Five Adventure Stories: Americans in Stalin’s Moscow
- Issue:
- УДК / UDK: 821.111(73).0
- Publication Type: Book Review
- DOI:
- EDN:
- Funding Sources:
The research was carried out at A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was financially supported by the Russian Scientific Fund, grant no. 23-18-00393 “Russia and the West viewing each other: Literature at the intersection of culture and politics, XX century”, https://rscf.ru/project/23-18-00393
- Abstract:
The monograph by Russian-American researcher, translator and critic Galina Lapina Americans in Moscow: 1930–1940 is dedicated to pre-war Soviet-American theatrical, educational, cinematic, diplomatic, literary contacts. Among the heroes of the book are American Ambassador Joseph E. Davis and his chauffeur Charles Ciliberti, writers Langston Hughes and Dorothy West, playwright Sophie Treadwell, actress Blanche Yurka and other writers, artists, diplomats, journalists who came to the USSR in the 1930s and early 1940s. The book consists of five chapters; each of them is devoted to a certain episode of Soviet-American connections: the failed film project Black and White; The Promised Land, Sophie Treadwell's play about Soviet life; Moscow theater festivals of 1933–1937; history of the Anglo-American Institute (1933–1935), Moscow summer school for American students; a comparison of two books about the USSR — Joseph E. Davis’ Mission to Moscow (1943) and Charles Siliberti’s Backstage Mission to Moscow (1946), that show Soviet reality from the opposing points of view. The book that is, in fact, a collection of articles, is however marked by unity and integrity; it reconstructs the general context of the period in question on the basis of the extensive material. Memoirs, correspondence, archival documents, Soviet and American press form a vivid picture of Soviet-American relations in the pre-war decade. Many sources revealing American attitudes towards the USSR used by the author, have not yet been translated or published in Russia. Galina Lapina’s book encourages further research and publishing projects.
- Keywords: Soviet-American contacts, travelogue, theatre, cinema, education, race problem, diplomacy.
- For citation:
Panova, Olga. “Five Adventure Stories: Americans in Stalin's Moscow.” Literature of the Americas, no. 15 (2023): 297–307. https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2023-15-297-307
- References:
Baldwin 2002 — Baldwin, Kate A. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Regarding Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963. Durham, NC & London, Duke University Press, 2002.
Baldwin 2016 — Baldwin, Kate A. “Variegated Hughes: Rereading Langston Hughes's Soviet Sojourn.” The Russian Review 75, no. 3 (2016): 386–401.
Baldwin 2017 — Baldwin, Kate A. “Revolution and Langston Hughes’ Central Asian Writing.” Literature of the Americas, no. 3 (2017): 90–105.
Carew 2009 — Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise. Trenton, Rutgers University Press, 2009.
Lapina 2022 — Lapina, Galina V. “Amerikanskie palomniki v teatral'noi Mekke: Moskovskie teatral'nye festivali ‘Inturista’ 1933–1937 gg.” [“American Pilgrims in Theater Mecca: Moscow Theater Festivals of ‘Intourist,’ 1933–1937”]. Rossica. Literaturnye sviazi i kontakty [ROSSICA. Literary Contacts & Connections], no. 2 (2022): 98–132. (In Russ.)
Lapina 2017 — Lapina, Galina V. “Black and White: The Story of a Failed Film Project.” Forum for Anthropology and Culture 13, no. 2 (2017): 213–246.
Lapina 2016 — Lapina, Galina V. “‘Chernye i belye’: istoriia neudavshegosia kinoproekta” [“Black and White: The Story of a Failed Film Project”]. Antropologicheskii forum [Forum for Anthropology and Culture], no. 30 (2016): 83–118. (In Russ.)
Lapina 2019 — Lapina, Galina V. “‘Zemlia obetovannaia’. Amerikanka o kommunalke” [ “Promised Land. An American on Communal Apartment”]. Novii mir [The New World], no. 9 (2019): 134–156. (In Russ.)
Lee 2015 — Lee, Steven S. The Ethnic Avant-Garde; Writers, Artists and Magic Pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, 119–148. New York, Columbia University Press, 2015.
Mickenberg 2017 — Mickenberg, Julia. American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the American Dream. Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Moore 2002 — Moore, David Chioni. “Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border: Langston Hughes’ Relevance, 1933–2002.” Callaloo 25, no. 4 (2002): 1115–1135.
Ostrovskaya 2017 — Ostrovskaya, Elena S. “Langston Hughes v perepiske s zhurnalom Internacional'naia literatura” [“Langston Hughes’s Correspondence with International Literature”] Literatura dvukh Amerik. [Literatura of the Americas], no. 3 (2017): 106–126. (In Russ.)
Roman 2012 — Roman, Meredith L. Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of US Racism, 1928–1937. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 2012.
Solomon 1998 — Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936. Jackson, MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Tzouliadis 2009 — Tzouliadis, Tim. The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin's Russia. London, Little, Brown, 2009.
Wiedlack 2020 — Wiedlack, Katharina. “A Feminist Becoming? Louise Thompson Patterson’s and Dorothy West’s Sojourn in the Soviet Union.” Feminismo/s, no. 36 (December 2020): 117–128.
