“Trusted Ally”: : Phillip Bonosky’s Soviet Contacts

Abstract

The article reconstructs the literary contacts of the American writer and publicist Phillip Bonosky (1916–2013) with the USSR. When the US Communist Party reached its crisis point in 1956, Bonosky did not renege on his political commitments to the USSR, having established himself as a devoted communist and “defender of the foundations.” Based on archival materials deposited in RGALI, we demonstrate that such a pro-Soviet position promised the writer personal preferences, which he enjoyed with pleasure. Bonosky visited the USSR many times — both workwise and with cultural and entertainment visits. On many occasions, he tried using his acquaintances and pulled a few strings when it came to speeding up the publication of his works in Russian and receiving royalties for them. However, as a writer of short stories and “proletarian” novels, Bonosky enjoyed great success neither in the USSR nor in the USA: his writings remained a marginal phenomenon and were hardly perceived as a significant cultural value in the Khrushchev thaw era, despite the declared interest of Soviet critics in works about the life and struggle of American workers.

Keywords

• soviet-american literary contacts
• phillip bonosky
• the third congress of soviet writers
• the cold war and the thaw
• archival documents