Instructive Criticism: Sergei Dinamov and Sinclair Lewis

The paper concentrates on the reception of American Nobel prize winner Sinclair Lewis in Soviet literary criticism of the 1920s–1930s. The interpretation of Lewis’ work by a prominent Americanist, literary critic, Party functionary, and editor- in-chief of the International Literature magazine Sergei Dinamov is in the focus of attention. The article traces the publication history of Lewis’s political novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935) in the USSR, its editing, censoring, cutting and translating, as well as its critical analysis and evaluation. In his critical reviews and articles Dinamov sought to give the Soviet reader a “correct” and “up-to-date” interpretation of the novel, and tried, though unsuccessfully, to influence the author, convincing Lewis to reconsider the images of communists in his work. The paper is based on the publications in the 1930s Soviet press as well as archived materials — Dinamov’s correspondence with Lewis, Soviet readers’ reviews from the 1930s of the American writer’s novels, and a transcript of Dinamov’s 1936 lecture at the Institute of Red Professors, that contains a critical survey of Lewis’s work.