PREFACE
On 3 October 1927, Theodore Dreiser received an invitation from the Soviet government to travel to Moscow for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. On that day he began writing a diary that he would finish on 13 January 1928, when he had come to the end of a lengthy tour of Russia. In Moscow he met Ruth Epperson Kennell, who, as his secretary and companion for the trip, contributed significantly to the composition of the diary.
Dreiser’s careful preservation of his papers makes possible this first publication of the Russian Diary of 1927–28. It is a document that will be of special value to anyone interested in American and Russian history in the twentieth century. During his stay in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Dreiser kept the diary to provide a record of the conversations he had with many of that country’s most famous cultural and political figures: Sergei Eisenstein, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Anastas Molotov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukharin, and Archbishop Platon, among others. These exchanges and Dreiser’s firsthand account of conditions in the Soviet Union during the pivotal years of the late 1920s make the diary an important primary source and among the last such historical documents from this era.
This volume continues the Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition’s tradition of publishing authoritative texts of writings that either survive only in manuscript or are otherwise inaccessible to both the specialist and the general reader. Such an undertaking would be unimaginable without the goodwill of the administration and the special training of the staff at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Paul H. Mosher, Director of Libraries at the university, has provided continuing support to the Dreiser Project. Michael T. Ryan, Director of Special Collections at the library, has generously devoted his own time and the resources of his staff to facilitating the work of the Dreiser Edition. The reorganization of the Dreiser Collection by Curator of Manuscripts Nancy Shawcross has made easier the preparation of this book and of others in progress.
Together with the Pennsylvania Edition of Dreiser’s American Diaries, 1902–1926 (1982) and An Amateur Laborer (1983), this edition of the Russian Diary is one of a projected series of volumes that will provide scholarly texts of Dreiser’s private papers. Because Dreiser never prepared this diary for publication, it has been presented in conformity with widely accepted principles governing the editing of private documents. The editors, Thomas P. Riggio and James L. W. West III, conceived the volume and shared equally in the verification of the text and the writing of the annotations and identifications. Riggio provided the Introduction and West the Editorial Principles and apparatus. The editors, and associate editor, Lee Ann Draud, proofread the text and verified the contents at each stage of preparation.
THOMAS P. RIGGIO
General Editor
The University of Pennsylvania
Dreiser Edition
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For permission to publish the text of Dreiser’s Russian Diary, the editors are grateful to the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, who hold copyright on Dreiser’s unpublished writings. The editors thank Arthur D. Casciato, who produced an initial transcription of the diary that was a helpful starting point for our work. Thanks also to Stephen F. Cohen and Rosemarie Reed for their generosity in providing information about and photographs of Nikolai Bukharin.
Professor Riggio wishes to thank Jay West and Marina Tchebotaeva for help in verifying Russian spelling and identifying Russian place names, events, and geographical features. He would also like to acknowledge Irena Kutkina, whose aid as translator and guide in the Russian archives, as well as at the sites that Dreiser had visited, made his stay in Russia both more profitable and more enjoyable. Special thanks also to Drs. Eleonora A. Kravchenko and Alexandro Kutkina of Moscow for their generous hospitality and aid in matters large and small. Professor West thanks LaVerne Kennevan Maginnis for assistance with the textual chores; he is grateful to Flora Buckalew, Kim Fisher, and Suzanne Marcum for much help with the annotations.
Russia would make a most delightful socialistic community if the Emperor could be suddenly done away with and the people as suddenly educated. The Government controlling everything, it would only be necessary to transfer the control to the people’s choice and you would have a kind of Utopia. The thing might be worked inversely and a fine socialistic community transformed into the most despotic form of government, with the reins all in one man’s hands, but that would not be likely to happen where people have once gained any kind of an intellectual status.
— Dreiser, at age 22, in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat,
2 January 1893
On 10 January 1928 Theodore Dreiser found himself making his way through the cold of a Russian winter day in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, an industrial center on the Black Sea near the mouth of the Dnieper River. He was ending a strenuous two months’ visit to the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and was having difficulty getting a visa to travel through Poland to western Europe. To his dismay, customs agents told him that he needed special permission to take manuscripts and printed matter out of the country. He was most concerned about a diary that he had kept since 3 October 1927, when he first learned of the Soviet government’s offer of an all-expenses-paid trip to Moscow. On that day he began his handwritten diary as a record of his experiences and reflections, beginning in New York and continuing aboard ship, and while traveling through Europe—first to Paris, then to Berlin and Warsaw, and finally into Russia.
He was invited initially, along with some fifteen hundred other international celebrities, for a week-long observance of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. When he requested that the government extend the invitation and finance him to a longer tour of the country, he was quickly obliged. He wanted, he told the Russian representative, “to see the real, unofficial Russia—the famine district in the Volga, say” (p. 29). The request seems not to have fazed the envoy. Dreiser was clearly a valuable commodity to a government that understood the value — and vanity — of artists and intellectuals. “The Soviet believes you to be the outstanding literary intelligence of America” (p. 28), he was informed, and preparations were speedily made for his trip.
By early November he was in Moscow and had hired a private secretary, Ruth Epperson Kennell. A thirty-four-year-old American expatriate who had been living in Russia for more than five years, Kennell made a living by translating and editing so-called anniversary editions of American writers, including Dreiser, for the government publishing house.
Shortly after their first meeting, she and Dreiser became lovers. When the American socialist Scott Nearing nominated her to be the novelist’s secretary for the extended trip, Dreiser jumped at the suggestion: “Since we are already so close,” he wrote in the diary, “it strikes me as almost an ideal choice” (p. 66). Because Kennell was not a party member, local bureaucrats objected, but when Dreiser angrily threatened to return home, a deal was struck that allowed her to stay on at his expense. Of course the government sent along with them an official guide provided by VOKS, the agency responsible for cultural relations with foreigners. Kennell followed Dreiser everywhere, made shorthand notes of his reactions and conversations, at times took dictation, and each evening reorganized her notes in the form of a typed diary.
