode in the polemical tone of these major texts. 45 In the third stage of travelogue development, especially in Ilf and Petrov's works, there are signs of a new practical mode emerging. On the one hand, we shall see that the texts influenced each other directly; on the other hand, we shall see that their affinity was determined by a common literary tradition as well as by the authors' broadly construed common ideology. The travelers usually acknowledged that they were writing within the tradition, and they explicitly referred to other participants in what can be seen as the American dialogue. Each new text established itself through its relation to the existing tradition and contributed to it. All three stages in the development of the American narrative are united by the same imagery, which writer after writer picks up and develops further. Thus, American travelogues continually allude to and directly reference each other. "How helpless Mayakovsky's American poems are!" exclaims Esenin when he sees New York. Pilniak criticizes Svinin's sentimental portrayal of Native Americans and approvingly quotes Mayakovsky on the disparity between blacks and whites. Upon reading a list of the American passengers on their steamship, Ilf and Petrov immediately begin to imagine what Marshak would do with these characters in a poem (Marshak had never been to America, but wrote a poem about an American traveling to Russia). Mayakovsky's description of New York provides not just an account of a steady vertical progress but also a good example of the self-perception, in an ironic vein, of Russian travelers to America as links in the same chain: Thirty years ago V. G. Korolenko looked upon New York and recorded: "Through the haze on shore there appeared enormous six- and seven-story buildings." Some fifteen years ago Maxim Gorky visited New York and informed us: "Through the slanting rain on shore could be seen fifteen- and twentystory buildings." So as not to depart from the framework of propriety apparently adopted by these writers, I should probably narrate thus: "Through the slanting smoke could be seen some pretty decent forty- and fifty-story buildings ... " While a future poet will record after such a trip: "Through the straight buildings of an incalculable number of stories rising on the New York shore, neither smokes, nor slanting rains, to say nothing of any hazes, could be seen." 46

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Mayakovsky's travelogue particularly acknowledges the inescapable pressure of the accumulated stereotypes of America and voices the challenge of saying something new within the tradition. Sometimes, however, the dialogue is not explicit. For example, Pilniak implicitly enters into debate with Mayakovsky's methods of studying America when he states: "One cannot see the real America from a train window. I chose to travel by car." If we read within the tradition, we see that Pilniak is referring to Mayakovsky's confession that he saw America from a train window (although Mayakovsky goes on to claim that he saw enough to grasp the essence of the country). Pilniak was, needless to say, responsible for a new mode of traveling across America-by automobile. Ilf and Petrov made similar claims: they announced that they were going to study the real America rather than the one that can be seen from a train window. It is important to remember that none of these writers spoke English: all of them found themselves in America "without a tongue," like the characters of Korolenko's eponymous novella Bez iazyka. All their reported conversations with Americans as well as their general vision of America were thus distorted by the language barrier. Ironically, even the linguistic deficiency contributed to the continuity of the genre. Russian travelers often blamed the language they were unable to master for its incomprehensibility and irrationality: Gorky, struggling with English at his friends' Adirondack estate, complains that, though Americans are rational, their language is not. The narrator in Bogoraz's "Black Student" discovers on his way across America that, however familiar-looking some people may be, they cannot speak the language familiar to him: "I would be on the verge of speaking to others in my native tongue when, screwing up their mouths, they emitted not broad, rich Russian but those dull indeterminate Anglo-Saxon sounds which resemble the wheezing of a broken barrel organ, and I would fall silent and walk past them."47 In a reversal of the accepted stereotype, Mayakovsky finds Americans non-talkative (skuposlovye), projecting his own inability to comprehend English onto native speakers of English. New places were gradually added to the Russian traveler's typical program and, accordingly, new travelogue topoi emerged. A common itinerary in the late nineteenth century included the transatlantic steamship journey, New York, Chicago (with a visit to a slaughterhouse), and often Niagara Falls; in the 1920s a visit to Ford's Detroit factory was added; in the 1930s-trips to Hollywood, Russian settlements in California, the Grand Canyon, and the Southern states. As Etkind notes, each traveler's immediate predecessor was the main adversary in this dialogue. We might add, however, that the texts of authors

INTRODUCTION

19

writing within the same time period, when rhetorical goals were similar, were closer to each other in form and thrust. The concrete genres of these semifictional travelogues varied: early on Korolenko wrote sketches and essays, not to mention unfinished fragments, while Gorky wrote pamphlet essays; shortly after the Revolution Esenin contributed a sketch and Mayakovsky a series of sketches and poems; in the third stage of the tradition, Pilniak wrote an analytical novel and Ilf and Petrov a travel novel with elements of the picaresque. Moreover, some writers created not only autobiographical narratives but also fictional ones. These include Korolenko's novella Bez iazyka, Gorky's short story "Charlie Man'' (which he later excluded from his American collection), Ilf and Petrov's story "Tonia," and Mayakovsky's poems. Given this variety in genre, the texts' shared features-on the level of form, the use of the grotesque, hyperbole, animating metaphors applied to objects and objectifYing ones referring to people, density of intertextual allusions; on the level of content, recurrent motifs and ideas-are all the more striking and significant. The world modeled by all these texts cannot be reduced to mere physical reality or attributed to a purely ideological agenda. The image of America remains mythological. 48 Documentary, fictional, and rhetorical elements blend together in the narrative of American travelogue. The texts extend beyond the frames of concrete genres: Gorky's pamphlets are close to poems; Mayakovsky's sketches use the same images and concepts as his poems; Ilf and Petrov's autobiographical novel includes the same ideas and details as their short story (in fact, "Tonia" was originally supposed to be part of the autobiographical travelogue). It seems that the writers were trying out different forms in order to express the same invariable characteristics of the American chronotope. A crucial factor in uniting the American travelogues and providing the framework for their ongoing dialogue is their Gogolian subtext. The American chronotope is generally structured according to the same principles as the artistic space of Gogol's tales and especially Dead Souls, a Russian vision and version of Dante's descent into Hell. In American travelogues of Russian writers, the model of Dante's Inferno is mediated through Gogol. In their travelogues, Russians usually represent America as an enclosed and isolated space. Multiple temporal paradoxes create the impression that it is located outside of time. By the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of a "young America" is replaced by a more complex paradigm wherein infantilism is combined with senility.49 In Soviet travelogues, America appears simultaneously modern and ancient. A journey to America entails not only geographical and temporal dimensions but also ethical value: it is

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a descent into the accursed land of rationalism, materialism, and egoismin other words, capitalism. In this respect, Soviet travelogues resemble medieval Russian pilgrimages to the lands of sinners. That notwithstanding, the Soviet writer has to undertake this endeavor in order to appreciate the beauty of his native land, in the same way as the descent into Hell prepared Dante for the revelations of Paradise. The writers' pilgrimages were marked by similar reactions and even similar events. All the travelers, for example, felt an urge to leave America as soon as they could. In his letters home, Korolenko expressed weariness and anxiety. Gorky endured a public scandal and had to interrupt his lectures. Esenin suffered terribly from public neglect, drank, and led a dissolute life. Mayakovsky, as he confesses in his autobiography "1, Myself," after half a year of traveling rushed back to the USSR like a bullet. Ilf and Petrov excised the Caribbean segment of their journey and even refused to see Hemingway's villa at Key West; their letters home testified to their impatient desire to return as soon as possible. Although the authors' reasons for leaving were different-political, financial, or familial-in a sense, America was indeed a personal Hell for most of them. The arc of the writers' actual lives in America could supply good material for a novel, since so many mysterious coincidences took place there. If we take the factual realities of these journeys as a text, we can trace a number of recurrent themes, some synchronic, i.e., occurring within the same period, and others diachronic. For example, both Korolenko's and Gorky's little daughters died in Russia during their fathers' American sojourns. This seems to have been a greater tragedy for Korolenko than for Gorky, and he complained that the year of his journey was a cursed one. For Korolenko, a true paterfamilias, the sudden death of his little girl impacted daily life much more than for Gorky, who was not living at the time with his official wife, Ekaterina Peshkova. "I have been expecting news of this kind at any moment, and it did not shock me. I am sorry about the girl and even more about Ekaterina Pavlovna," Gorky writes at the very end of a business letter. 50 Blunders or complications involving children became almost universal in the American sojourns of the travelers. While in America, Mayakovsky fathered a daughter with a Russian emigrant, Elli Jones (this daughter, Patricia Thompson, whom Mayakovsky met only once, published a book in 1993 titled Mayakovsky in Manhattan). During Esenin's American journey, one of the German emigre newspapers printed a belated report on his arrest and short-term imprisonment at Ellis Island, which included the following error: "Miss Isadora Duncan with her husband, a young Russian poet Serge Esenin, and two [non-existent] children, were forbidden entry to the

INTRODUCTION

21

territory of the United States."51 Both Ilf and Petrov felt especially homesick and constantly wrote home to their young wives and small children. Their letters, filled with inquiries about the children, were later published by Ilf's daughter, Alexandra. However, Ilf and Petrov were the happiest of all the travelers with respect to their families, since their children were real, alive, and legitimate. In Pilniak's travelogue alone we can find no trace of children. Among other biographical themes, the complicated marital relations of traveling couples can be mentioned. Esenin's troublesome trip with his American wife, Isadora Duncan, echoed the earlier public scandal that had burst out when it became widely known that Gorky had come with the dancer Andreeva, to whom he was not officially married. Esenin and Duncan had married for the purpose of their visit abroad, but the position of the young husband accompanying a famous wife proved unbearable for Esenin. Thus, in contrast to Gorky, it was the official marriage to his companion that gave rise to scandaP 2-Duncan's relationship with a Bolshevik ultimately cost her her American citizenship. My major task in this book is to study the recurrent textual motifs that constitute the major topoi of the American travel narrative. In the first three chapters (part one) I will study the three above-mentioned stages in which pre-Soviet and early Soviet writers encountered America. These chapters will focus on synchronic literary connections. The fourth chapter (part two) consists of multiple sections, which study recurrent subtexts (Gogol and Dante) and several prominent recurrent motifs that constitute the vertical, diachronic connections among all the texts. Finally, the fifth chapter (part three) is devoted to the image of Americans traveling to Russia, as they and their perceptions of Russia are imagined by Russian writers. Since the main focus of the book is Russian journeys to America, the purpose of this chapter is not to give a detailed overview of all the Russian texts that deal with Americans abroad, but to observe what happens to the concept of the transatlantic journey when the traveler goes eastward. Thus, in this chapter we will see yet another projection-how the model of the Russian's journey to America is projected onto the visit of a "typical American'' to post-revolutionary Russia. The title of my book-Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New Yorkshould not be read literally, since many of the visitors were not technically Bolsheviks. It is based on the title of Marietta Shaginian's sci-fi adventure travelogue Yankees in Petrograd (discussed in chapter 5) which in its turn is based on Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Like "Yankees in Petrograd," the generalizing formula "Bolsheviks in New York" emulates a cliched point of view according to which all the visitors from a

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certain country are similar. One of my book's tasks is to deconstruct this cliche and to show the peculiarities of each writer and each period against the general unifYing populist-socialist tradition. I hope that this study will offer the American reader an opportunity not only to look at him/herself from the point of view of the Other and to see how familiar features can be distorted-and illumined-in that mirror but also to learn more about this Other, by exploring the projection of his/her desires and complexes. However, I also hope this study will help the Russian reader to overcome some familiar prejudices and to understand the barriers that prevent a nationalist self from really seeing the Other. While reading the book, it is especially important to remember that what stands behind the vehement condemnations of America in the Russian texts is not merely a fear and rejection of the American Other. The American travelogue also represents an implicit recognition of Russia's own failings and a concomitant hope for a better future.

CHAPTER

ONE

PRE-REVOLUTIONARY DISCOVERIES OF AMERICA Korolenko and Gorky

THE GENRE 0 F RUSS IAN autobiographical literary travelogues, which

later determined the Soviet image of America, took polemical shape in the waning nineteenth century. Both the Marxist-oriented Maksim Gorki and a number of Populist writers, including Grigorii Machtet, Vladimir Bogoraz, and Vladimir Korolenko, contributed to the genre. All of these writers grounded their work in earlier traditions: Dostoevsky's macabre vision of America and the Slavophiles' repudiation of the New World political ideal. Meanwhile, their adversaries kept the positive "practical" travelogue tradition alive. In this chapter, I will provide a brief overview across the spectrum of late-nineteenth-century travelogue possibilities. I will then examine Korolenko's and Gorky's journeys in particular detail, since, of all the pre-revolutionary authors, these two had the greatest impact on the Soviet tradition. Grigorii Machtet lived in the United States from 1872 until1874, and his detailed descriptions of prairie pioneers and their way oflife are considered to be among his most distinguished literary works. 2 They are far from being anti-American, but the sketch "Obshchina Freiia" (Frey's Community), which resulted from Machtet's personal participation in William Frey's socialist experiment, reveals his disillusionment with America's realization of socialist utopian ideas. A similar far-reaching disillusionment with New World social institutions and relations characterizes the American works of Bogoraz. Bogoraz, an ethnographer by profession, wrote a series of autobiographical sketches, a novel Za okeanom (Beyond the Ocean), several short stories, and a novella, Avdotia and Rivka, which follows the lives of two representative emigre women, a Russian and a Jew. Bogora'z provides a subtle social and

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psychological analysis of situations in which different cultures clash and reveal each other's sore spots. The Populists Machtet and Bogoraz both agreed that American freedom represented, above all, the liberty to pursue material wealth. These views found their counterpoint in an extensive corpus of emigre texts as well as in the non-fictional, "practical" American travelogues written by the economists Ivan Ianzhul and Ivan Ozerov. Among the emigre texts, Peter Tverskoi's sketches were especially well known in Russia. After having spent fourteen years in America, Tverskoi published extensive adulatory surveys of American life as seen from within. 3 In them, he noted the difference between the older generation's social utopian (or anti-utopian) perception of America-including his own and Korolenko's-and the practical attitude of younger visitors such as Ozerov. 4 The "practicists"were interested in America's political structure insofar as it could be seen as the prerequisite to industrial advancement, which they studied in detail. Ianzhul, for example, examines the specifics of American business enterprises and the government's policies concerning them. 5 Ozerov analyzes the reasons for America's extraordinary economic advance. 6 In their image of America, the "practicists" emphasize its youthfulness, its equality of opportunity, and the social institutions that ensure democratic relations among its people. Scholars have noted that this westernizing trend in the late nineteenth century was oriented toward the achievements of "an industrial civilization from which more could and should be learned or borrowed than isolated techniques or pieces of equipment."7 To some extent, the Populists' radical negation of America was a response to this enthusiastic westernizing, "practical" trend. Importantly, however, it was the Populist response that was fictionalized and, thus, acquired an enduring influence on the travelogue tradition. As Rogger observes, "The names of the challengers, like Ogorodnikov or Tverskoi, cannot match in resonance those of Dostoevsky and Korolenko, Aksakov and Lavrov."8 Of course, both the Populists and the Westernizers expressed a broad range of views on America, which were neither entirely negative nor entirely positive. For example, although Pavel Ogorodnikov mentions fraud in American professional and public life, he still cherishes America as a land of personal freedom. 9 Konstantin Staniukovich's novel Pokhozhdeniia odnogo matrosa (The Adventures of a Sailor) offers a more complex picture: he too portrays America as the land of individual and political liberty, which awakens the consciousness of his chief protagonist, the sailor Chaikin. In America, Chaikin feels he is a man in his own right for the first time in his life, but in learning more about American life and interacting with people from

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27

various social strata, he begins to question the absolute value of freedom. He comes to the conclusion that, although Americans are free, they do not live righteously. In the literary travelogues that occupied the center stage of the American narrative in later times, the nuances observed by these earlier writers gradually receded. Between 1893 and 1906-the years when Korolenko and Gorky visited the United States-the travelogues' tone changed. Korolenko's contribution was analytical and critical, while Gorky's pamphlets were vehemendy negative. This shift was determined not only by the differences in the writers' political views, their temperaments, and the nature of their talents, but also by the different goals of their travelogues, which reflected changes in the internal political situation in Russia. Both writers, the Populist Korolenko and the Marxist-oriented Gorky, were concerned with the destiny of Russia's common people, and both evaluated America through the prism of its possible influence on Russia's destiny. Although biased, Korolenko searched for models, trying to determine whether Russia could profit from the American experience. Gorky, by contrast, visited the country after the upheaval of the 1905 Russian Revolution. He arrived with a concrete, urgent mission: to change history in a real way, that is, to facilitate a new, Bolshevik Revolution. The two writers' missions-the search for both answers and practical help--for the most part turned out unsatisfactorily. Korolenko came to the conclusion that even the positive aspects of American life could not be adapted to Russia; Gorky, with his overdy provocative revolutionary ideas, was unable to raise the funds he had hoped for. And despite their very different missions, both writers attributed a fantastical, deadly aura to America. In doing so, Korolenko employed defamiliarization, while Gorky used grotesque metaphors and synecdoche. Both provided tides-Korolenko's "Factory of Death" and Gorky's "City of the Yellow Devil"-that contributed to the image of a hellish world. Korolenko's brief visit to America spanned litde more than a month: he arrived in New York on August 13, 1893, 10 and visited Niagara Falls; he then attended the Chicago World's Fair, the primary goal of his visit, from August 20 to September 9; and he embarked for Europe on September 15. Anxiety hovered over the journey, which was shorter than Korolenko had initially intended: his daughter was seriously ill, and his wife took her to Romania. Mter his exhausting journalistic work covering the famine in the Volga Region, the trip had at first seemed a short break in the writer's routine. However, immediately upon his return to Europe, Korolenko was entangled in multiple crises: his daughter died; 11 he was imprisoned on false charges of disseminating revolutionary propaganda in America; and, once

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released, he was caught up in the dramatic case of the Votiaks 12-all of which hindered the writing and publication of his American impressions. Russian issues pushed American themes aside. He complained to his editor that it was difficult to focus on the publisher's timeline and demands. 13 In the following years, he constandy mused: "It's not the time for America! What America can there be if such things are going on in Russia!" 14 Yet, he repeatedly returned to his American notes, reediting and reevaluating them in the light of Russian public life. Public events linking America and Russia also captured his attention. In 1899, for example, he wrote an article for Russkoe bogatstvo, "Pereselenie dukhoborov v Ameriku" (The Resettlement of the Dukhobors in America), 15 in which he traced the history of the Dukhobor sect in Russia and its final exodus to America. He also voiced his skepticism as to whether the Dukhobors would be able to preserve their religion and culture intact in the new land. In fact, Korolenko's diaries and letters show that even in America he remained focused on Russia. During his journey, he tries to relate every social phenomenon he encounters to a Russian context. When he hears people at the Chicago Fair singing the American national anthem, he bitterly regrets that the singing of the anthem in Russia is much more formal. In his opinion, this is a consequence of the Russian lack of freedom of speech: when one cannot criticize freely, one cannot praise sincerely either. When he discovers that international traveling does not require a passport anywhere except in Russia, he comments ironically that a Russian consists not only of a body and a soul but also of a passport. In a short, witty excursus about the significance of the Russian passport, Korolenko negatively compares "a man without a document" (bez vida), to Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, who sold his shadow to the Devil. 16 Here Korolenko anticipates Bulgakov's famous dictum describing the Soviet bureaucracy in The Master and Margarita: "No document, no man." This use of synecdoche is common in the critical portrayal ofbureaucratic Russia and America, as we will see shordy. 17 Given the brevity of Korolenko's visit and the fragmented form of most of his American texts, we should acknowledge his attempt at objectivity and broadmindedness. He does not judge America but tries to perceive it from several different angles. Korolenko's most prominent American text, Bez iazyka (published in English as In a Strange Land), 18 defamiliarizes America by portraying it from the point of view of two Russian peasants, Dyma and Matvei, who come to the new land in search of a better life. Later writers will adopt this technique of defamiliarization in their American travelogues. 19 Many of Korolenko's American texts are structured as dialogues between characters who defend their differing ideologies, and Korolenko's image

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29

of America emerges out of their conflicting perspectives. Even his titles reflect this dialogical approach. His first story involving American material, written even before his journey, is significantly titled "S dvukh storon'' (From Two Points of View). Similarly, he gives a dialogical title to another work "Russkie na chikagskom perekrestke" (Russians at a Chicago Crossroad). Korolenko usually explores a phenomenon from more than two angles; he is aware of the danger of binary oppositions. In the sketch "Factory of Death" three visitors observe a Chicago slaughterhouse. The first-person autobiographical narrator finds the enterprise's machine-like efficiency disgusting.The conflict between his pro-American friend and a sentimental, Old World painter represents in miniature the clash between Westernizer and Slavophile attitudes toward America. The narrator's Westernizer friend praises Americans for their rationalism and fairness. He does not allow his companions to turn away from reality when, horrified by their first impressions, they attempt to leave the slaughterhouse. The painter nostalgically recalls the process of "lovingly" killing a calf in the Russian village back in his childhood but confesses that he has never observed the process down to its brutal end. Each point of view emphasizes the other's flaws: the reader is equally repelled by the automated animal slaughter and by the sentimental, hypocritical picture of the personalized killing of a beloved animal. But the authorial message is clear: Korolenko expresses his attitude to the slaughterhouse through his story's macabre title; and he grants the reader access to the narrator's emotions and physiological responses as well as to his thoughts. The narrator also has the last word in the argument. There is, however, a dose of bitter self-irony in his final judgement: he is so horrified by the morbid spectacle he has witnessed that he initially refuses to eat meat; but he confesses that his abstinence lasts no longer than a week. The subtlety of Korolenko's dialogic method is especially evident if we compare "Factory of Death" with Tolstoy's classic essay, "Pervaia stu pen"' (The First Step, 1891). In its portrayal of a slaughterhouse, Tolstoy's essay promoting the vegetarian cause preceded Korolenko's sketch. For both Tolstoy and Korolenko, a visit to the slaughterhouse was a self-imposed moral obligation. Tolstoy pursues a clear rhetorical task: combining aggressively anti-aesthetic sensual images with ethical logic, he leads his reader to realize that vegetarianism is the first step to real humanity. By contrast, Korolenko's sketch does not preach, which strengthens its artistic effect. Korolenko not only allows his narrator's interlocutors, whose views he does not share, to have their say, but he also engages the reader in the animals' point of view. At first, we glimpse the animals' feelings as reflected

