The Transnational Reception of Thomas Mayne Reid's Western Novels

“Westward Went I in Search of Romance”: The Transnational Reception of Thomas Mayne Reid’s Western Novels Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton, Gerald David Naughton

CEA Critic, Volume 75, Number 2, July 2013, pp. 142-157 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/cea.2013.0015

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cea/summary/v075/75.2.naughton.html

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Yulia PushkarevskaYa NaughtoN aNd gerald david NaughtoN “Westward Went i in search of romance”: the transnational reception of thomas Mayne reid’s Western Novels “My steps then were not directed towards classic shores, but to lands of newer and more vigorous life. Westward went I in search of romance,” wrote Thomas Mayne Reid in The Quadroon (1856). While the trope of “renewal” through westward adventure is well established in American Romanticism, the strange afterlife of Reid’s fiction presents a unique perspective on the enduring transnational romanticism of the American West. Reid’s most faithful and grateful reader was Russia. The enormous popularity of his escapist adventure novels in Russia—and Eastern Europe via Russian translations—eclipsed their fleeting success in America. Today, Reid is largely forgotten by both American readers and scholars. From the nineteenth century through to the Cold War era, and even beyond it, as the political relationship between Russia and the United States evolved, strained, and fractured, references to Reid’s novels abound in Russia. Czeslaw Milosz noted in 1981 that “Mayne Reid is the rather rare case of an author whose fame, short-lived where he could be read in the original, has survived thanks to translations” (145). The availability of excellent translations of Reid’s novels into Russian is one of the possible explanations for their transnational durability, but it is by far not the only one. Milosz also points out that the “romantic appeal of America” itself remained strong, not least thanks to Reid’s “significant contribution” (155). Reid’s greatest literary supporter, Vladimir Nabokov, who, in his memoir, Speak, Memory, wrote fondly of the “Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid” (332), actually named some of the most beloved spaces of his (Russian) childhood “America.” According to Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, “In Nabokov’s childhood, America had always seemed a fabulous, faraway place, the farthest place that one could think of” (331). This sense of fabulous remoteness, as many Nabokov scholars have noted, was “inspired by . . . Mayne Reid” (Sweeney 331). There may seem to be a paradox in the fact that a Russian émigré writer sentimentally labels the cherished land of his native childhood as “America,” but this paradox disappears when we consider that the young Nabokov’s vision of America derived almost exclusively from his fantasies of Reid’s distant, imaginary West. Indeed, as will be argued below, this act of territorial renaming actually fits with a

The CEA Critic 75.2 (July 2013): 142–156. © 2013 College English Association.

Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton and Gerald David Naughton

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little-studied comparative paradigm in which the American West was used to create a territory that we term conceptually the Russian “West.” Thomas Mayne Reid’s transnational reception is intimately connected to this project of cultural or territorial appropriation. Reid produced tales of the American West that were ideally translatable into other cultural realities. American narratives of the West have always relied on what Richard White describes as the “master narrative of the West” (9), which “erased part of the larger, and more confusing and tangled, cultural story in order to deliver up a clean, dramatic, and compelling narrative” (11). Such master narratives were readily exported, making the American West, from its very inception, a transnational phenomenon. Not only did the “clean,” “untangled” Western narratives that came from the pens of Fenimore Cooper and Reid endure in Russia and the Soviet Union, but they also prospered on this new soil. The cultural translation and reception of Reid’s Western adventures outside American borders provide an interesting paradigm for exploring the transnational West. As Neil Campbell suggests, the “application of . . . radical, outside perspectives drawn from beyond western studies” can be a way to “reposition the West within a more transnational, global matrix” (24). In Stuart Hall’s words, the West should be seen “as a meeting place, the location of . . . connections and interrelations, of influences and movements” (qtd. in Campbell 25). The key questions that this article wishes to address here are: in what ways did Reid’s West become such a “meeting place” for transnational “influences,” and how was the West repositioned and reconceptualized by America’s “Other,” (Soviet) Russia and Eastern Europe? the reception of Captain Mayne reid in russia: a short overview of a long history Whole generations of Russian readers have been raised with Reid’s collected volumes in the background—and, given the wide availability of his novels in Russia today, Reid remains popular in the country of his literary adoption. Tellingly, the latest editions of Reid’s books are invariably put under the category of “World Classics”—at the same time that they are hardly remembered in the world outside Russian and Eastern European borders. Maurice Friedberg’s contention seems to be appropriate here: Translations once published acquire a life of their own. Some become classics in their adopted homelands, like the King James Bible . . . James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, and Mayne Reid continue to be far more widely read in Russia and East Central Europe than in their homelands. (Literary Translation in Russia 2)

