Erskine Caldwell and the Soviet Union: Correspondence of 1935–1943

The corpus of archival materials documenting Erskine Caldwell's Soviet contacts in 1935–1943, including his stay in the USSR (May–September 1941) comprises documents from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation. It is Caldwell's correspondence with the representatives of Soviet literary institutions — Sergei Dinamov, Timofei Rokotov, Mikhail Apletin, Boris Suchkov, Aleksandr Fadeev, as well as official correspondence of Soviet ministries and organizations (Union of Soviet Writers, People’s Comissariat for Foreign Affairs, Customs Department of the People’s Comissariat for Internal Affaris), Soviet officials (Solomon Lozovsky, Konstantin Umansky, etc.) and their correspondence with the American media (NANA, CBS, The Life, PM). The epistolary corpus helps to reconstruct Erskine Caldwell’s and Margaret Burke White’s stay in the USSR, provides details of their work there as war correspondents. The corpus of documents opens with the 1935 letter by Sergei Dinamov, editor-in-chief of International Literature magazine, who started contacts with Caldwell (since 1937 the correspondence was continued by Timofei Rokotov, who replaced Dinamov in International Literature) and ends with the telegram congratulating Caldwell on his fortieth birthday (Dec 16, 1943), signed by the representatives of the Union of Soviet Writers Aleksandr Fadeev, Mikhail Apletin and Boris Suchkov, the last editor-in-chief of International Literature. This telegram sent at the end of 1943, the year of the closure of International Literature and the year of the turning point in the course of the Great Patriotic War (Caldwell was a witness to its beginning) draws a line under this period in Erskine Caldwell's Soviet contacts.