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in their eyes: "I am absolutely certain I saw mortal dread in the eyes of those hundreds and thousands ofliving creatures huddled together, awaiting their hour." 20 He suggests that the horses belonging to the cowboys who deliver the cattle are "intelligent animals": they understand where they are, and their "animal's heart[s] shudder in sympathetic horror" (92). So far, the author is still an observer, albeit a sympathetic one. But then he takes another step, seeing himself in the place of a slaughtered pig: "I couldn't help imagining that if my foot were to accidentally get caught in the noose and I were to roll up to him along the rail, he would scarcely interrupt the automatic gesture of his practiced hand on my account" (91). Korolenko shows all the stages in the efficient process of meat production; the animals, whose feelings the narrator reads in their eyes and whose point of view he briefly adopts, probably "were the very ones now leaving in the sealed and soldered tin cans" (91).1he horrifYing effect is intensified because the narrator does not change the sentence's subject: instead of the conventional "the meat left the factory in cans," he insists on the animals' status as once-live subjects. Korolenko painfully focuses on the only individuality left to various animals-their manner of death: the majestic death of a bull; the meek one of a sheep; the fretful one of a pig, who, in a human way, "dashes about and curses its fate" (91). Here the author repeatedly aspires to the solemn language of tragedy: the animals are "doomed" (90); the pig butcher is "the master of death" (91); and the "spectacle" of the stockyard is divided into acts. This vocabulary clashes with the gruesome atmosphere of the dirty stockyard and adds a new dimension to the narrative: Korolenko grants the animals their roles as tragic heroes and notes that the factory conveyor belt is as relentless as doom. In so doing, he simultaneously introduces the theme of America and its institutions as theater, a theme that will recur in the American text and be developed by Esenin, Mayakovsky, and others. Korolenko's seemingly balanced accounts of his journey abound in hellish images. In his In a Strange Land, Matvei, disillusioned in America, thinks that the Statue of Liberty's torch "lighted the entrance into a gigantic grave" (129).1he title "Factory of Death" gruesomely suggests that death, not meat, is the factory's final product. "The Factory of Death" epitomizes growing industrialization, a distinctively urban phenomenon in the traveler's eyes. In creating an expressionist image of the slaughterhouse, Korolenko registers the motifs that will later recur in the Russian narrative of American factories. In order to understand the origins of Korolenko's macabre images, we must look to the fictional and autobiographical beginnings of his characters' journeys. Significant foci in Korolenko's American travelogues are the trans-European and transatlantic passages that precede the actual

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American experience. Here, Korolenko compares not only Russian and American but also European institutions and ways of life. The title of his extended essay is "To America," not "In America," as Mayakovsky will later title his own travelogue. This anticipation of the journey and the period of transition-the ocean crossing-are crucial because the gap between expectation and actual experience makes America truly hellish. Disillusionment with the West begins in Europe, where the narrator, even though cognizant of his own naivete, nevertheless expects to find a Paradise. Against this horizon of expectations, his eyes capture "the bold figures of 'European' paupers with their rags, and their expression of suffering, degradation and vice stick in the memory with an intensity and vividness that they never had at home." 21 Korolenko introduces the concept of the Devil for the first time in these European excerpts in his sketch about General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, and his followers, titled "V bor'be s diavolom" (Struggling with the Devil). The Devil appears here as a symbolic stand-in for the community's collected vices, as a not entirely unsympathetic corrupter of a proper Protestant Sunday morning service. Endowed with "talent, critical instincts, and wit,"22 Korolenko's syncretic Devil foreshadows Gorky's similarly syncretic portrayal of the American crowd as a single monstrous creature. At the end of "Struggling with the Devil," we learn that General Booth has embarked on the same ship as the narrator; he sails to America in order to engage in a New World battle with the Incarnation of Evil. He has high hopes for success because America, in his opinion, is less rigid and less immersed in sin than England. Even so, however, the sketch still suggests an association between America and the Devil. Thus, even before crossing the Atlantic, the reader becomes aware both of the narrator's expectation of finding Eden on the other shore and of the serpent's presence there. Like the autobiographical narrator of Korolenko's sketches, Matvei Lozinskii, the protagonist of his novella In a Strange Land, envisions the country of his destination as an earthly Paradise, even while he is still crossing the ocean. His image of the ideal America encompasses the essence of early Russian dreams about the New World: America is very similar to Russia, only better; peasants are not so lazy, their clothes are cleaner, and they do not curse. However, Matvei discovers quite the opposite of a peaceful Russian village in New York City's horrible urban landscape. In a typically Populist contrast between the village as the embodiment of Russia and the industrial city as the representation of America, New York City is portrayed as viscerally repulsive. Streets look like caverns, houses are tall and dark; steel clangs overhead as the elevated train flies by, "curv[ing] like a

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serpent.""It seemed to [Matvei and his companions] that now they were in Hell, surely" (40). Much later, Matvei discovers that it is indeed possible to get used to America and to build a decent life, even to enjoy its freedom, i.e., that America is neither Hell nor Paradise. But he will always be tormented by dreams of Russia, since the new land is alien to him not just in its external manifestations but in its very essence. In the best traditions of both romanticism and modernism, Korolenko unfolds in parallel fashion the symbolic and the realistic levels of his stories/3 and his American writings are a good example of this technique. In a Strange Land can be read as a parable: its meaning resides far beyond the plot level. Throughout the novella, new semantic layers of the original Russian title, Bez iazyka, accrue. The title's most obvious meaning is "Without Language/Tongue-less" (the Russian word iazyk denotes both). The traveling characters do not know foreign languages and thus are totally helpless outside Russia. ''A man without a language is like a blind man or a little child" (17-18)-Matvei realizes as soon as he goes abroad. In the essay "To America," the autobiographical narrator confesses the same problem. A speechless traveler to a foreign country is similar to an inhabitant of Hades. Although Matvei has never been particularly articulate (in this sense, he was "without tongue" even in his native village), this deficit was not significant in his homeland, where he understood the rules and norms of life. In America, by contrast, tongue-less means clue-less. After their arrival in America, Matvei and Dyma discover that they know neither the English language nor the language of social behavior. The friends fail in social identification: they cannot believe that gentlemen, whose dress signals their association with high society, share a room in a doss-house with them. Back in Russia, Matvei and Dyma could avoid inappropriate situations, easily distinguishing people "of their own sort" from those belonging to other social groups. In America, they gradually learn that while all people are supposedly equal, there is still a huge difference between social strata, although it can be hard to discern. Over the course of the story, Dyma and Matvei represent a single split hero: one of them, Matvei, possesses strength and purity, the other, Dyma, wit and agility. Dyma learns the twinned languages of English and social behavior faster than Matvei. But along with adaptability comes moral relativism: he sells his vote-in Russian, his go los (voice )-to a shady political leader. Dyma tries to persuade Matvei to do the same, reasoning that nothing real or material will be lost. Matvei, however, refuses to sell what he considers a part ofhimsel£ Here again, Korolenko invokes Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl. Korolenko literalizes the idiom poteriat' golos (literally-"to lose

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one's vote/voice"), making the loss of voice symbolic: when Dyma returns from a political meeting, he cannot speak because he has been shouting too loudly and lost his voice. So, for some time, neither hero can speak: one is without tongue, the other, without voice. After Dyma sells his "voice," both are defined through related deficiencies. Korolenko develops the concept of a voice that can separate from its owner and exist independently in his sketch, "Zaarestovannyi golos" (The Voice Arrested), written several years after In a Strange Land, for the journal Russkoe bogatstvo. In this sketch, he relates an anecdote about a gramophone legally charged for playing a song based on one of Nekrasov's forbidden poems; the police not only confiscate the gramophone from its owner but lock it in a cell. The title of this satirical sketch suggests that Korolenko had in mind a parallel with the loss of voice in his American novella. 24 Additionally, Gogol's "Nose" operates as a subtext relevant to both the sketch and the corresponding episode in the novella. The voice's arrest stressed in Korolenko's sketch recalls Major Kovalev's search for his runaway nose. The overt link between Gogol and Korolenko, absent from the novella but present in the journal sketch, is the independence of the missing part and its official recognition by the state system. While Gogol's earlier tales abound in images of witches and demons, in the Petersburg Tales, of which "The Nose" forms a part, Gogol removes the culprit of the demonic from the narrative. 25 Korolenko takes this one step further by making his story subliminal and more subtle. For him, the fantastic is merely a hint, sensed as a plot turn and realized through the strangeness of events in the journal sketch and the implicit allusions to Chamisso and Gogol. For Korolenko's Matvei, America now symbolizes human alienation; because of his inability to speak English, he is astray in the American city. And his speechlessness is contagious-everyone he encounters turns speechless as well. A desperate, jobless man in a park commits suicide for want of a single kind human word; he and Matvei fail to understand each other and, thus, cannot help each other. The meaning of the novella's title is generalized to take in the absence of a common language among the world's people. Later in the novella, Matvei gets into trouble with the police. The conflict arises because the policeman cannot understand the only language Matvei is able to use, the language of gestures-which also turns out not to be universal. While Matvei begs the policeman to help him and tries to kiss his hand, the policeman beats him with a club, assuming that this gigantic, wild-looking man is trying to bite him. In a burst of anger, Matvei nearly kills him. Only a chance meeting with a fellow countryman finally saves

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Matvei. In this savior Matvei recognizes his one-time neighbor, a former member of the gentry. While the inability to understand each other's language is mortally dangerous in Korolenko's world, it is not the only hazard. The Russian who chooses to stay in another country and learn its language-in all senses of the word-eventually forgets his own culture and mother tongue. Distinctions between emigrants' national cultures dissolve not because of religious or national intolerance, but under the pressure of economic demands. In order to survive, one has to become like all the others. 26 Therefore, according to Korolenko, political liberty can be achieved only through a corresponding economic freedom. Still, Korolenko believes that this freedom is better than anything other countries offer. He confesses to feeling proud of the democratic spirit that allows Americans to overcome personal prejudices. Korolenko observes and pays homage to American social institutions, at least in principle (Tammany Hall is, of course, criticized in In a Strange Land). But it is the general democratic spirit of the Constitution, rather than the results of its implementation, that makes him admire AmericaY He applauds the American spirit but dislikes the people: "Despite the excellent state order, you see cruelty and ruthlessness everywhere."28 He seems to infer that American freedoms are wasted on Americans: in Russia, people are beautiful and deserve freedom, but it is not given to them. He disagrees with his fellow Russian emigrants, who believe that Americans do not deserve their own Constitution, but he nevertheless thinks that the Constitution's principles represent America's best. Significantly, Korolenko's heroes are mostly emigrants experiencing America, like Dyma and Matvei. 29 Individual Americans rarely appear in the travelogue except as background figures, with the notable exception of the sketch "Mnenie amerikantsa Dzhaksona o evreiskom voprose" (The Opinion of Mr. Jackson, the American, on the Jewish Issue, 1915), which centers on a single American character. But even in this sketch, Korolenko demonstrates that in America, virtue lies in an individual's ability to overcome personal prejudice in favor of the democratic idea. Mr. Jackson may be conceited and narrow-minded and express anti-Semitic sentiments, but he passionately protests and begins to despise his Russian interlocutors when they mockingly ask if he would demand that official action be taken against Jews-some sort of limitation of their individual rights or rights of residency, for example. When the mediocre Mr. Jackson states that, as an American citizen, he would be offended if anybody's rights were to be diminished, the narrator suddenly notices that his face has been transformed by his nation's noble spirit. The narrator further observes that even the petty

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tone of American newspapers changes for the better when their writers are provoked on the same issue. Attempts by Soviet critics to find a consistent social "class" analysis in the subtle observations and deep insights of Korolenko's American texts are not very convincing. 3 Korolenko considers social ideas secondary to general philosophical issues. In a Strange Land is less a critique of America than an exploration of man's loneliness in the world, his striving for an ineffable ideal, and the tragic absence of a common human language. As R. F. Christian notes, the author "is more unhappy at the breakdown of human intercourse than embittered over material institutions."31 He is more interested in the general qualities of America as a nation than in the nature of different social groups. More intuitive than analytical, Korolenko feels that American ways of development cannot be transferred to Russian soil, but he does not explain why. Deeply convinced that freedom must be given to the Russian people, he does not see any practical means for bringing this about. He concludes that America cannot serve as a model since it is neither an ideal Russia nor its opposite. He vaguely states: America might be good, but "not in our ways ... nowhere does a Russian person feel as misplaced as in America." 32 Nilov, the member of the Russian gentry who helps Matvei, 33 complains that in Russia he longs for freedom, "not a foreign one, but our own."34 Homesick in America, he finally returns home to work for this other, Russian freedom. Nilov thus voices a sentiment that was very familiar to Korolenko himself. After the October Revolution, Korolenko realized that revolutionary changes in Russia's social life would not bring the freedom and justice he longed for. 35 Korolenko preceded Gorky in visiting America, and Gorky regarded him as his teacher. Indeed, Korolenko was one of the writers who discovered Gorky, and he published his early works in Russkoe bogatstvo. Korolenko's writings, with their infernal connotations of America as a "Death Factory," must have especially influenced Gorky, but Gorky nevertheless did not inherit from his "Virgil" the inclination to consider phenomena from various angles so as to grasp their complexity. Instead ofKorolenko's multiple prisms, we find in Gorky the single perspective of a voyeur of violence. Reading Gorky's American texts, we cannot help recalling that Korolenko, in one of his first letters to Gorky, criticized his literary method for its oversimplifications, excessive negativism, and dreary picture of the world. 36 Gorky's comprehensive vilification of America was deliberate. He intentionally ignored easily accessible, more objective and balanced information about the country and its institutions. His adopted son, Zinovii

°

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Peshkov, had lived in America for a long time and had provided a much more balanced portrait of the country in his letters to his stepfather. 37 Additionally, Gorky's sojourn allowed him more exposure to different sides of the country, as well as more time for literary work, than had Korolenko's. While staying on Staten Island and in the Adirondacks, Gorky met many class-conscious workers, people from the working intelligentsia, but these meetings find no reflection in his texts. It is hardly a coincidence that during his American sojourn Gorky both presaged the contours of socialist realism 38 by writing the novel Mother and set forth a gruesome picture of America that became a model for later Soviet writers and journalists. According to Anatolii Lunacharskii, the first Soviet People's Commissar of Enlightenment, the socialist realist writer's task was to discern within the imperfect present-day society those features that heralded the shining ideal of the future, and to convey and promote that ideal. 39 With his American travelogue, Gorky accomplished the opposite: he revealed an image of pure Hell. This did not, however, represent a new departure in imagining America. Rather, Gorky utilized a set of expressive, ideological verbal and visual cliches, including New York as the City of Mammon and America as the Land of the Yellow Devil (the Yellow Devil being gold). He built upon the already canonical image of the greedy and gluttonous American capitalist. Gorky explicitly calls America Hell and, continuing the Slavophile line of argument, he attributes its hellishness to Americans' lack of spirituality: "Everywhere we see around us the work of the mind which has made of human life a sort of Hell, a senseless treadmill oflabor, but nowhere do we feel the beauty of free creation, the disinterested work of the spirit which beautifies life with imperishable flowers of life-giving cheer." 40 Describing New York, the epitome of America, he uses biblical expressions to create the image of an accursed city. Thus, Gorky builds on the nineteenth-century Populist tradition with its image of New York as a New Babylon. 41 Gorky's vehement negativism toward America should be read against the background of the pre-existing literary tradition. He persuasively demonstrates the chief argument of this book: that pre-Soviet and Soviet travelogues were determined by their authors' preconceived notions of America rather than by the actual reality they observed. Given his importance for my argument, I will provide a brief overview of the details of Gorky's American journey and summarize the most important scholarly interpretations ofhis travelogue. Gorky arrived in the United States in 1906 under instructions from Lenin. He was accompanied by Nikolai Burenin, a leading party member

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who served as his secretary during the trip, and by Maria Andreeva, his common-law wife, who worked as his personal assistant. Back in Russia, the turmoil of the 1905 Revolution had ostensibly been quelled by the creation of a representative assembly, the State Duma, and Sergei Witte, the new Chairman of the Council of Ministers, had requested a Western loan to support this democratic innovation. Gorky's mission was multipronged: to discredit both Witte and the proposed Duma; to dissuade the American public and the American government from granting the Russian government's request for a loan; and to persuade America to support, instead, the Bolshevik party and the future revolution, which would be genuinely democratic. He was also charged with the more abstract task of demonstrating to working people in different countries the kinship between all imperialist governments. Thus, Gorky's polemical intentions were defined from the very outset. Accordingly, it is hard to agree with Dmitrii Filosofov's claim that Gorky did not know what he expected or wanted from America. 42 A number of scholars attribute Gorky's bitterness against America to the public scandal that took place soon after his arrival. 43 Usually muted in official Soviet critical literature, and referred to without further explanation as an outburst of "hypocritical puritan American morality,"44 this scandal was undoubtedly exacerbated by Gorky's initial successes. As Tovah Yedlin notes, "The progressive segments of American society were opposed to the Russian autocracy, its disastrous war with Japan, and its policy of dealing harshly with the participants of the revolution."45 According to the newspapers, the Russian emissary was welcomed in broad public circles by a thunderstorm of enthusiasm as a fighter for human rights. In the first days ofhis sojourn, Gorky met Mark Twain at the A Club and H. G. Wells, who was in America at that time, at a reception at the Wilshire. In New York, he gave public speeches pleading for the "replacement and punishment of Witte," explaining the unrepresentative nature of the new Duma. 46 He later repeated these speeches in Boston and Philadelphia, and he even planned a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt. 47 Yet Gorky apparently considered the task of enlightening and uniting the working people more important and realistic than attending meetings in the higher official circles that might have aided his practical mission of preventing an American loan to the Russian government. According to the official Soviet version, his revolutionary propaganda displeased the American authorities, who were not interested in upsetting diplomatic relations with Russia. However, it is more accurate to say that Gorky's propaganda did not evoke a sympathetic response in American society at large, which trusted in

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constitutional social change. Gorky himself complained in a letter to Boris Krasin that many important people refused to support the Revolution after they discovered that the Russian government had taken measures to resolve the situation in a democratic way by constituting the Duma. 48 At this point, scandal erupted. Public attention was diverted from Gorky's message when newspapers revealed that his companion on the trip, Andreeva, was not his official wife. 49 1he meeting with Roosevelt never took place; public speeches in Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, and Chicago were cancelled. The committee that had been formed before Gorky's arrival to help him raise money for the Revolution now fell apart. Gorky and Andreeva were ejected from their rooms, and no hotel in America would receive them. Gorky accepted an invitation to the Adirondack estate of a compassionate American couple, Prestonia Martin and her husband John, who were close to workers' circles 50 and who eventually organized a new committee to support the revolutionary cause. Although Gorky continued to give occasional public speeches, managed to visit Boston and Philadelphia, and continued to publish his proclamations, after the scandal broke, he devoted most of his time to literary work, first on Staten Island, and then on the Martins' Adirondack estate. The whole episode was especially painful for Andreeva and determined her attitude to America. She constantly complained in her personal letters that she was surrounded by aliens with incomprehensible motives. She confessed that she felt as if she had "half died already-so different everything was"; that in America it was as if she were "in a coffin."51 Of course, to some extent, the public scandal also influenced Gorky's writings. Its echo is most noticeable in the satirical essay "Zhrets morali" (A Priest of Morality), where Gorky transforms the episode and pushes it to the limits of absurdity. In this text, Gorky maintains that the purpose of public scandals concerning morals is to blur the public's vision: "If you throw a lot of small chips into a river, quite a big log can float past among [the Americans] unperceived." 52 He echoes these ideas in the pamphlet "City of Mammon." Nevertheless, we have evidence that neither the personal affront nor the failure of his political mission blinded Gorky. Leaving aside his political speeches, all his American texts can be divided into three genres: the essays comprising the cycle "In America," the fictional interviews collected in "My Interviews," and the personal letters. Symptomatically, Gorky's portrayal of America in the essays and interviews differs from that in his personal letters. As Hasty and Fusso, as well as Yedlin, note, Gorky's letters from America contain not just criticism, but also interest

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and optimism: ''America is really something, you know. Not everyone has the good fortune to see it. It's amazingly interesting here. And damned beautiful, which came as a surprise for me"; 53 "I delight and I curse, it's both sickening and enjoyable, and-it's a hell of a lot of fun!" 54 It is also important to stress that Gorky wrote enthusiastic letters about America after the scandal broke, not merely before. While Korolenko's finished sketches and stories harmonize with his diaries and letters from America, there is a striking disparity between Gorky's letters, with their distinct notes of enthusiasm and respect for Americans, and his mordant essays, where everything is painted in black and white (with black in the ascendant). But a more nuanced image would have been incompatible with the propagandistic nature of Gorky's mission and his chosen genre, the political pamphlet. The distant respect, anxiety, and feeling of alienation in Korolenko's works were a natural part of his attempts to understand America, but for Gorky, the denunciation of capitalist America was a self-imposed political task. The Soviet critic Alexander Ovcharenko approvingly states that the fury of Gorky's essays resulted "not from his overwhelming impressions abroad," but rather from his preconceptions based on his earlier revulsion at the West's "treacherous help of the foreign imperialists to the Russian government during the first Russian revolution." 55 Significantly, Ovcharenko seems to consider such preconceived criticism more mature and objective than criticism based on actual impressions. He emphasizes that Gorky went to America already knowing what he was going to denounce: his task was to write propaganda rather than to gain new experience. Thus, first and foremost, we should read Gorky's American essays as exemplars of rhetoric. Even the interviews, which, as their genre suggests, might be expected to give voice to alternative opinions, are in fact monological. The narrator shows his opponents in a harsh satirical light, so that the reader can easily see that their words are evil and absurd. By analyzing Gorky's rhetorical strategies, we can clearly see that he designed his pamphlets and speeches for very different audiences. For example, he aims the proclamation "Do Not Give Money to the Tsarist Government" at a broad audience and addresses not just the workers but also those who actually have money to give, namely, the bourgeoisie, explaining that the revolutionary movement in Russia is so strong that a change in regime is inevitable and that the money would simply be lost. His "Address to the French Workers" is targeted not only at French but also at American workers. As Gorky "unveils the connections between all imperialists,"56 he acknowledges that even if he failed to raise any money he would still be

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enlightening the "people of labor." That is to say, his first concern is to distinguish among the social strata of his implied audience: workers, intelligentsia, and capitalists. What is more, the tone in the texts intended for the American versus the Russian public clearly differs. The first version of "City of the Yellow Devil," titled "City of Mammon" (the only one of his American pamphlets that was actually published in America), is milder than its Russian version. Its tone is more didactic, while "City of the Yellow Devil" is pure invective. The American version contains social analysis and developed reasoning. Gorky preaches that Americans should become more cultured and free themselves from the power of money. His reaction to the recent scandal can be easily traced in the pamphlet's bitter remarks about hypocritical moralists taking it upon themselves to judge others. But at the same time, Gorky expresses his belief that America is strong and healthy, although the sincerity of this remark is seriously undermined by his quote from Edgar Allan Poe: "Keep telling a thief that he is an honest man, and he will justify your opinion about him." 57 Reworking the text for a Russian audience, Gorky makes it more visual; he omits the sermonizing and the personal references, so that the Russian reader gets a hopelessly depressing picture. Thus, Gorky's implied audience determined his rhetorical tasks and significantly altered the image of America in his texts. Gorky himself acknowledged that his pamphlet "City of Mammon'' had no artistic value, but, firm in his intention to provoke the American public and warn the European one, he published it nonetheless. He was aware of his role as a mentor to the reading public, a shaper of public opinion; everything he wrote was immediately translated in Europe, and he insisted on publishing a work if he believed that it would set off fireworks. Filosofov declared that public success corrupted Gorky as a writer. Indeed, based on the material from his American journey, we can see how he subjugated the artistic side of his personality to his political task. Thus, it is paradoxical that some American readers of the pamphlet perceived it as pure truth, although the text, with its grotesque images and exaggerations, is as far as could be from a "photographic copy of reality." However, it is important to remember that Gorky's preconception was formed not only by ideology. His resentment of America took on a shape that cannot be understood in isolation from the literary movements of the time, both Russian and European, especially expressionism and urbanist poetry. In Gorky's texts, the familiar image of America as the land of the dead gains its strength from its urbanist specificity: New York appears as an octopus-like city devouring its inhabitants. Rougle shrewdly observes that, for Gorky, the encounter with America was not just an encounter

