“This commendable book is a well-informed cultural history of Walt Whitman reception in many countries. Delphine Rumeau and her assisting multilingual, informed researchers have done us all a great service.”

—Martin Bidney, Slavic Review

“The book deals with a “distant reading” of the fate of Whitman’s poetry after Whitman, embracing a large scope of authors (Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, French, Brazilian, and so on) and offering an encyclopedic view of the international Whitmania. Rumeau explains her method as the study of cultural transfers, with a focus on factual evidence and a historical perspective.”

—Nataliya Karageorgos, The Russian Review

“Rumeau’s informative, fruitful study adds to the ongoing critical discourse about the role of the poet and poetry, the link between the poetic and the political, and the inheritance that Whitman has left us (as we choose to interpret this legacy). In the ever-evolving field of Whitman’s reception, this book is a treat for scholars, and anyone who appreciates Whitman, anywhere in the world”.

—Dara Barnat, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

“Rumeau weaves a rich tapestry of strands far beyond the Russian-Soviet image of Whitman. She displays a cast of Russian-American intermediaries who shaped a socialist Whitman in Yiddish translations and a nation-building Whitman for Israel in Hebrew. Though much more awaits, Rumeau references Whitman exports into the languages of the Russian and Soviet empires and she charts the path for transnational studies of Whitman world-wide. ‘Salut au Monde’, indeed!”

—  Dale Peterson, The Slavonic and East European Review

“Delphine Rumeau’s Comrade Whitman is a powerful contribution to global literary studies. Her detailed, incisive account of Whitman’s Russian and Soviet reception not only transforms our knowledge of Whitman and his legacy, but it also gives a new account of literary internationalism itself.”

—Rebecca Beasley, University of Oxford

"Although the innovative focus on Whitman in Russia and the Soviet Union may suggest otherwise, this is the first study that establishes Whitman as a truly global poet. A  landmark in Whitman research proving that some poetry can break all bounds."

—Walter Grünzweig, TU Dortmund University and Andrássy Universität Budapest; author of Constructing The German Walt Whitman

“Just as Walt Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass became a paradigmatic work of world literature, so, too, Delphine Rumeau’s study of its reception in Russia and among the international left over the century between the 1880s and the 1980s embodies the very best of contemporary world literature studies. Erudite and multilingual, profoundly historic and featuring excellent close readings, Comrade Whitman is a pleasure to read.”

—Rossen Djagalov, New York University; author of From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World (2020)

“Whitman was a communist internationalist avant la lettre. His verse took the socialist world by storm at a time when the nascent Soviet Union was at the center of an internationalist utopian drive. In this superb book about translation, form, and the politics of the transnational left, Delphine Rumeau shows how the author of Leaves of Grass transforms the way that writers around the world, from Moscow to Madrid, thought about poetry.” 

—Amelia Glaser, University of California San Diego

Delphine Rumeau is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Grenoble, France. 

List of illustrations

Permissions

Note on transliteration, names and translations

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1. Whitman as a primitive (1880s–1910s)

1. A neo-wanderer

2. “Striking up for a New World”

The Adamic Whitman

The Greek Whitman

3. The barbarian 

The Germanic Whitman

Against “Latin” sclerosis

4. Westward: another direction for the quest of the primitive in Russia

5. Appropriation and separation

Transatlantic barbarians: Whitman and Verhaeren

Volte-faces

Chapter 2. The Futurist poet (1910s–1920s)

1. The poetry of modern chaos

Poet of the metropolis

A rebel against hierarchy

2. A precursor of Futurism 

A “propeller” of Western avant-gardes

Korney Chukovsky’s “first real Futurist”

3. Whitman and (post-) Russian Futurist poetry 

Velimir Khlebnikov: from circumspection to kinship

Vladimir Mayakovsky: from anxiety of influence to anxiety of impotence

Post-imperial Whitman (the Baltic states and Ukraine)

Chapter 3. Whitman the prophet (1880s–1930s)

