This image shows the first few paragraphs of an intriguing essay on Erskine Caldwell’s reception in the Soviet Union. It was featured in Soviet Literature Monthly, a multilingual literary journal published by the USSR from the mid-‘40s until the country’s dissolution. The article describes how Caldwell’s first book in Russian sold its first edition quickly, which is remarkable considering Soviet print runs during the 1930s numbered in the millions.
According to the review, Caldwell’s appeal lies in his portrayal of the downtrodden of American society (“Negroes, farmers and city slum dwellers”) but also in its quintessential settings like the “American backwoods,” its folkloric depictions, and, more importantly, the stories’ “surprising (…) affinity to Russian writings in denouncing stagnation, greed and spiritual emptiness.”
In other words, social realism.
Other Soviet critics saw a kinship between Caldwell’s fiction and their country’s own literature in the “moral makeup” of his protagonists as well as in the writer’s humor, which did not get lost in translation. To the author of this essay, however, there is also a properly political connection to be found in Caldwell’s work, which he considers “genuine art” and “undoubtedly Leftist” given the aesthetic approach to its milieu, supposedly based on “first-hand experience of hopeless poverty” and the “loss of the self and the craving for solidarity amidst despair” (ie. alienation in a capitalist society.)
All of the above reminds me that what I find the most fascinating and appealing about the U.S. is precisely the more authentic manifestations of its culture, the ones that are rooted in the land or in its social dynamics. This likely holds true for millions of people around the world who for generations have read authors like Hemingway or Faulkner, enjoyed America’s artistic production, or simply been lured by that part of the country that is not normally reflected in its cultural and political exports but which is where many foreigners find a commonality with their own experience.
Interventionism, foreign aid with strings attached, a Wilsonian desire to shape other societies into the U.S.’s own image, sanctimonious and selective promotion of human rights, a propagandized and artificial notion of a distinct type of “freedom” the rest of the world can only yearn for and which can be found solely in America, all of this generates considerably less kinship, if not downright hostility and suspicion, among those societies supposedly benefitted by Washington’s dictates and its colonial humanitarianism.
I have noticed before that when I read Appalachian literature and especially that which deals with coal mining culture and historical episodes forgotten by the cultural mainstream like the West Virginia Mine Wars, I am reminded of the coal mining novels of Chilean writers like Baldomero Lillo or Juan Marín, or testimonies like Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s Let Me Speak!, the memoir of a union activist in the mines of Bolivia. U.S. regional literature is perhaps one of the last holdouts for social fiction and it’s no coincidence that it emanates from parts of the country where socioeconomic problems are more acute or at least less present in the mainstream news cycle save for the occasional environmental catastrophe or a transient media desire to profile voters during electoral season. This is likely why this literature often touches on social issues in a more straightforward way than what one normally finds in the literary mainstream, even if, like most American writers, regional authors judiciously avoid anything that could be construed as didacticism. This might also be the reason why the Soviet Literature reviewer saw something in Erskine Caldwell’s fiction that American critics and writers rarely see in a homegrown author, even when it’s there.
Gonzalo Baeza 