Miguel Otero Silva in the USSR: Late Success of a Former Communist

Despite a biography full of episodes of struggle against dictatorship, revolutionary fervor of his early works, membership in the Communist Party, participation in the international peace movement, friendship with the major writers of his generation and “fellow travelers” of the Soviet Union (P. Neruda, R. Alberti, and others), and, finally, a desire to establish contact with the Soviet Writers’ Union, the Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva (1908—1985) remained unknown in this country for a long time. This article reconstructs the relationship between Otero Silva and Soviet literature from the first attempts at rapprochement in the mid-1930s to the peak of the writer’s popularity in the Soviet Union in the 1960s — 1980s. The paper explains why the Communist writer’s panegyric to Stalin in 1948 did not bring him the desired attention from Moscow, while the benevolent criticism of Soviet achievements by the renegade Marxist in the 1960s made him a “true friend” of the USSR. As a result of the study, the author concluded that during the Stalinist years Otero Silva lacked intermediaries who would “promote” him in the country, and, moreover, the publication of his works was impossible due to their plot features. In the 1960s, the Venezuelan’s sudden popularity in the Soviet Union was boosted by the fashion for Latin American literature combined with his own willingness to cooperate. Drawing on archival sources and the Soviet press, the circumstances of Otero Silva’s visits to the country in 1965, 1967, 1973, and 1980 are reconstructed. The author also shows how, as the Venezuelan’s fame grew in the USSR, his biography, created by Soviet literary critics, became formulaic and “appropriate” for a Lenin Peace Prize laureate.