The spine says 1976. The book is older than that, and it says so itself, in its own back matter. Mendelson's bibliography of Russian writing on Whitman lists, under 1969, "Mendelson M., Zhizn i tvorchestvo Whitman'a (Life and Work of Whitman), 2nd revised and enlarged ed., Moscow, Nauka, 1969", and under 1965 the first edition from the same publisher, 368 pages. Nothing in the notes postdates 1971. The latest American event the book registers is a Washington Post piece by Colman McCarthy from May 1969, written for the poet's 150th birthday. The Foreword — which opens "Several years ago, in 1969, poetry lovers all over the world celebrated the 150th birthday of the great American poet, Walt Whitman" — was evidently added later for export. Everything behind it is the Nauka book of 1969, which is in turn a revision of 1965. Read it as a book of the late Brezhnev-era Academy, not of 1976.
That matters, because 1976 was the American Bicentennial, and a reader could be forgiven for assuming that Progress Publishers commissioned a Soviet Whitman as counter-programming. They did not commission it. They timed it. Search the text for "bicentennial" and there is nothing; search for "two hundred years" and there is nothing. The book was written for a Whitman anniversary, not an American one. What Progress did was pick the year to put it into English — and the effect, in 1976, is a quiet claim of ownership. The argument the book leaves in a Western reader's hands is that America's greatest democratic poet is neglected at home and beloved elsewhere. Mendelson makes it explicitly: "It is true that in the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries Whitman's poetry has become the property of an immense audience. It is also true that in his own homeland he has not yet fully conquered the public." He assembles the supporting cast with care — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's copy of Leaves of Grass, passed around a women's prison and left behind there; Gus Hall in a 1966 interview, "I discovered Whitman while I was in Leavenworth." In the year of the tall ships, this is a book arguing that the republic has mislaid its own bard and that the workers' movement has been keeping him.
Maurice Mendelson was not an apparatus functionary. His bibliography records a doctoral dissertation on Whitman submitted in Moscow in 1956, a foreword to a Whitman selection for Goslitizdat in 1954, and centenary articles in Pravda and Oktyabr in 1955. He spent something like two decades on one poet, and it shows on every page. This is the rare Progress title where the honest thing to do is to spend most of the space on what the book gets right.
Mendelson works from the documents. He uses Whitman's Brooklyn Eagle journalism at length and in detail — the 1846–48 editorship, the leading article "Slavers—and the Slave Trade", the Wilmot Proviso fight, the paper's boast in the issue of 3 February 1847 that it was "the very first Democratic paper which alluded to this subject ... in a decisive manner", the dismissal by the owner Van Anden and Van Anden's evasive public explanation, and the Brooklyn Advertiser's rival account, which held that the editor had kicked a well-known politician down the stairs. He uses the earliest surviving notebook, identified by the Eagle office address on its flyleaf, and quotes its aphorisms directly. He uses a manuscript in the Library of Congress to date the founding of the Brooklyn Freeman, and Whitman's Library of Congress notes on Russian history and economics. He uses Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden, Edwin Haviland Miller's edition of the Correspondence, and the Whitman–Rolleston letters published by Indiana in 1951. He engages American Whitman criticism by name and quotes it accurately before disagreeing with it: Gay Wilson Allen, Emory Holloway, Sculley Bradley, Henry Seidel Canby, Richard Chase, James E. Miller Jr., Leadie Mae Clark, Leslie Fiedler.
The chapter on the Mexican War is the best demonstration that this is real historical work. It would have been easy to skip. Mendelson does not skip it. He states the damaging evidence first, in his own voice: "The editorials written by Whitman just after the American troops had crossed the border made the Mexicans out to be the blackest of villains. The editor accused them of being ready to execute hundreds of people; he spoke of the tyranny within Mexico and openly advocated seizure of Mexican territory." He quotes Canby's verdict that Leaves of Grass expresses "a young expansionist mind in an expansionist country" at full strength before answering it. Only then does he trace the turn — by the first days of 1847 the Eagle was arguing that "the time ... has arrived when all citizens should speak candidly and firmly on this subject of the Mexican War. Let it go no further!" — and he grounds the turn in a specific mechanism: the war question became inseparable from the slavery question. That is how the argument should be made, and it is made honestly.
The final chapter, on Whitman's reception in Russia, is the book's unique contribution and is largely unobtainable elsewhere in English. A notice in Otechestvenniye Zapiski in 1861 described Leaves of Grass as a novel, on the strength of having read English reviews rather than the book. Turgenev, in the early 1870s, wrote to Annenkov of his intention to publish "several translations of lyrical verses by the amazing American poet Walt Whitman (have you heard of him?) with a short foreword. It is impossible to imagine anything more astounding" — and a Turgenev translation of "Beat! Beat! Drums!" survives among his manuscripts in a Paris library. Pyotr Lavrov, the revolutionary populist, wrote on Whitman in 1882 under the name "P. Kryukov". Whitman's own "You Russians and we Americans!" — the December 1881 preface he wrote for a Russian Leaves of Grass that was never published — is reconstructed here from the Rolleston and Lee correspondence out of Dresden. And there is John Swinton's letter to the poet of 12 August 1882, reporting that a lecture of his had been translated for a Russian journal: "I guess this is your first introduction to Rooshia." A scholar found these things. They are worth having.
