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During his travel to the Soviet Union (November 4, 1927 — January 13, 1928) and on his return to the USA Theodore Dreiser was keeping in touch and dealing with Soviet literary institutions, periodicals and his Russian acquaints — publishers, editors, critics, etc. Ruth Epperson Kennell (1889 –1977) played an important role in making and maintaining these contacts in late 1920s-early 1930s. Ruth Kennell, who spent almost ten years in the Soviet Union, was a reference librarian (1925 –1927) in the Comintern Library in Moscow. On November 4, 1927 she got acquainted with Dreiser and was hired by him to serve as his secretary and guide as he toured the Soviet Union. Her role as a “Russian secretary”, personal assistant and friend is depicted in Dreiser’s Russian Diary and Kennell’s memoir Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union (1969) as well as in their correspondence that lasted till Dreiser’s death. Kennell continued to take part in Dreiser’s life and creative work in the USA, especially during the years that immediately followed their return from the USSR. The paper dwells at some length on Kennell’s biography, her role in publishing Dreiser’s work in the Soviet Union and USA, her work as an editor, critic and reviewer. Kennel had a long and varied writing career, and Dreiser helped her to start write and publish fiction. Their correspondence portrays Dreiser as a patron taking care of a young author and promoting her work. Kennell’s letters to Dreiser (1928 –1929) stored in the Manusсript Division of A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature are published in the addendum together with the Russian translation of several Dreiser’s letters to Kennell included in Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women. New Letters (2009).

The paper dwells on Ralph Ellison’s biography and his works, especially on his masterpiece Invisible Man (1952), its topical issues, poetics, the phenomenon of its exceptional success and the way it influenced over to Ellison’s status as one of the biggest XXth century classics and a reputed contributor to the African American and American literary canon. The essay traces the publication history of Ellison’s works, including posthumously released editions of his unpublished texts in 1990s-2010s, that became a result of an extensive research made by Ellison’s literary executor, literary historian, editor, textual critic John F. Callahan. The survey of American and European Ellison studies characterizes the basic corpus of books, academic papers, critical essays, collections, etc., both of the earlier (before mid-nineties) an contemporary period; the most outstanding scholars in the field are mentioned. Finally the essay gives a brief outlook of the scanty Soviet / Russian Ellisoniana – translations and editions, critical response and studies, and stresses an obvious discrepancy between the situation in the West and in Russia, where the Invisible Man still remains untranslated and the amount of scholarly papers, devoted to Ellison, scarcely reaches a dozen.

The paper makes a survey of the life and works by Phillis Wheatley (1753?- 1784), the first African American female poet, analyses critical reception of her poetry during her lifetime and up to nowadays, shows the way her literary reputation has been changing (sometimes drastically) as a result of the changing bias and attitudes in the course of the development of African American literary studies since 1960s till 2010s.The paper also attempts to assess Phillis Wheatley’s role in American literary and cultural history.

In 1938–1941 Richard Wright kept nourishing the idea to visit the Soviet Union,In 1938–1941 Richard Wright kept nourishing the idea to visit the Soviet Union,live and work there for some time; however, these plans never became real. The articleand the materials from the Russian State Archive of Art and Literature (RichardWright’s and Walt Carmon’s correspondence with the editors of “International Literature”,Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers, and the State PublishingHouse “Goslitizdat”) help to reconstruct Wright’s contacts with the Soviet institutionsand some aspects of his relations with the Communist Party of the USA, to specifyand provide some additional information that could complement to the recent studiesof Wright’s life and work.

