Литература двух Америк (Dec 2024)
"I Stuck with My Opinion about the Russians": Lion Feuchtwanger in the American Exile
Abstract
The article examines the stay of the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger in the United States during World War II, where he was able to emigrate from France in 1940 thanks to the assistance of the American president and American colleagues. The writer's work was well known in the United States, his novel Power was very popular, all of Feuchtwanger's books were published by the New York publishing house The Viking Press. On the other hand, the American public and American intelligence services knew the writer as a friend of the USSR and the author of the scandalous travelogue Moscow 1937. In the first months of his life in the United States, the press was interested in Feuchtwanger and his pro-Soviet position, but the situation changed after the alliance between the USA and the USSR. Feuchtwanger continued to maintain sympathy for the Soviet Union and repeatedly tried to establish contact with his friends in Moscow. He sent his manuscripts, letters and congratulatory telegrams to the USSR, and until 1943 his telegrams were regularly published in the Soviet press. However, the writer failed to publish a single one of his works in a Soviet publishing house during the war. The intermediary in the complicated relations between Moscow and the émigré writer was the Soviet vice-consul G. Heifetz, who regularly reported to the Soviet Union on the situation of German writers in the USA, and asked to publish Feuchtwanger's novels in the Soviet Union. Thanks to Heifetz's support after Germany's capitulation Feuchtwanger's first novel was published in a Moscow magazine.
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