From Russia with Love

Comrade Theodore Dreiser

This is a follow-up to an old post entitled Problems in which i described how my hostess scolded me for not 'know my own classics'. By this, she meant that it was a shame that I didn't know who Theodore Dreiser was. I asked all my American friends if they had ever heard of him or if they could name one of his supposedly phenomenal works. Only one recognized the name but could not think of any of his books/essays. Some others recognized "An American Tragedy" and "Sister Carry", but had no idea who the author was. The surprises continued when i asked my Russian acquantances about Teddy; they ALL knew him, without exception! He's apparently read by all children in school. Confused at this strange contrast, I asked Chris, my RC (Resident Coordinator), and he had an interesting and logical response. Below is a copy of his email:

Misha,

About Dreiser. Very funny that that came up. Of the American writers that Russians know well (Dreiser, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Henry, Steinbeck are the ones I hear the most frequently), Dreiser is the one that American knows least. He's one of those guys that gets at most a single sentence in an American history book, or even lumped in with other writers of the 1920s. The only book of his that I know is "Sister Carrie" but I haven't read it and I don't think people read it anywhere in schools these days. I think it's about a prostitute and was really controversial when it first came out but now doesn't seem so shocking. It's in the same sort of tradition as "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, it's one of those books that is famous for its role in history but no one actually reads.

He was probably read frequently in the Soviet Union for the same reason that the American Civil Rights Movement got so much press - because his books reveal the bad side of America. If he wasn't a socialist himself, he was strongly associated with the socialist movement. His popularity probably declined over the course of the last century along with the popularity of socialist thought in American intellectual circles.

So you can tell Tatiana Nikolaevna that although it's true that Americans know their own literature worse than Russians, no one cares about Sister Carrie anymore, and while Soviet schoolchildren were dutifully reading it to highlight the evils of the capitalist system, Americans had already forgotten about it.

The only other thing I know about Theodore Dreiser is that he was discovered by one of my favorite writers H.L. Mencken, a famous journalist from the Baltimore Sun - most famous for his reporting of the Scopes Monkey Trial - who founded a magazine called the American Mercury where Dreiser's writing was first published.

See you tomorrow at the banya. 6:40 in front of Bolshoi.

Chris

posted by Misha Molodoi @ 4:12 PM