The article explores Pearl S. Buck’s contacts with the Soviet Union and her literary reputation there. Since 1934 and up to the war (1943) her works have been regularly published and actively discussed by literary critics (S. Tretyakov, A. Elistratova, G. Mublit, M. Levidov and others) in the USSR. In their essays a set of ideologically bound clichés quickly was formed which determined Buck’s literary reputation up to the end of the Soviet period. She was treated as a strong realist, though her great talent was supposed to be limited by her religious “prejudices” (“a missionary’s daughter”) and her class affiliation (“a bourgeois writer”, “a spokesman for the American imperialists and colonialists”). Hence her manner of narration is understood as closely bound up with her attitudes: epic, “biblical” impersonal style, lack of bias, up-to-date social context, and ideologically “correct” evaluations. After the World War II Pearl Buck’s works are not published in the USSR; the attitude to Buck expressed in several critical essays of the 1950–1960-ies varies depending on the vacillating rhythm of SovietChinese relations. Publishing of Buck’s books in the 1990-ies after several decades of silence, has nothing to do with the Soviet traditions and follow the demands of the arising literary market in post-Soviet Russia. The article is supplied with publication of archived documents: Pearl Buck’s correspondence with Soviet literary institutions about the publishing of her works and her royalties, a shorthand report of mid-1930-ies (a core group of readers from the factory “Paris Commune” discusses Pearl S. Buck’s works with the literary critic E.D. Troshchenko), and a re-publication of Pearl S. Buck’s interview to Walt Carmon, American communist, editor, journalist, for Literaturnaya Gazeta (1937).

The first Soviet History of American Literature (1947) made by A.A. Startsev, A.A. Elistratova, T.I. Silman — scholars of Gorky Institute of World Literature, Soviet Academy of Sciences) was a part of a global academic project “world literary history” undertaken by V.M. Zhirmunsky together with his colleagues, specialists in Western literature at the Insitute of Literature (Leningrad) and by I.K. Luppol at Gorky Institute of World Literature (Moscow). The first volume was started in 1941; when the war began, the Gorky Institute was evacuated to Tashkent, and the work continued there. In 1945 the first volume was approved at Gorky Institute; the second volume was in work. However by the moment when the first volume was published (May 1947) the political situation in the USSR changed drastically. USA-USSR alliance gave way to the cold war. On Sept 21, 1947 A.M. Leites’ devastating critique of the History of American Literature was published in Kultura i Zhizn’ (#26), an organ of Agitation and Propaganda department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; after that the book was criticized at Gorky Institute and condemned as incompatible with the principles of the Soviet science. The second volume wasn’t published, the first one disappeared from the professional field. The debacle of the “American volume” marked the freezing of the world literary history project started in mid-thirties (it was re-started much later, in early 1960-ies), as well as all Western literary studies in the Soviet Academy up to the late 1950-ies. The research is based on the materials from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN).

The first Soviet History of American Literature (1947) made by A.I. Startsev, A.A. Elistratova, T.I. Silman – scholars of Gorky Institute of World Literature, Soviet Academy of Sciences) was a part of the global academic project “world literary history” undertaken by V.M. Zhirmunsky together with his colleagues, specialists in Western literature at the Insitute of Literature (Leningrad) and by I.K. Luppol at Gorky Institute of World Literature (Moscow) in late 1930–ies. The first volume was started in 1941; when the war began, the Gorky Institute was evacuated to Tashkent, and the work continued there. In 1945 the first volume of the History of American Literature was approved at Gorky Institute; the second volume was in work. However by the moment when the first volume was published (May 1947) the political situation in the USSR changed drastically. USA-USSR alliance gave way to the cold war. On Sept 21, 1947 A.M. Leites’ devastating critique of the History of American Literature was published in Kultura i Zhizn’ (№ 26), an organ of Agitation and Propaganda department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; after that the book was criticized at Gorky Institute and condemned as incompatible with the principles of the Soviet science. The second volume wasn’t published, the first one disappeared from the professional field. The debacle of the “American volume” marked the freezing of the world literary history project started in mid-thirties (it was re-started at Gorky Insitute much later, in early 1960-ies), as well as all Western literary studies in the Soviet Academy up to the late 1950-ies. The research is based on the materials from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN).