Years later, Kennell recalled her unusual arrangement with Dreiser: “He had instructed me to use I to mean himself in writing the diary. But he left the writing entirely to me, except for an occasional reminder to be sure to make a note of this or that.”1 (In practice Kennell sometimes strayed from this routine and lapsed into her own voice to describe Dreiser’s actions or to address brief asides to him.) Dreiser also requested that she make a carbon copy for herself, since he expected her to help him later in mining the diary for various publications. Kennell worked diligently at her task for sixty-eight days. She typed her text each evening, straining her portable Corona until a cable snapped, which sent Dreiser on a frenzied hunt for a repair shop in the port town of Batum on the Black Sea. At times she needed the better part of a morning to transcribe the previous day’s copious notations. At the journey’s end, she later recalled, there was a scramble “to finish typing my daily notes in order to hand over the complete diary of the tour to my employer at the border.”2
The writing of a second, secret diary of her own added to Kennell’s workload. In it she recorded conversations and events not included in the text that Dreiser carried away with him. For the book she later wrote about the novelist’s stay in Russia, Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union (1969), she turned to these pages for scenes that, as she observes, are “based on my own, not the official, notes.”3 Kennell’s “notes” have not survived, but they probably contained an account of her more private moments with the man she called her “dear boss.”
What does survive, at The State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow, is a copy of the parts of the diary that she typed for Dreiser. Accompanying it is a letter to the head of VOKS’ Foreign Affairs Department, Yaroshevsky, in which Kennell explains the nature of the document: “You will see the order is like a diary— the last pages are the first and the notes should be read from the bottom to top, beginning November 8 to November 30. Some pages are missing of the first two days.” She promises to “finish typing from my notes when I return and will give it to you.”4 She made good on her promise; without informing Dreiser, she delivered the greater portion of the diary to the VOKS home office.
Kennell’s leaking of the diary to the Russians seems to have been an act of self-protection. As an American given an unusual position at the insistence of a foreign celebrity, she naturally felt the need to prove her loyalty to her superiors. She must have suspected that VOKS was getting letters about Dreiser’s unflattering views of the country from its appointed guide, Trevis, and from Dr. Sophia Davidovskaya (the “Davi” of the diary), a physician who was sent along by VOKS to look after Dreiser’s health.5 Kennell’s awareness that she too was being watched may be the reason she made a point of occasionally distancing herself from Dreiser by commenting on his behavior in the diary itself. The government’s knowledge of the diary may also explain the difficulty Dreiser had in leaving the country with his manuscript.
In any case, Dreiser eventually disentangled himself from the bureaucratic red tape at the Russian border and carried the “official” diary to America, where he brought it to the state in which it now exists. He edited Kennell’s typescript, cutting and pasting together various portions of it and expanding and altering the text in longhand throughout. Certain entries in the diary suggest that Dreiser began this revision in Russia, but by 18 November he was already ten days behind schedule (see p. 108), and he appears to have stopped emending the text altogether as the trip increasingly drained his strength.
When Dreiser completed his work on the diary in New York, it ran to 424 leaves, 134 of which are in his own hand exclusively and 290 of which are edited portions of the document Kennell turned over to him at the Russian border. The final product is a complex document, more objective than a private diary and, at the same time, more self-consciously subjective in its desire to clarify and correct.6
What were Dreiser’s intentions in all this? Why did he keep such a “personal” diary? Why didn’t he tell Kennell about the alterations he made to her text? And why did he edit it so extensively?
Even before he left New York he seems to have conceived of the diary as something more than a private journal. His initial entries give details and information that suggest he had an audience in mind: for example, he identifies his dog as “Nick (the Russian wolf-hound)” and his upstate New York home as “Iroki (the country place)” (p. 31). In addition, the early sections contain extended segments of carefully wrought dialogue between himself and others. This is very different from the staccato, summary-style entries of his other surviving diaries and travel notes. In the past, each of his travel diaries was written mainly as an aide-mémoire for projected magazine articles or a travel book. In them he mainly jotted down impressions and half-lines — as in the travel notes that served as the raw data for A Traveler at Forty (1913) and A Hoosier Holiday (1915).7 Later, when he began writing these books, he turned to his notes and let memory and invention do their work.
One of the odd features of the book that he wrote about his Russian experience, Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), is its minimal reliance on the structure or contents of this diary. It might be that Dreiser was saving the Russian diary to publish as a travel memoir, a genre that was becoming popular among political pilgrims. If he did, he gave up the idea after revising Kennell’s text. Dreiser Looks at Russia probably would have been a better book had he followed his usual method of building a narrative around selected portions of his travel diaries, which he arranged chronologically and linked together with anecdotes and personal reflections. Instead he opted for chapters with impressive-sounding titles—“The Current Soviet Economic Plan,” “Communism—Theory and Practice,” “The Present-Day Russian Peasant Problem”—on subjects he was not well qualified to discuss.
Consequently, the Russian diary is far more instructive and colorful than the travel book. What they have in common is the uncertainty over the Soviet experiment that Dreiser shared with many American intellectuals in the 1920s. By 1927 little was left of the uncritical enthusiasm over the new Russian order that had led Lincoln Steffens to declare “I have been over into the future, and it works.”8 Such early hopes for a new political mecca at Moscow were clouded by the world war. The Red Scare further polarized Americans. Moreover, the Bolshevik heroes of 1917 seemed all too human after the ravages of the Russian civil war. And in the mid-twenties the Soviet adoption of the New Economic Policy appeared to many, including Dreiser, to be a shift from democratic socialism toward something closer to American capitalism. In addition, by the time Dreiser arrived in Russia, many of the earlier revolutionaries had already come to sorry ends. John Reed was buried in the Kremlin amid rumors of his final disillusionment; Emma Goldman, very much alive, had written eloquently of her disenchantment after Lenin squelched the anarchists at Kronstadt; and the diary itself records Dreiser’s memorable picture of the pathetic last days in Moscow of the exiled labor leader, Big Bill Haywood.
