1969/07/01 by Charles Moser, Charles A. Moser · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Anarchism and Radical Politics #Soviet and Russian History
paper · doi:10.2307/127397
THOUGH America in the abstract had significantly engaged the attention of radical Russian writers, at least from Radishchev's time at the end of the eighteenth century, actual visits to this country began to become common only about seventy-five years ago. The revolutionary activist and author Sergius Stepniak-Kravchinsky toured the United States in early 1891 to kindle enthusiasm for the Russian revolutionary cause; in 1906 Gorky found himself at the center of public scandal here largely because of his revolutionary activities (he composed that prototype of the socialist realist novel, Mat', in New York state); Mayakovsky journeyed to this country in 1925 as the literary representative of an established revolutionary regime, to be followed by other Soviet writers in increasing numbers as time went on. The prose writer Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (1853-1921), who spent a month in this country in 1893 primarily to view the Chicago World's Fair, was also associated with the Russian revolutionaries, but his commitment to the radical cause was not so unwavering as Stepniak's or Gorky's or Mayakovsky's. His impressions of America were those of a reasonable man attempting to reach a sober evaluation of what he saw about him, and because of their relative objectivity they retain considerable interest for the reader today. The investigation of Korolenko's trip is facilitated by the fact that he wrote a number of pages, both fictional and factual, which were directly or indirectly linked with his visit; moreover Soviet scholars have studied his reactions to this country in detail, although their treatments usually leave much to be desired by way of completeness and balance.1