Delphine Rumeau is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Grenoble, France. She is the author of Comrade Whitman. From Russian to Internationalist Icon (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2024), from which this post is drawn.
While Walt Whitman is mainly considered a national poet, his fame was truly international throughout the twentieth century. He himself expressed the dream of an “internationality of poems and poets binding the lands of the earth,” in a letter to an Irishman who was planning to translate Leaves of Grass into Russian.
And indeed, his poetry contributed to establishing such an international network. International, or rather internationalist: his worldwide diffusion was bolstered by his reputation as a socialist and communist poet. Paradoxical as it may seem, the American poet became a canonical author first in socialist European circles and in the nascent Soviet Union. My book, Comrade Whitman, investigates the poet’s Russian and Soviet receptions and maps out their global reverberations.
Although the word “icon” has been overused, especially when discussing anything Russian, I chose it because Whitman did become an image whose aura fascinated readers and conveyed a sense of the sacred, even in communist contexts. It is indeed difficult to separate the poet from his poetry. Whitman somehow programmed this set of reactions, writing in the poem “So Long”: “Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.” He also used photographs of himself in groundbreaking ways, and these images have in turn been central to his reception. G. Frank E. Pearsall’s portrait, for example, was widely circulated and contributed to the construct of Whitman as the prophet of Democracy and comradeship.
From the start, the Russian reception of Whitman was political and radical, leading to some unlikely stories. For instance, in 1889, the first poem that was presented as a translation from Whitman into Russian was in fact a complete invention by Vladimir Tan-Bogoraz, an activist in the revolutionary movement Narodnaia Volia.
A few years later, Leaves of Grass was smuggled into Russia when the young Korney Chukovsky, who would become a famous author of children books and a central figure of the Soviet intelligentsia, bought an illegal copy from a sailor on the docks of Odesa. This event marked the beginning of a lasting relationship with the American poet. Soon, however, Chukovsky had a rival: Konstantin Balmont, the Symbolist poet, also commented and translated Whitman. Even though Chukovsky relentlessly disparaged his translations, they were the most successful at the time. Balmont’s political readings were definitely more radical than Chukovsky’s, as his essay “Poetry of struggle” (1907) shows.
While Whitman was discussed in various essays before 1917, access to his poems remained fettered by censorship: Chukovsky’s book-length selection in 1914, for example, was banned for being “pornographic.” This situation changed spectacularly after the February revolution and even more so in 1918. Whitman was a favorite of head of the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) Anatoly Lunacharsky, who wrote an afterword for Chukovsky’s new edition of Whitman’s poetry. In 1919, this edition had a print run of fifty thousand copies. After Balmont left Russia in 1921, Chukovsky remained the country’s sole translator and authority on Whitman for decades. Balmont’s translations, meanwhile, remained popular throughout the 1920s and were often featured in anthologies of revolutionary poetry.
Whitman was indeed appropriated for propaganda purposes. During the 1918 October celebrations in Petrograd, his portrait, painted by Boris Grigoriev, was hung alongside the caption “Socialism.” The Petrograd Proletkult staged his poetry and went on tour during the Soviet Civil War, contributing to the poet’s fame in the most unexpected of places. For example, a brochure with the script of the performance was printed in 1920 at “the direction of political agitation of the Belomorsk military district.”
Yet the choice of poems was very selective, and quite different from what one usually finds now in an anthology of Whitman’s poetry. Poems like “Years of the Modern” or “Europe” were the great hits of this period.
Whitman also made appearances in the movies. He was praised by Mikhail Eisenstein and alluded to in Dziga Vertov’s film One Sixth of the World. Perhaps because Korney Chukovsky had little taste for them, uses of Whitman in agitprop have long remained a little-known chapter of the poet’s reception history.
Another understudied aspect is the degree to which Russian has superseded other languages in this history. I have therefore wanted to take into account the multilingual complexities of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. A number of facts taken for granted then needed to be reevaluated. For instance, the Latvian translations of Whitman were quite pioneering, with a small volume appearing as early as 1908.
The Ukrainian Whitman is also a fascinating part of the story. He was cited by the Futurist poets Mykhail Semenko and Oleksa Slisarenko and was the tutelary figure of the lesser-known Uman avant-garde group “Bezmezhnyky” and of their trilingual poetry review (Ukrainian, Russian and Yiddish). He was (partly) translated into Ukrainian by Ivan Kulyk, intensely involved in the policy of indigenization (korenizatsiia) of the 1920s. A little known 1923 Armenian translation, based on Russian versions, is another interesting case study.
In the Soviet Union, Whitman reached the peak of his significance in the 1920s, before the more nationalist turn of the next decade. By then, the Soviet reception no longer relied on foreign critiques and provided, in its turn, a renewed impulse to leftist readings of Whitman in Europe and the US. That was particularly true for Jewish and African-American minorities, for whom Moscow was a beacon of antiracism and anti-imperialism.
Few poets have been more translated and advertised in Yiddish, especially in the United States, by immigrants who mostly came from the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. Many of them moved in socialist circles, and their work on Whitman had a political agenda. To claim Whitman’s heritage was not only a pledge of allegiance to the American national poet, but also a way to connect the Yiddish transnational identity with a cosmopolitan vision of the United States, blending the two into a socialist internationalism.
At the end of the 1930s, Whitman became the herald of antifascism, a role that only expanded during the Second World War. His fortunes took different turns in the decade that followed. As the USSR extended its influence in Europe, so too did Whitman, especially in Soviet satellite states.
In the US, Whitman truly entered the national canon during this period—one reason, perhaps, for which he lost some of his appeal as a voice of radical protest. Yet this political decline was counterbalanced by the spectacular arrival of camarada Whitman in Latin America. The poet became part of what Rossen Djagalov has called a “solidarity trope,” shared by Soviet culture and the Third World. Whitman’s presence also increased in China, with the 1955 celebrations for the anniversary of Leaves of Grass marking the climax of this extended partisan reception. The poem “Salut au monde” was its anthem.
The history of Whitman’s Russian and Soviet receptions therefore reveals how the poet earned his place in world literature, a category whose meaning changed tremendously throughout the twentieth century and was deeply influenced by the equally changing conceptions of internationalism within the communist and Soviet agendas.
