How foreign writers saw Russia and its inhabitants: From Dumas to Dreiser

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Quite a few writers, whom they enjoyed reading in Russia and the USSR, visited the Russian open spaces. They left their memories of this exotic country for them. Some moments seem especially interesting to the modern Russian reader.

Lewis Carroll

The author of children's fairy tales and mathematical works, the Reverend Dodgson (this is the real name of the writer) visited the Russian Empire in 1867 - six years after the abolition of serfdom and five years before Russian girls could receive higher education in their homeland. In fact, Carroll was sent to this distant country: it was a diplomatic project by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, aimed at establishing a trusting relationship between the Church of England and the Greek-Russian Church, so that Carroll arrived in Russia precisely as a priest, and not as a writer or mathematician.

In his diary, Carroll marvels at the train compartment seats, which turn into beds in the evenings, and are surprisingly comfortable as well. During the day, when the seats were more like chairs (or, more precisely, sofas with handrails, partitions), nothing foreshadowed a restful sleep. Here's how Carroll described Moscow:

“We spent five or six hours walking through this wonderful city, the city of white and green roofs, conical towers that grow out of each other like a folded telescope; convex gilded domes, in which distorted images of the city are reflected, as in a mirror; churches that look like bunches of multi-colored cacti on the outside (some shoots are crowned with green thorny buds, others are blue, others are red and white), which are completely hung inside with icons and lamps and are decorated with rows of illuminated paintings up to the roof; and, finally, the city of the pavement, which resembles a plowed field, and cabbies, who insist that they should be paid thirty percent more today, because “today is the birthday of the empress”.

In his Russian speech, Carroll was struck by the word zashtsheeshtschayjushtsheekhsya (“defenders”) presented to him as an example of the complexity of the language. St. Petersburg appeared before the writer's eyes as an ultramodern business city by the standards of the 19th century: and uncommonness. The extraordinary width of the streets (even the secondary ones are wider than any in London), tiny droshky darting around, obviously not caring about the safety of passers-by, huge colorful signs above the shops - this is how Reverend Dodgson saw the Russian capital.

Alexandr Duma

A little less than ten years before Carroll, Russia was visited by another leading figure of Western literature - Father Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo. In general, Dumas thought to visit Russia for a very long time, being carried away by the history of the country while working on a historical novel about the Decembrist Annenkov and his French wife Pauline Geble. However, it was precisely because of this novel that the great disliker of the Decembrists (for obvious reasons), Nicholas I, prohibited the writer from entering the country. Only under Alexander II did his namesake Dumas finally manage to visit the Russian Empire.

Almost everything that he saw in Russia shook his imagination. All descriptions of cities are permeated with a romantic mood. Summer night in St. Petersburg "shimmers with opal reflections."The Kremlin, which Dumas certainly wanted to see in the moonlight, seemed like a "palace of fairies", "in a gentle radiance, shrouded in a ghostly haze, with towers rising to the stars like the arrows of minarets."

By the way, in Russia he managed to see the heroes of his novel. The Governor of St. Petersburg arranged a meeting with the Count and Countess Annenkovs as a surprise.

Kazan Dumas found the city of extraordinary politeness: here, they say, even hares are polite (the locals invited the writer to hunt these animals). As for the entertainment of Russians, Dumas wrote: "Russians love caviar and gypsies more than anything else." Gypsy choirs were really in great fashion at that time - but only in Russia. In France, only a few achieved success, like Pauline Viardot.

Germaine de Stael

The most famous oppositionist of Napoleon visited Russia in 1812 - just during the Franco-Russian war. In this war, she unequivocally took the side of Russia, if only from the consideration that Napoleon was a conqueror and aggressor. Most of all in the country she was struck by the national character: “The Russians do not know the dangers. Nothing is impossible for them. At the same time, she found the Russians soft-tempered and graceful.

And here is her conclusion on what explains the difference both in the way of life and in the character of the Russians and the French: worse than the French peasant and are able to endure not only in war, but in many everyday cases, physical existence is very constrained.

The severity of the climate, swamps, forests and deserts that cover a significant part of the country force a person to struggle with nature … The living environment in which a French peasant finds himself is possible in Russia only at great expense. The necessities can only be obtained in luxury; hence it happens that when luxury is impossible, they refuse even the necessary … They, like the people of the East, show extraordinary hospitality to a foreigner; he is showered with gifts, and they themselves often neglect the ordinary comforts of personal life. All this must explain the courage with which the Russians endured the fire of Moscow, combined with so many victims … There is something gigantic among this people, it cannot be measured by ordinary measures … they have everything more colossal than proportionate, in everything more courage than prudence; and if they do not achieve the goal that they have set for themselves, it is because they have crossed it."

Theodore Dreiser

The famous American visited the USSR in 1927: he was invited to take part in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He visited many Soviet cities, Russian and not only. The twenties were years of boundless creativity and bureaucratic madness; everything was possible here, except for the signs of capitalism. “I’m ready to say: if I put a copper saucepan on my head, put my feet in wooden shoes, wrap myself in a Navajo blanket, or a sheet, or a mattress, tied over with a leather belt, and walk like that, no one will pay attention; it’s different if I dress up in a tailcoat and a silk top hat. Such is Russia”, - this is how the writer conveyed the atmosphere of that time.

He was amazed that almost immediately after his arrival he ran into an American woman in Moscow. Ruth Epperson Kennel, a native of Oklahoma, had been living in the USSR for five years at that time. In fact, in the twenties, many Americans lived and worked in the Soviet Union - some traveled for ideological reasons, others hoping to miss the glass ceiling that colored Americans faced in their careers, others just for the sake of earnings, which were often offered more to foreign specialists. than in a homeland suffering from the financial crisis. Ruth eventually became Dreiser's secretary while traveling through the young Soviet country.

Among the things that struck Dreiser in the USSR were the spaciousness of apartments in newly built houses for railway workers and employees, the abundance of brand new kindergartens and nurseries, and the fact that in the theater it was impossible to understand which of the spectators belonged to which class: everyone was dressed equally decently. True, he could not imagine that otherwise they could not be allowed into the Soviet theater - depending, of course, what kind of performance.

Not all of our modern ideas about the past would seem adequate to the inhabitants of bygone eras: Did Russian women “give birth in the field” to other popular myths about tsarist Russia, in which they still believe?.