Should different nations inform themselves about world literature?

A few years back, I studied the effect of Goethe’s works in Russian Literature in the nineteenth century [see post].

Knowledge of the German language, philosophy, and science was constantly spreading through the Russian Empire from the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Klopstock. Fritz Strich in Goethe and World Literature states that “Russia’s intelligentsia wanted not only to merely read and understand these German works, but to possess completely their desire and intention “(Strich, 294).

Goethe’s Werther was translated into Russian in 1788  and caused a great excitement even with the difference between the mind of eastern and of western Europe. In Russia, his influence tended to make thought more humane and European, and thereby started a Renaissance movement which had been lacking in Russian thought.

For this blog, I will examine the influence of American Literature in the Soviet Union through the writing of Ernest Hemingway referencing the essay “Hemingway’s Revival in the Soviet Union, 1955-1962” by Stephen Jan Parker. This is the fourth and final post in a series of Hemingway’s influence in Europe[ see my last post of Hemingway’s works in Scandinavia].

Hemingway in the Soviet Union

The works of Ernest Hemingway were first published in the Soviet Union in 1934. In the following five years, his short stories, the novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, were published and led to immediate success. In the mid-thirties, International Literature asked Soviet writers which contemporary authors they “considered to be the most significant.” Hemingway was ranked number one in almost all replies. This came at a time when Soviet writers were writing odes to Stalin to stay alive or vanishing into the abyss of the Gulag. Some of these contemporary Soviet writers at this time were Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak (pre-Doctor Zhivago), Isaac Babel, and Alexander Fadeyev.

According to Stephen Jan Parker, a professor in Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Kansas and a prolific scholar of Russian literature, stated that Soviet critics viewed Hemingway’s works as the “honest portrayal of bourgeois life after World War I”(The Literary Reputation of Hemingway in Europe, Asselineau, 177). The war was a source of upheaval for the Hemingway hero; it caused him to reconsider his life among the “imperialists”.

His popularity was about to change. The Soviets became chiefly concerned with the works published during the Spanish Civil War, such as Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which received unfavorable reviews due to his brutal treatment of fascists by the loyalists and the persistent theme of “no cause is ever worth taking of a man’s life”. Thus, in 1940, publication of Hemingway ended in the Soviet Union for the next fifteen years (Parker, 178).

Revival of Hemingway

With the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1955, the fifteen-year moratorium was broken. Viktor Gorokhov reviewed the English version and claimed “The Hemingway romanticist sings of the beauty of solitary challenge. The Hemingway realist pitilessly reveals the senselessness of a fight alone…his heroes sought the road to the people, to intelligent struggle, to real optimism”(Gorokhov “Kheminguei I ego novaia kniga”, Novoe vremia, 27).

Gorokhov saw Hemingway speaking for himself through the words of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, “Pride in the simple man, the toiling man, enlivens the whole story…Let him be old, tired, sick, but he does not yield…he goes again to the sea”( 28).

In 1956, three students from the University of Moscow wrote an open letter to Hemingway on the subject of The Old Man and the Sea. They were impressed by the book and found similarities to the Burguete fishing episode in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, “Everywhere people fight for happiness, for a life worthy of man. They do not always win; they must endure both adversity and defeat. But he who know how to gain victory does not despair after his heavy failure—does not despair and continues to fight”(182).

Ivan Kashkin, Hemingway’s most prolific critic

Hemingway’s most prolific and most perceptive critic, according to Parker, is Ivan Kashkin. He appears to be the only Soviet critic concerned with Hemingway’s private life—his literary associates, his mythical stature in the West (183). Kashkin edited and translated many of Hemingway’s collected works which he published in a two-volume edition. He was generally regarded as the Soviet Union’s “expert” on Hemingway (as of the publication of this essay in 1965).

Kashkin published thirteen articles on Hemingway’s life from 1934-1961, “Alive in the Midst of Death” and “Rereading Hemingway”. In “Alive”, Kashkin questions if Hemingway sought death all his life as in the recurring themes of death and violence in his works suggests:

“He cannot but feel death in the life that surrounds him, and death for him, at least as an onlooker, is one of the main themes of modern decadent art. It is but natural that this should cast a shadow on his work”(Kashkin, “Dve novelly Khemingueiia”, Internatisionalnaia literature, 92).

The reason for Hemingway’s preoccupation with death, in Kashkin’s estimation, was his observation of it in two large and two small wars:

“Hemingway began to treat organized death as a social phenomenon inherent in the world that surrounded him”. After his experiences in World War I, his characters became “the lost generation” and were haunted by the “end of something” which dulled all their perceptions of life.

Hemingway soon became a bullfight connoisseur, fisherman, and hunter—all sports resulting in death. Instead of writing about strong men’s weaknesses, he now wrote about the moral strength of a decrepit old fisherman. “Life has shrunk to the narrow confines of a lonely old man’s vision” as seen in the distortion of events in For Whom the Bell Tolls as “the great truths of life”(Kashkin, 172).

In March, 1960, Kashkin continued to discover Hemingway’s  “roots” of social problems, “For us, of greatest importance in Hemingway is that he expressed one of the basic tragedies of man in a world which is broken into solitary cells, in the world of competition, profit, and war”(Kashkin, 215). Kashkin believed there was a very close correlation between the lives of the characters and the author as Hemingway wrote in a very personal style.

Through this discovery, Kashkin believed that Hemingway desired to create a good product, “one that should last for a while, even forever”(Kashkin, 220)—as we are still discussing his impact half a century later! Hemingway was professionally honest and produced high-grade craftsmanship not only through describing, but also in depicting. In Hemingway’s later years, he abandoned the “small” and concentrated on the “big fish, the big book”.

One final result of Kashkin’s discovery is the man who “affirmed life in the midst of death”(Kashkin, 222). Hemingway was a humanist, and it is revealed in his blood and in his art. “He is simply and honest and talented person. Even though Hemingway is a solitary and lonely writer, he is nonetheless a writer, surrounded by his numerous characters and books, who influences millions of readers”(Kashkin, 223).

Unfortunately, as we know, Hemingway took his own life a little over a year after this publication, July 2, 1961. The Soviets mourned his passing in words illustrative of great respect and admiration.

  • Leonid Leonov, one of the Soviet Union’s most distinguished authors wrote a commemoration in Pravada entitled “Ernest Hemingway: A Writer with a Universal Voice”, in which he said:
  • “I very attentively watched the stages of his creative genius and I think that his many innovating methods will be examined, interpreted, and in truth, imitated”(Leonov, July 29, 1961, 31). It is very difficult to find a student who has not read Hemingway, he continued.
  • “His restless soul, his preoccupation with moral problems, his aspiration, no matter what the cost, to find the genuine truth of life–all of this brings him close to Russian literature which had created Dostoevskii, Chekhov, Gleb Uspenskii” (Leonov,31).
  • In the Saturday Review, Ehrenburg wrote: “It hurts…that a man should have died who, through the love felt for him, has brought people together and nations otherwise remote from each other( Nouyi mir, No. 5, p. 131, May 1962).

** I would love to hear from my readers who have examined the reactions to Hemingway’s life and works in recent years in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia!

Work Cited

Roger Asselineau. The Literary Reputation of Hemingway in Europe.  New York: University Press, 1965.

Fritz Strich. Goethe and World Literature. London: Kennikat Press, 1949.