The paper examines early Soviet reception of Ernest Hemingway's works. The research is based on the readers’ letters to Goslitizdat (State Publishing House) from the funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI). A small collection of letters (1935–1936) shows readers’ reaction to the first Hemingway’s Soviet book editions: a short story collection Death in the Afternoon (1934) and Fiesta (1935). The readers unanimously condemn Hemingway for his “decadent” prose and Goslitizdat for publishing such “absurd” and “harmful” books. The only exception is a short positive review of the novel A Farewell to Arms (1936) sent to Goslitizdat in 1937. To uncover the reasons for the negative readers’ reception one should turn to the literary criticism of the 1934–1935, especially the essays by Ivan Kashkin who introduced the new author to the Soviet reading audience. A comparative analysis of readers’ feedback and critical discourse shows that the ambivalent and even contradictory image of the writer created by the critics made the readers think of Hemingway’s works as “decadent”, “bourgeois” and alien to Soviet people. Another reason was the innovative nature of Hemingway’s modernist prose which seemed obscure, confusing and unintelligible; the Soviet reader obviously preferred “clarity” and “simplicity” of Erskine Caldwell’s or Theodore Dreiser’s realistic writings. The situation changed by the 1937, when Hemingway was praised by both Soviet critics and readers as an anti-fascist writer, a heroic defender of the Spanish Republic.

Theodorе Dreiser was invited to the USSR to take part in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. His visit to the Soviet Union that lasted over two months (November 4, 1926 — January 13, 1928) has been documented and studied quite well: Dreiser's Russian diary that he kept during his travel was published almost 30 years ago, and four years ago its Russian translation appeared. Another source is Ruth Epperson Kennell’s book Theodore Dreiser and the USSR. A First- Hand Chronicle (1969). A number of studies and scholarly publications are devoted to Dreiser’s trip; however, new materials and documents that contribute to more detailed reconstruction of Dreiser’s Russian journey still are being found in the archives. New documents from the funds of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) that highlight Dreiser’s stay in Leningrad (November 26 — December 2, 1927) are published in the Addendum to the article: a report submitted to VOKS by Sergei Trivas, officer for Anglo-American countries, who accompanied Dreiser as a guide and interpreter, and a letter of gratitude from Dreiser to Nikolai Derzhavin, VOKS representative in Leningrad.

The monograph by Russian-American researcher, translator and critic Galina Lapina Americans in Moscow: 1930–1940 is dedicated to pre-war Soviet-American theatrical, educational, cinematic, diplomatic, literary contacts. Among the heroes of the book are American Ambassador Joseph E. Davis and his chauffeur Charles Ciliberti, writers Langston Hughes and Dorothy West, playwright Sophie Treadwell, actress Blanche Yurka and other writers, artists, diplomats, journalists who came to the USSR in the 1930s and early 1940s. The book consists of five chapters; each of them is devoted to a certain episode of Soviet-American connections: the failed film project Black and White; The Promised Land, Sophie Treadwell's play about Soviet life; Moscow theater festivals of 1933–1937; history of the Anglo-American Institute (1933–1935), Moscow summer school for American students; a comparison of two books about the USSR — Joseph E. Davis’ Mission to Moscow (1943) and Charles Siliberti’s Backstage Mission to Moscow (1946), that show Soviet reality from the opposing points of view. The book that is, in fact, a collection of articles, is however marked by unity and integrity; it reconstructs the general context of the period in question on the basis of the extensive material. Memoirs, correspondence, archival documents, Soviet and American press form a vivid picture of Soviet-American relations in the pre-war decade. Many sources revealing American attitudes towards the USSR used by the author, have not yet been translated or published in Russia. Galina Lapina’s book encourages further research and publishing projects.

