O\u27kei: An American Novel

On January 4, 1931, Boris Pilnyak (1894-1938) wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin, pleading with the Soviet leader to grant him permission to travel to the United States in order to conduct research for an ambitious book project he was undertaking that would compare communist Russia favorably to capitalist America. Pilnyak’s request received official approval, and a few months later the writer set off for the U.S., arriving in New York by steamer on March 12, 1931, and remaining in the country until August 3, 1931. During his nearly five-month stay in America, Pilnyak became acquainted with a number of prominent native writers, journalists, and critics (among others, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Floyd Bell, Max Eastman, and Michael Gold), attended a number of theatrical performances on Broadway, and visited a number of popular tourist sites, such as Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and the Ford automotive plant in Detroit. Hired by MGM Studios to co-author the screenplay for a film about a Five-Year Plan construction project in the Soviet Union (and to serve as a consultant on this film project), Pilnyak in early spring travelled with his host and personal interpreter, Joseph Freeman, to Hollywood, where they spent a month working on a pro-Soviet film, tentatively titled Soviet, which was plagued by creative differences and was never released. Pilnyak and Freeman decided to return to New York by car rather than by train, enabling them to see more of the country as they visited various locales in the desert Southwest, the deep South, and the industrial Midwest as part of their journey back to the East Coast. Upon his return to Moscow in early August 1931, Pilnyak began recording his impressions of the United States – and especially his serious misgivings about that country’s failing capitalist economy and its purportedly poisonous social and moral values (individualism, philistinism, materialism, consumerism, and so on) – in a travelogue that was completed in February 1932. It was subsequently serialized under the title, O’kei: An American Novel, in the March, April, May, and June 1932 issues of the journal Novy mir, before being published in a separate book edition in 1933. What is being presented here for the first time is a complete English-language translation of O’kei. Amerikanskii roman, available to readers in both an annotated version and a version without annotation, accompanied by an essay from the translator that seeks to acquaint readers generally with the reception that Pilnyak’s American travelogue received in the Soviet press at the time of its publication and its subsequent scholarly treatment by academics in both the former Soviet Union and the United States. This is the version without annotation

Episodes from the History of American-Soviet Cultural Relations: Stanford Slavic Studies, Volume 5 (1992)

Appearing here for the first time in an English-language translation are four of the illuminating essays, written by the renowned Pasternak scholar, Professor Lazar Fleishman, that are contained in his book, From the History of Russian and Soviet Culture: Documents from the Hoover Institution (Stanford Slavic Studies, Volume 5), published in 1992. These four essays appear in the section of his book, titled “Episodes from the History of American-Soviet Cultural Relations,” which includes the following: (1) “Introduction,” an introductory essay that provides background on the American journalist Joseph Freeman, (2) “Joseph Freeman and Boris Pilnyak,” an essay that explores Freeman’s relationship to, and correspondence with, the controversial Soviet writer during the late 1920s and early 1930s, (3) “In Polemic with Max Eastman,” an essay that examines the growing rift within the Communist movement, in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., between opposing Stalinist and Trotskyite camps during this same time period, and (4) “Toward a History of Eisenstein’s Mexico Film,” an essay that investigates the difficulties that confronted the famous Soviet film director in 1930-1931 during the shooting of his historical film about Mexican culture and politics. Scholars will be pleased to find that the titles of the works of literary criticism listed in Professor Fleishman’s endnotes, as well as the names of the authors who produced those critical studies, are not only translated, but also transliterated

O\u27kei: An American Novel (Annotated)

