Tag Archive: 0Soviet Russia

In the 1920s, in early Soviet Russia, a series of booklets began to be published by Kinopechat’, the state publishing house for cinema, focusing on the popular film actors of the day, Russian, German, French, British, and American.  ‘Bibliotechka kino-akterov’ (‘The Little Library of Film Actors’), as it was known, proved very popular, and ran to […]

Exactly 51 years ago today, on 21 August 1962, this rare little book, Glory to our heavenly brothers!  Verse and songs of Soviet Cosmonauts, was typeset and ready to print.  Published the year after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, it features ten poems (including work by Veronika Tushnova and Vera Inber) and four […]

As many of you know, I am interested in the reception of anglophone writers in Russia.  (See Wilde in Russia and its sequel.)  One of the most popular Western writers in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century was Jack London. ‘Until the 1950’s, Jack London was by far the most popular American […]

The Jamican–American writer Claude McKay spent seven months in early Soviet Russia, 1922–3, where he was ‘feted like a celebrity’.  So it’s not surprising that his work was quickly translated into Russian, his poetry appearing regularly in translation from 1923 until well into the Thirties. This is a 1929 translation of the best-selling Home to Harlem (1928). […]

1927 saw two Russian translations of The Color of a Great City (1923), Dreiser’s classic memoir of early twentieth-century New York: this one (Gosizdat’s), by Pyotr Okhrimenko, and one for “Mysl’” (Kraski N’iu-Iorka) by V. P. Steletsky.  What was particularly nice about this copy was that it still had its original dust-jacket: Pyotr Okhrimenko (1888–1975), […]