A Russian Journal

PENGUIN BOOKS

Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast – and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel,
Cup of Gold
(1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two Californian fictions,
The Pastures of Hea
ven
(1932) and
To a God Unknown
(1933), and worked on short stories later collected in
The Long Valley
(1938). Popular success and financial security came only with
Tortilla Flat
(1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian labouring class:
In Dubious Battle
(1936),
Of Mice and Men
(1937), and the book considered by many his finest,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with
The Forgotten Village
(1941) and a serious student of marine biology with
Sea of Cortez
(1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing
Bombs Away
(1942) and the controversial play-novelette
The Mo
on is Down
(1942).
Cannery Row
(1945),
The Wayward Bus
(1947),
The Pearl
(1947),
A Russian Journal
(1948), another experimental drama,
Burning Bright
(1950), and
The Log from the Sea of Cortez
(1951) preceded publication of the monumental
East of Eden
(1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he travelled widely. Later books include
Sweet Thursday
(1954),
The Short Reign
of Pippin IV: A Fabrication
(1957),
Once There Was a War
(1958),
The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961),
Travels with Charley in Search of America
(1962),
America and Americans
(1966), and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden
Lette
rs
(1969),
Viva Zapata!
(1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
(1976), and
Working Days: The Journals
o/The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

Born Endre Erno Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary, on October 22,1913, the self-styled Robert Capa became one of the most celebrated war photojournalists of the twentieth century. He left Hungary at seventeen and, until he died in 1954 – killed by a landmine in Indochina – he roamed the world photographing war. With his beloved companion, photographer Gerda Taro (killed in 1937), he first saw action during the Spanish Civil War, where his emphatic portraits of human anguish won him international acclaim. In 1938 he travelled to China and witnessed the Japanese invasion; he covered World War II, Israel in 1948, and Indochina in 1954. During his life he published five photographic texts:
Death in the Making
(photographs by Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, 1938);
The Battle of Waterloo Road
(text by Diana Forbes-Robertson and photographs by Capa, 1941);
Slightly Out of Focus
(1947);
A Russian Journal
(1948); and
Report'on Israel
(text by Irving Shaw and photographs by Capa).

Susan Shillinglaw is a professor of English and director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. She co-edited
Steinbeck and the Environment
and
John Steinbeck: Contemporary Reviews.
She edits the
Steinbeck Newsletter
and has published articles on Steinbeck.

JOHN STEINBECK

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press, Inc. 1948

This edition with an Introduction by Susan Shillinglaw published in Penguin Books 1999

Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000

Copyright John Steinbeck, 1948

Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, Thorn Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV, 1976

Introduction copyright © Susan Shillinglaw, 1999

All rights reserved

Parts of this book appeared in the
New York Herald Tribune
and other newspapers.

Photographs on pages 72, 80, 95,151, Copyright 1948 by The Curtts Publishing Company.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this

ISBN
9780141186337

IN 1946, WINSTON CHURCHILL announced that an "Iron Curtain" I had been drawn closed across Eastern Europe. In the winter of 1947, the cold war began in earnest. The Soviet Union, fierce ally of 1 the United States in World War II, had become a menacing presence, a foe barely understood. "In the papers every day," John Steinbeck begins his text, "there were thousands of words about Russia," and yet, he continues, "there were some things that nobody wrote about Russia, and these were the things that interested us most of all." His quest, and that of photographer Robert Capa who accompanied him, was to discover the "great other side," the "private life of the Russian people." Steinbeck and Capa's modest book about the lives of Russians,
A Russian Journal,
published in 1948, attempts only "honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn't know sufficiently."

In many ways, that is what John Steinbeck had been doing quite successfully for twenty years, writing books about ordinary people: paisanos, Oklahoma migrants, enlisted men in World War II, Mexican peasants.
A Russian Journal
does not sound the epic chords of I
The Grapes of Wrath,
certainly, but it has some of that book's empathy and humanity. Indeed, one explanation for the appeal of
A
1
Russian Journal
is that this book, unlike so many other accounts of I Russia published at the time, engages and informs in Steinbeck's I most characteristic manner: expressing empathy and understanding I for working people; capturing with a journalist's eye the telling de-1 tail; seeing "nonteleologically," recording merely what is witnessed; 1 and finally leavening the narrative with a wry humor absent in I many more ponderous contemporary accounts of travel through I Soviet-approved locales. If not the most erudite or wide-ranging I book about postwar Russia, Steinbeck and Capa's is just what they claimed for it: "It is not the Russian story, but simply
a,
Russian story."

