Discourses of Regulation and Resistance 3 - Censorship in the Stalin Period: Internatsional'naia literatura
from Part II - Case Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
Summary
The translator Nora Gal’, who worked on the editorial staff of Internatsional'naia literatura as a young woman, described her time at the journal in evocative and emotional terms:
What was the journal Internatsional'naia literatura for us students and, later, postgraduates studying the West in the 1930s before the war? Perhaps it was something like the cave from A Thousand and One Nights, full of fairy-tale treasures. We opened up other worlds. There were no Cements, Hydrocentrals, or poetic refrains in the style of ‘the cranes rumble in the construction pit’. We discovered Kafka, Joyce and Dos Passos, Caldwell and Steinbeck, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Brecht and Feuchtwanger, Jules Roman, Martin du Gard and Malraux, albeit partially and in abridged form. These are the encounters for which we are indebted to the journal. The discovery of Hemingway was a huge shock, not only for us – we were generally inexperienced – but for all readers. Of course in Interlit we could not avoid the rhetoric of world revolution, the primitive sloganeering about the ‘proletarian writers of all countries’. But it happened that we could find the new paths and crossroads of human fate in the deepest depths of our soul.
We had not suspected that one could write like that in our time.
Internatsional'naia literatura was a vital outlet for publishing major works of contemporary foreign, particularly Western, literature during the Stalin period. Like other ‘thick’ journals, it was not only a literary journal but also a socio-political one, which was charged with creating ‘a favourable image of the Land of the Soviets in the pinkshaded eyes of western intellectuals’. As such, the journal focused primarily on publishing work by proletarian and revolutionary writers, although it also included a significant number of ‘works of those left-bourgeois foreign writers, who portray the real actuality of the capitalist world’; meaning that the journal had some freedom to publish bourgeois authors, particularly during the first half of the 1930s, when cultural conditions were such that controls over foreign literature was still weak, allowing the journal to emerge as a ‘potential cultural bridge between the Soviet Union and the West’.
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- Discourses of Regulation and ResistanceCensoring Translation in the the Stalin and Khrushchev Soviet Era, pp. 67 - 101Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015