VII Zverev International Conference at RSUH: Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses in American Literature, Culture, and Politics: Pro et Contra

The review outlines the major topics of the conference on American Studies held by RSUH in May 2021. Colonial and postcolonial discourses, their intervention and interpretation are still simultaneously extraordinarily enabling and theoretically problematic. The question is how literary and historical texts as well as cultural and political representations could be analyzed from colonial and postcolonial point of view. The conference topics integrated colonial and postcolonial discourses into a wide range of humanitarian fields in order to understand their common elements, which make a contribution to an identifiable American national outlook. Themes of interest included colonialism as a discourse of domination; hybrid modalities of identity and their difference; ethnographic translations of radical alterity; postcolonialism and feminism as critical discourses; the relationship between race, language, and culture; global history and postcolonialism; postcolonial discourse in the US foreign policy.

Writers’ Letters to George Sylvester Viereck in a Private Collection

German-born American poet, novelist, journalist and editor George Sylvester Viereck (1884 –1962) during his almost 60-year literary career (his first poem was published in 1898) befriended, met and corresponded with hundreds of contemporaries, including world famous persons. His first biographer Elmer Gertz wrote in 1954, “One should go through Viereck’s correspondence with the great personalities of his time in order to learn the full extent of the admiration they expressed for him. Alas, that correspondence is scattered; but excerpts from it can be found in the catalogues of various autograph dealers and should be preserved”. Liberated from prison in 1947 Viereck was not able to restore his previous position in literary world, was in need of money and had to sell autographs from his personal archive. This publication includes letters of four writers addressed to Viereck and dealing with his literary and editorial work. All of them are preserved in the author’s private collection and are published in English for the first time. In Russian translation one letter is published for the first time, another one was previously published, two letters were quoted. Journalist, writer, and politician Brand Whitlock (1869 –1934) followed Viereck’s journalistic activities as well as his Decadent poetry. English author and poet Richard Le Gallienne (1866 –1947), being a living incarnation of the “naughty nineties” for Viereck, valued contributing to his magazine The International. Known as the Dean of American Biographers, famous writer Gamaliel Bradford (1863 –1932) refused to support Viereck’s protest against the prohibition of his novel My First 2000 Years in the Irish Free State. Poet, artist and filmmaker Ferdinand Earle (1878 –1951) remained faithful to his long friendship with Viereck even when the latter was emprisoned.

Cinematic Mirages of Theodor Dreiser

The article examines the history of cinematic versions (film adaptations) of T. Dreiserʼs novel An American Tragedy, the key concept of the analysis being that of a mirage (phantasm). It is the unattainable and unconscious desire for the mirage of wealth and luxury that guides Clyde Griffiths in the novel (not accidentally one of its early titles was “Mirage”). The plotline of Dreiser’s attempts to film the novel during his lifetime is marked by the same illusory, fantasmatic character: the script by Sergei Eisenstein, approved by the author, was rejected by Hollywood, the movie by Joseph von Sternberg, who eliminated sociological motives, was not accepted by Dreiser who tried to sue Paramount but lost the trial. George Stevensʼ post-war film adaptation of the novel titled A Place in the Sun, where the action was transferred into the early 1950s with their less rigid class stratification, became a tragic story about love and protagonist’s desire to dissolve into cinematic fantasy. A Place in the Sun was to become a cult film both among the intellectuals (Jean- Luc Godard) and among the mass media audience, the embodiment of which can be seen in the main character of the novel by S. Erickson Zeroville and of the eponymous movie by J. Franco. The history of the relationship between Dreiserʼs text and cinema can be perceived as a hypostasis of Roland Barthesʼ “death of the author”: appropriating a well-documented text of a real-historical author, cinema gradually and increasingly turns it into a space of intertextual play, from which the real author is eliminated and becomes a “mirage”, visible only to readers familiar with Dreiserʼs novel.