Undoubtedly, Reid, along with Cooper and London, has become part of the canon of world literature in Russia as well as a cultural point of refer-

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ence for Russian and Eastern European writers. Milosz, in his Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision, dedicates a whole chapter to Reid. He describes the plot of one of Chekhov’s stories, “Boys” (1887), in which two boys scorn those unfortunate creatures who have not encountered Reid. Based on their response to his novels, the boys are plotting to go to America, where there are “lots of furry animals” and where they can “get a living by hunting and plunder” (471). Chekhov’s young characters have no geographical conception of the United States or of the West (“California is lower down. . . .We’ve only to get to America and California is not far off”), even while they are equipped with a map (471). Instead, they project their romantic fantasies of survival and adventure onto the imagined territory of the American wilderness. Notably, the trajectory that the boys choose to travel to the American West is distinctly eastern—from Perm (a city in the Urals) via Tyumen and Tomsk (Siberia) to Kamchatka (Russian Far East). In Kamchatka, they plan to catch a boat to go to America. The lack of direction in the boys’ attempt to reach the West is symptomatic of the borderlessness of the West itself and its “emptiness” as a space. The West here functions as an imaginary transatlantic phenomenon. The fact that Reid’s novels escaped censorship in both communist and pre-revolutionary Russia reflects the “emptiness” of his American West. Quintessentially “Western,” in the best tradition of Wild West narratives, Reid’s novels also attempt to be curiously “cultureless” in the sense that they depict particular cultural realities by way of universal myths of freedom, escape, and romance. Neither pre-revolutionary Russia nor the Soviet Union—antithetical as these times were—perceived Reid as a cultural threat or, in the famous words of Russian translator Ivan Kashkin, a “mere reflection of an alien culture.” Friedberg writes: Politicized translation, including censorship, has a venerable history in Russia, antedating the Soviet regime by nearly a century. Ivan Kashkin’s advice to Soviet translators to simply omit those passages considered unsuitable for a Soviet audience (his euphemism was: texts that “merely reflected an alien culture”) had its forerunner in Belinsky’s observations of 1838. (Literary Translation in Russia 140)

Reid’s novels were able to endure under the political duress of Russian and Soviet empires precisely because they did not “merely reflect” American culture but, rather, created a version of a culture that could be (mis)interpreted as apolitical—romantic and escapist—in its very nature. Furthermore, the Soviet critics who did reflect upon his political leanings predictably deemed Reid to be a “Marxist” writer (Friedberg, Decade of Euphoria 118). Reid studied Marxism and was a strong opponent of American slavery. This aspect of his writing had traditionally been overlooked in American accounts of his work, until pointed out in historian Douglas Brinkley’s


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2010 study of another celebrated Reid devotee, Theodore Roosevelt (28). In the eyes of Reid’s Soviet readership, these Marxist leanings made him a de facto cultural critic of America. This perceived anti-Americanness of his writing may have been partially responsible for his canonization in Soviet Russia. More significant, however, in making Reid such an enduring figure in Russian culture, were his cosmopolitan and mythical qualities. Konstantin Kedrov, a contemporary Russian poet, philosopher, and literary critic, goes as far as to label Reid as a quintessentially “Russian” writer: Both Chekhov and [Soviet novelist] Kaverin were right: Mayne Reid infected whole generations of people with the spirit of freedom and a thirst for adventure. He transcended the limits of his heroic personality and became a cultural phenomenon, at least for two centuries. The popularity of Mayne Reid in the Soviet Union, with its multimillion editions, is a surprise for the Americans and the English. At home in his motherland and in America, he is known mainly to critics and philologists. In today’s Russia, Mayne Reid is still popular, at the very least thanks to the film adaptations of his novel . . . The Headless Horseman. . . . Of course, we no longer believe in noble Indians and trailfinders, but the thirst for freedom is unquenchable. Naturally, it is better to have a warrior for freedom with his head intact and alive, but there is a purely Russian expression—to enter battle ochertya golovu, slomya golovu [“breaking your head”]. In this sense, the onehundred-percent Scot, born in Ireland, who received American citizenship and returned to England, is a one-hundred-percent Russian writer. For us, he became ours; he became rodnoy [“of our homeland”] or, it can be said, our national literary hero. In a word, our Mongotimo. (our translation).

