First U.S. edition of Ilf & Petrov's travelogue (Farrar & Rinehart, 1937) / Image courtesy of Amazon
In a recent
postscript to his weekly American Hour
(Американский час) on Radio Svoboda, Alexander
Genis articulated a conclusion he’d come to that struck me as remarkable in its
insightfulness. The theme of the segment was “America through the Eyes of Russian Writers,” and special emphasis was placed on Ilf and Petrov’s 1935 travelogue One-Story America (Одноэтажная Америка),
named for the predominance of houses with just one floor here. Previous
episodes had focused on Maxim Gorky, Sergei Yesenin, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, each
of whom had also visited and written about the United States in the early part of the twentieth century.
Genis, a brilliant essayist, concluded the series by
throwing in his own two cents on the subject, extrapolating outward from the commentary
by correspondent Vladimir Abarinov and his guest Nikolai Rudensky. That’s when
my interest was piqued.
First, a quick tangent: note that Ilf and Petrov’s book was published
in English the first time, cleverly, as Little Golden America (trans. Charles Malamuth, 1937) and more recently as Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip (edited
by Erika Wolf & translated by Anne O. Fisher, 2007), in an edition that
includes the photographs Ilya Ilf took for the Soviet magazine Ogonyok. I recommend the newer book;
it’s great fun to flip through!
Now, back to Genis and his insight on Russians in America.
I’ll let him speak for himself:
…Vladimir Abarinov has to admit
that our fellow Russian writers who visited this country didn’t like it—not
Gorky, not Yesenin, not Mayakovsky, and not Ilf or Petrov (to these names, one
might add Pilnyak, Ehrenburg, and many others).
Why? Perhaps because they had all
come to the New World for new impressions. From dilapidated Europe, the
traveler arrived in the land of the machine, where, as Yesenin put it, “every
cigarette butt grew into a smokestack.” Not noticing the machine in America was
as hard as not finding the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
…Ilf and Petrov’s true
heroes are highways, gas pumps, assembly lines, automobiles, dams,
electricity, and of course, a bridge (this time in San Francisco). They wanted
to wrap it all up and haul it home so they could get to the bright future more
quickly.
As for “one-story” America, the two authors, like many other Russian
travelers, came to an unpleasant conclusion: this great country is populated by
a small people—mercantile, greedy, narrow-minded, and not worthy of America’s
technological might.
And now it’s time to pose a
question: why is the machine, which was inevitably found in America by Russian
writers, absent from the work of American writers? Without technology, all of
them managed to get by: Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, Steinbeck, Henry Miller,
and—stepping further into the past—Jack London, Mark Twain, Melville, Emerson,
and Henry David Thoreau. Why weren’t Americans themselves captivated by their
technological civilization? Why didn’t the industrial novel spring up here?
Why, as Ilf and Petrov asked, didn’t the engineer become a national hero?
Because America is not principally
an urban nation. And that’s what the outsiders from the Old World didn’t
notice. They looked for America somewhere other than where it prefers to live.
Cities in America are the exception that proves the rule…
Setting skyscrapers aside for offices and visitors, Americans
themselves have always preferred to live on the first floor of their own home,
a little further away from the excesses of technology. Having traded
civilization for geography, nature for culture, and artificial landscapes for a
natural one, America came out ahead. But you can only evaluate this deal when
you learn to travel like an American.
The secret of that art lies right on
the surface: it’s in the road, which is an end in itself. Greedily covering
mile after mile, the wayfarer dissolves himself into primordial emptiness, vast
reserves of which the New World still contains within its shores. Beneath the
wheels of the automobile, space takes on an
almost physical palpability. The map comes to life, tears away from the page,
and moves from two-dimensional abstraction into real life.
America can only be understood on the move.
[Translation mine]
Fascinating! And to my mind, mostly on the mark. It’s nothing
new to say that wilderness and the open road loom large in the American
imagination, but it does seem to be true that many visitors from Russia have
somehow missed that key point.
Not surprisingly, though, two Russian writers who
don’t fit the city-centric New World pattern are Nabokov and Brodsky: the
former wrote one of the classic American road novels, and the latter set some
of his finest poems in the woods of New England and small towns of the Midwest.
They got the lay of the land better than their machine-head compatriots did.
Leave it to exiles to complicate things!
