APPENDIX G
A Visit from Mr. Polevoy
THE NEW REPUBLIC
Soviet newspapers are bitter about the insincerity of American visitors to their country. While in the USSR, they say, Americans are lavish with their praise, but on returning home, they speak quite differently of Russia to their fellow Americans. Our newspapers in turn maintain that Soviet delegations to this country wear a mask of friendliness but once back in Russia present a hostile and unrecognizable picture of the United States.
Do visiting Soviet delegations present a true picture of their travels here to their own people? The editors of The NR have been given an opportunity to test this question. A delegation of leading Soviet writers visited the United States in October, 1955, under the chairmanship of Boris Kampov-Polevoy, a Soviet novelist and Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers. Mr. Polevoy and four members of his delegation spent one evening at the house of the NR editor-at-large. In the third of his articles on his journeys through the US published in the March issue of the Soviet monthly, Oktyabr, Mr. Polevoy describes the occasion as he remembers it. A translation of his article, and our comments follow.
In the evening we were invited to be the guests of Mr. Michael Straight, editor of the magazine The New Republic, at his out-of-town villa bearing the poetic name of “Green Spring Farm.” This tiny villa was in no way different from the small suburban houses of well-to-do members of the “intelligentsia” which we already had the opportunity of visiting. Alone the huge agglomeration of books on long shelves—quite unusual for an American home—and the beautiful pictures on the walls revealed that the owners of this house had a passion for literature and an artistic taste which could enable them to discriminate between works of genuine art and the militant flatness, which under the mask of innovationism has impertinently seized the key positions in American art. There were canvasses and drawings which not only prompted one to wonder on passing by, but which induced a desire to stop, to admire and to think.
The people who had gathered at the house were interesting too—journalists who had traveled a great deal, who had witnessed many events, who were able to think. A unionist leader was also present—an observing, aggressive, skeptical man.
At the outset—as it is the custom in the United States—the host showed us around his house. The five of us were jammed in for quite a while on the second floor in the tiny bedrooms of his two sons. David, the eldest, a fair-haired, healthy looking youngster, had his little room in a state of complete disorder. The radio was roaring, the gay green parakeets were screaming. Some radio parts together with books, screwdrivers, tubes of glue, bookbinders and knives were heaped on the table. The little occupant, apparently ready to go to bed, was sitting on his bed without his shirt and was reading something. At the sight of strangers he felt bashful, grabbed his shirt, started putting it on and when his head eventually emerged through its collar, his face and his ears were flushed and his brow pearled with sweat. However, having dressed, he immediately regained his composure and, as though nothing had happened, stretched out his hand with earnest poise. David—he introduced himself.
His younger brother, Mikey, had an artistic temperament. His table was all smeared with water-colors and pictures were hanging on the walls—fantastic tanks, ships, sinister profiles of Indians, noble-featured cowboys wearing hats of incredible dimensions. Mikey was evidently successful in this hobby of his and, after looking at his drawings, one could tell him without false flattery that he was an artist of the realist school and that many of his pictures were more accurate and perfect as to form than whatever is being exhibited by quite adult “uncles” at the opening of exhibitions of the so-called “new art.”