Mark Twain's Mississippi Writings in the Russian Imagination

FAIN: FT-291306-23

Cassio Ferreira de Oliveira
Portland State University (Portland, OR 97207-0751)

Research and writing leading to a book on the Soviet reception of Mark Twain’s writings from 1917 to 1991. 

The project is a book on the reception history of Mark Twain’s works in the Soviet Union. With their vivid depictions of antebellum life in the American heartland, Twain’s Mississippi writings, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, became classics of children’s literature in the Soviet Union, where they inspired Russian-language exemplars of the genre as well as screen and stage adaptations of the novels. They also served to illustrate racial and social turmoil in the slaveholding American South, enhancing Twain’s status as a critic of American inequality and imperialism. The book examines a key episode of cultural transfer and literary translation and reception between the capitalist and socialist worlds. More broadly, it illustrates how the Soviet Union turned cultural products originating in capitalist America into indictments of American society.