By the time Dreiser traveled to Russia, only diehard radicals, such as Scott Nearing, Joseph Freeman, and Michael Gold, were still publicly expressing their early faith in the Soviets. Others, including Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, and Goldman, had already reversed themselves and publicized their negative conclusions about the aims and future of the Communist state. A large body of liberals in America had, however, continued to give lip service to the “great experiment,” on which they projected their own dissatisfaction with American bourgeois values. But their lack of actual contact with Russian life, and their own comfortable middle-class lifestyles, resulted in ambivalent responses to Soviet policies. Even the Americans Dreiser met in Moscow did little to dispel his own ambivalence. Although he spoke to pro-Soviet activists such as Nearing and the journalist Anna Louise Strong, Dreiser spent as much time with Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson, hardly ardent supporters of the new order.
The Russian diary, then, is a product of the years before American progressives such as Dreiser turned with any real fervor to the Soviet Union as a model for a just society. This alone, however, does not explain its tone and character. Dreiser’s uneasiness about the Soviet system also reflects some basic and enduring aspects of his own thinking. Even in his Russophile phase in the 1930s, his political position could be summed up best in his words to the novelist Evelyn Scott: “I am not an exact Marxian by any means, and while I was in Russia, I was constantly threatened with being thrown out for my bourgeois, capitalistic point of view. My quarrel is not so much with doctrines as conditions. Just now, conditions are extremely badly balanced.”9
Conditions at home looked pretty good to Dreiser in 1927. He had finally published a best-seller, An American Tragedy (1925), and this, along with a lucrative film contract, had allowed him to share in the short-lived prosperity of Coolidge’s America. Consequently, his inclination was to praise capitalism at the expense of the Russian system. He argued that “American workers are the best off in the world,” boasted of “the unselfish work of scientists in America and the achievements of American financiers in building up industry, [the] 50% income tax, gifts of rich men to [the] country, improvement of social conditions to a high point”—and then he added, in a giant leap of economic illogic, “And perhaps the next step . . . will be the Soviet system, and I believe if this system were put to the masses in America, they would accept it” (p. 156).
The diary contains a number of such erratic conclusions. Dreiser was capable of swinging pendulum-like from an “ugly American” stance of smug nationalism to a naively idealistic view of Soviet goals and programs. But he was a good observer, particularly of official policies and the living conditions of the common people. Kennell, who frequently crossed ideological swords with her “boss,” remarked shrewdly, “I had the feeling always that he was arguing with himself, not me.”10 The same may be said for the often charged exchanges recorded in the diary between Dreiser and notable figures such as Nikolai Bukharin, Sergei Eisenstein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Karl Radek, and Archbishop Platon.
These conversations, along with the vivid pictures Dreiser supplies of life under the ten-year-old regime, give the diary a privileged place among social documents of the time. It belongs on a short list of important American records of life in Russia in the 1920s—a list that includes the accounts found in Eastman’s Since Lenin Died, Freeman’s American Testament, Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia, and the journalism of Walter Duranty, the English-born correspondent for the New York Times.
More than any of these writers, Dreiser was an enigma to his hosts. By 1927 the fifty-six-year-old novelist was regarded highly in Soviet circles, and his works were being translated by the state press. His books offered sympathetic portraits of proletarian characters such as Jennie Gerhardt and Clyde Griffiths, who surely could be viewed as victims of capitalism. Yet he also had aggrandized a predatory robber baron in the two Cowperwood novels —The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914)—that he based on the career of the Chicago traction king Charles T. Yerkes. While in Russia his comments in praise of American individualism led Kennell to conclude, with some justice, that “At the time of his pilgrimage to the first socialist country, the author’s challenging approach reflected a sympathetic identification with his hero Cowperwood.”11
Kennell’s observation captures one side of Dreiser. But his political allegiances, always hard to gauge, were more complex than she suggests. Strongly influenced by the Progressive movement of the 1890s, he was nevertheless distrustful of reform. In the nineteenteens, he befriended political rebels such as Daniel DeLeon, Eugene Debs, and Reed; but he never expressed any of the fervor found in, say, Reed’s prose epic of the Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). Dreiser’s writing appeared in radical magazines such as The Masses during the same years he was allying himself in literary battles with the political Tory H. L. Mencken—who by 1917 had already begun to worry in print that his friend was becoming a “professional revolutionary.”12 On the day the novelist left for Russia, his Marxist-leaning friends Freeman, Diego Rivera, and Joseph Wood Krutch were among a small group that gave him a farewell party, at which Dreiser reportedly became nostalgic over monarchy and expressed sympathy for the czar’s family.13
What could the Russians have expected of such a visitor? The young Soviet critic Sergei Dinamov, who figures prominently in the diary, had written Dreiser a year earlier, asking him what solution he had to the economic and political problems facing the world. Dreiser responded: “Life, as I see it, is an organized process about which we can do nothing in the final analysis. . . . Until that intelligence which runs this show sees fit to remould the nature of man, I think it will always be the survival of the fittest, whether in the monarchies of England, the democracies of America, or the Soviets of Russia.”14 Despite a long history of such statements, he was clearly someone on whom the Russians were willing to take a chance.
Although his thinking led him to emphasize “the nature of man” at the expense of national differences, Dreiser experienced culture shock when he arrived in Russia. The diary shows that his first response was to settle for easy stereotypes. He exhibited the traveler’s natural tendency to compare the customs of a new country with those of his own land. More often, however, Dreiser thought in literary rather than ethnocentric terms. He immediately projected images from his readings onto the undecipherable human mass before him: “In so far as I can see these are the true people of Russia’s great writers—Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgeniev, Dostoievsky, Saltykov. One sees their types everywhere” (p. 59). Only as Dreiser gradually worked his way through the new landscape did it come alive for him and yield at times to his feel for place, mood, and detail.
