Fedorova, Milla. Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 518 literature does not reduce itself to the principle that ‘we are all the same’, a temptation that Tolstoi’s own polemical pronouncements might tend to affirm. Rather — and this is where the transnational becomes very handy indeed — Foster permits interpretation of Tolstoi as one whose notion of world literature affirms variety and difference rather than confining them to the strenuously concealed margins of a hegemonic view. In the end Foster’s engaging study makes a crucial point: that, far from being a monologist or solipsist or hegemonic universalist, Tolstoi developed an ever more nuanced recognition of the incredibly complex interplay of different influences on which any cultural product must depend. In this sense, Foster captures the slippery Tolstoi of War and Peace who argued so eloquently against viewing an event from one perspective, who claimed that events are created by reciprocal interaction in regard to which no one interaction can pretend to describe the event as a whole. To have returned this magnificently plural Tolstoi to us, as Foster has in lucid and mercifully jargon-free prose, is a substantial achievement. Clemson University Jeff Love Fedorova, Milla. Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2013. xi + 229 pp. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.00. With brief glimpses backward and forward, this book offers the first indepth study of Russian literary travelogues to America in the crucial years between the twilight of the Romanov empire and the triumph of Stalinism. That description is too narrow, however, to encompass what Fedorova actually addresses. She considers a wide swathe of materials, including fictional, poetic, essayistic and cinematic texts that depict, through Russian eyes, journeys to America and Russian-authored ‘reverse travelogues’ about American characters encountering the Soviet Union. Fedorova’s larger ambition, then, is to analyse what she describes as the Russian ‘American narrative’ in all its genres and with all its invariants and modifications in the context of Russian and Soviet cultural and technological rivalry with the United States. Fedorova’s analysis pursues two modes of approach. First, there is a synchronic account of three stages of development from pre-Revolutionary to early Soviet and Stalin-era travelogues to America. Briefly stated, there is a shift from idealistic populist encounters with an American utopia or dystopia to ideologically-driven depictions of a false paradise and capitalist hell followed later by more nuanced accounts of the United States as an imperfect REVIEWS 519 model society. Each period is epitomised by several prominent writers. The harsh disillusionment of Korolenko and Gor´kii yields to the hyperbolic denunciations of Esenin and Maiakovskii succeeded by the anecdotal and factual cross-country accounts by Pil´niak and Il´f and Petrov. Second, Fedorova launches a diachronic argument that links all three periods within a larger pattern of recurrent motifs and fixed archetypes that is said to constitute Russia’s ‘American narrative’. In this regard, an initial focus on a select set of influential literary travelogues and their dialogic relationship to one another gradually is subsumed within a more mythopoeic construct — namely, a stable Russian ‘chronotype’ of America. The scholarship that informs this study is comprehensive with regard to both primary and secondary sources. With rare exceptions, the primary texts under close scrutiny are not readily available for classroom use nor are they ‘major’ enough to figure in most academic curricula. Fedorova’s discussion lends depth to underappreciated works by Korolenko, Esenin, Pil´niak and Marietta Shaginian; she also draws attention to valuable recent Russian publications on the topic by Etkind (2001) and Arustamova (2009). Along the way, there are some surprising insights such as the differential treatment of blacks and native Americans and the recurrent theme of the ‘arrested voice’ of the monolingual Russian observer who goes unheard and ‘tongueless’ in America. Chapter five provides an interesting addendum with its enriching discussion of cinematic (Kuleshov’s Mr. West) and poetic (Marshak’s Mister Tvister) ‘reverse travelogues’ depicting fictional American travellers in the USSR. The conclusion sketches all too briefly a post-Soviet epilogue in which the Russians’ ‘otherworldly’ image of America persists; a sequel volume would be most...