Seminar 1 | September 25, 2020


Roman Utkin (Wesleyan University), “Guides to Berlin: Exiles, Émigrés, and the Left”

While the October Revolution ushered in a new political age in Russia, it also fundamentally reshaped the broader leftist movement. As the Bolsheviks became the revolutionary party and prevailed in the Civil War, members of such major progressive parties as the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Constitutional Democrats eventually found themselves either imprisoned or exiled, along with supporters of the monarchy. In the early 1920s, the losers of the October Revolution, including thousands of leftists unaligned with the Communists, established Russian-speaking communities in Berlin, forming so-called “Russian Berlin.” As the center of the fractured German Left, Berlin fostered a remarkable diversity of political and aesthetic practices. It was in Berlin that many Russian revolutionary discontents decided to return from exile to Soviet Russia and accept life there on Bolshevik terms. This article examines a range of literary texts set in Berlin whose authors grapple with the impact of the Revolution and exile on the future of Russia and its literature. The aesthetic differences among various ideological perspectives emerge in representations of space and time in this city of necessity and compromise. The article focuses particularly on Socialist Revolutionary Viktor Shklovsky’s novel Zoo, or Letters not about Love (1923), anthroposophist Andrey Belyi’s travelogue In the Kingdom of Shadows (1924), and Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Guide to Berlin” (1925). These classic texts lie at the cusp of two traditions, Soviet and émigré, yet their ideological implications are often ignored. Contextualizing them in the post-revolutionary setting of Berlin demonstrates the complexity of emigre culture and its role in the development of early Soviet literature.



Edward Tyerman (UC Berkeley), “Revolutionary Violence with Chinese Characteristics: Chinese Migrants in Early Soviet Literature”

Significant numbers of Chinese soldiers, most of whom had migrated into the Russian Empire as economic migrants from the late nineteenth century, fought on the side of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. These Chinese Red partisans became a stock figure in literary representations of the Civil War, appearing in the work of such prominent early Soviet writers as Isaac Babel’, Artem Veselyi, Boris Pil’niak, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nikolai Ostrovskii, Andrei Platonov, and Mikhail Bulgakov. This chapter contends that the Chinese migrant soldier became a recurring presence in their writing because he concentrated within himself a set of ideological tensions over the social and historical meaning of the Revolution and the Civil War, tensions that revolved around questions of socialist internationalism, national identity, and racial difference. These migrant workers who fought and died for the Russian Revolution offered a vivid symbol for the possibilities of internationalist solidarity. At the same time, a certain stereotype emerged of the Chinese partisan as exceptionally fearless in the face of violent death. Combining literary analysis and intellectual history, I trace the origins of this image to the Russian variant of a transnational Yellow Peril discourse that circulated from the late nineteenth century and framed Chinese workers as physiologically able to withstand greater deprivation than their white counterparts, and hence an economic threat. Thus the American missionary Arthur Smith, in his influential Chinese Characteristics (1894, translated into Russian 1904 and 1916), defined the Chinese physiognomy as distinguished by an “absence of nerves.” In the literary figure of the Chinese migrant, we see how the era of socialist internationalism continued to deploy racialized understandings of difference that has taken root precisely as a means to forestall the possibility of solidarity between workers from different ethnic backgrounds.


Katerina Clark (Yale University), “Ralph Fox in Moscow and Central Eurasia”

My paper will treat the career of Ralph Fox (1900-1936), a British communist novelist, journalist and literary theoretician who was well known in the 1920s and 1930s but is largely forgotten today.  For years a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Fox also served as a regular commentator in its press on parochial issues of working class politics, and was a labor organizer.  But his many activities encompassed a much broader purview. During the 1920s Fox had three extended stints in Moscow where he was incorporated in Soviet institutions and in that sense “migrated,” if only temporarily.  During his last stint, he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute and intersected there with Lukács, who had an influence on Fox’s theoretical book, The Novel and the People (an important text for the 1930’s left when it was published posthumously after Fox was killed in the Spanish Civil War).  The paper will cover the Soviet periods, but will focus on Fox’s “migrations” of a more metaphorical order, his intellectual migrations.  It will discuss how Fox went from being a brilliant student of the classics at Oxford to becoming probably the British leftist of the inter-war years most committed to a Eurasian perspective, and largely as a result of his work in Central Asia and Mongolia. Fox, though primarily used in the Soviet Union as an expert on Britain and her empire (on which he also published extensively), served additionally as an Asia expert, participating for example in debates on Karl Wittfogel’s tract on oriental despotism. In both Britain and the Soviet Union he produced fictional and non-fictional works on such topics as Mongolia and Genghis Khan. And as one of the editors of the British leftist journal New Writing, he promoted texts by Asian authors so that until his death it presented the readers with a version of world literature in miniature.  Also, he served as godfather for the founding of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association, the largest indigenous intellectual body in India of the inter-war years. 



Seminar 2 | October 9, 2020

Helen Fehervary (The Ohio State University), “László Radványi alias Johann-Lorenz Schmidt (1900-1978): The Transnational Journeys and Multiple Lives of a Hungarian Intellectual and Scholar

Born in 1900, László Radványi was the youngest member of the Budapest Sunday Circle around Béla Balázs and György Lukács. He was active in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and after its defeat fled via Vienna to Heidelberg where he wrote a dissertation on chiliasm with Karl Jaspers and met his future wife, the German writer Anna Seghers. From 1927 to 1933 he was director of the Marxist Workers School in Berlin, traveled to the Soviet Union to consult with Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, and influenced the establishment of other such schools in Germany and Europe. In 1933 he and Seghers fled to Paris where he started a similar, much smaller school, and in 1940 was imprisoned as an enemy alien in the French concentration camp Le Vernet where he conducted classes in Marxism for his fellow inmates. He and his wife and children escaped from France in March 1941 on the freighter Capitaine Paul Lemerle. Its passengers included André Breton and Victor Serge as well as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who was to describe the trecherous Atlantic crossing in his Tristes Tropiques. After detentions in several camps, including Ellis Island in New York harbor, the family was granted asylum in Mexico. There Radványi held a professorship at the University of Mexico and became an innovator in the area of opinion research. He departed Mexico in 1952 and until his death in 1976 was professor of economics at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. His publicatons at this time mainly concern problems of imperialism and social conditions in developing countries.


Kimberley St. Julian-Varnon (University of Pennsylvania), Blackness in the Red Land: African Americans and Identity in the ‘colorless’ Soviet Union”

The paper examines African American identity construction through the lens of temporary migration and travel. I follow the experiences of a diverse group of African Americans who left Jim Crow Era America in the 1920s and 1930s to work and travel in the Soviet Union. During their visits, many of these travelers, including workers, agriculturalists, and artists, began to redefine their identities as Black people. The USSR projected itself as an anti-racist counter to the United States, including actively recruited black workers and even planned (then canceled) a film that portrayed the bleak racial environment in America. The State’s focus on anti-racism, combined with the limited context and experience with people of color in the USSR, created conditions that provided these visitors a unique space to examine, modify, and redefine their conceptions of personal and group identity.

The critical period of Stalin’s Revolution from Above and the resulting cataclysmic social change influenced the experiences of Black visitors. For many, they were able to craft another form of personal and group identity, that of the Soviet person. However, these visitors were in the minority and showed the limits to the extent to which Black visitors inculcated Soviet socialist ideology. Furthermore, their lived experiences also illustrate the significance of regional difference and violent white supremacy in the construction of Black American identity in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, this cohort of visitors shows the fluidity of identity construction and performance for African American travelers and migrants in the early 20th century.


Bradley Gorski (Georgetown University), “‘Dirt, Syphilis, and the Frontiers of the Revolution’: Langston Hughes on the Borders of Disgust”

Traveling through Soviet Central Asia in 1932, Langston Hughes met the Hungarian Jewish communist Arthur Koestler. The two immediately struck up a friendship that would define the two writers’ time in Tashkent and their divergent relationships to the Soviet Revolution thereafter. In Hughes’s retrospective account, I Wonder as I Wander (1956), he frames the difference between the two as one of disgust, specifically disgust at the public hygiene, native practices, and foods of Central Asia, a disgust that Hughes surmounts and that Koestler is unwilling or unable to overcome. This chapter examines Hughes’s use of disgust in light of his attempt to make Koestler (and, by proxy, the reader) see the revolution “through colored eyes.” Aesthetically marshalled disgust, this chapter argues, traces affective borderlines along cultural, racial, and social differences. Seeing the revolution through colored eyes means understanding that lines of disgust must be transgressed in order for the revolution to fulfill its promise of racial inclusion. At the same time, by showing Koestler unable to overcome his disgust, Hughes suggests that disgust—disgust at the racialized other—might be the most unyielding frontier of the revolution.



Seminar 3 | October 23, 2020

Tatsiana Shchurko (The Ohio State University), “‘Ephemeral’ solidarities and transnational feminist genealogies: re-imagining Hermina Dumont Huiswoud’s trip to the Soviet Union, 1930-33”

This paper focuses on the travel of a Black community organizer from Harlem, Hermina Dumont Huiswoud, to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. The October Revolution of 1917 became a gravitational force for many activists and scholars worldwide. To many U.S. Black activists, organizers, and writers traveling from the space of racial segregation, anti-Black racism, and Indigenous genocide to the Soviet state with its unique commitment to racial justice has been an uplifting experience. Particularly, for Black radical women, such travels from the U.S. to the Soviet Union were a vital practice of tackling restrictions and regulations imposed on their bodies by colonial and oppressive powers and ideologies. Unfortunately, the memory about these travels has been mostly forgotten, while socialist legacies and Soviet landscapes are mostly erased from transnational feminist histories and imaginaries of protest. Therefore, I re-evaluate Huiswoud’s travel to the Soviet Union to consider the former Soviet life-worlds as a part of the global struggle for social justice alongside with rethinking the transnational trajectories of feminist politics. Since Hermina Dumont Huiswoud did not leave detailed notes or diaries about her visit to the Soviet Union, I explore primarily one Soviet photo postcard from her archive that portrays a veiled woman of Soviet Turketsan. I use this photo postcard to imagine the possible relation between Hermina Dumont Huiswoud and a portrayed native woman. In this way, I suggest that a photo postcard, while reflecting a vague memory or a bare trace of transnational connection, also may problematize the location and politics of transnational feminist analysis. Thus, I argue that re-imagining encounters that “could have happened” provide important contributions to feminist ethics of solidarity and accountability both in the U.S. and the post-Soviet region.


Elena Zemskova (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), “Edward Falkowski, American Journalist in 1930s Moscow”

Among leftist emigrants in Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s, there was a group of people associated with media: newspapers, magazines and radio. This type of migration of writing people differs from political or professional migration, as well as from the long-term mission of journalists who worked abroad on behalf of their editors. Deciding to go to a foreign country because of their political beliefs, these migrants became involved in text production, as translators or authors, simultaneously, in newspapers and magazines, or later, publishing travelogues or memoirs. Reflexive writing at the crossroads of cultural and political boundaries as well as the will of those migrants to enter new literary fields – this is an area I am interested in this paper drawing on one particular example.

Edward Falkowski (1901 -1984), an American miner worker, activist and aspiring journalist who spent 9 years in emigration, first in Weimar Germany, then in the USSR, where since 1931 he was a reporter for The Moscow Times, is rarely mentioned by researches of Soviet-American cultural contacts. This is not surprising, as after returning to America in 1938, he published nothing based on his experience of emigration. However, numerous boxes from his personal archive in Tamiment Library of NUY, containing diary notes, interviews, articles drafts and an unpublished unfinished novel about the life of Moscow expats, enables us to explore the worldview and writing experience of a an emigrant working-class writer in the USSR of the mid 1930s. This paper will focus on Falkowski’s strategy on the border of the Soviet literary field and the leftist pole of the “World Republic of Letters” as well as the reasons why his Soviet experience turned out to be practically irrelevant in his further American biography.


Philip Gleissner (The Ohio State University), “Inconvenient Reunification: The Awkward Encounter of two German Leftisms in 1960s Moscow”

The parallel existence of two German states post-WWII also brought about two parallel leftist intellectual milieus and two separate approaches to socialism as a theory and practice that at times intersected, coincided, or conflicted with one another. These circles had their own modes of exchange that were shaped by the political climate between East and West, challenged by the baggage of the country’s Nazi past, and influenced by transnational ties beyond Germany. In this chapter, I will discuss these frictions and their impact on the work and thinking of leftist writers and public intellectuals in the German 1960s. I am particularly interested in how encounters were facilitated by the Soviet Union as a contact zone, where intellectuals from both sides of the Iron Curtain were brought together.

Conferences and delegations invited by the Union of Soviet Writers and exchanges facilitated by literary journals gave the occasion and framework for these meetings and further travel in the USSR. Based on life writing and travelogues, archival documents, and media coverage, I will analyze the encounter of a number of leftist intellectuals with Soviet socialism as well as with each other: the East German writers Eva and Erwin Strittmatter, the West German critic Hans Werner Richter, and the writer and public intellectual Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Oftentimes awkward, these encounters in a third place made an impact on the further development and division of the intellectual left, which created its own new challenges for the reunified country post-1989.



Seminar 4 | November 13, 2020

Anna Arustamova (Perm State University), “The ‘Father Of Russian Futurism’ In America: David Burliuk’s Literary Strategy in The Russian Voice”

The paper examines the strategies for promoting both proletarian and Futurist art used by David Burliuk in the United States in the 1920-1930s. A Russian émigré, Burliuk simultaneously presented himself as poet, mentor of novice poets, and editor of collections of Russian proletarian poets the USA. I focus on the Burliuk’s activity in the “red migration” newspaper “Russian Voice” (Russkii golos) as a poet as well as a member of the editorial board. He asserted the poetics of Futurism as a mentor, as a self-proclaimed historian of Russian Futurism, and as a living bearer of this tradition. Also, his attempt to foster a “proletarian poetry” in the U.S. and consolidate “proletarian” and beginner authors around the newspaper will be traced in the paper. My attention is drawn to Burliuk’s idea to build a bridge between the Soviet literary process and proletarian art in America. Introducing materials published in the Russian Voice as well as previously unknown archival documents, I reconstruct Burliuk’s (un)successful self-representation as maître and theoretician.


Michael Kunichika (Amherst College), “Preservation vs. Innovation in “Red” Travelogues of the 1920s”


Milla Fedorova (Georgetown University), Title TBA



Seminar 5 | December 14, 2020

Serguei Oushakine (Princeton University), “Circus, Theater, and Festival: On Spheres and Circles of Soviet Cosmopolitanism”

The chapter looks at the phenomenon of cultural transfer, or cultural arbitrage, as a key mechanism through which Soviet mass culture expanded its vocabulary of expressive means. In particular, the paper focuses on three case studies: Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Circus, the post-war campaign against “cosmopolitan theater critics,” and the film Devushka s gitaroi, produced during the 1957 film festival.


Elizabeth H. Stern (Heidelberg, Germany), “Staging Revolution in the German Democratic Republic”

Those working to remake dance culture in the early years of the German Democratic Republic were a motley group of ex-fascists, lukewarm socialists, newly returned committed communists, and apolitical artists trying to find consensus. Working in relation to two centers of power (the SED in Berlin and Soviet leadership in Moscow), GDR dance practitioners were compelled to adopt the Soviet genre of drambalet [dramatic ballet] and to confront their pre-war artistic traditions, namely expressionist Ausdruckstanz, which had been co-opted by the Third Reich. The circulation of pre-vetted repertoire, training techniques, ideology, and people were key to the establishment of GDR dance.

The 1953 staging of The Flames of Paris, a ballet about the French Revolution, created in Stalinist Russia to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, was a seemingly peculiar, yet strategic choice to help set GDR dance on the “correct path” toward Socialist Realism. As a Soviet cultural product and model drambalet that traveled widely within the Eastern bloc, Flames was intended not only to spur a cultural revolution in dance within individual socialist states, but also to help form a coherent, transnational field of revolutionary culture. This article uses this pivotal production as a case study to reveal the conflicts and compromises between German and Soviet artistic forms in the early years of the Cold War.


Irina Denischenko (Georgetown University), “Transnational Theory of the Avant-garde: János Mácza, Artistic Praxis, and Marxist Sociology”

This chapter considers the impact of the migratory movements of the European left on knowledge production in the 1920s. In particular, I investigate the contributions to literary and art theory of Hungarian emigres who fled to Soviet Russia in search of economic security and sought a socialist society to work towards. My analysis focuses on the first comparative and interdisciplinary theory of the avant-garde written by the Hungarian theater critic, Dadaist playwright, member and agitator of the Slovak-Hungarian Proletkult, and, later, Soviet theoretician of art and architecture, János Mácza (Ivan Matsa). Published in Russian in 1926, Mácza’s The Art of Contemporary Europe (Iskusstvo sovremennoi Evropy) applied the Marxist sociological method of cultural analysis, in vogue in Russia at the time, to European artistic activity in the first decades of the twentieth century. Comparing developments in literature, visual and plastic arts, theater, music, and architecture, Mácza spotlighted the work of artists we consider today as “avant-garde,” excluding the more mainstream artistic trends. His application of the Marxist method, which posits material and social forces as the common ground for parallel artistic developments, allowed Mácza to realize the coveted dream of Central and Eastern European artists: to find themselves on the cultural map of Europe. This method not only unseated Western Europe as the center of cultural production, but also made possible forms of comparison independent of a particular artwork’s or artist’s currency in the world art market. I argue that Mácza’s participation in the Hungarian avant-garde before his relocation to Soviet Russia, his links with the Hungarian Communist Party and the Czechoslovak Proletkult, his editorial work for avant-garde and political periodicals, as well as his embrace of Marxist methods of cultural analysis after immigration, enabled him to publish his groundbreaking theory decades before similar attempts were made in avant-garde studies in the West. In addition to highlighting the role of the international connections cultivated by Communist parties in Central Europe and Russia in shaping artistic production and its theorization in the early twentieth century, this chapter re-evaluates the theoretical significance of Marxist sociology in developing comparative and interdisciplinary methods in cultural studies.