Erskine Caldwell became known in the USSR in the mid-1930s through the magazine publications of his short stories and the Russian edition of the novel Tobacco Road (1938). In his correspondence with the representatives of Soviet literary institutions — Sergei Dynamov, Timofei Rokotov, Mikhail Apletin — Caldwell often discussed his plans to visit the Soviet Union. Caldwell and the famous photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, who became his wife in 1939, arrived in the Soviet Union after their trip to China in May 1941, and thus started their acquaintance with the Soviet Union in Alma-Ata. From Kazakhstan the American guests went to Moscow, had time to visit Ukraine, Tbilisi, Sochi, and on June 22 learned about the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. They stayed in the warring country until late September 1941. As eyewitnesses to historic events, Caldwell and Burke-White worked as war correspondents: they reported from the USSR for Life magazine and the newspaper PM. Caldwell's reports and Burke-White's photographs were also published in the Soviet press. Since July 1941, Caldwell conducted daily CBS live radio broadcasts from wartime Moscow. M. Burke-White held a photo session with Stalin, captured the historic visit to Moscow of Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s personal advisor. The article, based on the American and Soviet press and archival materials, reconstructs the history of the American couple's stay and work in the USSR and evaluates their activities as writers and war correspondents in the historical, literary and political context of the first months of the Great Patriotic War. Caldwell’s interview with the American Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt for Life magazine, which didn’t pass the Soviet military censorship is published in the Addendum.

The corpus of archival materials documenting Erskine Caldwell's Soviet contacts in 1935–1943, including his stay in the USSR (May–September 1941) comprises documents from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation. It is Caldwell's correspondence with the representatives of Soviet literary institutions — Sergei Dinamov, Timofei Rokotov, Mikhail Apletin, Boris Suchkov, Aleksandr Fadeev, as well as official correspondence of Soviet ministries and organizations (Union of Soviet Writers, People’s Comissariat for Foreign Affairs, Customs Department of the People’s Comissariat for Internal Affaris), Soviet officials (Solomon Lozovsky, Konstantin Umansky, etc.) and their correspondence with the American media (NANA, CBS, The Life, PM). The epistolary corpus helps to reconstruct Erskine Caldwell’s and Margaret Burke White’s stay in the USSR, provides details of their work there as war correspondents. The corpus of documents opens with the 1935 letter by Sergei Dinamov, editor-in-chief of International Literature magazine, who started contacts with Caldwell (since 1937 the correspondence was continued by Timofei Rokotov, who replaced Dinamov in International Literature) and ends with the telegram congratulating Caldwell on his fortieth birthday (Dec 16, 1943), signed by the representatives of the Union of Soviet Writers Aleksandr Fadeev, Mikhail Apletin and Boris Suchkov, the last editor-in-chief of International Literature. This telegram sent at the end of 1943, the year of the closure of International Literature and the year of the turning point in the course of the Great Patriotic War (Caldwell was a witness to its beginning) draws a line under this period in Erskine Caldwell's Soviet contacts.

