Article

Name: “On the Edge of Siberia with Ivanov”. An Article in the Newspaper “L’Humanité”

Authors: E. I. Pogorelskaia

A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature RAS, Moscow, Russian Federation

In the section Siberian Writers and Siberia in the Russian Literature of the 20th Century

Abstract: Since May of 1926 and till December of 1928, Leon Bazalgette (1873–1928), French writer, translator, and literary critic who was a close friend of Stefan Zweig, wrote the weekly column Foreign literature in the French Communist party newspaper L’Humanité. Among the materials published in the newspaper there are articles about Soviet writers and their most famous works. The article dedicated to Vsevolod Ivanov was published on March 14, 1928, after the publication of materials about Boris Pilnyak, Lidia Seifullina, Konstantin Fedin, and before the publication of an article about Isaac Babel. In this paper we publish a translation from French of Bazalgette’s article about Ivanov. This article provides a brief outline of Ivanov's biography, which is based on his Autobiography, written for the VOX Bulletin in 1927, before his trip abroad, to France and Germany. This part of the article deals with several stages of his youth, his work in the printing house and performances in the circus, his participation in the revolutionary events in Siberia and the beginning of his writing career. To introduce the French reader to the work of Ivanov, Bazalgette chose the works of the writer of the early 1920s, united by the theme of Civil war and partisan struggle: the novella Armored Train 14-69, which was well known in Russia and was published by that time in Paris in French translation, the stories Bull of times and Child. Bazalgette highlights the main problem raised by Ivanov in these works – the cruelty and devaluation of human life in the conditions of class struggle. Analyzing the three named works of Ivanov, the author of the ar- ticle characterizes the features of his style, says about the saturation of his texts with convex, strong, unexpected and vividly outlined images. At the same time, as the author of the article notes, these three works reflect only the stage of Ivanov’s creativity, which went far ahead in his stories and novellas written by him in the middle of 1920s. The notes to the translation of Bazalgette’s article comment on the realities mentioned in the article and correct the mistakes and inaccuracies made in this article.

Keywords: Vsevolod Ivanov, Léon Bazalgette, L’Humanité, soviet literature, autobiography, Armored Train 14-69, Bull of times, Child, Siberia, Civil war, partisans

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