Our Best Friend in America: The Soviet Afterlife of Mark Twain

In 1960, the popular Soviet magazine Krokodil dubbed Mark Twain the USSR’s “American Friend No. 1.” This surprised neither the Kremlin nor the magazine’s readers: Twain and especially his Mississippi novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, were favorites throughout the Soviet period, with the first translations dating to before the Bolshevik Revolution and film adaptations continuing to appear into the 1980s. Cassio de Oliveira explores why and how such a decidedly American writer came to occupy pride of place in a nation so emphatically opposed to American culture. How exactly did Twain become the Soviet Union’s “best friend in America”? How did that friendship change, and what did it signify, throughout the long and fickle decades of Soviet cultural policy and the Cold War?

What emerges from this complex history is not just the story of a single author’s foreign fortunes but also the history of Soviet literature as well as Soviet–American cultural interactions, which are revealed to have been more multifaceted and variable than might be assumed. Twain’s reception in the USSR also speaks to the largely hidden history of world literature in translation, even during decades of fraught geopolitical confrontation.