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Mr. Twister in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Sketching Laughter in Marshak's Poem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Yuri Leving
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Abstract

Samuil Marshak's poem Mister Twister (1933) is a biting satire about an evil American capitalist who travels to the Soviet Union with his spoiled wife and daughter. The work enjoyed immense popularity among generations of Soviet children until the 1980s and is considered a prime example of a socialist spoof on a genre of travelogue oriented toward mass culture. Yuri Leving puts Marshak's poem into a historical context and observes it against the ever-changing ideological landscape of Soviet literature during the three decades following the poem's initial publication in the satirical magazine for children, Ezh (Hedgehog). In Twister, Marshak was able to strike a careful balance between the comic and the ideological: although an obviously satirical portrayal, the protagonist sometimes appears more sympathetic than malignant. Over the years Marshak tried to adapt his poem to shifting official climates, a process that resulted in a series of curious metamorphoses highlighting a double-edged relationship between the mechanisms of oppression, auto-censorship, and laughter under state socialism. In addition, the article surveys Vladimir Lebedev's illustrative convoy of "Mister Twister" throughout its rich republication history and discusses visual representations vis-à-vis the issue of producing (rather than depicting) totalitarian humor.

Type
Soviet Jocularity
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , Summer 2011 , pp. 279 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

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References

1. For quotes from Mister Twister in this article, I use the translation by Sam Raphael Friedman that appeared in Soviet Literature, no. 1 (1948): 7-19, corrected against Marshak, S., Mister Tvister (Moscow, 1933)Google Scholar. The translation was reprinted in the anthology compiled by von Geldern, James and Stites, Richard, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales,Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917-1953 (Bloomington, 1995), 201–11Google Scholar. Whenever Friedman's rhythmic translation differs from the original significantly, I have taken the liberty of amending the text.

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13. Ibid., 205. As a reviewer of an earlier version of this article noted, “the travel narrative undergoes a double inversion: die foreigner comes to see us, to tour, so that we learn about the foreigner. It is sadly appropriate that this brilliant Soviet travelogue is one in which the Soviets all stay home: a journey by stationary bike,” thus evoking the classic distinction between second-world foreign language textbooks and American ones, “the standard American textbook scenario has Americans arriving in a new land to learn a new language. In Soviet textbooks, the native speakers come to us.“

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20. Ibid., 74.

21. Otdel rukopisei, Rossiiskaia natsional´naia biblioteka, St. Petersburg, S. Marshak's Collection, f. 469, op. 1, ed. khr. 2 (1933), 48 pp.

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30. This kind of comedy is often associated with magical realism. Mary Hartje, however, finds anodier example of this situation in Franz Kafka's novel The Trial. The protagonist, K., literally stumbles into the absurd reality of his “arrest” by a group of strangers. For the duration of the novel, he is unable to alter his own involvement in the meaningless situation leading to his trial. In addition, his “inelasticity,” his inability to recognize the absurdity of his plight, makes him a laughable figure to die reader. See Mary Ellen Hartje, “Magic Realism: Humor across Cultures,” in Harper, Graeme, ed., Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism (New York, 2002), 114 Google Scholar.

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39. Marshak's technique for working with his illustrators may be seen in the memoirs of M. Miturich (dated to some time after the 1950s): “He made almost no specific comments. … If he reallyjust did not like a drawing, he would start reading die verse to which the illustration was meant to relate, emphasizing the meter, the intonation, and sometimes he would also make me read the poem aloud.” M. Miturich, “Ritm stikha i risunka,” in Papernyi, Z. S., Fadeev, A., Galanov, B., and Marshak, I. S., eds., la dumal, chuvstvoval, ia zhil:Vosopominaniia o S. la. Marshake (Moscow, 1971), 289 Google Scholar.

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43. The changes made to the illustrations of Mister Twister conformed to the overall pattern in which Lebedev's artistic style was evolving at the time, as Gerchuk describes it: “Though Lebedev's characters remain as grotesque as ever, schematic depictions are replaced by individual personalities and psychology. The drawing style itself also changes: it becomes more diverse and more flexible; a style is chosen each time to suit the latest tiling to be depicted … Lebedev came into his own as a satirist in the 1920s and in that capacity he remained there.” Gerchuk, Iu. Ia., Vladimir Lebedev. Al´bom, ed. Viskova, I. S. (Moscow, 1990), 37 Google Scholar.

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46. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 68

47. Punin, N. N., Vladimir Vladimirovich Lebedev (Leningrad, 1928), 12.Google Scholar

48. Ibid.

49. [D. Zaslavskii], “O khudozhnikakh-pachkunakh,” Pravda, 1 March 1936. As quoted in Protiv formalizma i naturalizma v iskusstve: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1937), 11. As if foreseeing the wall of misunderstanding diat was being erected, Lebedev tried to explain himself before the official culture, declaring in an interview in 1933: “In his works, an author can break formal grammar rules without compromising the artistic value of his work. The artist can commit a number of errors in anatomy and form, and this likewise does not always ruin his work.” First printed in the journal Literaturnyi sovremennik, no. 12 (1933): 204-6 with the title “Beseda s V. V. Lebedevym.” As quoted in Glotser, Khudozhnikidetskoi knigi, 133

50. Ibid., 14.

51. Ibid., 13.

52. Ibid., 14.

53. Kichanova-Lifshits, Prosti menia, 37.

54. Ibid., 39.

55. In 1933, Marshak traveled in Italy and occasionally asked his wife how Lebedev's work on the illustrations for Mister Twistervizs progressing. “Is Vladimir Vasil´evich finishing up the drawings to Mister Twister” (beginning of June 1933); “Where is Vladimir Vasil´evich now? Thank him, my dear Sofia, for his drawings, and tell him that I will write him soon“ (7June 1933), both from Marshak, Sobraniesochinenii, 8:134-35 and 8:136-38.

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58. At the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States, with the appearance of the tobacco brands known to everyone, cigarettes become part of the soldier's regimen: they are sent for free to the front, thus forming habits and creating future customers. Unlike the sophisticated, old-fashioned, aristocratic pipe, the cigarette is simple, contemporary (an element of modernity), and democratic.

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61. Kichanova-Lifshits describes Lebedev's technique for selecting material as follows: what “he needed as an artist, he took and assimilated. And what he did not need, he rejected.” Kichanova-Lifshits, Prosti menia, 50.

62. The specifics of this picture are of some interest. It is noteworthy that Mr. Twister is depicted smoking a cigar, even though the underlying reference is to a cigarette pack. This is not as contradictory as it seems, because the cigar was understood as the universal symbol of status. An American millionaire would naturally have been associated with this glamorous detail, which in the Soviet Union in the 1920s (and for a long time thereafter) was identified with the style of Hollywood movie stars. Also noteworthy is that the camel has a single hump. In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov actually plays with the fact that the Camel cigarette pack depicts a dromedary (one-humped) camel rather than a Bactrian (twohumped) camel. See Abasheva, Marina, “Roman s reklamoi: Nabokov i drugie,” Neprikosnovennyizapas, no. 6 (62) (2008)Google Scholar.

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