Shamelessness and New Sincerity: Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace, and Trump’s America

The ascendency of Donald Trump to President of the United States was marked by the concretisation of the “post-truth” era, an era in which brazen falsehoods not only withstood counterclaims to veracity but seemed to derive their legitimacy from their opposition to readily accepted truths. Epitomised by Kellyanne Conway’s infamous promulgation of “alternative facts,” the defining characteristic of post-truth politics seemed to be that the content of an utterance mattered less than the shamelessness with which it was uttered. It evidenced a divorce between traditional concepts of sincerity and the truth on which such sincerity was traditionally premised, allowing for the post-truth manipulation of shamelessness to make the most forceful claim over the sincere. This trend, I will argue in this essay, has its roots in the abundance of cynicism that beset American postmodernism, which along with post-truth shamelessness also gave rise to the cultural need for a new understanding of sincerity. I intend to trace how Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work influenced one of the foremost proponents of such new sincerity, the novelist David Foster Wallace. Giving particular focus to Dostoevsky’s emphasis on shame in his post-Siberian works, especially in the portrayal of Fyodor Karamazov, I will argue that such emphasis has its correspondence in Emmanuel Levinas’s theorisation of the ethical. I will conclude by suggesting that Levinasian ethics, which represent a departure from the totalising tendency of Enlightenment philosophy, might thereby serve as the basis for a new type of sincerity, one that maintains a sense of the ethical in the face of post-truth shamelessness.

Rerproducing the Voice of Dostoevsky-Narrator in Spanish: Translator’s Notes

The voice of Dostoevsky-narrator is always live and theatrical. We can hear his voice that sounds spontaneously in the present tense. We perceive his changing timber, we can see that the writer strives to be scrupulous in passing on to the reader every minute detail, to prevent us from overlooking it. Sometimes there are doubts or musing in his voice. The narrator examines everything together with the reader, he is mounting adjectives, adverbs, participles before nouns. He makes sudden impulsive digressions, slows down, impedes the narration, he prolongs it nervously and convulsively up to making his manner tedious and at the same time captivating. Hence there appear choking fits, hyper-saturation, lengthiness, coarseness of the phrases. Usually all these tend to be softened and smoothed when translated into Spanish. Our grammar and literary conventions automatically ‘put everything in order’, keeping it under lock and key in the past tense, while Dostoevsky’s narrative lives, argues, debates, evolves in the present tense, being a sort of theater. The Spanish language, however, wants to make everything follow its rules. The article strives to study and demonstrate the characteristics of Dostoevsky’s “live style” in his novel The Idiot, and to discuss the possibilities and difficulties one is facing with when trying to reproduce them in Spanish.

Contemporary Jewish Prose in the USA

The essay presents an overview of Jewish American prose of the second half of the 20th — first two decades of the 21st century within the context of multicultural literature of the USA. The definition of Jewish literature remains a matter of debate. The author of the essay based on the opinions of critics concludes on the criterion for assigning a writer to Jewish literature. It is the artistic embodiment of the personal Jewish experience and identity in the works of literature, the view “from inside,” the perspective of collective memory and the connection to history and culture. Jewish literature today is one of the most developed ethnic segments of multicultural American literature. Writers under study are recognized throughout the world, their works have been translated into many languages, including Russian, they are known to readers and have already become the subject of study by literary scholars. Today, Jewish American literature is represented by two generations of writers. “Senior” generation includes the authors born in the 1920s–30s who began their literary careers in the 60s when there was a generational change in national literature. “Young” generation is represented by the writers who began their literary careers in the 2000s. On the example of the works of the most famous authors of both generations, the author of the essay talks about the factors determining the specific features of Jewish American prose and its characteristic themes, problems, and motives: the search for identity and roots, the representation and rethinking of the Holocaust, ethnic stereotypes, the image of the Jewish family, and the traditions of Jewish humor. The study of the works of modern Jewish writers in the United States allows us to draw conclusions about the display of border consciousness, national and ethnic identity, and collective memory in fiction.

