“A Philistine Writer Whining in a Swamp”: Soviet Readers’ First Acquaintance with Ernest Hemingway

Abstract

The paper examines early Soviet reception of Ernest Hemingway's works. The research is based on the readers’ letters to Goslitizdat (State Publishing House) from the funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI). A small collection of letters (1935–1936) shows readers’ reaction to the first Hemingway’s Soviet book editions: a short story collection Death in the Afternoon (1934) and Fiesta (1935). The readers unanimously condemn Hemingway for his “decadent” prose and Goslitizdat for publishing such “absurd” and “harmful” books. The only exception is a short positive review of the novel A Farewell to Arms (1936) sent to Goslitizdat in 1937. To uncover the reasons for the negative readers’ reception one should turn to the literary criticism of the 1934–1935, especially the essays by Ivan Kashkin who introduced the new author to the Soviet reading audience. A comparative analysis of readers’ feedback and critical discourse shows that the ambivalent and even contradictory image of the writer created by the critics made the readers think of Hemingway’s works as “decadent”, “bourgeois” and alien to Soviet people. Another reason was the innovative nature of Hemingway’s modernist prose which seemed obscure, confusing and unintelligible; the Soviet reader obviously preferred “clarity” and “simplicity” of Erskine Caldwell’s or Theodore Dreiser’s realistic writings. The situation changed by the 1937, when Hemingway was praised by both Soviet critics and readers as an anti-fascist writer, a heroic defender of the Spanish Republic.

Keywords

• ernest hemingway
• soviet readers
• 1930s
• reception
• literary reputation
• literary criticism
• ivan kashkin
• edmund wilson
• soviet-american literary connections