DEMAND FOR BOOKS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 11 January 1944, Page 2

DEMAND FOR BOOKS

THE PEOPLE OF RUSSIA

FAVOURITE BRITISH AUTHORS As regards books, writes Mr Maurice Dobb, a Cambridge University lecturer in Economics, in “U.S.S.R.: Her Life and Her People,” there is probably more publishing activity in U.S.S.R. than in any other country of the world. Not only is the number of titles published each year a large one (10,000 each year is quite common), but the editions that are printed of each book are surprisingly large. Mr Joseph Davies, who was American Ambassador in Moscow for some time, has pointed out that in a peace-time year seven times as many copies of books were sold as in Tsarist times. Editions of serious literature run into tens of thousands, even sometimes hundreds of thousands; and the number of copies of books of all kinds printed each year runs to more than 500,000,000. Some of these ere books about politics. Many of them are school and college text-books and instructional booklets about science and technology for factory workers. But the works of the great writers of the past are also in very great demand. Of Russian writers, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky are specially popular; also European classics like Dante, Balzac and Goethe; English writers from Chaucer to Fielding and Dickens. In 1939 special celebrations of the 375th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth were held, and in 1940 of the 540th anniversary of Chaucer’s death. DICKENS POPULAR The first Russian translation of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” has appeared in Moscow during the war. Between 1928 and 1930 three editions i of Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” appeared, each edition of 30,000 copies, and two editions in each case of “Nicholas Nickleby,” “David Copperfield,” and “The Old Curiosity Shop.” Later 75,000 copies were sold of an abridged edition of “A Tale of Two Cities”; “Pickwick Papers” ran into six editions; and the Children’s Publishing House issued 75,000 copies of “Dombey and Son.” When recently a new edition of Dickens’s collected works appeared, application was received for 20,000 sets within two days. MODERN WRITERS Of modern English and American writers, Steinbeck (author of “Grapes of Wrath” and “Mice and Men”), Dreiser, Hemingway, Galsworthy and Wells are well known. In Moscow there is a special State Public Library of Foreign Literature. The librarian of this has announced a great demand recently for books by Priestley, Cronin, Somerset Maugham and Arnold Bennett; and in 1941 and 1942 special exhibitions were staged in this library in honour of the birthdays of Bernard Shaw and Wells and Arnold Bennett. Of the younger Soviet writers it is difficult to speak shortly, and they must be read if they are to be understood. Of poets the most popular was formerly Mayakovsky, the futurist in style, who spoke in the language of the street and the factory about the revolution and its achievements. Mayakovsky ‘wished his pen to become a sword.’ One of his poems was called “The Cloud in Trousers”, another “Hands Off China” and another was about Lenin. RUSSIA’S NOVELISTS Of novelists the best known in England is Sholokhov, who has written a massive trilogy of novel about Cossack life on the Don during and since the revolution.

Among other outstanding figures is Alexey Tolstoy, who is best known as a writer of historical novels, and Ilya Ehrenburg, who was recently awarded a Stalin Prize for a novel about modern France called “The Fall of Paris” (which is now available in English); also writers like Fadeyev, Fedin, Leonov, Tikhonov and, less widely read, Olesha, Pilnyak and Babel. In recent years violent experiments in form and style have gone out of favour, and revolutionary themes, splashed on to a large canvas, have given way to what is called “socialist realism”—a concentration, whether in prose or poetry, on depicting life as it was and as it is, in all its richness of detail and variety.