The book's first chapter is called "The 'Puzzle' of Walt Whitman", and it names the puzzle in American terms, quoting Gay Allen: "No author in American literature has been a greater puzzle to his biographers and critics than Walt Whitman." Mendelson then restates it as a series of questions, and the form of the questions gives the game away. Every one is an either/or: was Whitman "a skilful demagogue playing at democracy, or a poet whose world view was organically linked with that of the democratic masses"? Was he "bound hand and foot by bourgeois individualism, or did his strength lie in an emotional and intellectual leaning towards collectivism?" A puzzle posed as a disjunction has already had its answer chosen.
To his credit, Mendelson does not simply deny the individualism. He concedes it and then subordinates it: "There is no doubt that the individualist and collectivist tendencies in Leaves of Grass often clash with each other. Yet the most important, decisive fact about Whitman the poet is, in the final analysis, that he was a man with a 'wide-open heart', attracted by collectivism." In the final analysis is the hinge. The contradictions are admitted as facts and then denied as facts about the poetry, because they have been assigned a direction. Part Four is titled "Firm as Ever": a life with no falling-off, no wrong turnings, only a trajectory.
Sometimes the trajectory is genuinely there. The late Whitman really did tell Traubel "... I find I'm a good deal more of a socialist than I thought I was ..." — Mendelson quotes the hedge along with the claim — and the notes for the undelivered lecture on "The Tramp and Strike Questions" really do say that beneath the political world lies "not the abstract question of democracy, but of social and economic organization, the treatment of working-people by employers". The reading of Democratic Vistas is strong and unsentimental; he lets Whitman's "society, in these States, is canker'd, crude, superstitious, and rotten" stand without softening, and he is candid that the book's cure — that literature alone might redeem the republic — is a "naive idea".
Where the trajectory is not there, the method shows its costs. Consider "Passage to India". Mendelson introduces it as a poem about technological optimism, notes that Whitman was excited by the transcontinental railway and the Suez Canal, allows that "Whitman expresses the hope that the achievements of the engineers will finally bring various nations closer together", and concludes: "But 'Passage to India' must be regarded as one of the poet's weaker works." The judgement is aesthetic. It is not, apparently, available to him that a poem whose organising image is the opening of the routes to Asia in 1869 might be a poem about the world market, and that the Marxist reading of it — the poetry of capital's global reach, sung by a man who had opposed the seizure of California twenty years earlier — is the most interesting reading on offer. A book alert enough to catch the expansionist Whitman of 1846 goes quiet on the imperial geography of 1868, because that Whitman is late, and lateness in this book has to mean growth.
The pages on Whitman's sexuality are where the book fails, and the failure is precise enough to name.
The subject is present. Calamus is discussed, "adhesiveness" appears a dozen times, Peter Doyle gets several pages, and the Symonds correspondence is quoted. Nothing is hidden. Everything is redirected. Calamus is "dedicated to the theme of manly friendship and 'robust love'", and Mendelson adds at once that "the poet emphasized that such poems had first of all a political significance". "Adhesiveness" — Whitman's own borrowed phrenological term for attachment between men — is glossed throughout as Lunacharsky glossed it, as a yearning for collectivism. Doyle, a horsecar conductor in his twenties when they met, becomes "his adopted son", and the letters between them are "the letters of a father or an elder brother". There was no adoption.
The refutation, where it is offered directly, is not an argument. "Critics of the Freudian school seek the key to Whitman's genius in his supposed homosexual inclinations. Again it must be said that no one has been able to adduce actual facts confirming such hypotheses. In Whitman's verse and prose the sun shines brilliantly and a fresh wind blows; his works breathe naturalness and purity." A claim about a man's life is answered with a description of the weather in his poems, and "purity" is left to do the work that evidence would have done. Later: "Whitman's biographers have offered us no real proof of the poet's homosexual inclinations." The pathology, note, is never attributed to Whitman; it is relocated onto the people asking. The critics have a "Freudian bent", they are "psychopathologists", they suffer from "sick thoughts" and generate "wild conjecture". Symonds, who asked Whitman the question in writing, is a man who needs help getting rid of his ideas.
The most revealing passage in the book is the one where Mendelson does his job and then stops. He quotes Whitman's furious reply to Symonds — the pages of Leaves of Grass "are not to be even mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the time undreamed and unwished possibility of morbid inference—which are disavowed by me and seem damnable" — and he notes, accurately, that Whitman went on to assure Symonds he had fathered six children and had a grandson who wrote to him. And then Mendelson writes the honest sentence: "No researcher has been able to unearth any facts which would confirm that the poet had children and grandchildren." He has put on the page, in his own words, the fact that the denial he is relying on contains a demonstrable fabrication. He draws no inference from it. He moves to the next paragraph, which is about a letter to Charles Warren Stoddard. The evidence is presented; the conclusion is unavailable.