Even after adjusting to the new sights and sounds, he found it hard to warm up to his hosts. The feeling was mutual. Some sense of the unofficial Soviet response to Dreiser can be found in the letters at Moscow’s State Archives. They suggest, as does the diary, that he was not the easiest guest to please. On meeting the famed Marxist theoretician Bukharin, Dreiser immediately “began my attack without delay” (p. 184). This appeared to Kennell as a supreme act of arrogance. But the interchange (one of the highlights of the diary) was not simply the product of hubris on Dreiser’s part. His attitude toward Bukharin was not without precedent, even among political radicals in America. Eastman, for one, had written in 1925 that although Bukharin was being praised for “a supposed theoretic mastery of the Marxian philosophy,” he had in fact “written a book about Historical Materialism, which is at once so scholarly in appearance, and so utterly undigested and confusing to the brain, that most people are willing to concede his mastery of Marxism in order to avoid having to read and study this book. What Lenin said about Bukharin is that he ‘does not understand the Marxian dialectic.’”15
The contentious Dreiser certainly did not need any such precedent to take on the various Russian dignitaries who crossed his path. Unable and, to some extent, unwilling to control the headstrong novelist, Kennell put her job in jeopardy by supporting Dreiser’s unorthodox requests. Despite her attempt to head off trouble by offering VOKS a copy of the diary, her relationship with Dreiser, both public and private, probably accounts for her own permanent departure from Russia shortly after he left.
After Kennell began transcribing the notes and relaying them to VOKS, all mention of her intimacy with Dreiser disappears. She did, however, write a curious postscript to the diary, which she sent to Dreiser in America. It is part love letter and part continuation of the polemic they engaged in throughout the trip. “And now farewell, a long farewell to my dear boss. I hope I can live down my loneliness, but if I don’t, won’t that prove the endurance of human affections—once in a while at least? . . . Your overpowering personality still envelops me. No one has ever so completely absorbed my individuality. . . . Just the same, I think you are wrong in your ultimate conclusions about life and specifically about the social experiment in Russia” (pp. 283, 281).
Kennell probably deserves more credit for influencing Dreiser’s long-term thinking about Russia than she has hitherto received. Her multiple roles—as private secretary, guide, translator, collaborator on the diary, lover, and later as correspondent and editor of Dreiser Looks at Russia—placed her in a privileged position during the time Dreiser was beginning to shape his ideas about the Soviet Union. As Dreiser’s first and chief antagonist in the debate over the authenticity of the Soviet experiment, she helped him formulate opinions on both sides of the question.
This was, of course, not a debate that Dreiser or Kennell originated. Dreiser did not have to read all the books and articles by those who had visited Russia to know the terms of the argument. In New York he had read Walter Duranty’s vivid reports in support of the new government.16 He also knew of the less sanguine conclusions reached by Goldman. Deported by the U.S. government for her anarchist views at the time of the Red Scare, Goldman arrived in Moscow with far greater hopes than did Dreiser. By 1922, however, she was issuing broadsides on the flaws of the Soviet system and the shortcomings of Russian heads of state. “Obsessed by the infallibility of their creed, giving of themselves to the fullest, they could be both heroic and despicable at the same time. They could work twenty hours a day, live on herring and tea, and order the slaughter of innocent men and women.”17 Because Goldman had many close contacts among the Russians and could speak the language, she was attuned to social nuances that Dreiser missed. Nevertheless, many of Dreiser’s conclusions in 1928 echoed her convictions. Both deplored Soviet terrorism, arguing that, in Goldman’s words, “the Communists believed implicitly in the Jesuitic formula that the end justifies all means.”18 Dreiser sensed, as Goldman had, that “the Bolsheviki were social puritans who sincerely believed that they alone were ordained to save mankind.”19
Unlike Goldman, however, Dreiser was in many ways attracted to Soviet dogmatism, notwithstanding his repeated outbursts against it. It was in his nature to be as absolutist and puritanical in his beliefs as any party member. One can sense this in the diary, particularly in his dialogues with Russian leaders. There is something close to a willingness to be converted beneath the heated exchanges, a desire to believe that an ideal society is possible, if only someone could answer his questions and quiet his vast skepticism about human nature.
In the late 1920s Kennell came close to being that someone. Among other things, she succeeded in getting Dreiser to rethink his prejudices. To her credit, she confronted him more honestly than she needed to. She seems, in fact, to have had nearly as many divided impulses as he. Dreiser sensed this in her, if we can trust the portrait of Kennell entitled “Ernita,” which he published in A Gallery of Women (1929). There he concluded that when he last saw her in Russia, she was “still strong in the Communist faith and all that it meant in the way of freedom for women, [but] she was no longer one who was convinced that it was without faults.”20 Dreiser’s position as her employer, as well as their romantic involvement, naturally complicated matters for her.21 Nevertheless, she remained, for all her friendship with Dreiser, ideologically committed to the Soviet experiment. On her return to America in 1928, she began a career as a writer of fiction for adolescents, most of which—from Vanya of the Streets (1931) to the stories she continued to write until her death in 1977 —sought to challenge the stereotypes about Russia that Americans absorbed at a young age. Even as late as the 1960s, after the idealism over the Soviet Union had long been shattered by the horrors of Stalin’s reign and by post-World War II realities, Kennell remained an unreconstructed advocate for Russia. Her 1969 book on Dreiser in the Soviet Union often takes him to task for what she considered his obtuse resistence to what is best in Russian life. This was, to be sure, an extension of the program of educating him that she had begun forty years earlier, only now she was using the medium of a memoir to speak to a larger audience. In retrospect it is clear that this was a long-term project for her. As early as the diary, we find her planting ideas for Dreiser’s later consideration; even her asides — such as “I didn’t say all this but I thought about it afterward” (p. 230)—show the ways in which the diary took on the character of an instructional manual in her hands.