On January 4, 1931, Boris Pilnyak (1894-1938) wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin, pleading with the Soviet leader to grant him permission to travel to the United States in order to conduct research for an ambitious book project he was undertaking that would compare communist Russia favorably to capitalist America. Pilnyak’s request received official approval, and a few months later the writer set off for the U.S., arriving in New York by steamer on March 12, 1931, and remaining in the country until August 3, 1931. During his nearly five-month stay in America, Pilnyak became acquainted with a number of prominent native writers, journalists, and critics (among others, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Floyd Bell, Max Eastman, and Michael Gold), attended a number of theatrical performances on Broadway, and visited a number of popular tourist sites, such as Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and the Ford automotive plant in Detroit. Hired by MGM Studios to co-author the screenplay for a film about a Five-Year Plan construction project in the Soviet Union (and to serve as a consultant on this film project), Pilnyak in early spring travelled with his host and personal interpreter, Joseph Freeman, to Hollywood, where they spent a month working on a pro-Soviet film, tentatively titled Soviet, which was plagued by creative differences and was never released. Pilnyak and Freeman decided to return to New York by car rather than by train, enabling them to see more of the country as they visited various locales in the desert Southwest, the deep South, and the industrial Midwest as part of their journey back to the East Coast. Upon his return to Moscow in early August 1931, Pilnyak began recording his impressions of the United States – and especially his serious misgivings about that country’s failing capitalist economy and its purportedly poisonous social and moral values (individualism, philistinism, materialism, consumerism, and so on) – in a travelogue that was completed in February 1932. It was subsequently serialized under the title, O’kei: An American Novel, in the March, April, May, and June 1932 issues of the journal Novy mir, before being published in a separate book edition in 1933. What is being presented here for the first time is a complete English-language translation of O’kei. Amerikanskii roman, available to readers in both an annotated version and a version without annotation, accompanied by an essay from the translator that seeks to acquaint readers generally with the reception that Pilnyak’s American travelogue received in the Soviet press at the time of its publication and its subsequent scholarly treatment by academics in both the former Soviet Union and the United States. This is the annotated version

A Russian Gil Blas, or The Adventures of Prince Gavrilo Simonovich Chistyakov

Although Vasily Trofimovich Narezhny (1780-1825) is generally considered to be one of the pioneers of the modern novel in Russia, his works have yet to be sufficiently recognized for their many artistic merits. He receives little critical attention in most histories of the rise of the novel in early nineteenth-century Russia. Born in Ukraine, but educated in Moscow, Narezhny wrote lengthy satirical novels imbued with a sardonic tone and an earthy brand of realism that tended to offend the refined aesthetic sensibilities of many contemporary followers of Nikolai Karamzin and his dominant school of literary Sentimentalism during the early years of the nineteenth century. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere (see The Russianization of Gil Blas, 1986), Narezhny\u27s reworking of his putative model, Alain-René Lesage\u27s extremely popular Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715-1735), was mistaken for an imitation of this very tame and light-hearted French roman de moeurs. Soviet scholars, as a rule, failed to recognise it for its bold attempt to revive the genre of picaresque fiction that had flourished two centuries earlier, during the so-called Spanish Golden Age, through works written by such native novelists as Mateo Alemán, Francisco Gómez de Quevedo, and the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes. Following the example of these enterprising literary forerunners in Spain, Narezhny sought to depict, in a highly satirical manner, the adventures of a lowborn rogue, Prince Gavrilo Chistyakov (he\u27s an impoverished prince in name only), who lives by his wits in a sinful and morally bankrupt Russian society that is filled with hypocrisy, deception, and falsehood. The tsarist censors, deeply offended by the sharp social criticism to be found in A Russian Gil Blas, refused to allow Narezhny\u27s novel to be published when it was submitted to them to consider for publication in 1815. Indeed, his novel would only see the light of day during the Soviet period (in 1938, to be exact), when it was hailed as a realistic satire of life in Russia under corrupt tsarist rule. It is my hope that this English-language translation of Narezhny\u27s Rossisskii Zhilblaz will enable, among others, American and British readers who cannot read Russian to become acquainted at last with this rollicking novel written by a pioneering Russian writer who has dwelled for far too long -- and far too unfairly -- in relative obscurity