1. The prophet of the body

“I believe in the flesh and the appetites”: the anti-Victorian Whitman

The passion of the body (Konstantin Balmont)

Yiddish poets and the female body

2. The poet as “kosmos”

The prophet’s heart as a cosmos (Morris Rosenfeld)

Cosmic consciousness (Richard Maurice Bucke)

A “chronic mystical perception” (William James)

From the Milky Way to Russian iconostasis (Balmont and Grigoriev)

3. The seer and the guide

New American and British churches

The Russian prorok

The prophet of the Promised Land

Chapter 4. From democrat to socialist (1880s–1919)

Foreword: the impact of the British editions

1. “The institution of the dear love of comrades”

Whitman and British ethical socialism

The transatlantic socialist fellowship

Continental European Whitmanites

2. The Russian democrat

Selected poems, from Whitman and not from Whitman

The poetry of “struggle” versus the poetry of “future democracy”

3. War and peace

“An example of war poetry”

Whitman the wound-dresser

Love and reconciliation

Chapter 5. The extraordinary adventures of Walt Whitman in the land of the Bolsheviks (1918–1936)

1. A wide circulation 

The 1920s: (re)-translating, (re)-publishing Whitman in Russian

The anthology of the revolution: highly selected poems

Korenizing Whitman

The 1930s: becoming a classic 

2. Whitmanian agitprop

Celebrating the revolution with Whitman in 1918

The Proletkult shows: “the first experiments of poetic theatre”

The Whitman club: “to kiss, to work and to die Whitman’s way”

Whitman and Soviet film: from kino-eye to montage

Chapter 6. Between the wars: a transatlantic fellow traveler (1919–1938)

1. In Europe: the relative decline of the socialist Whitman

The 1919 celebrations

Foiled European revolutions 

In the press: the Comintern of translators

Turning “Salut au Monde!” into a parody

2. In the US: Proletarian Whitman

Turning more partisan

Whitman for the workers

“Towards Proletarian Art”: Whitman among leftist intellectuals

In Yiddish: “Salut au Monde!” as a marching hymn

Whitman and the Great Depression

3. Supplementing Whitman’s America

“The other America”

Black Whitman, Red Whitman

Coda: Three American intermedial “Salut au Monde!”

Chapter 7. Pioneers and Pionery: political transfers (1886–1944)

1. Preamble: the British marches of the “Pioneers”

2. Russian and Soviet Pionery

Fake Pioneers

Avant-garde Pionery

From “frontline fighters” to pionery

3. In the US: “O New Pioneers”

Pionern: a velt fun marsh un arbet

The pioneers during the Great Depression

Chapter 8. Anti-fascist Whitman (1936–1945)

1. “Against war and fascism”

“Spain 1873–1874,” Spain 1936–1939

León Felipe: from “Song of Myself” to “Salut au Monde!”

2. World War II: The Whitman pact

A “wartime Whitman” in the US

Looking for Whitman on the White Sea

The honor of poets (the French Resistance)

1945: Singing the spring

Chapter 9. “Salut au Monde!” across the Iron Curtain (1946–1956)

1. “Salut au Monde!” a French comeback

2. Saludo al mundo: from Neruda to Mir

Pablo Neruda’s Let the Rail Splitter Awake 

Rendering unto Whitman what belongs to Whitman

Pedro Mir’s Countersong to Walt Whitman

3. The centennial of Leaves of Grass in 1955 

New Soviet translations, critics and responses

The World Peace Council and the 1955 celebrations

Yevtushenko and Neruda: watermelons and strawberries

Chapter 10. Back from the USSR (1955–1980s)

1. A Soviet classic

2. Pablo Neruda as Whitmanian go-between 

Nerudean repercussions

A final companion

3. Whitman and the counterculture

Walter Lowenfels: American and Soviet dialogs

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Goodbye, comrade?

Allen Ginsberg: Hello again, camerado!

4. From transatlantic to transmediterranean: new paths

Coda

Appendix

Bibliography

Index of Walt Whitman's Poems and Works

Index of Names