Comrade Whitman: From Russian to Internationalist Icon by DelphineRumeau. Newton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2024. 376 pp. $150.00. ISBN 979‐8‐887‐19460‐8

There are not many books that look into the links between Russian and American literature in the twentieth century: the Iron Curtain’s impact is still with us. Delphine Rumeau’s Comrade Whitman is a welcome exception. It offers an important narrative of how Walt Whitman, an originator of American poetry and a distinct voice of a new national literary tradition, became an international poetic ally for the literati on the left. Whitman also found a comfortable place in the Soviet literary canon behind the Iron Curtain. The book deals with a “distant reading” of the fate of Whitman’s poetry after Whitman, embracing a large scope of authors (Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, French, Brazilian, and so on) and offering an encyclopedic view of the international Whitmania. Rumeau explains her method as the study of cultural transfers, with a focus on factual evidence and a historical perspective. This approach will not tell you about the impact of Whitmanesque “catalogues” or long vers libre lines on Russian poetry, but it delivers interesting insights about the facets of Whitman’s oeuvre that came into demand internationally, in the context of the political agendas of the twentieth century. Even though the book discusses the international Whitman, the Russian and Soviet reception is at the core of the narrative. The book’s ten chapters cover the reception of Whitman from the tsarist Russia to the late-Soviet period. The first chapters look at the reception of Whitman as a new poetic voice of a country that broke its colonial cultural dependence on the metropole. The receptions paradoxically combine the visions of Whitman as an “Adamic” poet who gives names to things; a Greek poet who starts literature from scratch; a “primitive” poet who writes without sophistication; and a “barbarian poet,” “an antidote to the poison of civilization” (p. 36). The receptions tried to measure the poet against the domestic cultural dominants, on the one hand, and trusted Whitman’s self-definitions, on the other: thus, “primitive” Whitman is associated with an interest in primitivism in European art; “the barbarian Whitman” comes from the “barbaric yawp” in “Song of Myself.” These chapters deepen our understanding of the Futurists’ infatuation with Whitman: Korney Chukovsky’s fascination with Whitman’s absence of hierarchies, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s emphasis on the body, and Velimir Khlebnikov as “the Russian Whitman.” The poetic preoccupations with the American author soon give in to the political ones. Rumeau explores how Whitman, perceived as an ally by the Bolsheviks, was an inspirational tradition for the poets sympathetic to communism in the United States, Chile, and beyond. Pablo Neruda, for example, invited Whitman to assist him in the murder of the American president, “with your extraordinary help / verse by verse, we kill at the root, / Nixon, the bloodthirsty president” (p. 286). The author of Comrade Whitman aims at the inclusion of many different cultures that often share similar attitudes to Whitman. When the book explores the USSR, it goes beyond the Russophone poets, including Whitman’s reception in Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Yiddish—a rare and important perspective on the reception of a Western author in the USSR. Rumeau also explores the poets who paid attention to Whitman but developed a critical attitude. For example, Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima criticizes Whitman for ignoring the other (South) America, less infected with racism, in 1927. Something that Rumeau’s book does not address is gaps in Whitmania—the periods when Whitman was “detested,” as Ezra Pound put it. Yet these gaps are telling. In the United States, it was the Imagist tradition and T. S. Eliot’s impersonality theory that made the confessional tone and romantic posture of Whitman feel outdated for a few decades, until the beatniks brought him back. In the USSR, Soviet politics regarding literature as propaganda conditioned all literary receptions. Since Whitman got into the category of authors “friendly” to the Soviets, the poets of the Soviet underground—a space where real, free Russian poetry was written during the Cold War—perceived him as a sovieticized author and instead searched for the forbidden Anglo-American modernists, such as T. S. Eliot or W. H. Auden. Comrade Whitman ends in a coda showing that Whitman is perceived as a neutral classic in contemporary Russia, while in the West there is a renewed interest in him as a queer poet. It remains to be seen whether Russia’s homophobic ideological stance will spark new interest in Whitman as an author from the forbidden world.