Sergey Tretyakov and Ezra Pound: A Dialogue about Collectivization of Literature Between the Right and the Left

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to the dialogue between Ezra Pound and Sergey Tretyakov on the pages of a Dutch magazine Front edited by a Dutch writer Sonja Prins, and other periodicals. This particular episode of Pound’s contacts with left-wing writers hasn’t been duly researched so far. In spite of the dangerous political atmosphere in the 1930s, authors with different ideological views could freely exchange their ideas in the periodicals. The Front published a wide range of anti-bourgeois authors — their views varied from communist to fascist. The Federation of Organizations of Soviet writers (FOSP) was mentioned as a co-founder of Front, although later its name was withdrawn because of the magazine’s publishing policy, which allowed right-wing writers. Tretyakov’s essay “Writer-kolkhoznik” was published in the first issue of the Front; the next issue contained Pound’s response to this essay. In spite of his pro-fascist views, Pound seemed interested in Tretyakov’s work on the kolkhoz. Later both writers continued to argue outside the magazine — Tretyakov mentioned Pound in his Berlin lecture The Writer and the Socialist Village, Pound referred to Tretyakov, this time purely ironically, in Italian press. In the end the dialogue failed, both writers tended to speak about their own main topics — Tretyakov continued to reflect on the writer in the kolkhoz, and Pound was interested in the classical Russian literature and in the attitude to the classical Russian literary heritage in the new socialist Russia.