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with the highest stage of capitalism but also one with the city. He studies Gorky's texts through the prism of the Verhaern-Briusov tradition, offering persuasive examples of their stylistic closeness. Korolenko's In a Strange Land must also have influenced Gorky, since Dyma and Matvei perceive the American city as the epitome of Hell. 58 The image of the Devil in Gorky's texts is not exclusively negative. In his letters from America we occasionally see colloquial references to the Devil and Hell that are positive 59-Hell appears to be a place bustling with energy and the Devil is a very industrious fellow: ''Americans work like devils." "It is interesting here, like in Hell." "I work like the Devil."60 But Gorky transforms this sense of restless movement into a horrible picture in his pamphlets, where he accentuates the fruitlessness and senselessness of this incessant motion. He stresses its futility and represents city life as alternating cycles of hunting for gold and wasting it. Gorky explicitly extends Korolenko's image of the meat factory to the city as a whole, thus linking the images of meat and gold. What Korolenko's narrator visualizes momentarily as a horrible accident-a man being slaughtered at the factory as easily and automatically as a pig-Gorky makes into his central metaphor for the city. He maintains that, in the culture he is describing, people are meat indeed. "The streets are deep ditches that lead people down into the depths of the city, where-you imagine-there is a huge, bottomless hole, cauldron, or frying pan. All these people stream into it and there they are boiled down into gold." 61 This image is so dear to Gorky that it appears in both "City of the Yellow Devil" and ''A Priest of Morality." In the latter, Gorky enhances the effect by putting his own words into the American antagonist's mouth: the antagonist admits that the image is not his, but somehow "it has gotten into his head." In Gorky's expressionist interview "Khoziaeva zhizni" (The Lords of Life, 1906), the Devil is a positive figure, a descendant of Goethe's romantic Demon-the spirit of doubt and negation, and a predecessor ofBulgakov's Woland, a "part of the power. .. that always works good." In an earlier sketch "I eshche o cherte" (Yet More about the Devil, 1905), Gorky had already explored the rhetorical potential of the Devil as the representative of one's subconsciousness, and therefore, a participant in one's dialogue with oneself. The ironic Devil of this sketch, not unlike Ivan Karamazov's guest, appears as a moderate liberal's dream and asks provocative questions that reveal the hypocrisy of his interlocutor, who, in Gorky's case, supports the Revolution but errs in his belief that it can be carried out peacefully. The Devils in both the sketch and the interview obviously share socialist sympathies, but the latter Devil is more magnificent-which is quite

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understandable, since he is the autobiographical narrator's dream. 62 He takes the narrator on a spiritual journey to the "fountains of truth" (istochniki istiny)-to the literal and symbolic graveyard of ideas upon which modern society is built. Gorky materializes the image of these dead ideas, visualizing their creators as corpses in various stages of decomposition. His principal charge against the intellectuals of the past is that they tried to justifY the fragmentation of society and proclaimed the inequality of different social groups.The symbol of the cemetery goes beyond satirizing American society: Gorky uses it to critique the social development of humankind. But some of the cemetery's inhabitants are responsible for problems that are traditionally connected with America, such as racism and capital punishment-especially the electric chair. Moreover, the final framing episode of"The Lords of Life" also places the pamphlet into the American context: the narrator reports that he told his dream about the journey with the Devil to an American "who seemed more like a human being than the rest." 63 The American's reaction was entirely practical; lacking imagination and unable to move beyond the parable's literal meaning, he assumed that the Devil was the agent of a cremation company. Gorky thereby suggests that Americans are naive and simple and do not recognize their connections with the dead ideas of the past, simply dismissing, or "burning," them. In Gorky's American texts, the romantic Devil of his imagination, the one who strives for harmony and beauty, stands in contrast to the actual Devil of the present day-the Dostoevskian Devil of poshlosl, or petty mediocrity. This opposition foreshadows the conflict in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, where real evil is embodied not in the image ofWoland but in Moscow's petty clerks. Gorky's mediocre Devil reminds us not only of Ivan Karamazov's notorious Devil, who dreams of being reincarnated as a merchant's wife, but also of Fedor Sologub's Melkii bes (Petty Demon). 64 According to Gorky, the petty Devil rules America in his incarnation as the "Yellow Devil," gold. However, there is a discrepancy between concept and style here; Gorky's vivid imagination betrays him. His images of America are so intensely expressionistic, his condemnations so passionate, that the reader can hardly believe that the Devil of poshlosl is boring and petty. Although Gorky tries to de-aestheticize evil, his creation is luxuriously picturesque: "I imagine that somewhere in the center of the city a large lump of Gold, squealing voluptuously, spins at a horrifYing speed and diffuses fine specks along the streets, and all day people greedily angle for them, search for them, grab them" (140). To some extent, however, Gorky's narrative and syntactical monotony contribute to the image of America as the land of the Devil of Petty Routine. 65

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Gorky's greatest success in conveying the image of a tedious Hell is perhaps the essay "Tsarstvo skuki" (Realm of Boredom). Here, he describes the amusement park on Coney Island as a place where the traditional Devil's functions are performed: it simultaneously seduces with illusions and threatens with punishment, i.e., the many moralistic "attractions" presage the future tortures of wrongdoers. Coney Island virtually neutralizes the difference between sin and virtue, since both are for sale. Gorky focuses on the attraction that literally represents Hell. This artificial Hell is supposed to terrifY the audience and teach its members a moral lesson, but Gorky claims that it is unbearably boring. Here we recognize the familiar conflict between a conception and its embodiment, which characterizes Gorky's own manner of representing evil, but in reverse. The managers' failure to create a truly horrifYing Hell becomes the author's success in demonstrating a petty one: "Hell is made of papier-mache painted a dull crimson, the whole steeped in a fireproof substance exuding the foul odor of some heavy fat. Hell is very badly made-it will arouse disgust even in the most unexacting spectator."66 1he narrator notes that even the devils are bored in this Hell, and he ironically contemplates taking on the Devil's traditional role as provocateur and organizing a strike: "Enough of this nonsense! Why don't you go on strike, boys!"67 Gorky uses the technique of defamiliarization to create this twofold image of Hell: looking at the fake tortures, observers do not realize that they are in Hell already-the Hell of boredom and poshlosi. What Americans perceive as the fake demons of Coney Island Gorky perceives as the very real demons of America. In this respect, Coney Island is indeed the epitome of America. Ironically, its clumsy replica of Hell manages to fulfill its original function-to repel potential sinners. The visitors, as Gorky suggests, inevitably come to conclude that if the real Hell is as tiresome as this one, perhaps they should not sin. Gorky's principal contribution to the tradition of the Russian travelogue as a journey to Hell is that he achieves a perfect equilibrium between the fantastic and the realistic. His most prominent technique in showing America as the land of the dead is the inversion of the living and the dead: he portrays people as objects or animals, and things and machines as animate beings. In Russian literature, Gogol developed the technique of showing an empty, dead world in his Petersburg tales and especially in Dead Souls. Gorky borrows Gogol's poetics of the grotesque synecdoche and applies it to his American material. Later, in chapter 4, I will analyze the Gogolian subtext in American travelogues of Russian writers in detail.

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The sensation of Hell becomes especially vivid when Gorky's narrator suggests that the city's denizens are not really alive because they lack imagination and the ability to think: "To a living person, who thinks, who creates dreams, pictures, and images in his brain, who conceives desires ... to a living person this wild wailing, screeching, roaring, this trembling of stone walls, this cowardly rattling of windowpanes-all this would bother him'' (136). The American smile gains new connotations-it makes people's faces look like skulls: "His face is smeared with a thick layer of greasy dirt and on it flash not the eyes of a living man but the white bone of his teeth" (133). Gorky combines metonymical fragmentation with the technique of showing people as dead: ''A bold skull flashes dimly" (136). Even without proclaiming their deadness openly, he often describes New York City's inhabitants as if they were dead bodies, which produces an even stronger image: "the bodies of the children sprawling on the balcony grills" (135). In his anti-urban pathos, he even reverts to shockingly gruesome and decadent images in Baudelaire's vein: he shows people not only as corpses but also as worms inside a corpse. Gorky constructs the sensation of a deathly American "otherworldliness" mostly by using animating metaphors to describe objects. Thus, "dead matter" lives, moves, and breathes in his city: "Everything [not everybody!-MF] hurries, speeds, tensely quivers. The propellers and wheels of the steamships hastily beat the water-it is covered with yellow foam, broken by wrinkles" (132); "it all moans, wails, and screeches" (133); "over the entire bosom of the water" (133). Things are full of (negative) emotions: "Square, devoid of any desire to be beautiful, the dull, heavy buildings rise gloomily and tediously upwards. In each house one can sense an arrogant pride in its height and its ugliness" (133). Gorky endows objects and animals, but not people, with the virtue of social consciousness: ''And it seems as if everything-iron, stones, water, wood-is full of protest against a life without sun, without songs of happiness, in captivity to hard labor" (133). By contrast, the city's human inhabitants are satisfied with their meaningless work. They move like automatons with expressionless faces: "In their eyes there is no anger toward the rule of iron, no hatred for its triumph" (135). On closer analysis, however, we see that Gorky's objects are not exactly living: they are often likened to the living dead. He galvanizes rather than truly personifies things, emphasizing that this life of dead matter is unnatural and terrible: "all the houses look at each other walleyed from their dingy windows in exactly the same indifferent and lifeless way" (141). What is more, in Gorky's system of images the animation, or zombie-like galvanization, of things works alongside the de-personification of people.

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His city is full of sounds-unbearable whistles, rasping and howling. Yet the sound of human beings is absent. Gorky uses multiple techniques to stress people's dehumanization. His ghoulish picture of New York shows people as animals, worms, and microbes, as dead bodies, fragments of the whole, objects, and, finally, as an amorphous, liquid mass-the city's food source. To aggravate this impression of chaos, Gorky piles up synecdoches, repetitively objectifying metaphors, and comparisons. In portraying New York's capitalist inhabitants as denizens of the Other World, Gorky significantly avoids calling them "people." He defamiliarizes them: "A two-legged creature stunned and deafened by noise .. .looks at me strangely" (133). In contrast to the anthropomorphic features of objects, people's body parts are sometimes not quite human: "With their little paws the children grab the thin chips" (136). He objectifies them with derogatory similes: "The small people walk without volition, like stones rolling downhill" (139). "All day long people pour into [the square] from five streets very much like potatoes rolling out of sacks."68 He also reduces people to indistinguishable parts of a multitude, acted upon rather than acting: "Man is an insignificant screw, an invisible dot in the midst of monstrous, dirty complexes of iron and wood" (133); "all around, life boils feverishly like soup on a stove; little people run, whirl, and disappear in this boiling like bits of grain in a broth, like wood chips in the sea" (134); "in these streets, packed with people like sacks full of groats" (137); "[they] teem in filthy ditches, rub against each other like refuse in a stream of turbid water; they are spun and twirled by the power of hunger" (138). Gorky's collective images are of two distinctly negative kinds. A group is either a pile of similar objects (sacks of grain, specks of iron on a magnet), or an entity different from its parts-a monster or a machine: "Sidewalks are flooded with the dark streams of human bodies" (139). The crowd is described as one creature, in the singular. It has one face, "the face of the crowd," and one gaze: "Hundreds ofblank eyes acquire a common expression and a common stare-a watchful, suspicious stare."69 With his image of a creature that can restructure itself, lose parts and regenerate, Gorky anticipates the sci-fi images of alien monsters. But even when his group falls apart, its members do not become individuals. Gorky stresses their massproduced uniformity: "Their heads are all identically covered with round hats and their brains-this is evident in their eyes-have all already gone to sleep" (139); "the old, the young, the children-all are identically silent, invariably placid" (135). Even taken individually, people seem to be merely shards of a whole rather than self-sufficient persons. Fragmentation here has two meanings:

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all people are mere fragments of something larger but, at the same time, by the means of the narrator's description, each person has been torn into fragments: "More and more faces, one after another, flash in the windows like splinters of some single thing-a large thing, but smashed into insignificant specks of dust, ground into gravel" (136); "into the gutter-like streets the people drift, grim and silent. Broken people, disbanded people" (41). Thus, both collective and individual images of people are negatively charged. Gorky's city looks like a dissecting room where men and women are represented as body parts, mere synecdoches of themselves, a Gogolian parade of garments and body parts. 70 Formally, this fragmentation is justified by the observer's experiences: he travels above the streets of New York on the "El," catching glimpses, like snapshots, of people and their activities from the train window. He conveys his impression of a city full of dismembered people: "The dark face of an old woman ... flashed by;""women's bosoms and men's heads tremble" (135). The narrator virtually tears people apart, describing them as collections of organs: "What sort of a fluid runs in their veins? What must be the chemical structure of their brains? Their lungs are like rags fed upon dirt; their little stomachs like the garbage boxes from which they obtain their food." 71 Gorky also uses similes to compare people with animals: ''An old man, tall and skinny, with a predatory face ... carefully rummages in a pile of garbage, picking out pieces of coal. When someone approaches him, he turns his torso clumsily, like a wolf, and says something" (138).1he old man is not just like a wolf-he is like a wolf puppet, with separate body parts that can move independently of each other. Gorky creates chains of similes that emphasize the insignificance of his subjects. First he turns children into animals: " [Children] fight like little curs." Next, they become collective: "They cover the pavements in flocks, like voracious pigeons." Finally, he reduces them to "pitiful microbes of poverty" (137). Sometimes, Gorky mixes several similes in a cumbersome image, simultaneously comparing people with material objects and animals: "She stands as if made of stone and her eyes are as round as an owl's" (137-138). In "Realm of Boredom" Gorky transforms similes into metaphors, portraying the same crowd as an animal and a pagan idol with a copper face, requiring a human sacrifice. A piteous lion tamer is trapped between two beasts, the tiger and the crowd, but the latter is the scarier one: "He shouts to hide his deadly terror in the face of the tiger and his slavish anxiety to please the herd that calmly watches his capers, tensely awaiting the fatal leap of the beast."72 Only in Gorky's non-ideological and generically singular story "Charlie Man'' does he portray a man with humanity, by sharing his noble feelings

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with a wild creature's. The story does not deal with an urban theme or condemn America but treats it with mild irony. The hero, a hunter named Charlie Man, is a romantic character, opposed to society. In the story's first part, Charlie Man is portrayed rather ironically: he demonstrates a typically ''American" pragmatism when he refuses, in spite of his fellow villagers' requests for protection, to hunt a bear that is devastating their farms; he knows that bear fur has no value in the fall. Later Charlie Man frees a hawk, because he feels a kinship with the wild, gloomy bird who suffers in captivity. While his neighbors had recognized his prudence regarding the bear, now they condemn him for impracticality and stupidity. Charlie, thus, loses his reputation because he does not behave like an American. For the same reason, he gains the author's sympathy. It is easy to see why Gorky excluded the story from the collections of his American texts; its tone and setting undermined his general picture of America as a capitalist and urban Hell. As a lone short story, it did not fit in with his sketches and interviews. When using images of animals in his pamphlets, Gorky suggests that comparing animals to a city's inhabitants offends the animals. In the "Realm of Boredom," he portrays animals as much more noble, caring, and courageous than people. Unlike Gorky's people, animals in America have memories, passions, and real human emotions. For example, he portrays a monkey in the Coney Island Zoo as a mother protecting her child, who has been stabbed and pinched by the public: "The infant clings to its mother's breast, its long skinny arms wound round her neck and the tiny fingers locked behind" (30). 73 Nobody in the audience, not even the women, as Gorky emphasizes, pities the poor mother; only the elephant feels compassion. In "City of the Yellow Devil," Gorky creates a parallel and yet contrasting "human" image-a starving and exhausted woman remains indifferent to the sufferings of the child she is holding: ''A tall woman with big dark eyes stands in the doorway. She has a child in her arms, her housedress is unbuttoned, a bluish breast droops helplessly like a long purse. The child screams, scratching with its fingers at its mother's flaccid, hungry body, pushes its face into her, smacks its lips, falls silent for a minute, and then screams with greater force, beating its mother's breast with arms and legs. She stands as if made of stone" (137).1he monkey proves a better mother. In Gorky's America, animals figure as martyrs and prophets. Gorky therefore describes them in a solemn and elevated mode. Thus, he chooses a wise bear with knowing eyes as the protagonist of"Realm ofBoredom."The bear realizes what people are unable to understand, that their intolerable life in the city and their pitiful weekend entertainments are a huge set-up, intended to fool them and to deprive them of their humanity. Gorky uses

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Christ's words and asks the animals to forgive human beings who know not what they do, promising them that the time will come when people will change. For the moment, however, Gorky, the proclaimed socialist, ignores progressive American workers and discerns no portents of change. Gorky's picture of America might not have been so gloomy if his socialism had been more consistent. In his "literary portrait" of Korolenko, Gorky recounts a conversation he had with him on socialism. Korolenko claimed, "It's a muddle to me. Socialism without idealism-! can't understand that. And I don't believe the consciousness of common material interests is enough to build an ethical system on-we can't get on without ethics."74 Gorky, of course, maintained that he himselfwas much closer to the Marxist worldview, but he too found it difficult to reconcile socialism and individualism. This is particularly evident in his American texts, where his self-imposed political agenda exacerbates the discrepancies in his social views. Soviet critics found it hard to represent Gorky's American texts as products of conscious Marxist analysis, although they needed to do so in order to legitimize them as anti-American propaganda. Since the classic socialist realist novel Mother was written in America, it was simply impossible to admit that the author was anything less than a fully developed Marxist. Although one scholar claims that Gorky perceived New York not only as the "City of the Yellow Devil" but also as "the city where the working people take on Capital in the struggle for socialism,"75 there is nothing in the 1906 texts to support this argument. Scholars like Cioni and Rougle, unhampered by ideological dogmatism, rightly argue that Gorky's 1906 works hardly constituted a conscious Marxist analysis and that his perception of reality remained aesthetic and individualistic. 76 Among Gorky's contemporaries, Filosofov offers the most revealing analysis of Gorky's American texts with respect to this controversy ("Konets Gor'kogo" [The End of Gorky]). According to Filosofov, Gorky failed to provide a convincing picture of American social life for two major reasons. The first was his purely mechanical acceptance of socialism; lacking deeper understanding, Gorky merely tried to apply it as a universal lever for all social problems. The second and more profound reason was an intrinsic antinomy within socialism itself-its inability to reconcile the happiness of the individual with the needs of society. As Filosofov shrewdly remarks, Gorky had already failed to do this with Russian material. His major artistic discovery was the image of the bosiak, the rebellious outcast, the anarchist filled with rage and ready to wreak havoc on everything around him. Filosofov criticizes Gorky's attempt to draw a direct line from the bosiak to the socialist. He believes that rage was not an immanent quality of

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the man "from the lower depths" but, rather, that it marked a certain stage in his continuing evolution toward spirituality. He maintains that Gorky's attempts to turn his furious and large-souled bosiak into a revolutionary, to pass him off as no more than a product of his milieu, were tragically reductive, as were his attempts to reduce the human scale to the socioeconomic one. Filosofov differentiates between Gorky-the-writer, an instinctive romantic, and Gorky-the-citizen, an earnest, if superficial, social democrat, and thinks that the latter diminished and crippled the former. Interestingly, Plekhanov, one of the leading Russian theorists ofMarxism and ideologically very different from Filosofov, echoes his criticisms of Gorky's texts that feature an explicit social agenda-American essays, Mother, and the novella Ispoved' (Confession). While paying tribute to Gorky-the-artist, Plekhanov casts doubts on his capacity for theoretical thinking. He mocks his shallow, mechanistic understanding of socialism and regrets that he has turned into a preacher: "M. Gorky has very badly digested the truth which the proletariat brings into the world. This is the reason for many of his literary failures. If he had digested the abovementioned truth, his American sketches would have been written entirely differently: their author would not have seemed like a populist cursing the emergence of capitalism." 77 Indeed, Gorky makes it his mission to denounce America from top to bottom; hence, what he sees is a crowd, not the nascent, still disorganized proletariat. As Filosofov declares, Gorky undermines the very socialism that he proclaims. In fact, Gorky, like Korolenko, simply cannot accept socialism without idealism, cannot believe that common material interest is enough to unite people and restructure society. In "The City of Mammon," he claims that socialism is a creative process, the religion of the future/ 8 but then he ascribes American socialist ideas strictly to the upper classes. According to Gorky, even physical labor as such is no virtue-those who praise work as a cure-all end up as corpses in his cemetery of dead ideas. Gorky does not accept the idea of work without spiritual fulfillment and creative thought. Labor in America amounts to the meaningless drudgery of slaves, since people work merely for food and entertainment. He disparages workers as functional tools. 79 Fliosofov connects this condemnation with the sad irony of Gorky's own role in the Bolshevik movement, claiming that Gorky's party comrades always perceived him as merely a tool for broadcasting their ideas. In his essays, Gorky connects the American disjuncture between labor and socialism with anarchy. As long as individual men are shown in the process of gathering or dispersing, he occasionally refers to them as "people"; but

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once they unite, their human qualities are completely submerged. The mob, in the singular, is a monster, overwhelmed with violent desires; it wants to rape, murder, torture, and cannibalize. "A Mob" offers a scene of mass violence cast as the author's ghoulish dream, in which a crowd rapes and dismembers a woman. By story's end, this vision becomes fact when the mob murders a tram conductor. These episodes of carnal violence drip with sadistic eroticism to such an extent that one might suspect that Gorky's anarchistic nature secretly rejoices in creating them. The question of anarchism seems to be Gorky's personal sore spot. Indeed, Tolstoy accused him of a "malicious and cruel" anarchism after he published the novella "Troe" (The Three). But Gorky occasionally disparages the anarchism of the American masses quite violently, perhaps as a result of his continual struggle to fend off the label of"anarchist" himself. In "The City of Mammon," for example, Gorky criticizes the masses' destructive anarchism. However, in "The City of the Yellow Devil," he seems implicitly to long for the coming of an anarchist; his narrator imagines a young man destroying the city's dead matter and mixing it into one colossal heap. Nonetheless, Gorky felt compelled to emphasize the difference between socialism and anarchism and to proclaim himself a socialist. As Burenin reports, he insisted that American newspapers should emphasize this difference. 80 On his entry to America, when a guard asked him whether he was an anarchist, Gorky denied it, paradoxically claiming that the tsarist regime, to which he was opposed, was in fact an organized form of anarchy. The distinction between anarchism and socialism in Gorky's writings is very murky. Idealizing Russia, Gorky was inclined to see the seeds of a future revolution in the outbursts of the stirring masses. His personal letters and proclamations reveal that he was well aware of the dirty and violent nature of revolution. And, where Russia was concerned, Gorky was ready to accept the collateral damage of mass protest. 81 But since he opposed America to his revolutionary ideal, he condemned American outbursts as mere anarchism. He portrays the crowd of strikers in Mother as a gigantic bird, with the leader as its beak. But he is repulsed by the "raw" rage of America's oppressed working people and equates it with a monster's rage. Indeed, he uses the image of this terrible monster to represent the dark side of the workers' movement, which is a manifestation of the Other (chuzhoe). He divorces American workers from their Russian comrades, imagined in Mother as a collective, noble bird. Gorky's contemporaries' reactions to his American sketches ranged from suspicions that Gorky's literary talent had deserted him (Filosofov) 82 to admiration for his merciless unveiling of capitalism's contradictions.