“Mongotimo” here refers to Soviet writer Veniamin Kaverin’s popularized version of “Montehomo the Hawk’s Claw,” referenced in Chekhov’s “Boys” (471–72). Interestingly, both “Mongotimo” and “Montehomo” have been successfully adopted into the Russian language as references to Reid. Kedrov’s claiming of the novelist as a “one-hundred-percent Russian writer” repositions Reid as a quintessentially transnational figure, whose international reception both emphasized and transcended his transcultural status. Reid’s own work reflects both the transcultural/hybridic spirit and the spirit of universalism. His stories of the American West tell us less of the world “at the frontier” than of multiple worlds dreaming of a frontier. the West as imaginary transatlantic Phenomenon Though the typical American frontier narrative traces a westward trajectory from the east coast, Paul Giles has recently put forward other, more global, trajectories—for example, the “reverse geographic perspective, going from west to east”—as a way of showing how “American literature might be

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situated within a wider global domain” (43). Reid’s westward journeying itself carried a rhizomatic and transnational dimension. Born in Ireland, he sailed west to America in 1840, settling first in New Orleans before moving north to Philadelphia via Tennessee. His early life in the United States seemed directionless until the breakout of the Mexican-American war, which brought him to Texas. This proved to be a turning point in Reid’s career; after the war, he was able to style himself as “Captain Mayne Reid” (though the title may have been apocryphal)—an American frontier hero— and to turn his conceptual imagination towards a mythical West. But how does this mythical West become truly transnational? In a 2006 review essay on recent developments in Western or “Postwestern” Studies, Nina Baym attempts to define the potentially global character of the American West. She contrasts the “environmental approach” of the Western narrative with other, more urban traditions in American literature: If this environmental approach should turn out to be the most productive way to approach western American literature, then the genre (like the region) will never be at the center of American literary and cultural study, which is urban, cosmopolitan, and eastern—itself a regional product. As American literary study strives to become global, it relegates western American literature to the place it has long occupied—on the margins, away from the center. (827)

There is something very arresting about Baym’s dismissal of environmental writing here. In a strange sense, her article presumes that ecocentric narrative is inherently more parochial, more obsolete than anthropocentric storytelling. After all, the “environmental approach” that she highlights here is explicitly one in which “external environmental particulars” supersede “narcissistic autobiography” (827). The provocative position being put forward here is at odds with the transnational literary history of Reid’s novels, which somehow eluded national canons while becoming “World Classics” when translated—and all of this despite their ecocentric storytelling. One of the most striking aspects of Reid’s writing is the heavy naturalistic detail that he included amongst his improbable sensationalist narratives. While a certain amount of botanical or technical detail was not unusual for popular adventure fiction of the period, Reid indulges in this detail to a much greater extent than was typical. Douglas Brinkley goes so far as to categorize Reid’s books not as novels but as “half-fictions” (27). Brinkley notes the way in which these texts “awkwardly offered up the proper Latin names for wildlife and plants [they] encountered” (27). Reid’s writing was at pains to include credible naturalistic descriptions of the environment peculiar to the American West—often “slowing down the otherwise fast-paced prose” in the process (Brinkley 27). And yet Reid’s writing somehow did become transnational. His is a case that seems to offer a perfect refutation of Baym’s model: in attending


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to the topographical, Reid creates the potential not for parochialism but for cultural diffuseness. As Edward Watts writes, the “imposition of Latin names and Linnaean hierarchies . . . [brought] the region’s raw materials into categories of knowledge established elsewhere” (14). This process of “bringing elsewhere” is typically critiqued as what Elizabeth Lawrence describes as the “frontier’s distinctive annexation of nature,” in which dealings with “nature and reordering of nature” are done in the colonial spirit (qtd. in Davis 151). In Reid, however, the colonial project is much less successful than the transnational one. His narratives ultimately enjoyed an international rather than a national market. Rather than speaking to a nationalistic audience, his novels brought the West itself “elsewhere.” The level of naturalistic detail in Reid’s depictions of the Wild West helped to exoticize and commodify the West as a space for international consumption—and, as Baym tells us, the “Old West was about spaces” (816). Reid may be said to conform to this definition of the Old West. He describes western spaces as limitless and uncharterable: “We can see the ridges of the Sierra Blanca away to the eastward; but before us . . . the eye encounters no mark or limit” (The Scalp Hunters 57). At the same time, Reid’s West can also be conceptualized as a hybridic place, made up of multiple racial or ethnic “marks” and “limits.” In The Quadroon, for example, we learn that the West is not only a spatially and conceptually vast phenomenon, but also a hybridic concept. When Reid’s European protagonist arrives in the United States and “turns [his] face to the West,” the direction that he looks to has several potential referents. It is a space that contains “greater variety and interest than exists in any space of equal extent on the globe’s surface” (The Quadroon). He describes the “universality” of “genius” and “activity” in this space—“this moving world of busy life and enjoyment”—and attributes this genius to the transnational composition of the American “metropolis.” In New Orleans, the European observer is initiated into American cosmopolitanism: The Turk in his turban, the Arab in his burnouse, the Chinaman with shaven scalp and queue, the black son of Africa, the red Indian, the swarthy Mestize, yellow Mulatto, the olive Malay, the light graceful Creole, and the not less graceful Quadroon, jostle each other in its streets, and jostle with the red-blooded races of the North, the German and Gael, the Russ and Swede, the Fleming, the Yankee, and the Englishman. (The Quadroon)