On December 8, 2022, an international academic conference dedicated to the year 1922 as an important milestone in the history of American and European Modernism was held at the Russian State University of Humanities (Moscow). The conference aimed at the cultural reconstruction of 1922 and was organized by the Department of Comparative-Historical Literary Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities, and A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. American literary history occupied a prominent place in the program of the conference. The plenary session was devoted to T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land was published in 1922. Olga Polovinkina (Russian State University for the Humanities, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences) spoke about the importance of the aesthetics of the music hall for the strcture The Waste Land. Igor Shaitanov (Russian State University of Humanities, The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) drew a parallel between The Waste Land and Evegny Zamyatin's Alatyr’. Vassily Tolmatchoff (Lomonosov Moscow State University) suggested a new interpretation of the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. A.A. Astvatsaturov (St. Petersburg State University) considered T.S. Eliot’s modernist work in comparison with the creative attitudes and self-fashioning of Henry Miller. Alexandra Zinovieva (Lomonosov Moscow State University) spoke about Countess Marie Louise Elisabeth Larisсh von Moennich, the heroine of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and her participation in German and Austrian cinematographic projects of the late 1910s — early 1920s. Olga Panova (A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Lomonosov Moscow State University) reconstructed the year 1922 in the history of the Harlem Renaissance. Irina Morozova (Russian State University of Humanities) presented the year 1922 as an important period in the history of American pharaohmania. Olga Antsyferova (St. Petersburg State University) analysed the book 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics (ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté; Cambridge University Press, 2015) showing how the methodology of historical simultaneity works on the material of culture studies.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852) being the most powerful statement on the racial issue in the 19th century American literature, succeeded to incorporate and rethink everything that the national tradition had in stock on the problem of slavery and race relations. The Black racial / cultural identity model that was taking shape in the 18th century Anglo-American literature, later was being enriched and transformed throughout American (and African-American) literary history. Uncle Tom's Cabin became another crucial text (the next one after Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia) that provided the emerging Black cultural / racial identity model with a new quality: it became universal, nationally recognized — and at the same time a point of controversy provoking endless debates and open for dynamic change and transformations, as was the case with anti-Tom literature and the ambivalent reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in African American literary tradition. The analysis of The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) by Caroline Lee Hentz, a typical example of anti-Tom novels, gives an idea of the pro-slavery response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The final part of the paper is a survey of the main stages in African American response since the 1853 argument between Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass that became a matrix for the further polemic, and up to Henry Louis Gates’s subversive “double-voiced” interpretation of the novel which is in full agreement with the tendency to revise the role of white Abolitionists in the antislavery movement and African American history, typical for African American studies in the 1990s–2000s.

The role of Christianity as a factor that exerted a decisive influence over African American social and cultural history, is being debated time and again in the course of African American studies. The ambivalent attitude of the 18th –19th century Christian preachers and missionaries to slavery, egalitarian tendencies that combined with the idea of humility and resignation, led to contradictions and controversy in the evaluation of the role Christianity played in Afroamerica. The case of Jupiter Hammon (1711 –1806?), a preacher and the first Black Christian poet in America, illustrates the emergence of the basic topoi in the pre-war Blackamerican literary tradition: conversion to Christianity and literacy (enculturation) as two essential conditions for the acknowledgement of Black humanity and ability to integrate into the New World civilization. Jupiter Hammon refused to struggle against slavery; paradoxically, however, his work is an inherent part of both African American religious and cultural history and the New England Christian thought, that engendered Abolitionism and its most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (1852), based on the concept of the “religious genius” of the African and the “Black redemption” of the greatest American vice, slavery.

The paper concentrates on Claude McKay’s Soviet contacts, editions and his image in the Soviet literary criticism of the 1920s. Claude McKay arrived in Petrograd in 1922 as a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International and spent about 6 months in the USSR. His visit aroused interest in his poetry; two of his books – a collection of short stories Trial by Lynching (1924) and Negroes in America (1923) – were published for the first time in the USSR in Russian, their American editions haven’t appeared before 1970s. Claude McKay had vast contacts with Soviet leaders, writers, poets, artists, theater managers. His poems, essays and memoirs about his “Russian pilgrimage” help to understand both his interest in communism and his disappointment in the leftist movement and stalinism. McKay’s literary reputation in the Soviet Union underwent a change during the 1920s due to his evolution as a writer and his contacts with Leon Trotsky and Max Eastman. First he was introduced as a revolutionary American Negro author writing about Black proletariat, and a “friend of the Soviet Union”; however in late 1920s when his novels Home to Harlem and Banjo were published in Russia, critics stigmatized McKay as a “Bohemian lumpen-intellectual” and a petty bourgeois Black nationalist. McKay failed to become a symbol of the oppressed American Black proletariat; in the 1930s his poems are published very rarely, his name practically disappears off the Soviet literary criticism. The paper uses publications of American and Soviet press of the 1920s and archived documents.