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Contrary to the popular opinion that Gorky's American journey was a failure, Burenin states that the trip was indeed successful, if not in the manner expected. Summarizing the results of Gorky's American sojourn, Burenin lists the impressive number of texts he wrote there. As a matter of fact, Gorky's political mission was not a failure either; he was unable to raise money for the party, but at least America did not actively participate in the tsarist loan-although it is, of course, hard to determine whether this was a direct result of Gorky's intervention. Gorky's greatest success was artistic: he created a repulsive, derogatory image of America as Hell against which Americans could contrast the glories of the Paradise to be built in Russia. As Rogger remarks: "In any comparison between Russian utopia and American reality, America had to be (and still is) the loser." 83 But in fact, as we see in Gorky's American sketches, Russian writers compared a Russian utopia with the literary construct of an American dystopia. In the most influential pre-revolutionary travelogues, the hellishness of America lies in its urbanism. Their American journeys convinced Korolenko and Gorky that the American way of life was unsuitable for Russia. According to Korolenko, Russia can hardly learn anything from America, because it is too spiritually remote. For Gorky, America is useless because he discerns no sign of political activity among the workers of this most industrialized of countries. America's aura of energetic youthfulness, so typical for Westernizers' "practical" travelogues, is absent in Korolenko and Gorky. Instead, we find lifeless, mechanistic movement deprived of a higher goal. By contrast with these pre-revolutionary travelogues, travelogues written after the Revolution will recognize America's urbanism and technological advancement as major sources of attraction. Thus, although Soviet-era travelers will preserve the infernal features that Gorky and Korolenko so vividly stressed in their pictures of America, they will discover them in new places.

CHAPTER

TWO

POST-REVOLUTIONARY COLUMBUSES Esenin and Mayakovsky

F 0 R T H E M 0 S T PART, 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, nai:vete, 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,

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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 oflife.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 before the October Revolution was connected with Russian industrialization, 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 man."

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Exotic stereotypes of America, with buffalos and Indians like those in Chekhov's "Mal'chiki" (The Boys, 1887) had never ceased to nourish the imagination of Russian children. In his short story "Razgovor v shkole" (A Conversation at School, 1922), Arkadii Averchenko contrasts the child's dream of a Rousseauian, idyllic America with the "official" picture of an urban civilization that the teacher tries to impress upon her pupils. Averchenko thus mocks the positivist mainstream stereotype; his teacher tries in vain to proselytize the stereotypical benefits of industrial progress"huge multi-storied houses, hundreds of rushing tram cars, electricity and elevators"-which she sees as "culture." The children defend their ideal of a natural, uncivilized world, especially because it matches their lack of enthusiasm for formal education. They argue that people feel much happier in the woods, close to a fire, eating buffalo meat and hand-picked bananas-another attribute of exotic American life-than in the boring city. The narrator remarks ironically: "Culture, notably, was bursting at the seams, violently besieged and attacked by Indians, bonfires, panthers and baobabs."4 In Averchenko, the cultural and the natural both characterize America, but they are distributed as "grown-up" vs. "children's" stereotypes. In Russian literature, when America is represented as a kind of Eden, the tempting Devil or his shadow is often nearby. As Averchenko's narrator notes in passing, the children's argument with their teacher must have been inspired by a little school devil, an image that implicitly conjures up the connotations of America as a source of guilt in Chekhov's "Boys." Russian children continued to idealize and search for America before and after the Revolution. In Daniil Kharms's children's story, Kol'ka Pankin and Pet'ka Ershov choose an airplane, a modern means of escape, to facilitate an attempted escape to Brazil. 5 They are attracted by a familiar nexus of American images: palms, wild beasts, and Indians. Although the friends never get farther than a village outside of Leningrad, it is enough for Kol'ka to believe that they have visited Brazil. In his imagination, a cow turns into a bison, sparrows into hummingbirds, and a pine into a palm. 6 Village boys successfully play the roles of Native Americans, creating an association between Russian and American "savages" that is symptomatic for the Soviet travelogue tradition and that Kharms ironically re-interprets. In Lucy Sprague Mitchell's children's book Kak Boria gulial po N'iu Iorku (How Boria Went for a Walk in New York), published in 1927 in Russian, 7 the escape from home to America is quite different, with nothing imaginary or fantastic about it; little Boria, apparently an immigrant, actually lives in New York. Bored by sitting at home with his exhausted mother, Boria goes for a walk on his own and explores the city. The book offers a glimpse

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of New York realia from a child's point of view, in which the city proves friendly to little people-Boria has no trouble riding the train and finding his way to Central Park. The city, as represented in Mitchell's book, is very much like the one that Averchenko's teacher unsuccessfully tried to convey to her pupils. Boria's not-very-dramatic adventures are also reminiscent of Korolenko's fascination with the attention paid to children in an American city, where all the tram cars stop when a little girl crosses the street. The October Revolution was often compared in public discourse to the discovery of America, and after the Revolution, Russians' attention to America increased dramatically. While waiting for the world to discover it, the new country, Soviet Russia, launched its own process of discovery. Virtually everything-history, geography, world culture-was revisited and redefined synchronically and diachronically for new ideological purposes so that the young country could construct its own identity. Later, in the 1930s, this redefinition would ossifY into the rigid form of ideological cliches. America played an enormous role as Russia's point of departure in its search for self-identity, and the two nations' processes of assimilation and dissimilation dramatically converged. As Ball and Etkind show, the scale of change in the United States was comparable to that in Russia, but American change was technological, while Russian was social. Russia, however, also needed a technological revolution. On the one hand, Russia still viewed the land beyond the ocean as a capitalist Hell, as per Korolenko and Gorky; and caricatures vilifYing America in Soviet satirical journals played into these images. On the other hand, Russia studied and borrowed some of America's intrinsic features for the purposes of building a socialist Paradise, seizing on both the idyllic, romantic motifs in America's image and the practical trend glorifYing industrialization. Dozens of Soviet engineers and workers crossed the ocean in the 1920s and 1930s in order to acquire practical experience in capitalist factories for later implementation at home. Many of them composed documentary travelogues, which I will discuss in chapter 4, in the section on technology. During this same period, writers and journalists who traveled to America carried out a more complex social commission (sotsial'nyi zakaz), creating appropriate ideological imagery in and through the arts. With varying degrees of awareness, they grappled with the inherent inconsistency of modeling Paradise on Hell. In their travelogues, they addressed the disparity between the American social system and its utilitarian industrialism, which they understood as a demonic disagreement between form and substance. The journalist and party activist Kazimir Dobranitskii's documentary travelogue V Ameriku i obratno (To America and Back Again, 1927) offers

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an account of the author's 1925 journey aboard the commercial Soviet vessel Vatslav Vorovskii. Typically for the times, Dobranitskii challenges stereotypes by claiming that American technology is less sophisticated and less widespread than popularly assumed, even though it may be advanced in a few places. He quotes a farmer of Russian origin: "For the poor, there is no technology-only, maybe, an automobile." 8 Dobranitskii's book abounds in popular aesthetic and ideological anti-American cliches: he is repelled by the ugly skyscrapers; condemns the racism; argues that the ubiquitous automobiles do not significantly improve their owners' lives; and, above all, debunks American pretense and hypocrisy (''A lying, pharisaic country!"9 ). Many of the narrator's interlocutors in America are Russian immigrants who are dissatisfied with their present difficult existence. Not only those who came before the October Revolution but even former White officers and members of the bourgeoisie ask him whether it might be possible for them to return to their newly revitalized homeland. In his 1926 novella Russkii amerikanets (A Russian American), Boris Tageev, an officer, traveler, journalist and writer, casts doubt on the myth of America as the land of hope and opportunity for immigrants. 10 His protagonists, Petia and his father, leave Russia for America in search of a decent life. The father finally finds a job at Ford's Dearborn factory but, exhausted by the inhuman labor conditions, eventually dies. On his deathbed he makes Petia promise that he will return to Russia, where the October Revolution has taken place, and start a new life. Tageev's novella illustrates how the American dream was projected onto Russia during the 1920s. In the new Soviet myth, Russia replaces America as the final happy refuge for all working people. We see a similar redirection in Aleksei Tolstoy's play and film scenario Zolotoi kliuchik, iii prikliucheniia Buratino (The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino, 1936). Tolstoy's protagonist, the picaro Buratino, and his friends experience a series of dangerous adventures in the capitalist "Land of Fools" but finally escape to a "Land of Happiness," in which we cannot fail to recognize the Soviet Union. 11 The most important Russian writers to visit America in the 1920s-and the primary subjects of this chapter-were Esenin and Mayakovsk.y, two poets for whom America became an arena for poetic rivalry. Both Esenin and Mayakovsk.y considered themselves pioneers in artistic form as well as in the subject of their explorations (Mayakovsk.y even signed the letters he wrote to Lilia Brik during the journey "your Columbus"). Nevertheless, both of them relied on the literary experience of their predecessors, and their "discoveries" were generically predetermined. Paradoxically, the country that

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these two Columbuses had left, the young Soviet Union, was newer than the one they set out to discover. As major poets, Mayakovsky and Esenin transcend the declarations of their respective opposing artistic groups, Futurism and Imaginism. As Lekmanov and Sverdlov note, their primary antagonism lay in their choice of contrasting literary modes (stikhii)-the declamatory (oratorskaia) and the songful (pesnopevcheskaia). 12 Nevertheless, their rivalry was amplified by the significant ideological and aesthetic differences between Futurism, which strove for functionality in art as a means to grasp the skeleton of reality, and Imaginism, which relied on the expressive abilities of images as the conveyers of meaning par excellence. America became a testing ground for the expressive abilities of each artistic movement and, as we will see, revealed the limitations ofboth. 13 While contemporary critics generally opposed the Imaginist Esenin, the poet of the village, to the Futurist Mayakovsky, the poet of the city, both men's American journeys as well as their American texts reveal significant convergences. The revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whose taste, as Etkind notes, was paradoxically neo-classical, singled out Esenin as Russia's most talented contemporary poet, and he welcomed Esenin's trip to America. In an article written while Esenin was traveling abroad and later published in book form as Literature and Revolution, Trotsky stressed Esenin's closeness (as well as that of a number of"fellow travelers") 14 to the interests of the Revolution. 15 Trotsky believed that, given the new reality at hand, Esenin would broaden his repertoire of subjects and techniques, cast off his "peasant" limitations, and fully realize his potential. Paradoxically, therefore, Esenin, the "village poet," was the first major writer after the Revolution to experience industrial America first hand. Mayakovsky had already initiated the post-revolutionary literary exploration of America in advance of both Esenin's and his own actual journeys by means of his poem "150,000,000" (1919-1920), in which he created hyperbolic images of urbanism based on the capitalist American city par excellence, the Chicago of his imagination. Esenin, however, arrived first, in 1922-1923, and tried to take advantage of his priority as an eyewitness. Mter experiencing the "real" America, Esenin feels entitled to exclaim: "How untalented Mayakovsky's poems about America are!" 16 Appearing at the beginning of his essay "Zheleznyi Mirgorod" (An Iron Mirgorod), this remark highlights the literary rivalry between him and Mayakovsky and signals the text's dialogical mode. According to Esenin, only real experience can guarantee true representation. As the first official Soviet Columbus, he mocks Soviet urbanist poets, calling them "dear old

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dumb, home-grown Russian urbanists and electrifiers in poetry," and he points out that their poems are "based on the pictures in bad American magazines" (151-152). His essay not only debunks the Futurists but also reveals Esenin's disillusionment with the power of the poetic word in general and Imaginism in particular to convey the miracles of urban technology. Refusing to describe the grandeur of the steamship aboard which he made his transatlantic journey, Esenin laments: ''An image with no likeness. This was when I came to feel very clearly that the Imaginism my friends and I preached was exhaustible. I came to feel that the important thing was not comparisons but the organic thing itself" (148). He claims that technology is the art of the present day and that it does not need to be doubled or paraphrased by secondary artistic representation. Mayakovsky must have been affected by this challenge, especially since Esenin was not the only one who chastised him for lacking practical experience ofindustriallife. 17 Although critics often claim that Mayakovsky visited the United States merely out of curiosity, he was clearly compelled to make the journey, if only to convince himself and others that it was unnecessary. Mter being refused an American visa several times, he nevertheless embarked on a journey to Mexico, expecting to gain entry from there, even despite the fact that his money was stolen prior to departure. He was driven by the urge to compare real-life urban America to his own previous urbanist images. 18 Paradoxically, travel to America was the only way Mayakovsky could prove the power of his poetic imagination. Mter visiting the real Chicago, Mayakovsky finds confirmation that he had, after all, known the truth about America from the very beginning. He lauds the superiority of poetic truth over plain facts, comparing the image of Chicago in his poem "150,000,000" with both the Chicago of Carl Sandburg's representation and the more prosaic version in a guidebook. He concludes: "The guidebook described Chicago accurately and with no resemblance. I described it inaccurately but with a resemblance. Sandburg described it both inaccurately and with no resemblance" (201). Like Bulgakov's Master, who receives confirmation that his fantasy has, after all, been truthful, Mayakovsky could have exclaimed after visiting America: "Oh, how I guessed! How I guessed it all!" On the one hand, his American experience proved to Mayakovsky that Futurism was suitable for grasping the essence of modern technology. In the colossus of the Brooklyn Bridge, he recognizes the structural principle of Futurism, "a fight for construction instead of style." 19 On the other hand, Mayakovsky also emphasizes the downside of technology in America, its intrinsic connection with a corrupt social order. 20

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The "village poet" Esenin admires New York's urban landscapes as enthusiastically as the Futurist Mayakovsky. Even so, Gordon McVay's assumption that he "succumbed to the compelling power ofAmerica's industrial might" 21 oversimplifies the matter. Although Esenin admits that literary urbanism might have its place in America, he argues that in contemporary Russia it would be fairer to describe actual horses and carriages-the routine one knows-than to be a Futurist. Here again we encounter an unexpected discrediting of the power of poetic imagination. Esenin humbly recognizes his personal backwardness and limitations but tries to exonerate himself from the charge of counter-revolution by insisting that, although his writings may be insufficiently revolutionary, he has embraced Communist ideas in his heart. Nevertheless, as we shall see, various slips and contradictions in his texts demonstrate that, while his desire to be modern might have been sincere, he was more deeply attached to the old reality. Even as he praises the glorious industrial society to be built in Soviet Russia, claiming that he is ready to master the new style required from him by the Revolution, Esenin fails to achieve harmony with modern reality. After his arrival in America, Esenin intended to write a series of essays and a collection of poems about the country, but he never did so. Thus, his American travelogue took the form of an essay composed after his return to Russia, ''An Iron Mirgorod," as well as of an episode in his lyrical drama Strana negodiaev (The Land of Scoundrels, 1923). 22 To some extent, this paucity of texts resulted from the disastrous personal circumstances of Esenin's journey. Biographers note that Esenin's initial expectations of public success were fantastically high. According to Lola Kind, Isadora Duncan's secretary, Esenin dreamed of being translated into English and being appreciated by thousands of new readers, even though Kinel warned him that his poetry's melodic quality was unlikely to survive translation. 23 Esenin enjoyed extraordinary popularity in Russia, but he was not widely known in America. Although he planned several literary readings (and even published an address to the American public), there is no confirmation that they ever took place. No more than a handful of his poems had been translated at the time of his voyage. Thus, Esenin was reduced to being a companion to his wife, the world-famous dancer Isadora Duncan. Duncan was returning to her homeland after years of teaching modern dance in Europe and Russia, 24 and her performances, not Esenin's readings, gathered crowds. Esenin was extremely envious. In a letter to Vsevolod Rozhdestvenskii, he tells how excited he was to see his own picture in the papers, only to discover that he was referred to merely as Duncan's husband: "I was so furious that I tore the paper to shreds."25

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Like the Gorky scholars who trace his anti-Americanism to the public scandal with Andreeva, many ofEsenin's biographers attribute his negativism toward America to his humiliating role as Duncan's "prince consort." But scholars who focus on the trip's scandalous details tend to underestimate the depth of Esenin's inner crisis at the time of his American journey. It would be more productive to read the biographical data in the context of the disparity in importance of the poetic word in America and Russia and Esenin's general disillusionment with the expressive ability of the word. While English was Duncan's native language, she hardly needed it to attract public attention, since she spoke the universal language of dance. Esenin tried to take revenge by pointing to the temporal (although not geographical and national) limitation of dance as compared to poetry. He maliciously predicted that, while Duncan's movements would inevitably disappear together with her body, his poems would live eternally. When contrasting their artistic domains, it must have been especially infuriating for Esenin that Duncan did, in fact, co-opt his means; she never considered a show finished until she had delivered a speech. Although she introduced Esenin in these addresses and called him the Russian Whitman and the greatest Russian poet since Pushkin, this could hardly compensate for the fact that Esenin was compelled to remain mute. Lacking a language to conquer or at least to surprise America, he too turned to the language of gesture-albeit social rather than artistic-constantly drinking, initiating scandals, and provoking the public. While Duncan tried to carry out the cultural mission of raising funds for her children's dance school in Moscow, Esenin practiced the life of a hooligan, like the lyrical hero of his earlier poems. Paradoxically, at the end of this disastrous tour he proclaimed the superiority of the gesture over the word-at least in America-stating that Americans would never have remembered him for his poetry, but after his debauchery they would remember him better than Duncan. 26 And yet, even in the public arena of scandalous gestures, he was no match for his wife; Isadora's tour was curtailed by the authorities because of her "inappropriate" dances and her "pro-Bolshevik'' propaganda. Upon his return to Russia, Esenin reclaimed his voice and writer's identity and made certain retrospective corrections to the story of his journey. In ''An Iron Mirgorod," he either avoids mentioning Duncan or attempts to diminish her role. He writes mainly about his male companion (sputnik), apparently referring to Vetlugin, his and Duncan's interpreter and secretary. When it is absolutely necessary to refer to Duncan, he mentions her in such a way that the reader does not identifY her as Esenin's traveling companion, saying, for example, that he and his sputnik were allowed into

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the country because "friends of Duncan's had sent a telegram'' (151). Esenin also mentions that the "huge articles" in morning papers told "a little about Duncan'' (150), and then discusses in detail what they wrote about him, creating the impression that he, rather than his wife, was the major news, although in fact the reverse obtained. This belated literary revenge demonstrates Esenin's unreliability as a narrator and prepares the attentive reader for other inconsistencies in his text. Such contradictions abound in ''An Iron Mirgorod" and evidence the deep inner conflict Esenin experienced during his journey. His disillusionment with Imaginism, his complex relations with the new Bolshevik regimeparticularly his readiness to please Trotsky-and his desire not to be an outsider in the new life even as he struggled with his heartfelt attachment to the old, all contributed to this crisis. One could say that the paradoxes of the Russian attitude to America in the 1920s are condensed in "An Iron Mirgorod" and enhanced by Esenin's inner problems. In "An Iron Mirgorod," Esenin glorifies urban landscapes. Yet, in order to describe them, he employs the images of that very village reality he criticizes. For example, portraying New York City at night, he mentions "haycocks and stacks of lights" (kopny i stoga ognei, 150) around the skyscrapers. Voicing Nietzschean ideas, he praises Americans for putting man in God's place, but then he criticizes Americans for being primitive and narrow-minded. He approves of the merciless efficiency of American technological progress, making an explicit connection between American colonization of the New World and post-revolutionary Russian industrialization (carried out at the peasants' expense), but he exclaims in the next moment, "Poor Russian Hiawatha!" (153). Although he claims that the reason for his pity is the backwardness of Russian peasants, which he transplants in the American context onto the Native Americans, his words sound ominous. Esenin's American essay is both cheerful and sad. He writes that the American experience was rewarding but also that it has taken a lot out of him. What has been taken is, apparently, his illusions of world fame; and in the face of changes coming in his own country, he has lost the certainty of his own leading role. He finds himself in a position where he must accept and even welcome those changes: "I am close to [communists] intellectually and I hope I will perhaps be close to them in my works as well," he confesses in the essay (149). Esenin's urge to belong to the new era, to the people, his desire to "run after the Komsomol,"27 has the same pathos as Mandelstarn's triumphant and desperate claim: "You should know by now, I am a contemporary too!" (Pora vam znat', ia tozhe sovremennik/)2 8 At the same time, Esenin feels acutely that in the land of victorious socialism he is an unwanted stepson rather than a

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legitimate heir. 29 "An Iron Mirgorod" foreshadows the bitter confessions of his late verses. In the poem "Rus' ukhodiashchaia'' (Rus' Departing), written after his return from America, Esenin will sadly accept that there is no place for him in the new Russia. And, as his American experience showed him, he simply did not exist for any audience outside of Russia. American urbanism had no real effect on his verses, and Trotsky's expectations remained unfulfilled. It is obvious that the much-anticipated poems about America could never have been written. The journey to America deepened Esenin's inner crisis, both personal and poetic. As Esenin's friend Mariengof testifies, he came back from his journey a ruined man. 30 Two years after his return from America he committed suicide. By contrast, Mayakovsky enjoyed extraordinary success in America. In the transatlantic "old" New World, he acted as the ambassador of a new revolutionary land. More than any other writer I examine, he represented the public face of Russian literature to America, and his immediate impact was greater than anyone else's. He managed to attract thousands of people to New York and Chicago's public halls; he gave readings in Nit Gedaiget, a summer camp for Jewish workers. Although the majority of his audience was Russian-speaking, he impressed other Americans too: his poetry's declamatory nature, as well as the overwhelming passion of his declamation, were much more suited to represent the Revolution than Esenin's melodiousness. With the grandeur of his poetic figure, 31 Mayakovsky epitomized the new state that had sent him abroad. In America he felt that he personally was on the same-large!-scale as that country's feat of industrial construction, which was not surprising for a poet to whom the sun occasionally paid a friendly visit (as in his poem "Neobychainoe prikliuchenie, byvshee s Vladimirom Maiakovskim letom na dache" [An Extraordinary Adventure that Happened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky, One Summer in the Country], 1920). As a result of his journey, Mayakovsky compiled a cycle of American poems, which appeared in print while he was still traveling, and a book of essays, "My Discovery of America." This output is rather impressive, even if we take into account that Mayakovsky, to use Vladislav Khodasevich's expression, ran an economical poetic household, reusing images, ideas, and whole lines in both his prose essays and poems. 32 Although some critics are perplexed that such significant biographical facts as the meeting with his fellow Futurist, the poet and artist David Burliuk, who had emigrated to America some years before, or even his love affair with Elly Jones, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, are not reflected in the travelogue, 33 these omissions are quite understandable. Mayakovsky was, after all, writing not

