The cover of Alexander Etkind's 2001 book, Tolkovanie puteshestvii: Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Interpretation of Journeys: Russia and America in Travelogues and Intertexts) shows a crowd of European immigrants greeting the first sight of the Statue of Liberty with excitement and hope, symbolized by the brilliant light emanating from the American continent. By contrast, on the cover of the second edition, from 2022, we see a picture of a solitary couple, their eyes closed in rapture as they dance together into what appears to be an abyss. The change suits well the author's overall approach to the book's main theme, as well as the many revisions he has elected to make to the original text. As he fine-tunes his arguments about the complex relationship between Russia and America in the public national imaginations, and in representative fictional and non-fictional texts from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Etkind focuses closely on the experiences of individuals rather than the masses. This critical choice makes good sense. The men and women that leap off the pages of his study are indeed exceptional because of their talents, travel opportunities, or ideological sway. With the help of famous writers such as Aleksandr Pushkin and Alexis de Tocqueville (Ch. 2), Mikhail Bulgakov (Ch. 6), Ayn Rand and Hannah Arendt (Ch. 8), Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak (Ch. 9); radical thinkers like Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Chaikovskii, John Humphrey Noyse, William Frey (Ch. 3), and Lev Trotskii (Ch. 7); groundbreaking psychologists and philosophers like William James and Dmitrii Konovalov (Ch. 4); and fellow-travelers like Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Il΄ia Ilf, Yevgenii Petrov, Theodor Dreiser, John Reed, William Bullitt, and Louise Bryant, among others (Ch. 5), Etkind's book stages fascinatingly provocative real or imaginary conversations between remarkable human beings across generic, temporal, and geographical boundaries.
All chapters have been revised to correct errors in the original, and updated to reflect new information that has emerged over the twenty years since the first publication of the book. More specifically, Ch. 7 (about the suicide of Trotskii's daughter) has been expanded with new sections on “FreudMarxism” and Trotskii's interest in psychoanalysis, as well as more extensive discussions of Zinaida Volkova's correspondence with her father. Similarly, Ch. 8 has been modified by adding more close readings of Ayn Rand's fiction, while completely removing other parts (for instance, an extended comparison between Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism). The overall effect softens the original critique of Arendt's understanding of totalitarianism, and leads to the predictable conclusion that Arendt, unlike Rand, was not an ideologue and therefore did not force her work to comply with pre-existing ideas. Ch. 9, about Nabokov and Pasternak's rivalry, has also been shortened and adjusted to clarify further the author's main argument; even so, it still remains likely “the most controversial” (10), and certainly the longest in the volume.
The scope of Etkind's studies is astounding, as are his intellectual acumen and ability to deploy approaches from different disciplines into the production of a cogent, often memorably aphoristic style of writing. In his conclusion (Ch. 10), he describes his preferred method of critical analysis, New Historicism, as “necessarily eclectic. One of its obvious goals is to dissolve the boundaries between texts and not-texts, literature and not-literature, and in general the boundaries between genres, disciplines, and institutions” (533). The same could be said of his book as a whole: it is a brilliantly eclectic collection of essays, loosely organized around the topic of the Russo-American cultural exchange over two centuries, which mixes together historiography, psychoanalysis, philosophy, political science, and literary interpretation with sometimes debatable, yet always thought-provoking results. Occasionally, one wishes the breadth of his studies were matched by an in-depth investigation of important topics (for example, there's much more that could be said about the comparison between the treatment of Russian serfs and African American slaves in the products of the earliest cross-cultural contact between Russia and America), yet Etkind would also be the first to admit that his work is not intended to be exhaustive; his book is meant to be the impetus for further intellectual conversations about the past and the future of the Russo-American encounter.
Today, as Putin's war with Ukraine rages on, it is crucial that we understand better the history and psychology of Russia's relationship with the west. If, as Etkind suggests as well, Russians have always constructed their national identity as a response to the west, and America in particular, that past can provide valuable lessons for our present moment, which means that Tolkovanie puteshestvii is more relevant than ever.
