In 1960, the popular Soviet magazine Krokodil dubbed Mark Twain the USSR's "American Friend No. 1." This surprised neither the Kremlin nor the magazine's readers: Twain and especially his Mississippi novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, were favorites throughout the Soviet period, with the first translations dating to before the Bolshevik Revolution and film adaptations continuing into the 1980s. This book asks why and how such a decidedly American writer came to occupy pride of place in a nation so emphatically opposed to American culture. How exactly did Twain become the Soviet Union's "best friend in America"? How did that friendship change, and what did it mean, throughout the long and fickle decades of Soviet cultural policy and the Cold War? What emerges from this complex history is not just the story of a single author's foreign fortunes but also the history of Soviet literature and culture as well as Soviet-American cultural interactions, which are revealed to have been more multifaceted and variable than might be assumed. Twain's reception in the USSR also speaks to the largely hidden history of world literature in translation, even during decades of fraught geopolitical confrontation.
Cassio de Oliveira is an associate professor of Russian at Portland State University. He is the author of Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921-1938.
List of Illustrations A Note on Twain Editions, Translations, Transliteration, and a Fraught Word Choice Introduction: Mark the Soviet Twain Chapter 1: How Mark Twain Became a Critical Realist (and Why This Mattered to the Soviets) Chapter 2: Being Huckleberry Finn: Mark Twain in Russian and Ukrainian Translation Chapter 3: Red Dawn: Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Agents of Revolution Chapter 4: From America with Love: Twainian Locales in Soviet-American Exchanges Chapter 5: You Got a Friend in Me: Mark Twain, the USSR's American Friend No. 1 Chapter 6: Faraway, So Close: Tom and Huck in Postwar Soviet Illustrations, Film, and Literature Coda: Mark Twain's Afterlife, After the Soviets Acknowledgments Appendix A: Editions of Huckleberry Finn Referenced in this Volume Appendix B: Chapter 40, "I did wish aunt Sally would come . . ." Appendix C: Chapter 31, "It was a close place . . ." Notes Filmography Bibliography Index
"Tracking Twain's reception in the Soviet Union from the first postrevolutionary translations to a 1981 made-for-TV movie, de Oliveira offers fascinating new insights into how the long-dead Twain became during the Cold War the Soviet Union's 'best friend in America.'" - Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, author of Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip "This readable, fresh, and illuminating work by a stellar scholar offers new perspectives on how this most American of American authors could be embraced so fully by the Soviet Union. Well-researched and beautifully written, it deserves a wide readership." - Shelley Fisher Fishkin, author of Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade
