Приключения нетоварища Кемминкза в Стране Советов

The Adventures of Untovarich Kem-min-kz in the Land of the Soviets E. E. Cummings and Russia

Selected, introduced, commented and translated into Russian by Vladimir Feshchenko and Emily Wright

Summary

This publication is an anthology of texts relating a unique and unknown occasion when Western avant-garde literature met the Soviet literary and political scene. A selection of chapters of Eimi, an experimental travelogue-cum-novel on Soviet Russia, is translated into Russian for the first time since it was published in English by one of America’s most prominent avant-garde poets E. E. Cummings (1894–1962).

Edward Estlin Cummings, best remembered for his poetical works, was also a prose writer, playwright and painter. Some of his early poetry was published in 1917, in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. In 1922, he published his first novel The Enormous Room soon to be followed, in 1923, by his first collection of poems, comprising his wildest experiments with form, verse, grammar and punctuation Tulips and Chimneys. In the 1920s he asserted himself as a part of the Anglo-American avant-garde, alongside Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos.

Eighty years have passed since the publication of E. E. Cummings’ highly experimental book on Soviet Russia Eimi. Russian readers can at last discover for themselves a long-forgotten satire of the Soviet regime written in a burlesque language and style. Based on the writer’s five-week trip to Soviet Russia in 1931, this documentary takes the form of an intriguing novel, modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Cummings compares his trip to Moscow to a descent into hell, using an infernally difficult language to depict his epic journey. In the novel, the poet-writer meets his guides to the unworld, whom he names Virgil and Beatrice, and other real representatives of the Soviet culture such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, Zinaida Raikh, Lili and Osip Brik, Sophia Tolstaya, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergey Yesenin, whose true identities are hidden by pseudonyms. Cummings’ hell is also haunted by the apparitions of Vladimir Lenin’s bust, the ghost of Karl Marx, the spirit of Maxim Gorky and sub-human masses. Eimi tells the story of the trial and survival of the author’s individuality, his “I am”, in the land of We — early Stalinist Russia. Ezra Pound compared the literary style of Cummings’ attack on the collective dictatorship to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Beside the selected translated chapters, this publication contains a preface, explanatory notes and texts both directly and indirectly linked to Cummings’ Soviet journey and the writing of Eimi. It includes Ezra Pound’s review upon the first publication of the book, E. E. Cummings’ preface to the second edition of The Enormous Room of 1934, a one-act posthumous play by E. E. Cummings called Weligion Is Hashish, as well as a few of his poems pertaining to his journey. The reader can also discover Semen Kirsanov’s 1931 translation of Louis Aragon’s poem Red Front, which Cummings was translating into English at the time of his journey. It was also Aragon who had sent his American friend and counterpart to discover the USSR. Annexed documents include a detailed timeline of Cummings’ expedition based on his diary and his later comments on his own book.

One hundred pictures including photographs, propaganda posters, caricatures, book and magazine covers illustrate this publication, giving the reader a broader view of what Cummings’ Marxland looked like.