Comrade Kemminkz in Hell: E. E. Cummings's Eimi and Anti-Communism

Abstract

In Eimi, his poetic, typographically experimental prose memoir of a 1931 trip to the Soviet Union, E. E. Cummings measured his subjective ‘I-me’ against the collectivist values and bureaucratized realities of the only existing socialist society of his time. His book overlays an allegorical Dantean descent into inferno with detailed, diary-like treatment of Cummings's encounters with various Communist Party officials, Soviet cultural intellectuals, and American political fellow-travellers and tourists. Although later in his life, Cummings would increasingly embrace a simple, binary hostility to communism, at the moment of Eimi his position is more complex with respect to the questions of communism and anti-communism. His experimental prose technique allows him a powerfully reflexive autobiographical voice that plays freely between attraction to and repulsion from his experiences in the Soviet Union. Especially focusing on his relations to other Americans in the U.S.S.R., Cummings makes his primary object of critical scrutiny not so much the Soviet system itself, as the willingness of liberal American intellectuals to embrace and make apology for that system, which openly disdained their liberal values and portended their ultimate liquidation.