Dralyuk, Boris. Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907–1934 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 520 and done, Fedorova has authored a unique and valuable survey of a neglected genre within modern Russian culture. Her broadly informed scholarship makes an estimable contribution to cultural studies and in particular to the burgeoning field of Russian-American comparative studies. Departments of English and Russian Dale E. Peterson Amherst College Dralyuk, Boris. Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907–1934. Russian History and Culture, 11. Brill, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2012. xiv + 182 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €96.00: $133.00. The Red Pinkerton, long limited to walk-on parts in Soviet cultural studies, is finally the star of its own monograph. Prior research into this unique subgenre of Soviet pulp fiction has been insightful but frustratingly piecemeal; Katerina Clark, Louise McReynolds, Robert Russell, Maria Malikova and Maria Cherniak have each analysed the Pinkerton genre, all briefly and all but Russell inthecontextofwiderstudiesofSovietmassculture,suchasClark’sPetersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (New Haven, CT, 1995) or McReynolds’s recent Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2012). Boris Dralyuk’s definitive survey of the ‘Russian Pinkerton craze’ consolidates, expands and enhances recent scholarship through a wideranging , engrossing investigation of early twentieth-century sources. The Pinkerton began as a European phenomenon: mass-market, often luridly illustrated translations or pastiches of the semi-fictional adventures of the American detective Nat Pinkerton or his various epigones. The new trend horrified Kornei Chukovskii, whose celebrated 1908 essay denounced Pinkertons as degrading the intellectual tradition of detective fiction (exemplified by the violin-playing Sherlock Holmes) by appeasing the lowest common denominator of readership, so-called ‘Hottentots’. Dralyuk suggests thatChukovskiimissedthepointofPinkertons:farfrombastardizingHolmes’s (questionable) intellectualism, they belonged to an entirely disparate fictional genealogy, a cross-fertilization of the dime novel and comic book. What’s more, their melodramatic formulae offered readers — especially the very young and very traumatized — reassuring visions of a structured, predictable universe, where law and order were inevitably if eccentrically enforced. Pleasure in Pinkertons became a surprisingly widespread foible of the Soviet intelligentsia; Dralyuk winkles out nostalgic recollections of the genre from Kataev, Esenin, Eisenstein and Shalamov, among other secret indulgers. Pre-Soviet Pinkerton writers may have included Kuprin, Kuzmin, Nikolai Breshko-Breshkovskii and REVIEWS 521 even Osip Brik; Dralyuk is at his best explaining the combination of financial imperatives and physical showmanship that might have encouraged these authors to pen cheap thrillers under the veil of anonymity. Many splendid Pinkerton covers and illustrations are reproduced throughout this volume, but one of the rarest (and most memorable) depicts Kuprin and fellow writer Aleksei Budishchev held aloft by the circus strongman and pilot Ivan Zaikin in 1913. This bizarre image aptly conveys the populist enthusiasm and proletarian machismo that coincided in the Pinkerton genre. The post-1917 Pinkerton is more problematic to categorize, even for its contemporary critics. It overlapped with at least two new genres: science fiction and the novel of political propaganda. Although Bukharin created the ‘Red Pinkerton’ concept in a 1922 speech calling for a new genre of proSoviet , suspenseful entertainment, Dralyuk points out that the pedagogue Viktor Soroka-Rosinskii had already (in 1910) identified Pinkertons as a Trojan horse for inculcating ethical values in children. Some writers, most famously Marietta Shaginian, did respond to Bukharin’s call. But by the early 1930s, the Red Pinkerton had gone the way of Bukharin’s career. Dralyuk cites a 1934 Literary Encylopedia entry which vilified Pinkertons as ‘focused propaganda for imperialist tendencies’ (p. 75) beside a self-contradictory article by Samuil Marshak (then director of the Gosizdat children’s imprint). Although Marshak classified the genre alongside pornography as a dangerously bourgeois, ideologically compromising indulgence, he simultaneously cited evidence from young readers which demonstrated the novels’ enduring appeal. In his concludingchapter,DralyuksuggeststhatBukharin’ssupportbackfiredagainst the Red Pinkerton’s survival; already, before Soviet times, critics used the term ‘Pinkertonovshchina’ as a ‘cudgel’ (p. 151) for beating writers. Even Gor´kii got a taste of anti-Pinkerton contempt when his novel, The Life of a Useless Man (1908), was pilloried as banal, imitative sensationalism by a Marxist critic. The very qualities that made Pinkertons universally popular with young readers — their cosmopolitan characters and supposedly...