Huck Finn’s Adventures in the Land of the Soviet People

Abstract

In 1956, Alexander Kuznetsov, the Vice Chairman of the Soviet Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, commissioned a formal scholarly report on Mark Twain's reputation in the USSR in response to a letter from Bradley Kelley, of the Redding Times, around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Mark Twain Library in Redding, Connecticut. 1 Kuznetsov's goal was ambitious: he wanted to start building a bridge over the cultural and political divide separating the Soviet Union and America, and felt-with good reason-that Twain would serve that purpose better than anyone else. 2 In addition to being one of the best-selling American writers in the USSR, 3 Twain had tangible personal connections to Russia: He had visited and written about the country in The Innocents Abroad; he had been a friend of such famous Russian authors as Maxim Gorky, S. M. Stephnyak-Kravchinsky, and Ivan Turgenev; he had even had a Russian son-in-law. 4 Much more importantly, Twain's works had enjoyed immense popularity in Russia from the moment they had become available in Russian translations. His story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was translated into Russian as early as 1872, and The Gilded Age immediately after its publication in America. 5 The first collection of Mark Twain's works, in eleven volumes, was published in Russia in 1896. A second edition came out in the year of Twain's death, and a complete collection in twenty-eight volumes appeared in 1911. 6 The prerevolutionary fascination with Twain and the Russian admiration for his satirical talents (he was often compared to Gogol in the press), only intensified after the emergence of the Soviet State, as his critical stance towards the realities of American life, his antiracist position, and his disdain for organized religion, made him extremely palatable to the new socialist government. 7 Between 1918 and the end of 1959, more than 10,926,000 copies of Mark Twain's books in twenty-five languages were