Her lessons were not wasted on Dreiser. Although he opened his book on Russia by announcing that “I am an incorrigible individualist —therefore opposed to Communism,”22 he had mainly good things to say about the Soviet state. Kennell’s resistance to his ideas also had a long-range effect on his positions in the thirties, when he made use of many of her arguments in public pronouncements. During that decade, Dreiser was one of many Americans whose idealization of the Soviet Union was stimulated by the economic breakdown and social malaise of the depression years. In effect, the Russian diary bears witness to one of the major historical ironies of these decades. In the 1920s, when Russia was going through a relatively democratic and orderly phase, most intellectuals were either apathetic or, like Dreiser, divided in their opinions about the Communist system, whereas in the 1930s, they projected their utopian ideals onto the most repressive regime in Soviet history.
The ambivalences in Dreiser’s pronouncements about Russia sent mixed messages to his readers. On the basis of Dreiser’s public statements, Mencken concluded that his old friend had been brainwashed by the Russians.23 When Dorothy Thompson accused Dreiser of plagiarizing from her book The New Russia (1928), Mencken judged that the Russians had fed her the facts for the book and that “Dreiser also went to Russia and was taken for the same ride and loaded with the same material.”24
The diary, however, tells a different story. The situation was more complex than Mencken understood. It is difficult, even with the evidence of the diary before us, to determine the extent to which Dreiser’s travels were controlled. He was obviously treated to the royal “guided tour” whenever possible — including the standard visits to model prisons, schools, and housing complexes for workers. And he was supplied with a state guide, whose duty was to keep him away from any kind of spontaneous contact with the natives.
But Dreiser was more difficult to brainwash than either Mencken or the Soviets supposed. He was always suspicious of dogma of any kind, even dogma he wanted to believe in. Kennell understood this. She knew that her charge was not duped by the ploys of his hosts, and as a result she tended to go along with his attempts to dodge governmental restraints. Years later she recalled that, “alert to propaganda, he was suspicious of the Russians.”25 The diary shows Dreiser complaining constantly about the official line he was being handed. “There are so many fixed things the Soviet is determined the foreigner must see—usually (always, I might say) things which reflect glory on the Soviet labors. In consequence I am hauled here there all to speedily. As for touching or sensing the intimate, commonplace life of the city—not a taste” (pp. 161–62). Dreiser looked to his secretary to help him contact some of the commonplace life of the country. Sometimes that meant merely getting a good local meal. Even in this, Dreiser was aware of the standard policy: “I tried to persude someone to take me to a simple Russian restaurant in Leningrad—but no—foreigners must see only granduer” (pp. 163–64).
Kennell, to be sure, conspired with Dreiser to undermine what Paul Hollander has called the “techniques of hospitality” that are employed by governments to win over foreign visitors.26 This was not always an easy task. The tour organizers hoped that she would work with the VOKS agents to keep Dreiser in line during the trip. When, for instance, they were about to leave Moscow for the first time, the interpreter Trevis turned to Kennell and in a confidential tone said, “We’ll be traveling together for several weeks, I hope. Between us we ought to be able to manage the old man—right?”27
Kennell resisted all such overtures. More than once the diary shows her leaving behind the appointed guides and sneaking away with Dreiser on unauthorized excursions. She oversaw the meeting between him and Radek, who, as a friend of Trotsky, was being watched and therefore had to slip past the guards at his Kremlin office to talk politics with Dreiser at a hotel. At times Kennell uses the diary to expose the darker side of life under the Soviets. For example, when they met a local priest in a small village, Dreiser plied him with potentially embarrassing questions. The priest responded vaguely and with apparent untruths. In the diary account of this event Kennell includes the priest’s parting words, whispered to her in secret: “‘Please explain to the gentleman that I would gladly have answered his questions, if we had been alone, but before a Jewess, and the government representatives and a newspaper correspondent! If I had given my opinions —’ He drew his finger across his throat” (p. 205).
Kennell trusted Dreiser with such information because she believed that the unvarnished truth was enough to convince him that the Soviet state was the best hope for the future. (She seems to have assumed, somewhat naively, that her reader at VOKS would understand her intentions as well.) Moreover, for all her complaints, she evidently took pleasure in Dreiser’s habit of playing devil’s advocate, his often perverse disposition to oppose and contradict. Her parting words to him acknowledged the “tremendous intellectual stimulus” (p. 281) he had been for her, although she evidently admired him more for his questioning mind than for the consistency of his ideas. Lastly, she realized how much a creature of moods he was. She reminded herself and others along the way that “When Mr. Dreiser was feeling tired and miserable, he always took a gloomier view of conditions.”28 Not a systematic thinker, Dreiser held “views” that reflected his deepest prejudices, many of which were not altogether conscious. Among the most obvious was his suspicion that the Soviets were dogmatists in the manner of his bête noire, the Catholic church.
Churches and religious services drew Dreiser like a magnet throughout his travels. He noted with interest that a great number of Russians had continued to take the “opiate of the people.” At any moment he would turn to the question of religion, as he did in the middle of an economic discussion with the vice president of the All-Russian Cooperatives: “Does not the Soviet Govt, try to educate the children to be adherents of the Soviet Govt? just as the Catholic Church educates the children to be Catholics?” (p. 125). Unhappy memories of a Catholic childhood had led Dreiser to adopt exaggerated nativist fears about the power of the Roman church in America. He believed the church engaged in a secret program of international expansion, a form of spiritual imperialism that matched the political aspirations of many Soviet leaders. In pessimistic moments these fears surfaced, and he projected his worst nightmares onto the Soviet regime: “Your program . . . is exactly that of the Catholic Church or the Greek Church. ... & it’s policy toward the young—its desire to color permanently the psychology of the same. I have said —and repeat—that the Soviet Central Committee got rid of one iron dogmatic faith only to erect a second & to me more dangerous one in its place” (pp. 188, 173–74).
