'History of American Literature' and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Article 2

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).