Whose Artists in Uniform? Boris Pil'njak and American Writers in the Early 1930s

Abstract

During his five-month stay in the United States from March to August 1931, Boris Pil'niak became acquainted with several significant American writers: Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, Regina Andrews, Waldo Frank, Mike Gold, Max Eastman, W.E. Woodward, and Upton Sinclair. These encounters are important for at least two reasons. First, Pil'niak's impressions of these writers reflect the Soviet debates during the early 1930s about literature's social commission and about the virtues and shortcomings of American literature as a model for Russian literature in this regard. Second, when viewed in the context of the growing schism in the American socialist and communist movement, the controversy over Max Eastman's assessment of Pil'niak and the Soviet writer's response, which appeared in Modern Monthly, New Masses, and Partisan Review, it becomes clear that Pil'niak found himself caught in the crossfire of the American literary and political polemics of the day. Within the emissary-like context of his trip, I argue that not only were certain Soviet authors “artists in uniform”, so also were many of their American counterparts. While the body of Pil'niak's travel memoirs is large and multifaceted, this article focuses specifically on his experiences with American writers, based on an analysis of heretofore unutilized archival sources in the United States about his trip and on his travelogue Okay: An American Novel.