The Other” in J. Steinbeck’s “A Russian Journal”: Specificity of Reception and Representation

Abstract

The paper analyses John Steinbeck's travelogue "A Russian Journal" based on the writer's impressions of his visit to the USSR in 1947. Unlike many other American authors, whose representation of the Soviet Union, being ideologically biased, abounded in stereotypes of the Cold War, Steinbeck, in the spirit of New Journalism, placed special stress on objectivity and factualness of his "Russian text". Striving to achieve impartiality of imagological representation, he abstracted from considering the political regime and focused on ethnocultural traits of the people, their everyday life. The mixed genre, which includes travelogue and report features, provided an opportunity for Steinbeck to combine publicistic and belles-lettres discourse and to create an image of "the other", marked with the author's subjectivity. The view from the outside, an estranged vision of another culture, combined with the narrator's emotional involvement, enabled Steinbeck to execute an expressive picture of the Soviet life, the picture which has both a genuine sympathy for ordinary people who had survived the trauma of the war and hoped for a bright future, and irony and sarcasm towards the bureaucratic state system, Stalin's cult. The cycle of reports, written by Steinbeck, is distinguished by its rich imagery and emotive intensity; it demonstrates the author's skill in creating individualized characters and visualizing his impressions. Alongside with the artistic merits of "A Russian Journal", we should note Steinbeck's effort to overcome the stereotypes about Russia and to represent the Soviet hetero-image through the prism of universal human values, axiological constants, which are common for all mankind.