Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR

Why, at the height of the Cold War, was Kurt Vonnegut freely published in Russian translation in the top literary journals and book series in the USSR?

Sarah D. Phillips explores a fascinating yet little-known chapter in the history of literary and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War: the popularity of the American author Kurt Vonnegut in the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Drawing from previously untouched archives of manuscripts, letters, and FBI files, along with her interviews of literary and cultural figures active then in the USSR, Phillips investigates several key yet little-explored questions about Vonnegut’s “Soviet Chapter.” What was it about Vonnegut’s writing that so appealed to readers and literary critics in the 1970s Soviet Union? Were Vonnegut’s works censored, and if so, what exactly fell prey to the infamous “Red Pencil”? How much was Vonnegut aware of his cult status in the land of Lenin?

Alongside an account of Cold War politics and literary cultural diplomacy, Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR is also a book about relationships — between Vonnegut and the Soviet reading public, between Vonnegut and the Soviet literary establishment, and most especially, between Vonnegut and the woman whose masterful translations were devoured by readers of Russian: the famous Soviet translator Rita Rait (1898-1989).

A work at the intersection of anthropology, history, and literary, translation, American, and Slavic studies, Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR is a close look at the unique contexts around an author and his readers, and the legacies of this literary cultural diplomacy in American and post-Soviet literary cultures today.

Author Biography

Sarah D. Phillips is Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, USA. She is the author of two award-winning books, Women’s Social Activism in the New Ukraine (2008) and Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (2010).