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a literary autobiography but an ideological, rhetorical work, developing the trend that had begun with Korolenko and Gorky and adapting it to postrevolutionary needs. Soviet scholars acknowledge Mayakovsky's crucial role in creating the American text; they point out that although Korolenko and Gorky had been to America, they went too early to be able to contemplate it from the Revolution's radiant heights. 34 Edward ]. Brown doubts the sincerity of Mayakovsky's negativism and suggests that in his critical portrayal of America Mayakovsky not only censored his immediate impressions but also harked back to Gorky's "City of the Yellow Devil."35 Rougle argues that Mayakovsky did not have to make a special effort to censor himself and that Mayakovsky simply agreed with Gorky, with whom he shared an ideological platform. 36 My task, however, is to advance this issue beyond the mutual influences of particular authors and to represent it as a narrative tradition that, while maintaining its core features, was transformed during each historical period and correlated with the immediate rhetorical needs of the Soviet homeland and the peculiarities of each author's style. Mayakovsky acknowledges participating in the existing tradition of describing America in general and New York City in particular; moreover, he realizes that it would be impossible in his time to write a travelogue without referring to this tradition. Recalling Korolenko's awe at huge sixand seven-story buildings, and Gorky's mention of New York's fifteenand twenty-story buildings, he facetiously claims his place in this line by describing forty-to-fifty-story buildings, and he even conjures up a future poet who will continue the tradition and tell his readers about New York's "incalculable number of stories."37 There is a grain of skepticism in this statement that hints at Mayakovsky's attitude toward American technology: he does not anticipate a major breakthrough in engineering that might produce new types of housing but predicts more of the same. In order to see the uniqueness of Mayakovsky's treatment of America, we need to ask how, being "without tongue" in America, he deals with the muteness that plagued Esenin. Mayakovsky places the linguistic problem at the forefront of his American travelogue, focusing especially on the issue of translation. His search for a means of communication-in the most general sense-determines the spirit of his text and distinguishes him from all other Russian authors of American travelogues. Already at the American border, Mayakovsky must face the disadvantages of his language deficiency. Ashamed at knowing only Russian, his autobiographical narrator at first pretends that he also knows French. 38 After an unsuccessful attempt to communicate in a mixture of broken

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French and English and a search for an interpreter, he manages to pass the entry interview and gets an American visa. Yet, as soon as he learns enough English to communicate on the everyday level, he discovers that in New York he is surrounded by a multinational, multilingual crowd, and English is of no great use. New York City reminds him of the Tower of Babel after the Confusion ofTongues, but in reverse: in Babel "languages were mixed up so that no one could understand them, while here they are mixed up so they can be understood by everyone" (193-194). However, Mayakovsky notes that in Ford's factories the managers prefer not to place people of the same nationality together on the assembly line. The resulting difficulty of communication between the workers, enhanced by a ban on unions, prevents the spread of a revolutionary movement that Mayakovsky, like Gorky before him, is unable to effect in America. The absence of class-conscious communication-the language of revolution-in the multilingual crowd worries the poet most of all. In his poem "Svidetel'stvuiu" (I Witness), he invests some hope in "translation" and calls upon the Communist International to transform (in the Russian, literally "translate") racial rage into class rage: "Komintern, perevodi rassovyi gnev na klassovyi" (italics mine). 39 Because the "original" source of revolution is Soviet Russia, the Revolution must be exported, translated into English, transferred into American reality. Mayakovsky perceives language as the embodiment of social values and therefore posits it as a vehicle for projecting them. Thus, in his view, Russian is the original language, the language that most clearly expresses thought, and English is merely its shadow or simulacrum. The uniqueness of Russian history and the experience of the Revolution guarantee exclusive status to the Russian language. Translating revolutionary songs will be the first step in America's social change: song will help to fill the temporal and spatial gap that now divides the new Russia and "the backward" America: steamships "with translations of Zharov's [revolutionary songs]"will furrow the ocean. 40 Mayakovsky's witty macaronic poem "Baryshnia i Vul'vort" (The Lady and Woolworth's) perfectly illustrates his socially determined linguistic attitude. The poem's title and its archetypical situation-an amorous relationship between an anti-social male and a refined female-is reminiscent of the early film Baryshnia i khuligan (The Lady and the Hooligan, 1918), in which Mayakovsky did triple duty as co-director (with Evgenii Slavinskii), scriptwriter, and actor. But in the poem's title, the male hero is replaced by a store, pointing to the petty nature of the girl's tender feelings. Moreover, in the poem the love affair exists only in the girl's imagination. The poem's lyrical hero, a Soviet poet wandering the streets of New York, stops in front of the

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window of a huge department store, amused by the sight of a girl advertising razors. Trying to distract her with his own sidewalk "advertisement," he begins to glorifY the virtues of the Revolution. From the other side of the shop window, he addresses her with a passionate propagandistic speech in Russian, including a call for violence against the bosses. Assuming that he is speaking English, the girl behind the glass tries to read his lips and takes his harangue for a declaration of love. She thus perceives what she is ready to hear-just like Russian travelers to America. The poem is bilingual: Mayakovsky turns his "shards of English" into macaronic speech. The message, sent in the original language, is therefore distorted by the English code through which the girl deciphers it and by the girl's stereotypical sentimental consciousness. Revolutionary preaching in Russian sounds like a romantic confession in English. Mayakovsky holds the girl, rather than the hero, responsible for the misunderstanding. As McLean notes, "The Lady and Woolworth's" is a wonderful example of how Mayakovsky "succeeds in making poetic capital out of his own breakdown in communications."41 Finally, the poet gives up on the idea of explaining anything to the girl either in Russian or in English, metaphorically suggesting a direct, violent transfer of thoughts, akin to mental rape: "How can one cut knife-thoughts into her head?" (Kak vrezat' ei v golovu mysli-nozhi?). 42 1he desired impact of revolutionary language in Mayakovsky's poem is dangerously close to a brain transplant. Here we might recall that a similar brain operation is performed at about the same time by Professor Preobrazhensky, a character in Bulgakov's novella Sobach'e Serdtse (Heart of a Dog, 1925), where the surgeon, indeed, manages to "cut" revolutionary ideas into a dog's head, albeit unintentionally. Preobrazhensky transplants a "proletarian'' pituitary gland and testicles into a dog and creates Sharikov, the monstrous homo soveticus. 43 While Mayakovsky's lyrical hero wants to teach the American girl revolutionary language, Bulgakov considers the ability to spout revolutionary verbiage, which his dog-turned-into-man masters, as evidence ofhis inhumanness. In Mayakovsky's view, in order to spread the Revolution, Soviet Russia must translate itself to America, even if this translation requires violating the recipient. Correspondingly, in order to understand America, to establish contact and to appropriate its achievements, Russia must also "translate" America. Explaining the transatlantic country to his readers, Mayakovsky finds Russian equivalents for American political realia. He renders American diplomatic euphemisms into simple Russian, the language of common sense that reveals the truth ofevents. For example, he discusses America's ambiguous policy toward the conflict between France and Morocco, according to which

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the United States first supplied pilots to France and then recalled them "on humanitarian grounds." Mayakovsky ironically suggests the real reason for these actions: "Translated into Russian: Let's have the money and you'll get your pilots" (italics mine, 188). English, which, for Mayakovsky, is prone to euphemisms that disguise the truth, is thus contrasted to Russian, the truthful language, which directly reflects the meaning of reality. In his American prose sketches, Mayakovsky registers another curious function of the Russian language in America. He relates the story of some New York City street boys whom their teachers punish for cursing, which they, naturally, find very inconvenient. A quick-witted man solves their problem by teaching them-for appropriate compensation-Russian curses (182-183). Here, Russian functions as a sacred language for expressing genuine emotions. Mayakovsky was not limited to language as a means of communication; the official reason for his visit to America was to participate in an exhibition of advertising posters. 44 The lyrical hero of his later poem "Vo ves' golos" (At the Top of My Voice, 1929-1930) "licked off the spittle of consumption with the tongue/language of the poster" (iazykom plakata vylizyval chakhotkiny plevki). 45 This line's shocking effect is achieved by combining the visual and the linguistic: the double meaning of the word iazyk prompts the reader to visualize the image, so that the poetic line itself turns into a "poster." Although he makes good use of the universal language of drawing, Mayakovsky primarily relies on verbal expressioneven though he is limited to one language. He nevertheless continually recruits the techniques of the visual arts for his poems. For example, portraying New York's skyscrapers, he employs perspective as if he were describing a drawing: "Finally houses with well-like walls with squares, little squares and dots of windows rise up."46 In his descriptions, Mayakovsky contends with Russia's common literary stereotypes of America. He criticizes the Russian reader's picture of Americans-based on 0. Henry's stories-as inauthentic. He claims that he will not repeat the platitudes formulated by, among others, Korolenko and Gorky and known to any first-grade schoolboy, such as America as "the country of the dollar" inhabited by "the jackals of imperialism," even though he acknowledges their validity. Yet, he claims that he has discovered the universal power of money as well as its poetic and religious status in the United States, declaring that this phenomenon requires a new means of description: ''A country that annually consumes a million dollars' worth of ice cream alone deserves some other epithets .... God the dollar, the dollar the Father, the dollar the Holy Ghost" (181). In fact, Mayakovsky's

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"discovery" demonstrates his dependence on the tradition: it was Dickens who coined the term "the almighty dollar" in his American Notes to describe Americans' chief aspiration, and Gorky had already employed hyperbole to describe the power of money. Like Gorky and Esenin, Mayakovsky attempts to uncover America's national identity. Accordingly, we find qualities in his texts that we have already seen: Americans are limited, developed technically but not culturally, and obsessed with money. Much more consistently than his predecessors, however, Mayakovsky emphasizes class differences among Americans, employing the Marxist vocabulary of an early revolutionary poster: ''Americans vary. Some are proletarian and some are bourgeois" (192). Likewise, he also differentiates among national groups within New York's population, even if social criteria override ethnic difference. For Mayakovsky, immigrants from different countries are, first and foremost, foreigners, brought together "for exploitation, speculation, and trade" (193). In contrast to Korolenko, who worried that the core qualities of any national character would dissolve in America's multinational environment, Mayakovsky stresses that national communities in New York City do not mix with each other but preserve their customs and language intact for decades. Besides, Mayakovsky queries who is entitled to be called "an American'' 47 and argues that New Yorkers of all nationalities-including black as well as South Americans-have this right. By activating the broader connotations of the word ''American," he struggles against American linguistic imperialism and protests its "appropriation" by the United States. An analysis of Esenin's and Mayakovsky's texts demonstrates that both poets, despite their aesthetic, ideological, and personal differences, develop similar broad strategies for representing America. Both writers develop a complex system of anachronisms that help them deal with the problem of borrowing from their antagonist. They find that America, for all its technological advancement, is socially backward. They constantly stress the discrepancy between modern appearance and archaic substance, shell and core. Esenin demonstrates America's backwardness through allusions to the much earlier Gogol. Mayakovsky's poem "Neboskreb v razreze" (A Skyscraper in Cross Section) portrays New York's signature building as both provincial and archaic, like something out of a small town, a "pre-October Elets or Konotop" (sovsem dooktiabr'skii E/ets a/' Konotop). 48 In contrast to the Soviet ideal of communal living, Mayakovsky's outwardly magnificent skyscraper is merely a pile of isolated cells occupied by petty inhabitants. Mayakovsky constantly emphasizes America's anachronistic contrasts: he

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is outraged that an old-fashioned, hypocritical Texas tar-and-feathering of an adulterous woman can coexist with "the finest train in the world," the Twentieth-Century Express (184). The central poem in Mayakovsky's American cycle, "Brooklyn Bridge," hinges on a temporal paradox: an archaeologist of the future will be able to reconstruct the image of twentieth-century civilization from a single fragment of the Brooklyn Bridge, as if it were the fossil fragment of a dinosaur skeleton. This image is twofold: on the one hand, the bridge magnificently represents twentieth-century civilization; on the other hand, future generations will see this epitome of modernity as an antiquity. Contemporary American civilization is described here as ancient from the point of view of the future. Esenin and Mayakovsky conceive the American journey as a journey in time. Science fiction associations are unexpectedly relevant here, since each writer understood his American experience as a journey "back to the future": what seems a sci-fi future turns out to be a retrograde past, Mirgorod (rather like Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). Mayakovsky, playfully mixing together space and time in order to debunk America's pretensions to modernity, states: "I was striving to get seven thousand versts ahead, but came seven years back'' (Ia stremilsia za 7 000 verst vpered, a priekhal na 7 let nazad). 49 This temporal paradox must be understood in the context of relations between one's own and the Other-svoe and chuzhoe. The America that the writers perceived during their journey was a complex projection of Russia, combining characteristics of Russia's past and future. Since postrevolutionary Russia was proclaimed the new America, it was understood that the poets were sailing from this "new America" (see Blok) to the "old" one. Thus, what they discovered in present-day America were features of Russia's provincial past. At the same time, the "new America" in Soviet Russia had yet to be built, and, paradoxically, the experience of the presentday, actual America was indispensible for accomplishing its construction. Hence, throughout their journeys, the poets continually looked for the seeds of the Russian future in the American present. The common feature that strikes the reader ofEsenin's and Mayakovsky's travelogues is the recognition of certain elements in a foreign land. Portraying President Woodrow Wilson as the symbolic grand capitalist in his "150,000,000," Mayakovsky writes: "His enormous top hat rises up on his head like the Sukharev tower" (tsilindrishche na nem vozvyshaetsia bashnei Sukharevoi). 50 In his travelogue, he calls the Mississippi the Russian Volga; the manner in which Americans spend money-"with real style"-reminds

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him of Russian merchants. Esenin's first impression of the real New York is the familiar smell of the hardware stores back home. While defining new realities through familiar ones is typical for travelogues, the travelogues of the 1920s project Russia onto America much more extensively and complexly than before. In fact, Esenin's entire essay narrates a Russia that sprouts from the America he is observing. His admiration for American technology provokes not only regret for Russian backwardness but, simultaneously, praise for the process of Communist construction. The farther he moves into America's depths, the more "Russian'' it becomes: "Before your eyes pass plains with sparse forest and-alas, terribly reminiscent of Russia!-little wooden Negro villages" (153). When Esenin discovers that American policemen dress like Russian ones, he explains that "the textile industry has been mainly concentrated in the hands of Russian emigrants" (154). Finally, he realizes that a significant proportion (30 percent) of New Yorkers are emigrants from Russia, which makes this most American of cities look "somewhat akin to Odessa and the western districts" (154). Indeed, Esenin establishes a rather unexpected progression-he moves from criticizing Russian backwardness to realizing that, at heart, America is much like Russia and that many Americans, or at least New Yorkers, have come from Russia! Yet Esenin found no place for himself on either side of the Atlantic. Perhaps his disillusionment with America was so bitter because it reflected his violently suppressed disillusionment with Soviet Russia. For Esenin and Mayakovsky, the "familiarization'' of certain aspects of America serves multiple ideological purposes. Esenin, who admires the magnificence of Broadway, writes: "Comparatively recently, Broadway still resembled our old Nevsky" (152), an observation that builds on Pavel Svinin, who, more than a hundred years earlier, had admired the rapid progress of the two young countries, America and Russia, both of which managed to erect magnificent new cities in the wilderness. Thus, by establishing a parallel between the two countries, Russian writers saw America's success as evidence for the possibility of even greater progress in Russia. Moreover, both Esenin and Mayakovsky recognize American technical achievements as "Soviet" by nature. "After all, this street is ours too," Esenin announces about Broadway (152). In his poem "Nit Gedaiget," Mayakovsky points out that the Brooklyn Bridge is no more than an imperfect reflection of the ideal bridge to Communism that will be built in the land of the Soviets:

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We have bridged the gap between us and Communism And this bridge is a hundred years long. Are we looking down with disdain from this giant bridge? too proud of ourselves?

No. We are not trying to fool anyone by bridges. What's a bridge, after all? A device for catching colds. (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7: 89)

Nevertheless, comparisons with Russian backwardness compromise America. For example, Mayakovsky finds that New York's streets are as dirty as those in a Russian province. Yet, the comparisons also indirecdy criticize the Russian realities that needed to be transformed in the process of socialist construction, and they provide a blueprint for change. Esenin's and Mayakovsky's mutual projections of Russia and America onto each other reveal their stances on colonialism. Depending on their immediate rhetorical goals, Soviet travelers actualize and combine two perspectives-that of the colonizers and that of the savages. Viewing the Brooklyn Bridge, Mayakovsky exclaims: "I stare as an Eskimo gapes at a train," which Etkind reads as "identification with the colonized mind," 51 sinceMayakovskyadmires New York like a savagewitnessinga technological miracle. This is correct as far as it goes, but the simile is part of a complex, self-contradictory system of images. In the poems "Nit Gedaiget" and "Broadway," Mayakovsky transforms a "savage's" humble admiration into the condescending disdain of a representative of a more advanced race. From the heights of the "bridge to Communism," the actual Brooklyn Bridge seems like an outdated artifact. Soviet superiority is superimposed on the European tradition of depicting Americans as technologically advanced savages (see Mandelstarn's ''American Girl"), which is preserved in Soviet travelogues. This earlier tradition is especially evident in Esenin, who simultaneously pities Russia for her lack of industrial culture and criticizes America as a young and therefore primitive nation. The picture is even more complicated by the fact that Esenin justifies the inevitable

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cruelty of American cultural development-including the extermination of the "savage" Indians. Analyzing the poets' projections in travelogues, we should not underestimate the degree of their dissimilation with America. Even the structure of some of Mayakovsky's sentences reflects the alienation of Americans. For example, he writes of their obsession with a healthy lifestyle: "Celery has iron. Iron is good for Americans. Americans love celery" (189). This would have been mildly ironic if the poet had not implicitly separated Americans into special organisms with special characteristics ("good for Americans"). Mayakovsky's pronouncement is modeled on the famous syllogism ''All human beings are mortal. Socrates is a human being. Therefore, Socrates is mortal,"which enhances the impression of American otherness, since the reader has no choice but to assume that Americans are not like all human beings. Both Esenin and Mayakovsky employ hellish references in describing their American experience. Esenin mentions the Devil in occasional, usually cheerful, slips into colloquialisms, like those we have seen in Gorky: "These Americans do a hell of a good job of [advertisement]" (152). He can also imitate the Native American's vision of white Americans: "The Indian would never have done what the 'white devil' has done on his continent" (152). Mayakovsky's references to Hell are more diverse and macabre. He confesses to his companion that the noise in the center of New York reminds him, like Gorky, of the howling of beasts, "gluttonous and hungry," making him think of Dante's she-wolf, a beast who "devoured its prey but could not satiate itsel£" 52 His prose sketches demonstrate with dark irony that getting to the world of the dead can be easier than entering America: he tells a story about guides who do a profitable business smuggling illegal immigrants across the U.S. border but sometimes prefer to kill their clients along the way: "Many have emigrated directly to the other world" (166). Here, the Other World functions as a virtual substitute for America, as it does for Dostoevsky's Svidrigailov. Later Mayakovsky shows how emigrants who were lucky enough to have reached not the literal world of the dead but New York's Penn Station exclaim, "We're lost, brothers; they've driven us into the grave alive" (170), reacting like Korolenko's peasants on arriving in the city. Of course, direct colloquial references to Hell do not exhaust the theme of a hellish America in the travelogues of the 1920s. America's demonic nature reveals itself in its hollowness. Money has replaced the most basic and natural human feelings: even the baby in Mayakovsky's poem "Broadway" suckles its mother's breast "as if it were not a breast but a dollar." 53 The

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disparity that the travelers discover between surface and substance confirms their expectations: America is nothing but a phantom, albeit a paradoxically materialistic, "iron'' one. In looking with increased interest toward the "land beyond the ocean," Russia idolizes America's technical achievements and perceives it as a model for the organization oflabor. Yet Russian travelers also persist in portraying America as a capitalist rival, and America emerges as a land of paradoxes. But these stereotypical paradoxes in the works of Russian travelers of the 1920s are overlaid with logical and structural textual discrepancies and contradictions, the most significant of which concern the oppositions between old and new and svoe and chuzhoe. Both Esenin and Mayakovsky disparage the old in America as svoe for the Russia of the past, and recognize the new in America as svoe for Russia's future. The concept of incorporating certain elements of American life into Russia without grasping their substance in its entirety is problematic from the outset. The official exhortation of the period-"to catch up with and surpass America"-implies the possibility of building an ideal America in Russia, of combining advanced production with a quintessentially humane social order. Therefore, Soviet writers who traveled to America in the 1920s criticized it for its divergence from the ideal that they believed would manifest itself in a "future America," a new ''America-in-Russia." In this sense, the America the travelers experienced was no more than the negative of a blueprint.