The collaboration between Capa and Steinbeck was, in fact, serendipitous. The two had met in London in 1943, and renewed their friendship in New York in March 1947, planning to leave for Russia as soon as possible, until, on May 14, Steinbeck took a nasty fall from a window of his apartment, shattered his knee, and spent a few weeks recovering (the knee, however, would give him problems throughout the trip). Each restless and independent, neither Capa nor Steinbeck, in fact, particularly cared for collaborative ventures. As early as 1936, when writer John O'Hara passed through Pacific Grove, eager to meet and then work with John Steinbeck on a stage adaptation of the recently published
In Dubious Battle,
Steinbeck declared that he "liked him and his attitude. … I think we could get along well. I do not believe in collaboration." Yet despite his protest to the contrary, collaboration came easily to Steinbeck; he initiated or was drawn into several joint projects, many completed-as was his 1940 trip to the Sea of Cortez with marine biologist Edward Ricketts
(Sea of Cortez,
1941)-some aborted, as was the one with O'Hara. In particular, Steinbeck gravitated toward visual artists, filmmakers, and photographers. Robert Capa, famed war photo journalist, formed with Steinbeck perhaps the happiest of Steinbeck's alliances with an artist in another medium.

Capa, whose celebrated war photos had frozen individual human torment and exuberance, shared Steinbeck's compassion and curiosity. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1913, Capa possessed the qualities of exuberance, tolerance, and a humanitarian spirit that captivated Steinbeck. As biographer Richard Whelan notes, Capa's political philosophy, similar to Steinbeck's own, was formed when Capa was a rebellious teen: "democratic, egalitarian, pacifistic, semi-collectivist, pro-labor, anti-authoritarian, and anti-fascist, with a strong emphasis on the dignity of man and the rights of the individual." Forced to leave Budapest in 1931, he had been in exile most of his life, wandering the world as witness to the ravages of war, sometimes shooting photos for
Time, Life,
and
Fortune,
always focusing on the human drama, the ordinary in the extraordinary. Capa photographed people, not events, aiming his camera, notes Whelan, on the "edge of things … studies of people under extreme stress."

The two artists' forty-day trip to the Soviet Union in 1947 was, like Steinbeck's 1940 trip to the Sea of Cortez with Edward Ricketts, an expedition of the curious. Like Ricketts and Steinbeck on the earlier journey, Capa and Steinbeck also "wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality." If the structure of
Sea of Cortez
melds two approaches, the "conventionally scientific" and the experiential, this travel narrative opts for the single lens: "We would try to do honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn't know sufficiently." Theirs was a journal, a photo essay. The structure they chose for their book-indeed, the dominant metaphor of
A Russian Journal-
is the Soviet Union as a framed portrait.

I

With the onset of the 1940s, the world had altered its step. "Things are very bad in the world, aren't they," Steinbeck wrote to his editor Pascal Covici in 1940. "Everything seems to be going to pot, everything as conceived before I mean. Maybe out of the fighting and the struggle there will come some kind of new conceptions. I don't know." Throughout the 1940s, John Steinbeck sought "new conceptions" for his own work. He began the decade composing a scientific travelog, ended it working on his most personal and ex-perimental novel,
East of Eden. A Russian Journal
is part of his ongoing effort to discover fresh material, to

forge new literary forms, to rekindle in his writing, as he wrote in his journal during a dark moment in 1946, "the glory that shadows everything else and that makes me seem like a grey and grizzled animal now. … So long since I've done the old kind of work-so long."

In the late 1930s, John Steinbeck had found that glory while writing his masterpiece,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). For a decade prior, he had been perfecting his craft and publishing in quick suc cession the works most often associated with John Steinbeck, social historian: the short stories in
The Long Valley
(written in the early 1930s, collected in 1938); the comic tour de force,
Tortilla, Flat
(1935), and the labor trilogy,
In Dubious Battle
(1936),
Of Mice and Men
(1937), and
The Grapes of Wrath.
By the end of the Depression John Steinbeck, novelist of the people, was a "household name," noted the promotional material for the 1940 John Ford film
The Grapes of Wrath.
That name, however, became something of a burden for the author who had fiercely declared in letters his need for anonymity in order to write. The world's gaze was upon him in the 1940s, expecting high sentiments from this chronicler of the poor. Critics and reviewers waited for the familiar voice of the proletarian writer to return to the gritty themes of the 1930s. He resisted. "I must make a new start," he wrote his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, in November 1939. "I've worked the novel… as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it-a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don't know the form of the new but I know there is a new thing which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking." At the cusp of the new decade, his initial course was scientific and ecological, "things more lasting," he remarked to Sheffield. John Steinbeck, novelist, transformed himself into John Steinbeck, marine biologist, as he set out in March 1940 with friend, biologist, and intellectual soul mate Ed Ricketts to explore the littoral of the Sea of Cortez; the 1941 account of that trip,
Sea of Cortez,
is one of Steinbeck's neglected masterpieces, a rich brew of scientific observation, philosophical musing, and humorous anecdotes capped by Ricketts's catalog of specimens discovered on the trip.