User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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commissars. I am not claiming that his Soviet sources revealed to Hemingway everything they knew about the darker sides of Soviet life, particularly Stalin’s terror, for they would have been unlikely to risk being found out as Hemingway’s source of such information since he was known to them as a famous writer and journalist. However, Hemingway, one way or another did crack some of the Soviets’ seamier secrets, as we see in Robert Jordan’s ruminations on the fate of the Russian poet Mayakovsky who, according to Jordan, was guilty of the sin of Bohemianism, but now that he is dead, he is a “saint” (Hemingway). I understand this to mean that Hemingway was concerned about the fates of Soviet Russian writers and that Jordan’s irony shows that he understood they were subject to the vagaries of the state’s ever shifting attitudes toward them. I have to say here parenthetically that among the writers of his time Mayakovsky was certainly the reddest of them all, and his leftist proclivities outlasted even those of the regime itself. For all of Robert Jordan’s political awareness and involvement, he is no party’s man, and ultimately, we judge him not on his politics but on his character. Likewise, I believe that we should judge Hemingway by the character of his prose and not his politics.

It seems clear that the red connections of Hemingway and Mailer are sometimes linked with their interest in things Russian and sometimes not.

Moreover, both writers are bound up with Russian literature in a number of substantial, one might even say formative ways. To put it briefly, Hemingway

was clearly well read in Chekhov and he also read authors of the Soviet period. As Clarence Brown points out, Hemingway’s praise of Andrei Platonov to Soviet journalists helped spur the Soviets to resume publication of this writer of exceptional and original talent. It was during the 1960s that Hemingway experienced a surge of popularity among Russian readers. Indeed, I remember vividly a young man I met in Kiev in 1969 who had literally read all of Hemingway that was available in Russian translation at that time and who knew by heart the plots of many of his stories and novels. There is not space here adequately to describe what voracious readers of fiction Russians are except to say that they—from professional intellectuals to professional bus drivers—often know well not just the “classics” of their own literature but those of world literature, including of course Hemingway. Furthermore, some of the Russian writers who are often associated with a loose grouping from the 1960s called “Young Prose,” for example Yury Kazakov, show the unmistakable hand of Hemingway in their manner of writing. So

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 commissars. I am not claiming that his Soviet sources revealed to Hemingway everything they knew about the darker sides of Soviet life, particularly Stalin’s terror, for they would have been unlikely to risk being found out as Hemingway’s source of such information since he was known to them as a famous writer and journalist. However, Hemingway, one way or another did crack some of the Soviets’ seamier secrets, as we see in Robert Jordan’s ruminations on the fate of the Russian poet Mayakovsky who, according to Jordan, was guilty of the sin of Bohemianism, but now that he is dead, he is a “saint” (Hemingway). I understand this to mean that Hemingway was concerned about the fates of Soviet Russian writers and that Jordan’s irony shows that he understood they were subject to the vagaries of the state’s ever shifting attitudes toward them. I have to say here parenthetically that among the writers of his time Mayakovsky was certainly the reddest of them all, and his leftist proclivities outlasted even those of the regime itself. For all of Robert Jordan’s political awareness and involvement, he is no party’s man, and ultimately, we judge him not on his politics but on his character. Likewise, I believe that we should judge Hemingway by the character of his prose and not his politics.
+It seems clear that the red connections of Hemingway and Mailer are sometimes linked with their interest in things Russian and sometimes not.
+Moreover, both writers are bound up with Russian literature in a number of substantial, one might even say formative ways. To put it briefly, Hemingway
+was clearly well read in Chekhov and he also read authors of the Soviet period. As Clarence Brown points out, Hemingway’s praise of Andrei Platonov to Soviet journalists helped spur the Soviets to resume publication of this writer of exceptional and original talent. It was during the 1960s that Hemingway experienced a surge of popularity among Russian readers. Indeed, I remember vividly a young man I met in Kiev in 1969 who had literally read all of Hemingway that was available in Russian translation at that time and who knew by heart the plots of many of his stories and novels. There is not space here adequately to describe what voracious readers of fiction Russians are except to say that they—from professional intellectuals to professional bus drivers—often know well not just the “classics” of their own literature but those of world literature, including of course Hemingway. Furthermore, some of the Russian writers who are often associated with a loose grouping from the 1960s called “Young Prose,” for example Yury Kazakov, show the unmistakable hand of Hemingway in their manner of writing. So
+Page break