Finding Formulas for Socialism: Soviet Transformations of John Dos Passos’ 1919

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics II: Translation, Modernists, and Communist World Literature

Abstract

In the Soviet debates of the early 1930s over socialist realism and artistic method, the role of foreign authors as models and anti-models, and translation’s mediation in this thanks to the prominence of world literature, played significant though underexplored roles. The Soviet reception of the American writer John Dos Passos provides a striking example of this dynamic. His popular and critically acclaimed novels, tied to his own visit to the USSR and admiration of constructivism, also became bestsellers in Soviet Russia, but within a few years turned controversial as Soviet literature developed towards an incipient socialist realism. Outlining the stakes of the Soviet confrontation with modernism through theorist-participants such as Gyorgy Lukács and lesser-known contemporaries, this paper will trace three versions of formulas for a socialist literary project through Dos Passos’ novel 1919 and two Russian translations of a section of the novel.

Author

• Zachary Murphy King, Bilkent U (Turkey)