ABSTRACT
Admirers of the Russian Soul were bewildered by the events of the revolutionary year 1917. William Gerhardi had never had the Russian Soul fever, although in his novels, Futility and The Polyglots, and in his study of Chekhov, he had displayed more expert knowledge than most of the soul-worshippers possessed, of certain aspects of the Russian temperament. The controversies that preceded the dissolution of the Association of Revolutionary Writers in 1932 are reported, with many quotations; the work being done by Soviet poets, novelists, and playwrights-Mayakovsky, Ivanov, Leonov, Kataev, Alexei Tolstoy, Fadeev, Pasternak, Gladkov, Lidin, Prishvin-is described and briefly criticized. There was no such excitement among intellectuals in the United States over the Russian Soul, as among the English. Enthusiasm for the Moscow Art Theatre had begun before the Russian Revolution and was at its height when the company paid its 1923-1924 visits to the United States.