CHAPTER

THREE

AUTOMOBILE JOURNEYS OF THE 1930s Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov

I N 1 9 3 3 , T H E S 0 V I E T U N I 0 N was finally officially recognized by the United States, its major ideological rival and "negative ideal."The amicable period in official relations between the two countries was, however, shortlived and less than idyllic, owing to ongoing antagonism between the two socio-economic systems. 1 The Soviet Union blamed America for its failure to regulate the situation concerning tsarist debt. The United States sent a note protesting the seventh Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow in 1935, because the U.S. State Department considered it a violation of the initial agreement between Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and President Roosevelt. According to this agreement, each country pledged not to interfere in the other's internal affairs, and Soviet support for the American Communist Party was considered an example of such interference. As Nadzhafarov has suggested, the Soviet Union saw little danger in ignoring the agreement, given the United States' relatively passive role in international politics during the 1930s. 2 Matters worsened dramatically after Russia and Germany concluded an alliance, and RussianAmerican diplomatic relations remained frozen until Hitler's invasion of Soviet territory. Throughout the 1930s, a twofold image of America persisted in the public imagination as well as in official discourse: America was the embodiment of capitalist evil, on the one hand, but a paragon of new technology, accuracy, and efficiency on the other. According to Jeffrey Brooks, the perceptions of industrial America's glory were already beginning to fade in the early 1930s. 3 But Sonia Hoisington refutes his claim, pointing to articles in architectural journals throughout the 1930s, in which the double image persisted-and even acquired more concrete details. 4 In fact, both positions are justified;

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Hoisington's observation that ''America took on flesh and blood" is not irreconcilable with Brooks's statement that the dissociation between Soviet Americanism and the actual America had reached its peak by the end of the NEP era. Since America was navigating a devastating economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it served Soviet ideologists as living evidence that capitalism had failed as a socio-economic form. Therefore, separate aspects of American life, including its technology and its architecture, could still be studied enthusiastically. This was less dangerous than in times of American prosperity, since these isolated features by no means justified capitalism as a method of production. The 1930s are marked by a new professional interest among Russians in American architecture and cinema-in concrete, tangible images of America that are conveyed not only through verbal means but also through visual media. The achievements of American architecture appeared in such journals as Arkhitektura SSSR. Ogonek, Inostrannaia kniga, and Krasnaia nov' reviewed developments in American culturallife. 5 In 1934, a group of architects, including Boris Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko, and Vladimir Gelfreikh, visited the United States. 6 In 1939, Iofan designed the Soviet pavilion for the New York World's Fair. Fum -making was one of the areas in which itwas considered urgent to learn from America, at least in its technical aspects, and in the 1930s Soviet filmmakers traveled to America as frequently as did Soviet writers. 7 In 1932, the famous director Sergei Eisenstein worked in Hollywood and undertook a journey across Mexico. While his cinematic works mostly concern Mexico, 8 his written sketches ironically describe his experience in the United States, portraying it from an angle previously unknown to the Russian readerfrom onboard a helicopter. 9 In 1935, the chief administrator of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumiatskii, came to the United States accompanied by the director Fridrikh Ermler and the cameraman Vladimir Nilsen. They faced a daunting task: to study the American process of film-making in detail, from the first to the last stages of production. 10 The tasks of Soviet writers traveling to America in this decade are also more global than ever before. Boris Pilniak visits America in 1931. In his O'kei: Amerikanskii roman (OK: An American Novel), published as a book in 1933, he reviews the entire history of the country as the history of capitalism, and he demonstrates on the basis of facts and numbers that America's socio-economic system is doomed. Four years later, in 1935, the duo of prominent Soviet satirists, Ilia Ilf and Evgenii Petrov, visit the country with a different task; curious travelers and careful masters of the collective Soviet household, they tour America in search not only of capitalist vices

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to be mocked and disparaged but also of what can be borrowed. Their travelogue, Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (One-Storied America; published in English as Little Golden America), 11 brims with concrete propositions for borrowing American workers' accuracy, precision, and work ethics, as well as the democratic character they have observed in people's relations. In 1936, after their return to the USSR, they even write a letter to Stalin suggesting that the American standard ofliving should be transferred to Russian soil. Both OK and One-Storied America are travelogue novels, but while Ilf and Petrov's plot generally coincides with the heroes' itinerary, as in traditional travelogues, Pilniak's narration ignores his actual trajectory and follows, instead, unfolding recurrent motifs and the development of the narrator's thoughts. Ilf and Petrov's novel resembles a picaresque tale, but Pilniak's OK, driven by his "Scythian" universalism, is intended as a new chapter in the collective memory of world history. Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov explored America in Ford automobiles, which allowed them to study it more closely than earlier Russian travelers. They charted new places on the map of the America of Russian travelogues: the reader ofboth novels finds not only traditional descriptions ofNew York, the Ford factory, or Chicago slaughterhouses, but also impressions of the Grand Canyon and California, accounts of visits to Molokan communities, and sketches ofHollywood.The authors ofboth travelogues strive to experience "the real," everyday, rural life-the one-storied America that supplied the title for Ilf and Petrov's novel. Both traveling parties had brief opportunities to work for the American film industry: MGM hired Pilniak as a writer and adviser for a film set in the Soviet Union, and Ilf and Petrov wrote a cinematic adaptation of 7he Twelve Chairs. Both projects failed, as had Eisenstein's, but the writers had the opportunity to experience Hollywood from inside. In America the writers were treated with friendliness and attention. The Great Depression spawned a new U.S. interest in Soviet Russia. Inspired by the success of the first five-year plans-especially the images transmitted abroad-many Americans sought to study the Soviet experience. 12 Pilniak's visit was partially sponsored by the Hearst Foundation. Ilfand Petrov brought "pockets full" of letters of recommendation and spent their first months in the United States attending receptions and giving speeches. The theme of American hospitality achieves hyperbolic levels in their novel: the travelers confess that they cannot "manage the powers they have summoned." 13 All of the travelers enjoyed their meetings with prominent figures in American cultural and political life, as well as unexpected encounters with common people. Americans served as guides both for Pilniak and for Ilf

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and Petrov: Pilniak was accompanied by Joseph (Joe) Freeman, a member of the American Communist Party and a writer and journalist who actively participated in The New Masses proletariat magazine. Additionally, for part of the way, Isidor, an itinerant Hollywood actor, also went with them. Ilf and Petrov traveled with the Thrones, portrayed in their novel as the Adams couple. While the writers share itineraries and motifs, they take different stances toward America. Pilniak uses exclamations of surprise and delight ironically "Ah!", "Oh!", "Uh!", as the reaction of other travelers, which he does not share. Ilf and Petrov sincerely admire the organization of American daily life. They especially praise America's work ethic, while Pilniak, by contrast, avers that it is a hypocritical atavism left over from the age of Puritanism. 14 Pilniak stresses that everything in the country is mechanized, including elements of life that should remain individual-like driving, eating, entertaining, loving one's country. Ilf and Petrov acknowledge that such uniformity at least guarantees a high level of service even in the distant small towns: although road motels lack an individual touch, you can always rely on having hot water, and the ubiquitous service stations make the journey safe. Of course, Ilf and Petrov's novel also contains a good dose of social criticism, and it condemns the vices of capitalism, if not America itsel£

Pilniak- Poetics and Rhetoric Among American travelogues, Pilniak's OK is striking for the absence of a traditional, cohesive narrative. Striving for a universal scale of social and historical analysis, its author chooses instead an impressionistic, fragmentary form. A modernist writer 15 with a superimposed ideological task, Pilniak tries to convey the essence of America by scattering personal observations, reports of seemingly random meetings and conversations, statistical data, newspaper articles, and surveys of historical events throughout the text. Thus, the novel should be analyzed from the point of view of both poetics and rhetoric. The scope ofPilniak's American travelogue can be compared with that of his early novel Tret'ia stolitsa (Third Capital), about which Pilniak himself wrote: "The action takes place nowhere .... The heroes are Russia, the world, faith, faithlessness." 16 We could similarly say of OK that the action takes place in America, Russia, the World, since the author compares everything he encounters in America with Russian phenomena, placing his observations into a universal context. Exploring America during the Great Depression, Pilniak interprets its crisis in a Spenglerian vein, as part of the decline of

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the West. For him, the United States is "the most Western West" (450), the epitome of an artificially encapsulated capitalism separated from other capitalist countries by an ocean. Unburdened by a feudalistic pre-history, America's past is progressive, its history rooted in the principles ofbourgeois democracy. But in the contemporary world, this pure capitalism has become the chief antagonist of socialism, which offers a new social formation whose victory is inevitable. Pilniak affirms de Tocqueville's prophecy that Russia and America will become the two major world powers: "The USSR and the USA are playing the chess of humankind nowadays" (451). The travelogue's timeline is not restricted to the short period of the writer's American sojourn; as in his story "Rasplesnutoe vremia" (Spilled Time), he operates with world history. Pilniak understands history not merely as a succession of events but also as an ever-changing, sliding perspective on these events. As he claims, time is one of his novel's heroes. The significance of historical phenomena can change with time; the present provides a new context for understanding the past. Pilniak opens and closes his novel with the same story, which gains the status of a parable: Betsy Ross passes the first American flag to the first president of the United States, and her granddaughter passes the red flag to the Detroit branch of the Communist Party. This succession of events proclaims the Socialist Revolution as the legitimate heir of the American Revolution: "Time had transformed [literally, "animated"] good living into dollars. Time had established the rules of pioneers: do what you want, do it how you want to, the only thing important is success. But time had also accomplished what had already been written earlier-Betsy Ross's granddaughter passed the red flag" (611-612). Thus, time had turned in a spiral, just like Pilniak's novel, which in the end returns to the same story on a new level, enriched by the experience of the entire American journey. According to Pilniak, with the emergence of the Soviet Union, man has ceased to be a passive object of history; now he actively changes the world, constructing history. 17 Pilniak's task as a writer is to find or build links between various events. Thus, he also functions as a "constructor of history" in a different sense, as a constructor of a new historical perspective. Such an attitude to the past contains a dangerous ambiguity; if the meaning of events is constantly reevaluated in the light of new realities, how can the final value of certain events be established? 18 Pilniak's claims to the effect that the Socialist Revolution had provided such an ultimate value seem unpersuasive in the context of his own historical concept. According to Pilniak, the title of the American Novel-the exclamation OK-conveys the essence of the American character. Its etymology demonstrates an officially acknowledged respect for ignorance-specifically,

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one folk etymology derives it from an error on the part ofPresidentJackson, who allegedly misspelled the initial letters of the words "all correct." Its popular usage reflects Americans' optimistic acceptance of both good fortune and hardship: ''An American goes bankrupt on the stock marketOK. An American crashes his automobile-OK. He is robbed by banditsOK" (445). Pilniak's attitude to this quality is ironic rather than respectful; for him, it is a manifestation of passivity, indifference, and an absence of deep, conscious understanding rather than a manifestation of strength of spirit. 19 Similarly, Ilf and Petrov recurrently mock Americans' optimistic laughter in their travelogue, but they also pay tribute to their perseverance. In his novel, Pilniak uses the word "o'kei" as a common noun, 20 a paraphrase of his novel ("on the first pages of this American o'kei," 635), calling himself "the author of'o'kei."' The rather scanty scholarly literature discussing OK praises the novel for its detailed, critical overview of American life 21 and criticizes it for its "haste, superficiality and the anecdotal nature of the approach."22 Paradoxically, both characteristics are appropriate: the vast factual material that supports the author's arguments is fragmented and scattered throughout the text; facts are juxtaposed with anecdotes; the profundity ofPilniak's historical and social approach is fused with superficiality. Vehement criticism of capitalism is juxtaposed with acknowledgement of America's high living standard; a haughty tone conceals the awe and reluctant admiration of the grandeur of American technology-an achievement that the writer immediately disparages as inhumane. On the one hand, Pilniak's anti-capitalist sentiments were sincere: after all, he was an instinctive anarchist-revolutionary and wanted to be, like Esenin, a contemporary of his fellow-citizens. On the other hand, by the beginning of the 1930s it was vitally necessary for him to write an ideologically correct novel. In the early 1930s Pilniak's status in writing circles was dangerously ambiguous; he had just recovered from a notorious literary scandal in 1929, a manhunt (travlia), an ideological campaign in the official press aimed at him and Zamiatin.The state, having seized control over the literary process, pointed its finger at Pilniak as a scapegoat for all fellow-travelers. Vera Reck, who discusses this campaign in detail in Boris Pi! niak: A Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State, observes that the campaign focused on the political inertia of many Soviet writers, who would shortly learn their lesson and clarifY their attitude toward Soviet authorityYThe specific charges against Pilniak were both political and artistic. He was accused of "apoliticism," because of his multiple statements that it was possible for a writer not to take sides in a state's political life. 24 As Reck points out, "apoliticism" at the end of

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the 1920s was a broader notion than merely political indifference; it became an offence against the State. The charges of "apoliticism" paradoxically embraced Pilniak's ideological errors, his leftist anarchic sympathies. As Alexander Voronskii, an astute critic and the editor of Krasnaia nov', noted, the Revolution had been a cleansing turmoil for Pilniak; he was enchanted by its wild drive rather than being focused on the process of building the socialist future. 25 Stalin himself pointed to serious errors in his writings: the characters in his early works, "leather jackets," were romantic orthodox Communists, ideologically harmful to the next stage of victorious socialism; their prototypes would be exiled and exterminated in the 1930s. Pilniak was also widely criticized for his ambivalent attitude toward machines and technology in general. 26 After his 1923 journey to England, where he witnessed the achievements of Western technology, he declared that for the first time the Communist workers' machine revolution "had sounded" (zazvuchala) for him. Nevertheless, he could never fully accept it. In his novel Mashiny i volki (Machines and Wolves), a character expresses a distrust toward machines that the author apparently shares; ultimately the character dies, pulled into the wheel of a factory machine. 27 Many of Pilniak's "errors" were stylistic rather than political, since style had become a political matter by the late 1920s and the 1930s. Pilniak's ornamental prose, with its absence of a unifYing plot, was disparaged as "Pilniakovism'' (pilniakovshchina), and other writers-fellow-travelers in particular-were warned against it. Pilniak was temporarily spared in the early 1930s, since the purpose of the campaign was not to ruin him but, rather, to broadcast the state's new expectation that writers would engage in the task of advancing class struggle. 1he very fact that Pilniak was chosen as an exemplar of the fellow-travelers was not necessarily fatal; the purges of unconventional writers, artists, and other cultural activists were yet to come. Pilniak was not only not arrested at this time but he continued to enjoy Soviet writers' privileges, was still accepted in certain high party circles, and was even granted permission (in order to get it, he had to appeal to Stalin personally) to go abroad-to America and, later, to Japan. His arrest came some years later, after he had written and published OK and Stones and Roots, an account of his Japanese journey. Meanwhile, in 1931 Pilniak had yet to perform his penance and prove his trustworthiness by exposing Russia's major political rival. The demonizing tradition of the American travelogue provided an appropriate frame for this task. In OK, perhaps more than in any other travelogue, the author's personal experience is secondary to the superimposed political idea developed over

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the course of his text: capitalism is doomed, and the current crisis marks not its next cycle of development but, rather, its end. Pilniak buttresses this idea with historical, economic, and social analysis, and his personal observations illustrate and validate his theoretical conclusions. He juxtaposes this multifaceted analysis with mythological images of his own country. The Soviet Union, emanating light, is contrasted to a bleak America where advertisement is the only beacon: "While in the USSR one can spot the Polar Star whenever one looks at the sky, even during a blizzard; here, in the train windows, everywhere, different girl and boy advertisers stick out" (512). The very superficial inadequacy of this contrast points out the diverging scales of values in both countries. For Pilniak, the Polar star serves as the celestial representation of the Kremlin star, a Soviet analogue of the Nativity star. 28 Pilniak's narrator posits himself as an ideal Soviet citizen. Like Mayakovsky's autobiographical traveler, he is his country's plenipotentiary, and he operates with the cliches of Soviet propaganda in a manner that seems exaggerated and almost grotesque to a contemporary reader. The narrator switches from the first person to the third, occasionally referring to himself as "a Soviet citizen" and praising this citizen for his political consciousness. Pilniak's idealized Soviet citizen is used to envisioning money in terms of goods for his country: "He knew that he had to go 'to America' but he also knew that his country had more need for American combines and thousand-ton presses than for his trip" (448). Yet, as K.rystyna Pomorska notes, the major "ideological flaw" ofPilniak's earlier works, the disdain for machines that he never overcame, continues to manifest itself in the American travelogue. 29 But here the author puts it to ideological use, constructing the image of America as a hellish technological civilization; therefore, Pilniak's archaism becomes a Soviet virtue. Pilniak's infernal portrayal of New York builds on Gorky's images, but now, in the 1930s, the urban Hell is overflowing with machines. In Pilniak's apocalyptical picture, the monstrously exaggerated technological city annihilates itself: "The city is deafened with noise ....The city is turned into a huge kerosene stove of soot and suffocation. It is a city that has gone mad and crept onto itself with its iron, concrete, stone and steel, and crushed itself. This is a city where man cannot live; one cannot drive an automobile in this city, since automobiles have to ride not along the streets but on top of each other" (498). The statement "man cannot live in the city" literally repeats Gorky's lamentations in "City of the Yellow Devil": "To a living person this wild wailing, screeching, roaring, this trembling of stone walls, this cowardly rattling of windowpanes-all this would bother him" (136).

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And as in Gorky's and Mayakovsky's New York, objects are shown as alive through personifYing metaphors. For example, the narrator sees a cab-a virtual herald of Hell-carrying "on its back" (na spine) a poster: "Get on, dude, don't you know that there is still vacant space in Hell?!" (602), thus ironically suggesting that there is a shortcut between the streets of New York and Hell. Even outside the city, Pilniak continues to portray the otherworldliness of America through technological imagery. He discovers not only a romantic urban Inferno, but also the Hell of an ultimate, machine-crafted uniformity. 30 In OK, Pilniak represents America as one gigantic factory belt where everything is mechanized and mass-produced and is, therefore, indistinguishable. Not only man-produced objects but even small American towns are mere specks on this factory belt. Like their inhabitants' views, beliefs and emotions, the towns lack individuality. Pilniak's traveler observes an American paradox: American individualism easily coexists with almost universal mass-production. Despite Pilniak's conscious striving for ideological correctness, his American novel still contains the "artistic fallacies" Soviet critics had discerned in his earlier works: "hysterical composition"; absence of a coherent plot; fragmented, repetitive narrative. Even the travelogue genre, which might have dictated a narrative linearity organized around the hero's journey, failed to straighten Pilniak's work. OK is a complex narrative combining the features of a political newspaper article, oral pamphlet, scientific study, and poetic text. Pilniak supplements Mayakovsky's poetic passion with the credibility of a documentary. He involves the reader emotionally and at the same time attempts to convince him with facts, creating the sensation of subjective objectivityY At first, OKgives the impression of a spontaneous monologue, an accusatory, improvised public speech. The narrative is distorted, interrupted; sometimes phrases remain unfinished, as if the author had lost his train of thought. Often Pilniak begins a story, then diverges from it, only to pick up the topic much later; for example, he begins to tell about his encounter with a lady in Central Park but finishes several chapters later. The narrator (or speaker?) occasionally switches from polemical mode to a simple conversational tone and interweaves anecdotes and road stories into his passionate anti-capitalist pamphlet. But even in these stories he is only seemingly diverted from his major idea, for any given fact, which might appear neutral at first glance, may then be followed by political commentary, sometimes quite superficially. For example, in describing American eating habits, Pilniak mentions grapefruit, unknown at that time to his Russian readers, and immediately adds: "Burbank

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who, by the way, created this fruit, which people in three-quarters of the globe now eat, once had the misfortune to say that he did not believe in God, and he died, bullied by the American clergy" (446). By rhetorically addressing his implied audience, Pilniak enhances the monologic effect: "Workers from the American Labor Federation, have you read about it?!" (650); "Dear American individualists!" (503). Some of his addressees are allegorical: "Dear American liberty!" (503) and even "Dear Nietzschean dollar" (dorogoi nitssheanets dollar, 504). Here Pilniak creates an untranslatable pun: in Russian, "dorogoi" means both "dear" and "expensive." In order to convey the illusion of oral speech, Pilniak stresses certain words, dividing them into syllables: "And the American philistine in the loneliness of democracy... wants to break-a-way from these standards!" (I amerikanskii obyvatel' v odinochestve demokratii ... khochet iz etikh standartov-vyr-vat'-sia! 597). His mocking use of exclamations (Akh, okh, ukh!) has been mentioned earlier. Pilniak likens some of the voices that break into his text to the hysterical voices of America herself: "More! More! More! Ten cents for a spoon, a notebook, a handkerchief, a stocking! Three hundred fifty dollars for a 'Ford'! More! More! Morel-American prosperities!" (611). These multiple voices, coming as if from the crowd, constitute the background ofPilniak's monologue. The initial impression of spontaneity is, however, deceptive: Pilniak's abundant factual material demonstrates that this "speech" has been thoroughly prepared. Pilniak refers to different sources/voices that support his narrative: he quotes Svinin, Lenin, and Engels and incorporates lengthy passages from Stuart Chase's economic analyses into his text. He refers to R. M. Blank's Amerika, published in Russian in Paris in 1928, and criticizes Descartes for his idealism (535). Near novel's end, he gravitates more and more toward the use of the Other's word and sets various sources in collision, as if allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions, even though these conclusions have already been predetermined. In order to strengthen his rhetorical point, he turns not only to pro-Communist sources but also to daily newspapers, whose headlines reflect the economic crisis and, therefore, serve as "the witnesses for the prosecution." Arranging the novel's fragments, Pilniak employs poetic means in order to achieve its rhetorical purpose-to show the global crisis of American capitalism. It is impossible to grasp the peculiarity of the travelogue if we leave aside its poetic nature. As with a poem, the succession of the travelogue's elements is based on phonetic similarities, subtle semantic shifts, and associations of memory. 32 Repetitions of lengthy passages, so unusual in a novel, become understandable as the mark of a poetic work.

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Poetic features recruited for rhetorical purposes manifest themselves on different levels of the text, and they often violate speech norms. Since this problem has not received scholarly attention before, I will provide representative examples of OKs linguistic experiments in an appendix. Lexical and grammatical neologisms reflect neologisms on the level of composition-the aforementioned repetitions of paragraphs, fragmented narration, sudden interruption of narration. OK only seems to be a motley mosaic. On closer reading, we recognize the recurrent patterns and threads that disappear from the surface to be picked up again later. The author eventually returns to and finishes the sentences and stories broached in the beginning of the novel. An anecdote may be folded into a metaphor or metonymy: Pilniak often constructs idiosyncratic idioms that refer to representative episodes in the text, incomprehensible if the reader has missed the semantic link. For example, missis chertova mamasha (Mrs. Devil's Mother) is recurrently mentioned in the narrative in the meaning of "layouts." We can reconstruct the meaning of this expression through the derogatory idiom idi k chertovoi materi (literally, "go to Devil's mother," "go to H e11") . Pilniak's seemingly random juxtaposition of passages not only serves the purpose of creating a wide, patchwork-like picture of American reality, but also works on the principle of"the poetics of omitted links": 33 the reader is invited to discover the implied connections. For example, Pilniak juxtaposes a passage about Americans' piety, in which he describes the religious services that typically open political conventions, with a portrait of Al Capone and his racket (part 28). At the juncture of the two passages is the motif of a bridge: ''A bridge much more grandiose than the Brooklyn Bridge was being built there, the bridge from "technological individualism" into gangsterism'' (557). Various "invisible bridges," logical and emotional, form recurrent motifs throughout the novel: "Is there no opportunity to build not only an emotional but a logical bridge between the airy 'freedom' of skyscrapers and the underground quiet work of hogs in Chicago?" (503). 34 This image foregrounds the reader's primary task: to see the invisible bridges between social phenomena of different planes, between different historical epochs, and to find connections among the different aspects of American life, as well as among the fragments of Pilniak's own novel. But the freedom of interpretation that Pilniak offers to his reader is illusory: the author elicits a predetermined answer. Multiple voices and styles are orchestrated to create the image of America as a capitalist Hell on earth. The only travelogue that transcends this monological mode of the

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American narrative-insofar, at least, as this was even possible in the early Soviet era-is Ilf and Petrov's Odnoetazhnaia Ameriha.

llf and Petrov-An American Picaresque Ilf and Petrov's narrative differs from those of their predecessors in many respects-in the breadth of the material covered, the authorial figure, the genre of the travelogue, the method of writing, and the general tone, as well as in the presentation of the authors' American companion and their multiple American interlocutors. Their trip was the most extensive one undertaken by Russian writers since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it permitted the most comprehensive investigation of the country. Over the course of two months, Ilf and Petrov crossed the continent from New York to San Francisco, visited Los Angeles and returned via the Southern states; along their way they toured twenty-five states and covered approximately ten thousand miles. Traveling by automobile with their American companions-drivers, guides, and interpreters-Ilf and Petrov had many opportunities to communicate with Americans of various backgrounds and from different social strata, such as hitchhikers, motel owners, and city clerks, whose voices and stories they interweave into their authorial narrative. Moreover, Ilf and Petrov's travelogue comprised not only text but also many photographs (they took more than a thousand), which significantly influenced their narrative. The travelogue first appeared as a series of short essays and photographs in Ogonek (starting in April 1936),35 was later published in installments (Znamia 10 and 11 [1936], and Roman-gazeta 4 and 5 [1937]), and was finally released as a book in 1937. One-Storied America builds on the authors' personal letters, written during the journey, meticulously kept road diaries, 36 and articles and photo~essays. In the final text, immediate impressions are balanced by generalizations, animated by feuilleton-like sketches, 37 and organized around a single road plot. There is no significant difference between the tone of Ilf and Petrov's book and that of their personal documents, such as we find in Gorky. The final result took the form of an ironic, picaresque, semi-fictional, semi-documentary road novel. Ilf and Petrov developed some parts of their American text into separate works, including the sketch "Chasy i liudi" (Hours and People) and the short story "Tonia." They also wrote a feuilleton "Kolumb prichalivaet k beregu" (Columbus Approaches the Shore), an ironic fantasy about the effect Columbus's arrival would have had in modern-day America, as well as the effect the modern America would have had on Columbus.