This was not a limit of the state of knowledge. Mendelson takes the Symonds text from the introduction to Walter Lowenfels's The Tenderest Lover (Delacorte, 1970) — an American selection of Whitman's love poetry, edited by a communist — and uses the document while ignoring the reason anyone had gathered it. He cites Edwin Haviland Miller's Correspondence throughout and quotes Miller's remark that the poet "remain[s] mystifying" without engaging Miller's own psychological reading of the poetry, published in 1968. He knew where the argument was. Soviet law criminalised sex between men throughout his working life, and Soviet publishing would not have carried the other conclusion. It is possible that Mendelson believed what he wrote. It is not possible that he had no idea what he was declining to consider.
Search this text for "Stalin" and there are no hits. Search for "socialist realism", "Zhdanov", "formalism": none. That is a real finding and it deserves stating plainly. Mendelson is not writing agitprop. He quotes Lenin once, on Marx and Hermann Kriege, and the citation is apt. He quotes Marx's letter to Lincoln from the General Council minutes. Otherwise the Marxism in the book is a general one — classes, the trajectory of American capitalism, the Utopian socialists — and the literary method, whatever else is wrong with it, is not the method of a state directive. Much of this book could have appeared, with different footnotes, from an American university press.
The policy is nevertheless in the volume, in two places, and both are outside Mendelson's prose.
The first is a name in his own bibliography. The 1935 Leningrad Leaves of Grass is listed with its two introductory essays, one by Chukovsky and one by "Mirsky D." That is D. S. Mirsky, who returned to the Soviet Union in 1932, was arrested in 1937, and died in a camp in the Kolyma region in 1939. He appears twice in these pages as a bare citation. The book has dates for the edition and none for the man. Mendelson could not have written it any other way, and it would be cheap to blame him for the omission. But a reader in 1976 who wondered what became of the critic who introduced Soviet readers to Leaves of Grass would find, in a book of this thoroughness, no thread to pull.
The second is on the last page. Bound behind Mendelson's index, Progress advertises a companion anthology of Soviet multinational literature, "composed of works belonging in form to some specific nation, in content to the ideas of socialism." That is the Stalin-era formula, printed on the endpaper of a book whose author never once invokes it. Trotsky quotes the same words in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), ch. 7, "Family, Youth and Culture": "Culture should be socialist in content, national in form." That chapter remains the sharpest account of what happened to Soviet literary life and why. Its central claim about the fate of writers under the bureaucracy — "The most eminent artists either commit suicide, or find their material in the remote past, or become silent" — needs one addition to cover the case in your hands. There was a fourth exit: the remote place. A nineteenth-century American poet, dead since 1892, was among the safest subjects a Soviet literary scholar could choose, and the scholarship here is as good as it is partly because the distance bought the room to do it well. The same chapter records what Trotsky had proposed instead, in 1924: that the state might "place limitations upon creative freedom, but in no case pretend to the role of commander in the sphere of science, literature and art." He was not offering unlimited freedom, and the record of the early Soviet years is not spotless on this. He was refusing the state the role of judge of literary merit — the role that decided, among much else, that some critics get bibliographies and some get camps.
For the specific vice of this book — the conversion of a poet's whole life into a political trajectory — the best short answer in our tradition comes from C. L. R. James, writing as G. F. Eckstein in Fourth International, vol. XI no. 2, March–April 1950, on Mailer and Melville. The Stalinists, James wrote, "taking advantage of the confusion of bourgeois thought, continue to make the most outrageous approximations between a writer's political beliefs and his artistic creation." In the same essay James disposes of Mendelson's central question in a single clause, by refusing it: "While Whitman sang paeans to great individuals, Melville in 1851 drew the individualism of American capitalism to the end." The individualism is a fact about Whitman, not a phase he was leaving. It is what a Marxist criticism has to explain, not explain away.
Read Part One, the Brooklyn Eagle chapters, and the final chapter on Whitman in Russia. The first two are careful documentary history; the last contains material you will not easily find in English. Read the Democratic Vistas pages, which are strong. Read the treatment of Calamus, Doyle and Symonds as a specimen of what a state can make a good scholar do with a subject he understands perfectly well.
And keep the book's own opening page, which is better than its argument. Mendelson begins in Arkhangelsk in the summer of 1942, among the survivors of a torpedoed Arctic convoy. One elderly American sailor asks him, shyly, whether a particular book might be obtainable in the town: he had carried it across the oceans for decades and it had gone down with the rest of his possessions. "The American was asking about a book, but he seemed to be speaking about a living human being, someone very close and dear to him." He found another copy in Arkhangelsk. That is the honest core of this book — that Leaves of Grass moved between an American seaman and a Soviet scholar in the middle of a war, and that neither of them needed a resolution of the puzzle to know what had passed between them. Mendelson spent three hundred pages resolving it anyway.