Whitman and the Crowd

Abstract

Sciences of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR met in Moscow to arrange continued cooperation between scholars of the two countries. The protocol then signed includes the field of literature and language and identifies the following areasfor attention: of the history of American and Russian literatures and their mutual relations; the work of William Faulkner, Walt Whitman; literature and national consciousness; semiotics in literature and linguistics; exchange of scholarly materials regarding Eskimo languages. Accordingly, two Soviet scholars participated in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture of the University of Mississippi in the summer of 1982. And, as the second step in this infant endeavor, four Americans participated in the Walt Whitman Conference held at the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow in October 1982. I was one of the four. The building occupied by the Gorky Institute was formerly a nobleman's palace and figures in War and Peace. It retains a sense of its former days, although one who comes into the foyer and faces the shallow slope of the broad stairs for the first time is primarily aware of having entered an institution. The stately details are there, but the initial glance reveals a concierge's desk, metal coatracks, and the familiar, tired wood of nineteenth-century educational edifices the world round. The conference took place in a large, second-floor room, once, I guessed, a ballroom. A long rectangular table extended across one end of the room, and during the conference the Americans and Soviets satfacing one another over it. The rest of the room was filled with chairs arranged in rows, but if the