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One-StoriedAmerica shifts the paradigm of the Soviet-American text with a more nuanced mix of elements. While the journey to Hell still remains its underlying model, utopian features are reclaimed. As in Ilf and Petrov's description of Chicago, "nowhere else ... are heaven and hell so tightly interwoven" as in their One-Storied America. Additionally, happy adventures and personal misfortune both underlie the travelogue. The curious duo's enthusiastic journey had a macabre downside, not reflected in their text: Ilf's health significantly deteriorated during the sojourn. Once Ilf discovered that he was seriously ill, the trip became a virtual journey to the Other World. One-Storied America was published a few days before his death. Given Ilf's illness, the process of composing the text was atypical for the famous satirical duo. In the summer of 1936, for the first time in their shared writing careers, Ilf and Petrov worked separately, each on his own chapters. However, upon showing the written chapters to each other, they were surprised to find out that, as a result of the years of communal work, they had worked out a common style that represented their mutual identity. As their contemporaries noted, Petrov's mild humor complemented Ilf's dry, bitter satire. 38 One-Storied America demonstrated that each had integrated the other's viewpoint into his writing. 39 This attention to the other's perspective and acknowledgment of different ways of seeing was perhaps one of the factors that allowed them to create a uniquely multifaceted picture of America. In her insightful, cross-disciplinary article on perspective and the spatial structure of Ilf and Petrov's travelogue, Anne Nesbet links Ilf and Petrov's vision of America to Eisenstein's theory of montage and his study of perspective in Griffith's Intolerance. She examines the ironic tension between urban verticality and the "one-storied" horizontality of America, which constructs a paradox in the text. 40 Nesbet analyzes the skyscraper in Odnoetazhnaia Amerika not only as a cityscape dominant, but also as a new optical device that offers the authors a multi-angled picture of the city from its window. The novelty of Ilf and Petrov's perspective can be understood only in comparison with their predecessors' treatment of verticality. We have had examples of observing and describing the city from on high in Gorky, Mayakovsky, and Pilniak. Such a location suited the Russian observer very well, since it coincided with the high moral stance he intended to demonstrate and allowed him to physically view America "from above" (svysoka). In Gorky, this point of view facilitates objectifYing similes and metaphors: "The window of my room overlooks a square; all day long people pour into it from five streets very much like potatoes rolling out of sacks. They mill around and then scurry on, and again the

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streets suck them into their gullets. The square is round and filthy, like a pan long used for frying meat but never yet scoured." 41 In constructing his city perspective, Mayakovsky employs cinematographic methods: when he portrays the onset of the workday in New York, his artistic eye registers the movement of masses of people like a camera fixed in his hotel window, without shifting its focus or angle. The poem "Skyscraper in CrossSection'' anticipates Eisenstein's idea of a transparent skyscraper, which the director planned to realize in The Glass House, a film he conceived in 1927.42 Mayakovsky's poem functions like Eisenstein's elevator, moving up through the vertical construction and allowing a glimpse into the life of the building's inhabitants. But Mayakovsky utilizes this elaborate technique for a straightforward purpose; sliding through the stories of the skyscraper, he visits different social strata and demonstrates the extremes of America's social hierarchy. Thus, the building represents the structure of society in inverse: the lower stories are occupied by higher ranks, while the poorest are huddled at the top. Verticality is treated mono-dimensionally here. Similarly, Pilniak constructs his cityscape as an observation from the roof of a high-rise belonging to an acquaintance. And like Mayakovsky, he makes it a metaphor for social inequality. Looking down, he sees the roofs of the seven-storied houses of the poor, black with soot; raising his eyes, he observes the magnificent skyscrapers belonging to multi-millionaires who are richer than his host, and he "understands everything" about New York, a city that is excellent only for millionaires. Although Pilniak admits to being impressed with the picture of the "fantastical," "biblical," "ominous," "grand" city from above, he abruptly shifts his perspective and immediately contrasts this view with scenes that a pedestrian might witness: "But if you walk along the streets of New York, it is a terrible city, the most terrible in the world" (498). Only Ilf and Petrov take advantage of the possibilities of the skyscraper as an optical device to create an in-depth, multi-planed, non-politicized picture. In order to see all the layers of the city, they change their position, even lean out the window: "New York opened at once on several planes. The upper plane was occupied by the tops of those skyscrapers that were higher than ours .... On the next plane, open in its entirety to our gaze, in addition to stacks, skylights, and tomcats one could see flat roofs on which were small one-storied houses with gardens, skimpy trees, little brick paths, a small fountain, and even rattan chairs ....That monstrosity [the elevated railway] was on the next plane of New York City... .In order to see the last and fundamental plane, the plane of street, one had to bend out of the window and look down at a right angle. There, as in reversed binoculars,

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one could see a tiny crossing with tiny automobiles" (22-23). 43 As Nesbet convincingly argues, this attention to perspective was apparently facilitated by the fact that, by the time of the duo's American journey, Ilfhad become a passionate photographer. 44 Even though Alexander Rodchenko, a prominent constructivist photo-artist, criticized Ilf-as-photographer for the flatness of his unprofessional pictures in his review of the American photo-essays, 45 the very habit of using different lenses contributed to the duo's complex vision of America. Indeed, the use of the camera actually involved looking at the country rather than only reading it! Some of the scenes in One-Storied America represent, in fact, photographs made with words. The writers would "stop the moment" and describe certain scenes as shots, as if they had seen them through a camera lens. Apparently, the camera not only registered their experience for bookkeeping purposes (as per Rodchenko) but also actively shaped it: ''And thus the Rocky Mountains remained in our memory: a bright and cold springlike day oflate November, small compact clouds racing across a greenish and translucent sky, and over the edges of the plateau gray and blue cliffs as even as a fence" (195). Such verbal photo-sketches in the novel demonstrate how exactly Ilf and Petrov's narrative "processes" visual image through words and conveys the depth and complexity lacking in their visual means. In the next sentence the writers radically shift the scale of the scene and universalize it, pushing the borders of the "photograph" so that it embraces the whole world before refocusing on the travelers. The writers find themselves not only at the ridge of the Rocky Mountains (the Continental Divide) but also in the universe as a whole. This infinitely broadening perspective recalls the finale ofGogol's ''A Terrible Revenge": in Ilf and Petrov's words, "Back of us, below, were Texas, Chicago, New York, the Atlantic Ocean, Europe. Ahead of us, below, were California, the Pacific Ocean, Japan, Siberia, Moscow. There we were ankledeep in icy slush, clumsily tugging the chains over the hard tires washed clean by the water" (195). The complexity of Ilf and Petrov's picture of America is not, of course, exhausted by its multi-planed spatial perspective. Rather, the spatial perspective serves as a synecdoche for their overall vision of the country, reflecting, as if in a drop of water, the world of One-Storied America. While the main prism through which we see the country is that of the foreign narrators, Ilf and Petrov take the viewpoints of Americans into account to a greater degree than any other travelogue writers of the period. Their American guides and companions as well as multiple American interlocutors-from hitchhikers to prominent writers and engineersprovide the American perspective.

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The traveling duo, who functioned as a single author, appear as the travelogue's joint narrator. Ilf and Petrov always refer to themselves as "we," and that corporate subject almost never splits; if they wish to refer to only one of the duo they say "one of us."Their Virgil is also realized as a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Adams. Mr. Adams, an engineer, was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and both he and his younger wife spoke excellent Russian. For the travelers, they became ideal companions, "a complex hybrid," "a guidechauffeur-interpreter-altruist" (gido-shrfero-perevodchiko-besserebrennik, 4 5). The Adamses ideally combine svoe and chuzhoe: not just foreign observers of the alien country, they are svoi for Americans; at the same time they are Communist-oriented and socially svoi for the travelers. Their inclusion enhances the travelogue's persuasive power. Adams himself had had a vast experience of the Soviet Union. Ilf and Petrov's description of his Soviet journey outlines an ideal that they themselves apparently aspired to in America: He had worked at Dneprostroi, in Stalingrad, Cheliabinsk. A knowledge of old Russia made it possible for him to understand the Soviet land as it is rarely understood by foreigners. He had traveled across the USSR in hard cars [railroad cars with wooden bench seating]. Entered into conversation with workers and farmers. He saw the country not only as it opened to his gaze, but he saw it as it had been yesterday and as it would become tomorrow. He saw it in motion. (133) Criticism of the American economic system's flaws as well as mockery of the details of American life are especially convincing when they come from an American. "It is very interesting when a heart fills with pride while the purse is emptied in proportion," quips Mr. Adams, as he gazes at hotel signs that exhort travelers to "let their heart fill with pride when [they] utter the name of the hotel in which they stopped" (131). Serious and funny, intelligent and responsible, genuinely interested in people and making friends easily everywhere, the Adamses represent the best type of Americans according to Ilf and Petrov. However, one of Mr. Adams's features is quite atypical for Americans: he has little reverence for money and treats it light-heartedly. Mr. Adams exemplifies hybridity. Although he has a real-life prototype, he is also a literary character loosely modeled on Dickens's Mr. Pickwickhe himself even refers to Dickens in chapter 15. 46 Like Pickwick, Adams visits distant rural areas of his own country in the company of friends. Also like Pickwick, Adams is a round-faced, plump, short man in spectacles. Both share common character traits: they are childish, absent-minded, kind,

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and noble. Mr. Adams's absent-mindedness, however, is balanced by Mrs. Adams's practicality. Moreover, as Ilf and Petrov insist, his is the passionate absent-mindedness of a person who becomes engaged in a conversation or a particular idea and forgets the entire world. The Adams couple's comical features constantly enliven the narrative. As guides, Mr. and Mrs. Adams exhibit only one flaw-their passion for "getting information" about the road. But the more information they obtain, the more confused and uncertain they become, and the more misapprehensions occur to them. Mr. Adams's absent-mindedness provides the travelogue with a recurrent comical sub-plot: he constantly forgets various objects (his hat, glasses, and watch) in hotels and asks to have them mailed to places scheduled for future visits, where the travelers will be able to pick them up. Thus, the journey across America becomes a race for Adams's belongings. Sometimes the travelers are ahead of schedule, or their things have been misdirected. Almost invariably, they fail to arrive on time. Then the objects are re-sent, but again they miss the travelers, who have already left. Thus, the travelers lose their parts along the way, as it were; and meanwhile the parts move along independently, constantly trying-but failing-to catch up with their owners. This results in a degree of suspense. Only in New York, at journey's end, are the Adamses reunited with their lost things-with Mr. Adams's favorite hat and, most importantly, their chief "absent belonging," their baby. Aided by Mr. Adams, the travelers communicate with other Americans, whose stories they integrate into their travelogue. As is quite natural for travelogues, many of these chance acquaintances appear in the third person, together with the authors' interpretations and ideologically appropriate comments. It therefore comes as no surprise that the narrative, which was written in an era of ideological stringency but was nevertheless intended for publication, is biased. It is hard to disagree with Karen L. Ryan, who argues that the novel's image of America is constructed as the ideological Other. 47 But given the demonizing literary tradition of the American narrative, the writers' belief in socialist ideals, and the requirements of the censorship, it is still surprising how many different American voices found their way into Ilf and Petrov's travelogue and how broad a spectrum of worldviews it represents. The reaction of readers and critics, disturbed and puzzled by the paucity of accounts of oppressed workers, exploited blacks, and impoverished farmers, 48 demonstrates how unusual the travelogue was. The narrators' American interlocutors come in two major kinds: prominent figures (politicians, writers, engineers, to whom the Russian writers had letters of recommendation) 49 and incidental acquaintances (owners of tourist

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houses,hitchhikers, salesmen). Both groups are welcoming toward Russians, but while the former are genuinely interested in the changes taking place in Russia, the latter willingly tell their own stories but ask no questions. The narrators conclude that "typical Americans" are incurious and self-centered. But at the same time, Ilf and Petrov acknowledge that Americans are good friends, attentive to others and ready to help strangers. The farther the travelers proceed into the depths of America, the more gloomy is their picture of America and the more evident is the devastation caused by the Great Depression. The narrators' sincere admiration for the level of service, efficiency, organization, democracy, and disciplined work ethics is fused, on the one hand, with puzzlement in the face of obvious inconsistencies and, on the other, with rage and condemnation of the capitalism that has forced their interlocutors to leave their homes and wander in search of work. In One-Storied America, the chronotope of the road determines the heroes' meetings with various native inhabitants. They move horizontally in space as well as vertically among different social strata, seeing through and mockingly unveiling society's corruption. As in classical picaresque novels, society itself is in the process of change. Ironic observers, outsiders in the loci they visit, the travelers belong to "a plane, different than the entire other world, which gives them an opportunity to mock this world and undermine its institutions." 50 Their function is close to that of Bakhtin's jester/foolto lay bare the gloomy deception of a stagnant worldY However, while One-Storied America contains certain undeniable features of the picaresque novel, 52 the travelers epitomize the high end of the rogue's image; the low one is absent. The travelers are not swindlers; they neither pursue material interests nor try to establish themselves in the society they explore. By the time of their American journey, Ilf and Petrov were the authors of two picaresque novels, which are considered Soviet exemplars of the genre. These two novels, 7he Twelve Chairs and 7he (Little) Golden Calf, are sometimes referred to as the "Bender saga" or the "Bender cycle,"53 since they are united by the image of the protagonist, Ostap Bender, who travels across post-revolutionary Russia. Charles Malamuth chose to title his English translation of One-Storied America "Little Golden America," thereby pointing to the reign of "the golden calf" in America, but also providing a link between the two types of picaresque journey, Bender's and Ilf and Petrov's. Indeed, the three novels echo each other at the level of detail: for example, Ilf and Petrov's American car, the Little Ford or "Fordik''"of a noble mousegray color" (blagorodnogo myshinogo tsveta), which evoked a fierce personal attachment and pride in its owners, reminds us of the car christened "the

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Antelope" in 7he Golden Calf, which is also more of a character than a means of transportation. Ilf and Petrov's readers occasionally suggested that the writers should have sent Ostap Bender himself abroad. 54 However, there is a significant difference between One-Storied America and the Bender saga. First, as Ryan notes, the reality explored in the American travelogue was not the writers' own, and mocking the Other is a less complex and noble task than ironically portraying onesel£ Secondand related to the first-is the travelogue's autobiographical character, the absence of the complex sliding lens provided by Bender. Analyzing the structure of 7he Twelve Chairs and 7he Golden Calf, Shcheglov observes that these texts create a flickering (perelivaiushchiisia) effect: on the one hand, they belong to the tradition of high, idealized Soviet romanticism, and on the other, they present a harsh satire on Soviet daily life. 55 In the American travelogues, by contrast, there is no ironic gap between the hero's stance and the authorial position; the authors and the protagonist-narrators coincide. This determines the absence in One-Storied America of an "organic ambiguity," which, according to Shcheglov, characterizes the world of the two earlier novels. As Zholkovsky observes, every episode of the Bender saga "combines the leitmotif of the itinerant hero with that of a typical specimen of the surrounding milieu." 56 Moreover, in the travelogue tradition, Bender's "invariant behavior" consists of three elements: recognition, or the reduction of his new acquaintance "to a formula, identifYing the appropriate set of cliches for manipulating him''; "parodic mimicry" of his enthusiasm and characteristic discourse; and cynical exploitation. While the third element is missing in One-Storied America, the first two are present in the treatment of Americans. As the authors of their own text, the travelers realize the picaro's function oflaying bare society's deceptions through literary narrative rather than through actual interaction with their acquaintances. The "recognition'' and the "reduction'' of American acquaintances to an appropriate formula occur throughout Ilf and Petrov's journey. Each interlocutor possesses a number of individual features, but these are overlaid with typical ones. Although Ilf and Petrov claim that they try to withhold generalizations, they eventually furnish the formulaic portrait of a typical American. N ai:ve and childlike, he dreams of getting rich and therefore supports adversarial political interests. Hence, the travelers conclude that the "typical American'' is "one-storied," or horizonless. In contrast to Bender, the autobiographical heroes do not try to adapt to their new surroundings but remain themselves, i.e., representatives of Soviet consciousness. But they do mimic the style of their collective "interlocutor,"

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America. In the style of advertisements, they recognize a "typically American'' naive and boastful desire to be "the largest, the best, the most effective," and they reproduce this style in their own text in an ironic fashion: "In America, a customer is sold not a bed, but good repose" (210); "we were finally obliged to fill our hearts with pride and take rooms in a hotel" (160); "this made it [the Las Palm as Camp] resemble a hotel and justified the traveler's filling his heart with pride" (327); "for twenty-five cents the photographed pedestrian may have a candid photograph of himself, a splendid photograph, in the uninhibited act of raising his leg" (25). Analyzing Ilf and Petrov's earlier, non-American texts, Paul Klanderud demonstrates how, by making Bender mimic official formulas and ironically reproducing similar formulas in their feuilletons, they inculcate into their reader's mind the potentially subversive concept of total linguistic control in a totalitarian state. 57 In their American travelogue, they employ the word of the Other as their own and thereby demonstrate the linguistic control carried out by a capitalist state. But in this latter case, this feature is part of the overall critique of an alien ideology; we do not see a complex opposition between the reality they criticize and the ideal they glorifY, as we do in the Bender cycle. In discussing the limitations of One-Storied America, we should not, however, forget that the border between svoi and chuzhoi in the travelogue is social rather than ethnically xenophobic; it separates not Russians and exotic Americans but Soviet-oriented characters and those who do not share socialist ideals. Shcheglov's observation on the Bender saga applies equally to One-Storied America: "The criterion of belonging/non-belonging to the socialist world separates the 'clean' from 'the unclean' in Ilf and Petrov."58 While one can find the chuzhoi in their Soviet picaresque, there is also plenty of"svoi" in their American text. Under the category of svoi we can include Upton Sinclair, who was popular in the Soviet Union; Lincoln Steffens, who was disappointed in the American social system; Rhys Williams, a friend of John Reed; and the engineer Thompson, who praised Soviet industrialization. When Ilf and Petrov narrate their meetings with these people, their tone is full of admiration, and the style is close to their ideal Soviet discourse. A highly romantic, mythologized image of the Soviet Union provides the ever-present background to Ilf and Petrov's American text. As in the Bender saga, it serves as the ideal, the opposite of described reality. However, the authors' attention to the details that can and should be borrowed from America provides a perspective on Russia, which is not always idealized. America never makes them doubt either their own ideals or Soviet ideology,

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but it does make them think about concrete flaws in Soviet life. For example, the travelers' admiration for American service, organization, efficiency, cleanliness, and democratic working relations highlights the absence of all these qualities from Russian life. The lack of precisely these virtues had been the object of irony in the Bender cycle. And perhaps the most important quality that redeems the authors of OneStoried America is their self-irony. While irony and satire verging on solemn condemnation are ubiquitous in the American discourse, One-Storied America offers the first opportunity for travelers to treat themselves ironically. This is what makes Ilf and Petrov's travelogue so outstanding; unlike all the previous writers in the tradition, Ilf and Petrov were able not only to observe alien reality but also to turn their optical instrument on themselves-aliens experiencing the otherness of America-and have the courage to make themselves objects of the reader's humor. They confess their insecuritiesespecially, the fear of looking ridiculous in unfamiliar surroundings-and record embarrassing situations: "At first we were tormented by the thought that because of our inexperience we had got into the wrong taxi, into some antiquated vehicle, and that we were funny and provincial" (10). It is impossible to imagine such a self-ironic account in Gorky or Mayakovsky. Even when the latter does find himself in an embarrassing situation (for example, the one described in the sketch "How I Made Her Laugh," or an episode where he was cheated at Coney Island), he immediately turns his narrative into a satirical pamphlet. Hence, Ilf and Petrov's travelogue uniquely combines satire directed against the Other with self-irony; loyalty to Soviet ideals with attempts to grasp American reality from different angles; and condemnation of the capitalist system with high esteem for the organization of capitalist life. The America Ilf and Petrov observe-with all its splendor and misery, multi-storied cities and flat rural areas; magnificent technological achievements and the devastation caused by the Great Depression-enhances these ambiguities. As a result, Ilf and Petrov portray America as both Utopia and Hell. Although Ilf and Petrov consciously strive to provide an objective picture of America rather than to describe America as an Inferno, the paradigm of the journey through Hell pervades their portrayal of the capitalist state, and demonic images constantly impinge on the narrative. Nesbet observes that "the potential for hellishness" can be found "on both axes of the American landscape (the vertical of urban spaces and the horizontal of small-town repetitions)." 59 We can add that Ilf and Petrov distribute devilishness stylistically between the "high" romantic, urban Demon and the petty rural Devil of indistinguishable elements and eternal repetitions. Their image of

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New York is full of traditionally romantic infernal associations inherited from Gorky: "From time to time something rumbled hellishly under our feet or something else thundered overhead" (11); "a considerable flame spouted out of one of the cans" (11); "the earth trembled underfoot. And through the grates in the sidewalk came a sudden gust of heat ....Through vents placed in the pavement and covered with round metallic covers, steam broke out. For a long time we could not understand where that steam came from''(13).1his Hell is operatic, however; the smoking vents in the streets make them expect the emergence of Mephistopheles: "Almost at any moment one expected the vents to open, Mephistopheles to spring out of one of them, and, after clearing his throat, begin to sing in deep bass, right out of Fausl' (13). Chapter 5 of Ilf and Petrov's travelogue, titled "We Seek an Angel without Wings," relates their dream about an angel who would lead them out of the demonic city. In One-Storied America, urban Hell exists as one extreme on the spectrum "Hell-Paradise." Ilf and Petrov write of Chicago: "Scarcely anywhere else in the world have heaven and hell intertwined so intimately as in Chicago" (136).1he portrayal of Chicago, an epitome of the urban violation of nature, is even more harsh than the image of New York. The reason for this hellishness is obvious-capitalism. Infernal vocabulary appears as soon as Ilf and Petrov begin to analyze the social order in America: "The elevated [train] brings an income to certain companies; therefore, New Yorkers become martyrs. Along Broadway, through all the crowded traffic. With a hellish screeching, a streetcar hobbles along-only because it pays one man, the owner of an ancient streetcar company" (30-31). The other embodiment of capitalist Hell-the rural petty devil of indistinguishable small towns-does not evoke romantic associations. Eternal repetitions of one-storied America remind us of a bleak Hades rather than a vivid Inferno. Its boredom is inescapable. Portraying the deadness of small towns, Ilf and Petrov effectively invert similes. Instead of likening the towns to cemeteries, they choose a less straightforward technique; they liken the cemetery in New Orleans to a small town in rural America: "Its two-storied brick dullness makes the cemetery reminiscent of a small American town. It even had its Main Street" (354). While both the urban and the rural represent types of Hell in Ilf and Petrov's American narrative, the urban violates the natural: "The earth gave man all that he could take from it. Man applied himself with admirable skill. .. .Yet, on this amply fertilized soil, instead of gleaming palaces of joy, there sprang up, in defiance of all reason, a huge, ugly, poisonous fungus, the city of Chicago in the State of Illinois" (139). At the same time, the hellishness of American urbanism is not based on technology. In this