Tennessee Williams in Soviet Criticism of the 1940–1960s

The article attempts to present the reception of the plays by Tennessee Williams in Soviet criticism of the 1940s and 1960s to show the dynamics of changing opinions and assessments by Soviet literary and theater critics. In the late Stalinist years Soviet researchers (Michael Morozov, Veniamin Golant, Anna Elistratova, Vadim Gaevsky) were least engaged in the literary analysis of his plays, which they considered exclusively through the lens of ideology and politics. Critical judgments were reduced to a series of offensive comments on the “inferiority” of the “ideologically alien” playwright. During the Khrushchev Thaw the ideologically bound criticism were being gradually softened, its clichees being no longer relevant. There appeared articles by Georgy Zlobin, Moris Mendelson, Raisa Orlova, Vladich Nedelin, etc., that aimed to understand Williams’ peculiar and unique creative method. The analysis of the reception of Williams’ work by Soviet critics in 1940–1960s demonstrates that the recognition of the American playwright’s talent or, conversely, harsh language used against him was directly related to the political situation in the USSR and the United States, as well as to the Soviet-American relations in the realm of politics and cultural ties. As soon as the rigid ideological pressure of the state machine was relieved to some extent, Soviet critics followed the criteria of objectivity and literary taste. The study is supplemented by the bibliographic index of Soviet criticism of Tennessee Williams works, 1947–1969. The addendum is an attempt to create a complete bibliography of Soviet critical articles about Tennessee Williams’s work published in the 1940–60s.

“Dear TD”: Ruth Epperson Kennell-Theodore Dreiser Correspondence, 1928-1929

During his travel to the Soviet Union (November 4, 1927 — January 13, 1928) and on his return to the USA Theodore Dreiser was keeping in touch and dealing with Soviet literary institutions, periodicals and his Russian acquaints — publishers, editors, critics, etc. Ruth Epperson Kennell (1889 –1977) played an important role in making and maintaining these contacts in late 1920s-early 1930s. Ruth Kennell, who spent almost ten years in the Soviet Union, was a reference librarian (1925 –1927) in the Comintern Library in Moscow. On November 4, 1927 she got acquainted with Dreiser and was hired by him to serve as his secretary and guide as he toured the Soviet Union. Her role as a “Russian secretary”, personal assistant and friend is depicted in Dreiser’s Russian Diary and Kennell’s memoir Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union (1969) as well as in their correspondence that lasted till Dreiser’s death. Kennell continued to take part in Dreiser’s life and creative work in the USA, especially during the years that immediately followed their return from the USSR. The paper dwells at some length on Kennell’s biography, her role in publishing Dreiser’s work in the Soviet Union and USA, her work as an editor, critic and reviewer. Kennel had a long and varied writing career, and Dreiser helped her to start write and publish fiction. Their correspondence portrays Dreiser as a patron taking care of a young author and promoting her work. Kennell’s letters to Dreiser (1928 –1929) stored in the Manusсript Division of A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature are published in the addendum together with the Russian translation of several Dreiser’s letters to Kennell included in Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women. New Letters (2009).

Vladimir Nabokov and Transatlantic Contexts in Saint-Petersburg University

The review traces papers of the International conference V. Nabokov and Transatlantic Relations in American and European culture hosted at Saint Petersburg State University on May14–16, 2021. Scholars in various fields of humanities traced the routes of intercontinental cultural contacts of the XX-th century to construct a global context to understand Vladimir Nabokov as a paradigmatic transatlantic figure. The main direction which was discussed in papers of D. Ioffe, T. Venediktova, G. Kruzhkov, O. Panova, A. Astvatsaturov, O. Antsyferova, I. Golovacheva, A. Shvets, O. Sokolova, traditionally turned out to be American and British. The Russian cultural context viewed through the transatlantic prism was outlined by E. Penskaya, V. Feshchenko, A. Rodionova, A. Masalov, Y. Probstein, C. Bernstein and by Marjorie Perloff. The issues of transatlantic transfer in Romanesque literatures were presented in the papers of L. Muravieva, A. Petrova, V. Popova and I. Khohlova. The speakers discussed Franco-American autofiction, the images of Americans in the works of G. Apollinaire and the history of Soviet-Latin American and Portuguese-American poetic contacts, German and Scandinavian contexts viewed the in light of transatlantic problems. Discussion of Vladimir Nabokov works summed up a kind of outcome of the conference that brought together linguists (A. Kretov, Zh. Gracheva), historians of literature and culture (D. Tokarev, A. Bolshev, N. Shcherbak, A. Stepanova, N.A. Karpov ), scholars of poetics and narratology (F. Dvinyatin, V. Schmid, E. Kazartsev, D.Yu. Dovzhenko, N.I. Emelyanova).