Walt Whitman, Bolshevik
Reading Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left on the F train this morning, I found out that Walt Whitman was one of the very first American writers translated by the Soviet government after the Revolution. Reading around the internet after I got home, I discovered the following:
- In 1919, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Red Army Deputies printed 50,000 copies of Leaves of Grass.
- During the Civil War, Whitman’s works were rushed to Red Army soldiers at the front.
- Between the Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, 28 editions of Whitman’s works were published.
I also found out, from Aaron, that initial funding for The Masses came from the Vice President of the New York Life Insurance Company.
Things you learn while riding the F train…
9 Comments
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I wonder what those Red Army soldiers made of Whitman’s propaganda for American imperialism against Mexico in Song of Myself.
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On a related subject, James Fenimore Cooper was deeply appreciated amongst the Soviets. References to the Leatherstocking Tales come up throughout Tarkovsky’s films (one of the characters in Stalker is nicknamed Chingachgook) and as late as 1989 the USSR released a set of stamps based on the series – https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/1989_CPA_6128-6132_Strip.jpg/650px-1989_CPA_6128-6132_Strip.jpg
And this is all aside from the central place Cooper has in Lukacs’ book on the historical novel (I’m not sure how widely accepted he was in Soviet intellectual circles). -
This will tickle you: checkout the first publisher of Leaves of Grass. They’re the same folks who published the History of Woman Suffrage… and I can’t say a lot more ’cause I’m writing about it…
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In the other direction, I was surprised to learn a few years ago that Abraham Lincoln read Marx.
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Holy Shit. Really? What’s the source?
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I think it was in this interview with John Nichols about his book on the history of American socialism:
http://will.illinois.edu/mediamatters/program/april-24th-2011
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I listened to it. Lincoln read the New York Tribune, which published Marx’s writings about the Civil War. But I don’t think Lincoln ever directly cited Marx himself.
Lincoln also accepted the labor theory of value, but that didn’t necessarily come from Marx. It was a fairly mainstream idea at the time.
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I don’t know if Lincoln ever cited Marx, but what Nichols claims– and what I wrote in my comment, is that he read Marx. In fact, chapter 3 in Nichols book is titled “Reading Marx With Abraham Lincoln”, (Chapter 1 is titled “More of a Socialist then I thought: Walt Witman and a Very American Ism”). According to Nichols, Lincoln was a Painite and many of the founders of the Republican party were socialists. Nichols bemoans the fact that our public debates today are narrow and stunted compared to those in the past, which included socialists.
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