Cold War Kreutzer: Tolstoy’s Posthumous Political Career from Venice to Palestine

Abstract

The year 1960 marked the fiftieth death anniversary of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), one of the earliest self-proclaimed world writers. That summer, the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) organized a lavish international conference near Venice; meanwhile, in Haifa, the Palestinian Trotskyist Jabra Nicola (1912–1974) published his translation of Tolstoy’s sex-obsessed late novella The Kreutzer Sonata. These two events exemplified contrasting styles of Cold War literary internationalism, one aspiring to global dominance and the other to local impact. Both responded to Tolstoy’s “world” status, Kreutzer’s moral ambition, and the Soviet Union’s successful appropriation of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Exploring the CCF archives and the Arabic Kreutzer tradition, this article asks how each of these 1960 events came about, what they assumed, and what they achieved. The Palestinian Israeli case offers a usefully peripheral perspective from which the Cultural Cold War appears both more tangible and less strictly bipolar. Jabra’s translation used the resources provided by Soviet cultural diplomacy for local progressive ends: not to press for social change in Arab society, but to build the cultural confidence of readers who found themselves both minoritized as Israelis and isolated from their fellow Arabs.