Although Dreiser’s was not an uncommon view of Soviet dogmatism, his intense outrage sprang from other than political causes. He might have been less troubled on this account had he been aware of the full force of the Soviet campaign against organized religion: in 1927–28 alone the authorities closed more than 270 churches, eighty monasteries, fifty-nine synagogues, and thirty-eight mosques.29 Dreiser, however, focused less on such political events than on the nature and function of religion in society. After returning to America he wrote to Kennell, chiding her for mistaking his position. His great enemy, he said, was not religion but religious dogma: “There is, for instance, the religion which is a response to as well as awe or reverence before the beauty and wisdom of creative energy. Many people—free of any dogma—enjoy it.”30 What finally overrode many of his scruples about party dogmatism was his gradual awareness (and strong approval) of the Soviet aim to destroy the patriarchal structures of old Russia—including those relating to the church, family life, marital bonds, and the role of women in society.
Although Dreiser was deeply concerned about such social issues, the political infighting that intrigued most of his contemporaries did not engage his energies or attention. He seems barely aware of the momentous struggles for power that were taking place in Russia, resulting soon after his departure in the emergence of Joseph Stalin as absolute dictator. Other than a few vague references, there is no mention of Leon Trotsky’s dramatic revelation of Lenin’s Testament in October 1927. Nor does Dreiser reflect on the historic events that occurred during his visit: the consolidation of Stalin’s power through the expulsion of prominent Bolsheviks from the party in November and December and the exile of Trotsky to Central Asia in January 1928.
He was equally uninformed on matters that had a more direct impact on him as a writer. He surely would have been unhappy to learn that the state publishing house, Gosizdat, which he courted while in Russia, refused to publish the works of some of his intellectual heroes: Herbert Spencer, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. Or that, along with Nadezhda Krupskaia’s infamous Committee for Political Enlightenment, Gosizdat conspired to remove such writings from the libraries.31 Dreiser did, however, experience firsthand the government’s censorship of Russian theater and film productions. He laughed off a socialist dramatic version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But the joke turned sour when it came to his own work: he walked out on Stanislavsky when the director was ordered not to produce a play based on An American Tragedy because censors found the “religious sections” and the relations between employers and workers to be presented too sympathetically. He was followed out of Stanislavsky’s office by the director’s secretary, who placed her hand in his arm and said gently, “Perhaps in another five years we might be permitted to produce it.”32
By 1928 such antagonisms and disappointments were already beginning to take second place to what proved to be the major factor in Dreiser’s response to Russia: the issue of what he called “equity,” by which he meant social and economic parity for all. What unifies Dreiser’s point of view in the diary is a cast of mind that habitually led him to question the integrity of any purportedly humane economy. Dreiser has often been accused of being, to borrow William Dean Howells’s characterization of Mark Twain, a theoretical socialist and a practical capitalist. Unlike later critics, Howells recognized this as a typically American paradox, not a character flaw. And in any case, it applies more aptly to Dreiser’s posture in the thirties than to the voice we find in the Russian diary. While in Russia, Dreiser knew that the figure he cut was mainly that of “a materialistically infected bourgeois —or blood-sucker, not fitted to either grasp or sympathize with the ills of the underdog” (p. 178).
There’s a mixture of disingenuousness and assertive pride in this statement. Dreiser took obvious delight in arguing what Kennell called his favorite thesis: that the big, naturally endowed individual gets ahead, and the little, incompetent mind falls behind in the struggle of life. He repeated this like a mantra, to the point that Kennell began to suspect that the gentleman was protesting too much. Put another way, he was straining, as he had done most of his adult life, to identify himself with the uncommon man. His comments throughout the diary reveal a good deal about the unspoken drives behind his “thesis.” A few examples will suffice. Of Bukharin, he belligerently asks, “Can you mention a great mind from the proletariat?” (p. 190)—a strange challenge coming from a world-famous writer who had himself risen from proletarian origins. Or take the incident aboard ship at Gagri on the Black Sea, where the second-and third-class passengers produced in him a strong visceral reaction: “The huddled masses of them gave me a sense of nausea” (p. 264). One need not be a devout Freudian to appreciate such a verbal “slip” from the pen of this American son of an immigrant. In the same vein, he defends American justice in the Sacco-Vanzetti case: “I tried to explain the attitude of the American public to foreigners who had not been naturalized” (p. 239).
Not many years later, Dreiser would do an about-face on these matters. He could then, for instance, write to Mencken, justifying his allegiance to the Soviet agenda on the grounds of his proletarian beginnings: “I know you have no use for the common man since he cannot distinguish himself. But I have.... You see, Mencken, unlike yourself, I am biased. I was born poor.”33
Actually, this personal element appeared in a muted way among his first newspaper articles after returning from Russia. He speculated that in the new Russia it might “be possible to remove that dreadful sense of social misery in one direction or another which has so afflicted me in my life in America ever since I have been old enough to know what social misery is.”34 This side of his feelings about Russia emerged more clearly in the 1930s, when widespread economic problems in America encouraged Dreiser to contemplate the social and political roots of his childhood deprivations. In the process of doing so, he revised backward his earlier experiences: “As for the Communist System—as I saw it in Russia in 1927 and ’28 — I am for it—hide and hoof.”35
The Russians have always appreciated Dreiser’s good will, keeping his books in print and even, in 1968, naming a street after him (“Dreiser Street”) in the Ukrainian coal-mining center of Stalino, later called Donetsky. But while Dreiser was still in Russia, he was noticeably less elated by the system, as he made clear when he took leave of Kennell: “I’d rather die in the United States than live here,” he grumbled (p. 276). By this point the great champion of individualism had been exhausted by the rigors of the trip. Kennell later recalled his state: “How pitifully altered was the American delegate! His smart light-gray topcoat was grimy, his scarf bedraggled, his suit untidy, his bow tie missing, and he himself unwashed.”36 He sat waiting for his train, his bronchitis aggravated by the damp Russian winter, his chest wracked with pain, and his handkerchiefs filling with phlegm faster than Kennell could have them washed.
