Between the battlefield and the marketplace: International Literature magazine in Britain

ABSTRACT

The article discusses the Soviet literary magazine Internatsionalnaia literatura (International Literature) as a cultural institution, an important part of the intellectual and literary contacts of the Soviet culture of the 1930s in Britain. An organ of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers and later the Union of the Soviet Writers, the magazine sent its English version to Britain and was read by an audience close to the Communist party of Britain, while the magazine’s editors had vast correspondence with their British authors and readers. Taking into account a wide range of archival documents, the article explores the magazine’s distribution in Britain, the attitudes of British left-wing writers toward it and its place in the international literary market.

KEYWORDS:

• International Literature magazine
• international union of revolutionary writers
• communism and literature
• Soviet literature under Stalin
• Soviet-British cultural exchange

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Elena Ostrovskaya, PhD, is an Associate Professor of the Faculty of the Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics teaching a number of courses in English and Russian Literature, Translation Studies and academic and research skills in English. Her current research interests are translation studies, Russian and comparative literature. She is a member of the collective research project on the history of International Literature magazine.

Elena Zemskova, PhD, is an Associate professor at the School of Philology, Faculty for Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her research interests include comparative literature and translation history. She published a number of articles on the history of translation in the USSR in 1930s. She is a leader of the collective research project on International Literature magazine.

ORCiD

Elena Ostrovskaya http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3106-1979

Elena Zemskova http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9665-3131

Notes

1. The present article tends to refer to the papers by Safiullina of 2009–2012 (Safiullina, 2009; Safiullina & Platonov, 2012) rather than the dissertation.

2. Transcripts of some of the committee’'s meeting with the criticism of the magazine are to be found in RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social-Political History), F. 541, Op.1, D. 1.

3. RGASPI, F. 541, Op.1, D. 1, L. 9.

4. RGASPI, F. 541, Op.1, D. 1, L. 35.

5. RGASPI, F. 541, Op.1, D. 1, L. 39.

6. RGALI (Russian State Archive for Literature and Art), F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 566, L. 25–26.

7. This rather extraordinary event has been discussed in a number of works, such as Emily Tall's ‘The reception of James Joyce in Russia’ (Tall, 2009, pp. 247–248), to name a recent one.

8. The history of Mezhdunarodnya Kniga is worth a detailed examination, as the organization seems to have been one of the key players in cultural interactions of USSR with the West. It was set up as a joint-stock company in 1923 and was engaged in a variety of activities. In the early years of the Soviet State, among other things, it ran an independent book publishing business and traded in the West antiquarian Russian books either confiscated from their owners or abandoned by them. In the period of 1960–1980, Mezhdunarodnyay Kniga had a monopoly on purchasing and selling abroad not only books and periodicals, but also music, films, and art.

9. RGASPI, F. 541, Op.1, D. 18, L. 45.

10. See note 9.

11. This publishing co-operative, alongside Mezhkniga, was among the institutions that played a pivotal role in establishing and maintaining cultural relations between the USSR and the West. However, no systematic research of its history has been done yet. In its early period, it was closely tied with Comintern and involved in dissemination of the Soviet Marxism abroad. It came to an end in the epoch of the Great Terror, when most of the foreign members of its staff were purged as spies and either executed or sent to GULAG. In 1938, the publishing house was reformed and re-titled into Izdatelstvo literatury na inistrannyh iazykakh (Foreign Languages Publishing House). In the period of the Thaw, in 1963, on its basis, the famous Progress publishing house was established, which had been printing Soviet books in foreign languages for export until the collapse of the USSR.

12. GRASPI, F. 495, Op. 78, D. 133, L. 128.

13. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 25, L. 24.

14. RGALI , F.1397, Op. 3, D. 554.

15. RGASPI, F. 495, Op. 78, D. 133.

16. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 8, L. 36–37.

17. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 8, L. 3,9,10.

18. Hynes quotes Stephen Spender to illustrate the formation of the boundaries of the period, ‘“From 1931 onwards,” Stephen Spender wrote, “in common with many other people, I felt hounded by external events.” The date is not an arbitrary one: 1931 was the watershed between the post-war years and the pre-war years’ (Hynes, p. 65).

19. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 619, L. 22.

20. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 566, L. 3.

21. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 566, L. 5; D. 604, L. 4.

22. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 566, L. 3; D. 619, L. 22.

23. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 621, L. 3-3ob.

24. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 619 , L. 5.

25. See note 24, L. 28. Translated from Russian as the archival document contains only the Russian translation of the letter. Translation is mine – EO.

26. See note 25, L. 36.

27. See note 26, L. 14.

28. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 574а, L. 1.

29. RGALI, F. 1397, Op. 1, D. 653, L. 1–2.

30. RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History), F. 3, Op. 34, D. 157, L. 7.

Additional information

Funding

The article was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2014–2015 [grant number: 14-05-0004] and supported within the framework of a subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program.