The Soviet Controversy over Pushkin and Washington Irving

Abstract

/W ASHINGTON IRVING is not today a figure widely known to Soviet readers. There have been few translations of his works in the last thirty-five years, and critics have awarded to him far less attention, favorable or otherwise, than to Cooper, Poe, Whitman, Mark Twain, or a large number of more recent American writers. What interest there has been is shown in the occasional translations of a few of his short stories, especially Rip Van Winkle, and in the controversy arising from the discovery, in 1933, that Pushkin had undoubtedly borrowed from Irving the subject of Golden Cockerel.' Irving was translated into Russian as early as 1825,2 and by 1830 was widely known to the Russian reading public. In that year Moskovskij vestnik, introducing a translation of excerpts from The Conquest of Granada, referred to Irving as one of the most distinguished writers in the United States, notable not so much for the depth and originality of his views as for the richness of his imagination and for a style always pure and colorful. Irving was popular among the Decembrists, and, on the other side of the political fence, the government-sponsored journalist N. Grec spoke of him as his favorite author. That this interest in Irving should be shared by Pushkin was natural enough. N. A. Polevoj, as early as 1831, noted a relationship between Knickerbocker and Belkin ;3 and Pushkin himself once quoted Irving with regard to the noble savage in literature.4 But it was only a century later that Soviet critics were to unearth evidence of the full extent of Irving's connection with Russia's most honored writer. Interest in Irving, in Russia as in America, died down after the middle of the nineteenth century; by 1917 he was not a sufficiently prominent figure in the Russian public eye to merit the attention of revolutionary critics. It was only in 1926 that there opened up the line