Kennell feared that the trials of his final days in Russia would color his report to America. But a letter written to her on 24 February 1928 made her hopeful that he had recovered from his last ugly mood. He assured her that his book would “not seriously try to injure an idealistic effort.” He also commented on a new fact of life in America that dramatically altered his analysis of Russia: “Besides, learning that there were bread lines here—the first since 1910—I became furious because there is too much wealth wasted here to endure it. Hence, while I am going to stick to what I saw favorable and unfavorable I am going to contrast it with the waste and extravagance and social indifference here. I may find myself in another storm. If so, well and good.”37
For better and worse, this “contrast” became the standard by which he conducted his ongoing critique of American life for the remainder of his days. And, as he predicted, the storms did come.
THOMAS P. RIGGIO
1. Ruth Epperson Kennell, Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 49. Dreiser later added Kennell’s text to the diary he had written in his own hand; moreover, he cut, arranged, revised, and augmented her notes to suit his own ends.
2. Kennell, 183.
3. Ibid., 109. For an example of the differences between the two texts, see the interview Dreiser had with Archbishop Platon in the diary entry for 30 November 1927 and compare it with Kennell’s version in Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union, 109–12.
4. Kennell to Yaroshevsky, undated, The State Archives of the Russian Federation, Moscow. The diary and letters, which I discovered in the Russian archives, provide an added dimension to the complex relationship between Dreiser and Kennell.
5. The letters from Trevis and Davidovskya that survive at The State Archives of the Russian Federation show this to be the case. The letters are particularly critical of what was considered Dreiser’s unfriendly attitude toward the customs and people of the Soviet Union.
6. Arthur D. Casciato, in the only study of the diary to date, has pointed to what he calls the “textual intersubjectivity” produced by Kennell’s and Dreiser’s joint participation in the writing of the text: “Neither his nor hers but rather theirs, the Soviet diary records and reproduces that intersubjectivity.” Casciato, “Dictating Silence: Textual Subversion in Dreiser’s Soviet Diary,” Papers on Language and Literature 27 (Spring 1991): 187.
7. Dreiser’s unpublished travel diaries are in the Dreiser Collection, Special Collections Department. Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania.
8. Quoted in John P. Diggins, The American Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973), 90.
9. Dreiser to Evelyn Scott, 28 October 1932. In Letters of Theodore Dreiser, ed. Robert H. Elias (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), 2:615.
10. Kennell, 200.
11. Ibid., 80.
12. H. L. Mencken, “The Dreiser Bugaboo,” The Seven Arts (August 1917); rprt. in The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser & H. L. Mencken, 1907–1945, ed. Thomas P. Riggio (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 2:773.
13. Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Discus Books, 1969), 159. Daniel Aaron stated that he recalls this story’s being told to him by Mike Gold but that after so many years he cannot be certain (Aaron to Riggio, 21 September 1994). It is worth noting that in the diary Dreiser shows no such sentiments; in speaking of Czar Nicholas II and his family, he says, while visiting one of the royal palaces outside Leningrad, “I could understand quite clearly why it was necessary to get rid of these people” (26 November 1927). As early as 1896, when Dreiser was editor of Ev’ry Month magazine, he placed the following under a photograph of Nicholas:
Practically the arbiter of Europe and, as director of all the energies of the Russian horde, a menace to civilization, he is anything but a brilliant man. He confers and decides in affairs that may affect ages and peoples most remote, and yet, to such a pass has the iniquitous inheritance system arrived, the wildest, most crack-brained heirling can by birth inherit such power and estate. (1 December 1896)
For Dreiser’s thought during this period, see Nancy Warner Barrineau (ed.), Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
14. Dreiser to Sergei Dinamov, 5 January 1927, in Elias, Letters, 2:450.
15. Max Eastman, Since Lenin Died (New York: Boni Liveright, 1925), 30. For another, less polemical, view of Bukharin’s intellectual abilities, see Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973).
16. Duranty’s newspaper articles are collected in Gustavus Tuckerman (ed.), Duranty Reports Russia (New York: The Viking Press, 1934).
17. Emma Goldman, Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923), 111.
18. Ibid., 110.
19. Ibid., 112.
20. Theodore Dreiser, A Gallery of Women (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 1:357.
21. After reading the story of “Ernita” in manuscript, Kennell wrote to Dreiser that
The story wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t tell how Ernita, after a series of painful personal experiences at the hands of individuals in the cause she had given herself to, met a certain great man, and came to know him very intimately and with deep, almost maternal, affection, and how they battled over principles and theories of society until he gradually broke down her philosophy and her faith, and some of her most cherished principles in regard to her sex. This sounds as though he might be a villain, but he isn’t at all. Quite the contrary.
Kennell to Dreiser, 9 June 1928, Dreiser Collection, Special Collections Department, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania.
22. Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 9.
23. Other critics have followed Mencken’s lead. See, for example, Aaron, Writers on the Left, 159. Dreiser biographer Richard Lingeman wisely concentrates on the inner debate at the heart of Dreiser’s response to communism. See Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908–1945 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1990), 289--310.
24. H. L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, ed. Jonathan Yardley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 337. There are a number of more likely explanations. One is offered by the journalist Anna Louise Strong, who said that she had given Dreiser and Thompson the same notes “which both of them used in undigested form.” Quoted in Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1961), 495. Some support for this is found in the diary, when Dreiser is noted listening attentively and at length to Strong’s ideas about Russia (see entry for 17 November 1927, p. 107). Another possibility was provided by Louise Campbell, who typed and helped edit the manuscript of Dreiser’s book. She told Dreiser biographer W. A. Swanberg that Dreiser instructed her to use Thompson’s newspaper articles to pad Dreiser Looks at Russia. Swanberg speculates that Dreiser might have asked others who helped him put together the book to do the same thing. See Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), 343.