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respect, Ilf and Petrov differ from Korolenko and Gorky, for whom inhuman technology was an immanent characteristic of the monstrous city. Ilf and Petrov glorify the struggle of man with nature and man's eventual victory; after all, the dream of gaining control over the material world inspired Soviets throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, the travelers enthusiastically praise the American materialization of the Soviet dream of harnessing nature. Viewing the achievements of American technology, they could have repeated with Mayakovsky: "I am proud of this mile of steel. My dreams have come alive in it." 60 Describing the construction of a bridge across the Mississippi, they claim: '~merican nature and American technology met in a contest of power" (353). Later they resume: "In the long battle between man and nature, man has come out the victor" (354). The wonders of technology provide much grist for Ilf and Petrov's rhetorical mill. In the sphere of"non-urban" technology, the opposition of Hell-Paradise is reversible: Hell may be associated with the wild, archaic, unharnessed, and natural (in the negative sense), and Paradise with the civilized, technological, and man-made. Portraying the idyllic, irrigated valleys of California-formerly dessicated deserts-the writers stress that human labor has turned desert into Paradise: "California was not at all a paradise; it was a desert ... .In this paradise it is necessary to toil endlessly, uninterruptedly; otherwise it will turn into a hell" (326). Praising American roads, they write with nostalgia but also with pride: "Where the feathered arrow of the Indian had whistled stands a gasoline station, and the compressor breathes heavily, forcing the air into the automobile chamber. ... And where the Spaniards, breathless under the weight of their leather and steel armor, dragged themselves along the scarcely noticeable trail now stretches the usual American highway, a road of high caliber" (327). While regretting the fate of theN ative Americans, they cannot help but admire the achievements of American labor. Although they pay tribute to the Soviet discourse of man's struggle against nature, Ilf and Petrov do not focus on this conflict. More often than not they try to overcome the binary opposition "technology-nature" by fusing the two: they note that American technology has already become the country's landscape. They repeatedly describe American technology in terms of nature: "When we passed this desert we found ourselves in another one, where telegraph poles were grown and nothing else. Another day passed, and from the desert of telegraph poles we passed to a desert overgrown with advertisements, billboards, announcements, and all kinds of written, drawn, and printed pleadings" (329). Throughout the novel, they consistently develop the idea that, in America, nature and technology are

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phenomena of the same order. They compare caves with gigantic, manmade decorations, and they indicate that it is difficult to distinguish human artifacts from natural phenomena: "Right outside the city is a gigantic crater seemingly made by nature. As a matter of fact, it has been dug out by people" (329). They are fascinated by orange plantations near Los Angeles, which they juxtapose with oil derricks; a stove for warming the air near each of the orange trees surprises them as much as the orange trees themselves. They claim: "The Empire State Building, Niagara, the Ford plant, the Grand Canyon, Boulder Dam, sequoias and the suspension bridges of San Francisco-they were all phenomena of the same order. American nature and American technology not only supplement each other in order jointly to astonish the imagination of man, but to squelch him'' (256). Ilf and Petrov portray the utopian pole of America as the harmony of nature perfectly organized by human effort and technology. Depicting technology as landscape, Ilf and Petrov demonstrate that Mayakovsky's dream of a technology that would expunge the external manifestations of industry has, in fact, been realized in the America of the 1930s. But the travelers always remember and remind the reader that any American utopia is an illusion, a man-made Eden corrupted by capitalism. Under the guise of Paradise lurk hellish working conditions: "In this paradisiacal valley, where large pale grapefruit ripen, in the valley permeated throughout with the opiating odor of lemons and oranges, in this valley goes on the most cruel exploitation of Mexicans and Filipinos in the entire world. And more than for its lettuce and oranges, this valley is known for its brutish treatment of strikers" (327). This paradoxical, twofold image of the country is perhaps best of all summarized by Ilf and Petrov's readers: ''America would have been paradise if it had been socialist."61 In their short story "Tonia," the accents shift, and Ilf and Petrov demonstrate that America can be a real Hell for Soviet citizens stripped of their country and isolated from the Soviet collective and collective work. As does Korolenko in In a Strange Land, the writers portray America through a simple, natural character. (In "Columbus Approaches the Shore" they also employ this technique, but in an ironic vein: the fact that the na!ve character-Columbusis coming from a different era enhances defamiliarization.) Tonia, the young wife of an embassy clerk, Kostia, follows her husband to America, expecting to experience the greatest adventure of her life. Instead, her relationship with America is the story of a non-meeting and, later, a profound disillusionment. In contrast to Korolenko's Dyma, who is shocked by a demonic New York immediately after disembarking from his ship, Tonia and Kostia do not even have the opportunity to see the city in the rush of their arrival: "Only half an

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hour later, already sitting in a Pullman car on the 'New York-Washington' train, did Tonia realize that she had passed the largest city in the world. But what kind of city it was she could not tell. In her memory, it remained only as a rumble, an ancient taxi where the radio was playing, the gloom and glitter of some unknown streets."62 Their destination is the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Unlike the autobiographical, peripatetic narrators of OneStoried America, Tonia is confined to an isolated space. Time, which passes unnoticed for Kostia, who is occupied at the embassy, almost stops for Tonia. Like a prison inmate, she keeps track of the slowly passing days: "Sitting with her husband in the evening, Tonia used to say with surprise: 'Do you know, Kostia, that we have lived here for twelve days already.' 'Is that really so?'Kostia marveled, 'and I haven't noticed"' (466). The embassy is an island of normal Soviet life and work in the midst of a dreary hopeless country, but it is insufficient to make Tonia happy; deprived of connections with a larger community, she gradually withers. The situation is resolved by an abrupt "happy" ending: Tonia and her husband are unexpectedly ordered to return home. Taking into account the social climate of the 1930s, today's reader cannot miss the dark irony of this ostensibly cheerful ending. The final scene of the story is ominous: "Tonia with a sinking heart ... saw in the gloom of the winter night a wooden watchtower with a Red Army soldier dressed in a long guard's coat and a helmet. For a minute, the lights of the train spotted him, the gun's barrel glistened, and the tower slowly moved backward.1he guard was covered with snow but, unmoving and imposing as a monument, he did not shake it off" (498). Even though they remain faithful to the ideals of the Soviet system, Ilf and Petrov, perhaps unconsciously, portray the heroine's return as an entry into another infernally enclosed space, the Soviet Union, which she considers to be a Paradise. The stunned reader recognizes the fusion of Heaven and Hell-which is characteristic of Ilf and Petrov's image of America-in their home country. We are left with a paradox of projection, the ambiguous rhetorical task that has devolved onto Soviet travelers in the 1930s: they must search out the aspects of America worth borrowing, but, at the same time, they must also criticize capitalism as a system. Since the Soviet Union has now established itself in the world and has been recognized by the United States, the urgent need for denunciatory pamphlets, propagandist sketches and poems has ceded place to a serious, balanced critique of America. The theme of America as the Other World is still relevant, but it has become less explicit, existing as an undercurrent in the travelogues. Accordingly, both Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov distinguish between a romantic urban Hell and the mundane Hell of rural American routine.

CHAPTER

FOUR

RECURRENT SUBTEXTS AND MOTIFS IN AMERICAN TRAVELOGUES

I N P R E V I 0 U S C H A PTE R S 0 F T H I S B 0 0 K , I posited three periods in the evolution of Russian literary journeys to America and examined the travelogue writers' shifting political and rhetorical goals, as well as their individual stylistic peculiarities within each of these periods. In this part, I will adopt a diachronic approach. I now turn to major shared features that show beyond doubt that Russian writers' American travelogues do, indeed, constitute a single narrative-which I have called "the American text of Russian literature." In examining shared features, we come up against the travelogues' complex interweaving of reality and narration. Predecessors' travelogues determine the itineraries oflater travelers, who, for their part, face a choice: either to comply with their models and visit famous-and much described-places of interest and supply their own account of them; or to diverge from the tradition, experience new things, and propose new narrative themes. In this part, I will analyze a body of recurrent travelogue motifs, which I will account for, on the one hand, by the common physical realities experienced during each of the journeys but, on the other hand, by the narrative tradition of the Russian journey to America. The literary tradition filters reality; and reality, in turn, re-insinuates itself into literary accounts. Paradoxically, we see the workings of this dynamic particularly clearly in instances when writers do not visit a traditional point of interest. Having chosen to bypass a particular destination, the travelers nevertheless acknowledge their awareness of the "rules" of the American travelogue, which decree that they should have visited it. Pilniak, for example, admits that he did not see the Statue of Liberty "which always starts the description of America," and yet he pays ironic tribute to the tradition by supplying a description of it (see the section in this chapter on the Statue of Liberty).

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Just as crucial for creating the American text of Russian literature as recurrent motifs are shared subtexts. As I will show, Gogol and Dante underpin and inform each of the literary journeys, a phenomenon that I attribute both to the two authors' direct impact on the traveling writers and to the Russian literary tradition of intertextuality.

Russian Travelers in the Infernal Land of Dead Souls -Dante and Gogol as Recurrent Subtexts As we have seen in earlier chapters, the descent into Hell serves as a template for Russian writers' American journeys. Although we encounter direct references to 1he Divine Comedy somewhat infrequently, Dante's epic nevertheless provides a particularly apposite background against which to read the travelogues. We know that Gogol was strongly drawn to Dante, 1 and Gogol, in turn, served as a direct source for the allusions and techniques the travelers adopt in order to show America as the Other World. Similar to 1he Divine Comedy, both Dead Souls and the American travelogues feature a traveler who moves through a space that is represented by the author as the land of the dead. Gogol's presence is often signaled through explicit textual references. These straightforward allusions, however, are merely the tip of the iceberg; more significant is the fact that, in the travelogues, Gogol becomes a prism for the Russian literary perception of America. Even when travelogues do not explicitly allude to Gogol's texts, they employ his grotesque poetics to portray America as a land of dead souls. For example, New York's literary space bears an uncanny resemblance to Gogol's Mirgorod and St. Petersburg. Similarly, American travelogues borrow Dead Souls' journey structure in order to show real life as Hell. When Ilf and Petrov visit San Francisco, they acknowledge their kinship with Dead Souls' picaro-in-chief: "Like Chichikov, we paid a visit to the mayor of the city" (264). In a certain sense, Chichikov and the Russian travelers embark on the same mission, a quest for dead souls. But whereas Chichikov passes off dead serfs as live ones in order to mortgage them, Russian travel writers invert the process by seeking out the living and portraying them as dead in order to cast America as a capitalist Other World. Oddly enough, Gogol himself viewed America positively, very much in the vein of the early Herzen, who at first portrayed America as a liberal refuge. In his youth, Gogol envisioned America as an ideal faraway land, a symbol of the unknown. In his early years he romantically planned a voyage to America. This dream journey, as Yuri Mann suggests, is echoed in the first, uncensored version of Dead Souls, in the crucial episode of"The Tale of

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Captain Kopeikin." 2 Kopeikin is a one-armed, one-legged war veteran who rebels after the government refuses to help him. He then organizes a gang of robbers in the woods near Riazan', intending to victimize government officials. In Gogol's first version of the tale, America figures as the refuge to which Kopeikin eventually flees and from which he writes a letter to the tsar asking him to establish pensions for disabled veterans. Gogol creates a textual pattern that proves to be foundational for travelers to America: he applies grotesque techniques in order to reveal the infernal characteristics of space-which is to say, his own, Russian space, the world of svoe. Our travelers redirect and repurpose Gogol's technique in order to demonize the Other, the chuzhoe. But, as I have argued in previous chapters, over the course of the entire time that Russians experience America, they simultaneously maintain an ideal of Russia firmly in mind. As a result, they navigate such a convoluted complex of projections that the borders between svoe and chuzhoe inevitably blur. Gogol's play 7he Inspector General is perhaps the most obvious influence on Russian travelers' perceptions of themselves (and, ironically, on their contemporaries' perceptions of them as well). The figure of Khlestakov, the petty clerk whom corrupt provincial officials mistake for a high-ranking inspector and who embraces this role-all the while spinning the most improbable lies-virtually haunts Russian writers in America. One influential scholarly hypothesis proposes Pavel Svinin, the first Russian travelogue writer to America, as Khlestakov's prototype. 3 Svinin's picturesque account of his journey, full of exoticism, sealed his reputation as a liar and unreliable narrator in the eyes of his literary contemporaries. Pushkin said of him: "Pavlushka was a neat, kind, diligent boy but he had one big flaw: he couldn't say three words in a row without lying."4 In fairness to Svinin, specialists in American history value him for his open-mindedness and attention to detail, and modern Russian literary scholars like Rezepin have tried to salvage his reputation. For our purposes, however, it is important to note that the very fact of going to America and writing about it seems to presuppose that a travelogue writer, even a trustworthy one like Svinin, must be some kind of Khlestakov. In fact, Svinin may have deserved this reputation less than some of his successors, particularly the authors we are studying here. 5 In American travelogues, the dashing figure of Khlestakov undergoes a strange transformation and becomes a ubiquitous presence, casting its influence over the narrator, who begins to perceive himself as Khlestakov. It even impinges on the object of description, on America itsel£ Of course, America with its abundance of technological miracles and its penchant for self-aggrandizement and extravagant exaggeration could make any Russian

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traveler writer feel like a Khlestakov.The writers themselves suggest that there is something Khlestakov-like in America's very nature, in its boastfulness, its vacuity, and its concern for superficiality and external effect (in order to express this boastful superficiality, they employ the word "khlestakovshchina," or "khlestakovitis").The implication is that the travelogue's material chooses and forms its own narrator, and each writer must deal in his own way with the fact that America has imposed the role of Khlestakov on him. The first mention of Khlestakov in the American narrative appears in Mayakovsky's poem "150,000,000." Describing the grand scale of his imagined American city (Chicago), Mayakovsky exclaims: Courier outstrips courier at full career. You couldn't count 'em all. Such a number would make the greenhorn Khlestakov gasp for breath. (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2: 133)

One Soviet critic has observed that the allusion emerges when the poem's heroic energy is overshadowed by a fantastic satire based on hyperbolic and grotesque images. Moreover, the reference accompanies a shift in the narrative voice from that of the Soviet Poet, the representative of millions, to Khlestakov's private casual tone. 6 Many Soviet critics, however, have interpreted the allusion as a simple genre marker. Pertsov, for instance, writes that "the employment of the Gogolian image introduces a satirical tone into this picture ofbourgeois bustle and advertising, khlestakovshchina," thereby dismissing the causal connection between the object of description (khlestakovshchina) and the Khlestakov-like narrator. Rougle goes further, suggesting that when Mayakovsky states that his imaginary America is grander than Khlestakov's wildest fantasies, he reveals a similarity in narrative stance between Gogol's hero and his own. Both are ready to offer their audience a poeticized and exaggerated version of popular fantasies: "Both exaggerate to the point of falsehood, both claim to have had firsthand experience of'the big wide world,' and both, in fact, presume fairly much the same values and ideas of that world on the part of their listeners-Petersburg/ Chicago is grand because the food there is marvelous, because the place is swarming with generals, etc." 7 Rougle sees Mayakovsky's implication that the new proletarian audience is also petty and ignorant as a basis for Trotsky's criticism of the poem. Trotsky's touchiness draws our attention to the fact that khlestakovshchina, as a characterization of both the object of description and the narrator, is contagious and infects the image of the implied reader as well. The fact that Mayakovsky, having experienced America in person, feels

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justified in defending his early poem as true to the nation's spirit confirms that a new Khlestakov, with a more vivid fancy than Gogol's character, is indeed the only authentic narrator for the task of describing America. Even Gorky, despite his first-hand experience of the reality he described, was not immune from being perceived as a Khlestakov by his contemporaries. In his article "The End of Gorky," Filosofov brands Gorky as a Khlestakov for describing Europe, and later America, as if he were the first traveler ever to write about them, even though he has no knowledge of the countries he visits and lacks the compassion that should ideally underpin a real travelogue. 8 Filosofov targets Gorky's didactic tone, his alleged ignorance, his readiness to judge what he does not understand, and his presumptuous statements, which are offered as a new word despite being well-worn. By showing Gorky up as a Khlestakov, Filosofov refuses to become a member of Khlestakov's reverent audience. Allusions to 1he Inspector General appear again in the two travelogues of the 1930s. Pilniak feels like a Khlestakov when the journalists who greet him on his arrival in America pass around an informational flyer about him: 9 "Some people I didn't know were handing around to journalists a 'statement'-some sort of Khlestakov document about me, telling all kinds of stories about how old I am, and who my dads are, and what kind of soand-so I am" (455). This torrent of self-advertisement-a routine part of standard American business behavior-seems like a weird kind of boasting to the Russian writer. He is annoyed that the Khlestakovian journalists try to turn him into a Khlestakov as well, and he rejects the role. Pilniak's references to Khlestakov are purely satirical. 10 America, as he sees it, is a country ofKhlestakovs who perpetually show off and exaggerate. In portraying America, he invokes Gogol by regularly repeating a phrase that Khlestakov utters when he is completely carried away by his own embellished stories of life in St. Petersburg: "The banner is galloping off" (shtandart skachet; an expression that has become proverbial in Russian). Pilniak invokes the phrase in order to point to the American passion for patriotic ostentation as evidenced by America's ubiquitous banners and other national symbols. He also plays with a pun on "shtandart (banner)" vs. "standart (norm, standard)": "The banner-and the standard-are racing!" (Shtandart-i standart-skachut! 508); "all of New York's oohing and ahing is about national banners and standards ... for those who have a checkbook in their pocket" ( Ves' akhovyi i okhovyi N'iu fork v natsional'nykh shtandartakh i standartak~dlia tekh, u kogo v karmane chekovaia knizhka; 501). Through this Gogolian allusion, Pilniak indicates that America is a country of slogans and stereotypes, obsessed with self-aggrandizement and mere display.

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Although Khlestakov is not explicitly mentioned in Ilf and Petrov's travelogue, they apparently have him in mind in their portrayal of the dashing Captain Trefiliev, 11 whom they meet in Hollywood. When the Captain tells the travelers about his extraordinary adventures and his historic role in the Russian Civil War-delivering Denikin's order to Kolchak-we easily recognize Khlestakov's agitated manner of speech, which is full of grotesque exaggerations: "You see, I raced in express trains! From the train to the ship! From the ship to the train! Through Europe, the Atlantic, America, the Pacific, Japan, the Far East" (303). 12 The crippled Captain Trefiliev evokes the figure of yet another of Gogol's adventurers, the aforementioned Captain Kopeikin, who brings in train the aura of Dead Souls.lt comes as no surprise that such a grotesque figure might appear on one of Hollywood's movie sets, which Ilf and Petrov regarded as the essence of American illusion. Another explicit connection between Gogol and the American travelogue-a reference to Mirgorod-occurs in Esenin, who as a "peasant" poet is especially sensitive to the tensions between the archaic (the country) and the modern (the city). The combination of Old World and modern connotations in his text's title, ''An Iron Mirgorod," recalls a scene in his poem "Sorokoust," where Esenin writes sympathetically about a foal racing against the train: "Doesn't he know that the steel cavalry triumphed over living horses?" 13 Gogol's Mirgorod is the epitome of a sleepy provincial town where life is almost immobile. Esenin refers to the Mirgorod cycle, in particular to "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Qyarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich," the story of a petty legal suit over an absurd trifle, to stress America's social and intellectual provincialism: "The strength of reinforced concrete and the mass of the buildings have limited the American's brain and narrowed his vision. The American's manners recall the manners of Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich, of eternal Gogolian memory" (154). Thanks to Esenin, Mirgorod becomes a recurrent ironic symbol of American provincialism. In later travelogues, writers refer to Mirgorod when they wish to stress the coexistence of external, technological advancement and social backwardness. Pilniak finds this contrast typical for Russians in America. After visiting the Molokans, a religious sect of Russian origin, Pilniak provides an estranging description of their traditions. Everything archaic in their village reminds him of Gogol's province, and a puddle in the center of the village immediately calls to mind a similar one in Mirgorodone of the town's major points of interest: ''At the crossroad there is an orthodox-Lord forgive mel-puddle, like in Gogol, but above the puddle there is an American street lamp" (487).

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Esenin also invokes Gogol's Mirgorod for the purpose of mocking American bureaucracy. The customs procedures at Ellis Island remind him ofMirgorod's clerks; the bureaucracy reaches a Gogolian level of absurdity. But in the very absurdity of both Gogol's sleepy and Esenin's "iron'' Mirgorod lies the hope for a miraculous escape-perhaps outside powers will serendipitously intervene to resolve all problems? In "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich O!Iarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich," the sudden interference of a pig, who gobbles up an essential document, brings the endless lawsuit to an end. In Esenin's case, higher powers prevail: Duncan's friends use their influence to lobby the president, and as a result, Esenin and Duncan are granted permission to enter the country. "Mirgorod! Oh, Mirgorod! A pig has saved the day!" Esenin exclaims (151). At first glance, it may strike the reader as counterintuitive that Esenin chooses the idyllic, innocent town of Mirgorod as an epitome for urban America. But is Gogol's Mirgorod really all that innocent? The Mirgorod cycle provides a transition from the poetic world of the Dikanka tales, where the everyday and the phantasmagoric are distributed between two different types of chronotope, 14 to the illusory space of the Petersburg tales, which efface the border between the normal and the surreal. Esenin's essay emphasizes the fragmental, gloomy features of Gogol's Mirgorod, stripping it of its shabby idyllic charms and turning it into a hostile "iron Mirgorod." The attribute "iron'' suggests "urban'' (in the sense of the city's building material), but it also invokes anxiety in its figurative meaning of "harsh," "merciless." In Gogol's Mirgorod tale "Viy," the adjective "iron'' relates to the demonic and fantastic, since it defines the eponymous character, the monstrous Viy: "Horrified, Khoma noticed that he had a face of iron." '"There he is!' cried Viy and pointed his iron finger at him" (italics mine). 15 Thus, Esenin's title suggests a connection with both "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich O!Iarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" and "Viy," the most morbid tale of the Mirgorod cycle, and infuses his image of America with undertones of the Other World. As Voronskii notes, "In 'Viy' the absurd, the dead, the otherworldly has conquered reality and has become a part of it ( V "Vii" zaum: mertvoe, nezhit'pobedili iav', sdelalis' chast'iu ee). 16 In Poetika Gogolia, Mann describes the Gogolian technique of the grotesque: "What's needed is for the doll or the automaton to, as it were, replace the man, for the mask to coalesce with the human face, for the human body or its parts to be objectified, to become an inanimate thing." 17 Mann's characterization of Gogol's later style, where the fantastic is forced out from the plot level onto the stylistic one, works very well for the American travelogue, and Gorky's pamphlets provide a clear example of

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YANKEES IN PETROGRAD, BOLSHEVIKS IN NEW YORK

this Dantesque/Gogolian technique. Gorky's city is mythological in Dante's manner-the author presents vivid pictures of Hell, which sometimes seem almost literally taken from 1he Divine Comedy. Yet Gorky's task is to portray a real city, so the fantastic is restricted to the level of narrative style. By employing Gogol's method of"non-fantastic fantasy" (Mann) or "romantic realism''(David Fanger), 18 Gorky can portray New York as a real place where the demonic substance shows through the actual fa