ABSTRACT
The Russian Revolution of 1917 galvanized the American imagination, and it played no small part in the development of literary modernism in the United States. Prior to Bolshevik victories in Petrograd, Moscow, and elsewhere in Russia, American writers from across a broad spectrum of socio-political and artistic perspectives considered themselves lost and ineffectual inside a culture they often despised but could not change. The Russian Revolution offered them a concrete example of national transformation on the grandest imaginable scale; they followed its events, philosophies, and policies with keen interest, because the Revolution offered a tangible vision of realized political and aesthetic desire. This shared attention drew previously disparate thinkers and artists together, and it provided impetus for the interchange and cross-fertilization of ideas and aesthetics; the Revolution was a touchstone and catalyst for many of the individual and often competing strands of what we now call modernism. But what brought American writers together also eventually drove them apart. As the Revolution continued, as its fate became less certain and its manifestations more centralized and endlessly violent, writers were forced to reconsider and revise their earlier enthusiasm. Even the most ardent American Bolsheviks had to at least re-examine how their political beliefs and aspirations coincided with and converged from the pronouncements issuing from Lenin and his representatives. Ann Douglas's observation that the “1920s in the US were at least as post-Marxist as they were anti-Marxist” (20) rings true; if many writers of that decade and beyond were given to strong denunciations of Bolshevism, it is because so many of them first found their voices through the Revolution. This chapter will demonstrate first how the Russian Revolution opened a space for the development of a new American sensibility and then how, as the Revolution faltered, writers responded to that increasingly uncertain space of transformation. The focus of attention here will be primarily the first four years of The
Liberator, because of all the little magazines I consider here, The Liberator followed the Russian Revolution most closely.