25. Kennell, 22.
26. Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 16–21.
27. Kennell, 88.
28. Ibid., 147.
29. See Basil Dmytryshyn, USSR, a Concise History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 131.
30. Dreiser to Kennell, 5 September 1928, Dreiser Collection, Special Collections Department, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania.
31. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 295–96.
32. Kennell, 43–44.
33. Dreiser to Mencken, 27 March 1943, in Dreiser-Mencken Letters, 2:689.
34. Quoted in Lingeman, 309.
35. Dreiser-Mencken Letters, 2:690.
36. Kennell, 184.
37. Dreiser to Kennell, 24 February 1928, Dreiser Collection, Special Collections Department, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania.
EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES
Dreiser’s Russian diary is both a private and a collaborative document. Its printed rendering in this edition reflects both of these characteristics. The diary is private in that it was not finished for publication. A scholarly text of such a diary should therefore preserve its preliminary, personal nature, insofar as that is possible in a typeset medium. Public documents (novels, stories, essays) usually appear in public dress, with misspellings corrected, grammatical errors rectified, and slips of the pen set right. In private documents, these same features are usually preserved unless they interfere seriously with comprehension. Accordingly, nearly all misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and other idiosyncrasies —in both Dreiser’s and Ruth Kennell’s sections of the diary—are preserved. Substantive emendations have been introduced only to clarify confusing passages, and some minor punctuation has been added to assist in readability.
This diary is collaborative in that it is the product of two hands: Dreiser writing as himself and Kennell writing both in her own persona and in Dreiser’s. This collaboration, essential to an understanding of the diary, is signaled by the use of differing typefaces. Dreiser’s handwriting is rendered in an italic face; Kennell’s typing is printed in a roman face. The majority of the entries in the diary are entirely in one face or the other, but many are genuinely collaborative, with Dreiser revising and augmenting the typed entries that Kennell produced. The alternating faces always signal this collaboration to the reader.
The diary is presented almost entirely in clear text, with no symbols, diacritics, or other barbed wire. No effort is made to render excised words. A few illegible readings are indicated by “[unreadable word].” Blank spaces that appear when Dreiser could not recall a name or a term are printed as 
. All underlinings in the original diary are printed as underscores, not italics. The diary has been divided editorially into six sections in order to reflect the stages of Dreiser’s journey: “En Route,” “Moscow,” “Leningrad,” “Return to Moscow,” “Through Russia,” and “Farewell.”
Annotations are supplied throughout the diary for persons, literary works, journalistic writings, and public buildings and establishments. The minor Soviet officials whom Dreiser met and interviewed are not identified, nor is an effort made to gloss the names of all towns and communities that he visited in Russia. Well-known figures such as Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Kerensky are not annotated. A few confusing readings in the text are clarified in the notes. When necessary, words in other languages (principally in Russian) are defined, and the most serious of the misspellings in Russian are corrected. If no note appears, then the person or place is unidentified or has been judged not to require annotation.
Many of the place names recorded in the original diary are misspelled. Dreiser and Kennell often made their notes several hours after passing through train stops or villages, and they did not always spell the names of such places correctly. In the Russian sections of the diary there was the added problem of rendering the Cyrillic characters into the Latin alphabet. The errors in these place names do contribute to the private character of the diary, but from a practical viewpoint they might confuse biographers and scholars. Place names have therefore been corrected, whenever possible, by reference to maps and guidebooks of the 1920s.
There are some small problems with dates. Both Dreiser and Kennell occasionally lost track of the day of the week or entered an incorrect year. Dreiser would sometimes compound such errors by figuring the date of the next entry from the erroneously dated previous entry, thus carrying forward the mistake. There seems to be no good reason to preserve such errors; they are rectified here, and the emendations are recorded in a separate table in the apparatus.
The original diary is a part of the Dreiser Collection (MS Collection 30, Box 222) in the Special Collections Department, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania. The diary began as a volume of blank paper, 150 x 228 cm, bound in unstamped dark blue imitation leather. Archivists, in processing the diary, added folio numbers in pencil to each leaf. The diary text covers leaves 1–424 of the volume; the remaining leaves are blank. One leaf, between 20 and 21, has been razored out, removing the final page of Dreiser’s discussion with Helen Richardson about whether she will accompany him on the trip. The diary was in Helen’s possession for several years after Dreiser’s death, before it came to Penn. It is likely that she excised the page, perhaps to remove some personal or intimate reference. The entry breaks off during a discussion about a pair of Russian boots (“red ones, maybe”) that Dreiser is to bring back for her. It is now beyond our ability to know whether she received the boots.
Dreiser made nearly all of his holograph entries on the rectos of the leaves, using a variety of ink and pencil colors—blue, blue-black, purple, red. Kennell typed her entries (in an elite face) on separate leaves, rectos only. Most of the copies that she gave to Dreiser were carbons, in purple. Later, back in New York, Dreiser cut up her typed leaves, emended and augmented them in his own hand, and pasted them onto the rectos of the bound volume, thus swelling its bulk considerably.
Other surviving travel diaries kept by Dreiser are filled with interesting detritus from his trips—photographs, postcards, receipts, menus, maps, telegrams, and letters. Surprisingly, the Russian diary contains almost none of this kind of material, although it does preserve several pencil sketches by Kennell —of Dreiser and of persons whom they met and interviewed. Two of these sketches are reproduced in this edition.
The textual apparatus at the rear of this volume is a selective record, listing only emendations that affect meaning. A full record of emendation is on deposit in the Dreiser Collection, along with other materials gathered during the preparation of this volume.
JAMES L. W. WEST III