{"id":7548,"date":"2026-10-13T12:27:59","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T12:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7548"},"modified":"2026-10-13T12:27:59","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T12:27:59","slug":"a-russian-journal-by-john-steinbeck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7548","title":{"rendered":"A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck"},"content":{"rendered":"

Near the end of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong>, the travellers are handed a sealed cardboard box and told not to open it until their plane has left Soviet airspace. Inside are four thousand negatives, less whatever the censors kept.<\/p>\n

They kept very little: some shots that showed landscape too clearly, some pictures of German prisoners, and one photograph of a girl. Steinbeck writes that nothing which mattered had been withheld.<\/p>\n

A group will want to disagree, because the photograph they took is of the most arresting human being in the book.<\/p>\n

What A Russian Journal Agreed Not to Do<\/h2>\n

The setup of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong> is a bar in New York in March 1947. Steinbeck has a play that has failed four times. The photographer Robert Capa has a dead poker game and a finished book. They conclude that everything written about Russia is written by people who have not been, and that nobody is reporting what Russians wear, eat or laugh at.<\/p>\n

The Herald Tribune<\/em> funds the trip, which runs forty days across August and the first half of September. And they set themselves a rule, stated more than once: record only what they see, add no editorial comment, reach no conclusions about anything they do not know well enough. Keep clear of the Kremlin and the military. The closing sentence of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong> insists it is not the Russian story but only a Russian story.<\/p>\n

That rule is the book\u2019s method and its problem, and it is what a table should spend the evening on.<\/p>\n

The Case For the Method of A Russian Journal<\/h2>\n

A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong> produces real people, which almost nothing else written about Russia in 1948 manages.<\/p>\n

There is the woman harvesting cucumbers on a Ukrainian collective, twice widowed, who announces that men are afraid of her now, then tells Capa that had God thought to consult the cucumber before designing man there would be fewer unhappy women in the world. She shakes one at his lens and the entire field falls about laughing.<\/p>\n

There is the small boy who runs to his mother in astonishment to report that these Americans are people the same as us. There is the beekeeper of thirty years\u2019 standing whose proudest possession is six new queens out of California, and who shuts his visitors in a tent and feeds them black bread and honey while the hives roar outside.<\/p>\n

And there is a Georgian table fourteen feet long whose opening course was half a fried chicken per guest, followed by a second chicken under green sauce, with Capa quietly coming apart behind a waistband he refuses on principle to loosen.<\/p>\n

The Case Against It<\/h2>\n

Here is the counter-argument against A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong>, and it was made loudly in 1948.<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/em> said the book was better written than most on the subject and shallower than many. One reviewer praised only the photographs. A Ukrainian academic living in Munich published a response whose title asked, in effect, why did you not want to see. The sharpest critic simply asked how much of the unseen a reporter has to supply before a story becomes understandable rather than merely superficial.<\/p>\n

The evidence is in the text of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong> itself. In the Lenin Museum he observes that among the hundreds of paintings and relics there is no image of Trotsky<\/a> at all, that to the children filing through he simply never existed, says this is an approach to history he cannot understand, and walks into the next room.<\/p>\n

At the Stalingrad tractor factory, whose workforce built tanks under shellfire and then went out to defend the building, he is shown everything and allowed to photograph none of it. He notes that most of the machinery is American and the line was laid out by American engineers, so the secrecy protects nothing, and leaves it at that.<\/p>\n

A group can take either side of this honestly. The rule is the only reason the human material is as good as it is. It is also the reason the book cannot account for the country it is standing in.<\/p>\n

What the Censors Took Out of A Russian Journal<\/h2>\n

This is where the argument resolves itself, and it is the best thing in A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong> to put to a table.<\/p>\n

A young woman was living in a hole in the ground among the ruins behind their hotel, coming up each morning to pick over a rubbish heap before sleeping in the weeds. Steinbeck describes a face of chiselled loveliness and eyes that were not quite human, and concludes that something in the siege had broken and she had retreated out of the century altogether. The one gesture he cannot get past is small: her shawl slips while she eats, and her free hand puts it back without her thinking about it.<\/p>\n

Capa got her with a long lens. That negative is one of the handful the censors kept.<\/p>\n

So the most remarkable image the trip produced exists only as prose, and the man who wrote the prose records the confiscation without appearing to register what it proves. A book founded on the claim that a camera has no preconceptions ends with the state editing the camera.<\/p>\n

Where It Will Lose People<\/h2>\n

Long passages of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong> concern aeroplane ventilation, hotel plumbing and which restaurant has the worse service.
\nA very great deal of vodka, and detailed accounts of every banquet.
\nOnly the approved circuit: Moscow, Kiev, Stalingrad and Tiflis, the standard itinerary for any Western visitor of the period.
\nThe refusal to interpret becomes, in places, indistinguishable from having nothing to say.<\/p>\n

Reading It Alongside the Novels<\/h2>\n

The trip changed what he wanted to write about. He came home from a country where the group had swallowed the individual and began thinking about the novel in our analysis of East of Eden<\/a>, which is about nothing but individual moral choice, and about the word discussed in our piece on the timshel debate<\/a>. Set beside our analysis of The Grapes of Wrath<\/a>, where the documentary eye comes with a furious argument attached, the contrast is stark: same observer, opposite policy on saying what he thinks. The ruin he walks through is the aftermath of the battle of Stalingrad<\/a>, which a group may want a paragraph of background on before starting.<\/p>\n

Questions for the Table<\/h2>\n

One scene is worth raising first. At a dinner given by the Moscow Writers\u2019 Union, a man stood and told the visitors to write a truth that would improve relations between the two countries. Ilya Ehrenburg was on his feet at once, shaking a finger in his colleague\u2019s face and saying that to instruct a writer is an insult. Nobody at the table attempted it again.<\/p>\n

Is refusing to interpret a form of honesty or a way of avoiding responsibility?
\nThe potato sentence. What should he have done with it?
\nCapa is funnier and more alive on the page than any Russian in the book. Does that matter?
\nIf the censors thought one photograph was dangerous and the writer thought nothing important was lost, who was right?
\nWould a reporter today be allowed to publish a book that reaches no conclusions?<\/p>\n

Before You Assign It<\/h2>\n

A flattened city and the numbers who died in it. A young woman whose mind has gone, living underground. One unbearable second-hand memory from the front, told over a restaurant table, about what a freezing soldier did with a dead comrade\u2019s body in order to fire his rifle. Captive Germans marched past civilians who will not look at them.<\/p>\n

Where It Leaves You<\/h2>\n

With a better question than the one it set out to answer.<\/p>\n

A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong> promised to find out whether Russians were people, which was never genuinely in doubt, and the book duly reports that they are and that they wanted peace and comfort and their children fed. That conclusion is true, humane, and not worth two hundred pages by itself.<\/p>\n

What the book documents by accident is the shape of its own permission: the itinerary it was handed, the factory it could tour but not photograph, the single frame it was not allowed to bring home. A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck<\/strong> believed a lens could be innocent. It demonstrated instead that somebody else always chooses where the lens is allowed to point.<\/p>\n

That is a far more interesting book than the one he thought he was writing, and he wrote it without meaning to.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Near the end of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck, the travellers are handed a sealed cardboard box and told not to open it until their plane has left Soviet airspace. Inside are four thousand negatives, less whatever the censors kept. They kept very little: some shots that showed landscape too clearly, some pictures of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}