There is nothing particularly “new” or unexpected in this ethnographic inventory—or in the easy “celebration” of ethnic diversity. But the persistent connections that Reid’s narrator makes between “blank” western landscapes and their multicultural appropriation can, perhaps, give some insight into the transnational appropriation of Reid’s Western fictions. Throughout the novel, the narrator insists on his inability to “distinguish

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[the] features” of what he denotes as the “Far West society,” where the “landmarks do not exist” (The Quadroon). The diffuseness of “features” and “landmarks” compliments ethnic diversity, so that Reid’s West is both empty and cosmopolitan. Interestingly, Reid brought his own cultural background and territorial beliefs into the Wild West. In The Headless Horseman, his best-known and best-loved novel, he inserts the narrative of the west of Ireland into his narrative of the American West. The novel’s charismatic protagonist, a mustang hunter named Maurice Gerald, is a Galwegian, whose servant, Phelim, spends his days drinking poitín with a dog called Tara. Reid’s endearing portrayal of stage Irishness embeds an Irish narrative within his narrative of the West. This is no dismissive gesture. Indeed, the novel relies on the appropriation of its author’s native, Irish folklore to conceive of a Western narrative. Although many readers have assumed that Reid took the model of his decapitation myth from local Texan folklore (Herda of Cypress 127–28), the “headless horseman” was also a long-standing Celtic myth with which Reid might well have been familiar. The “Irish Dullaghan,” as Bob Curran explains, was a fearsome horseman mounted on a black stallion who carried his phosphorescent turnip-shaped head in front of him like a lantern. . . . To meet with him was an evil misfortune for he had the power to hoist the traveler onto his horse and carry him away into the afterlife or to the fairy world. Many disappearances in Irish localities were explained in this way. (249)

This Irish myth places the un-American firmly within the tradition of the American West. His mythological, romanticized representation of the West—borrowed from his native Irish romanticization of the Gaelic West— made his texts an appropriate cultural export for many years to come. Reid uses the narrative of the West of Ireland—a vision of wilderness and authenticity that parallels the narrative of the Wild West. Fintan O’Toole notes that American desert landscape has all the qualities of timelessness, freedom from history and social amnesia that the Irish Romantic movement always sought in the West of Ireland. . . . For the Irishman drawn to the cities of the New World but distrusting them as alien, the desert represents the perfect form of exile. (42)

The West of Ireland’s presence within the middle of the Texas prairie is thus Reid’s way of inscribing his own (trans)national identity and history into the transnational narrative of the American West. Such transnational insertions lie at the core of Reid’s fascination with the West. And yet, Reid’s strategy is not merely one that absorbs a “foreign,” Irish narrative into a “national” American one. Reid’s transnational reception—particularly the effective recreation of the American West within Russian borders—renders


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his narratives truly borderless. According to Paul Giles, there is little of interest in the “incorporation of multiple or discordant voices in a certain preestablished framework of unity,” an “ever expanding circle of a national narrative” (qtd. in Campbell 29). Instead, Giles advocates analyzing the “external points of reference that serve to relativize the whole conceptual field, pulling the circumference of national identity itself into strange, ‘elliptical’ shapes” (qtd. in Campbell 29). One of Reid’s most enduring legacies lies in this process of “relativization.” His American West is “pulled” to such an extent that it can no longer be said to be territorial at all. It seems likely that Reid, in fact, never spent substantial time in the West. Apart from his writing about certain parts of Mexico and the Southwest, all of his western landscapes are, to a greater or lesser extent, inventions. In fact, the period during which he was perhaps most prolifically writing about the West was a period in his own life that was marked by transatlantic crossings between England and New York. Reid’s conception of the West directly springs from his own rhizomatic, transatlantic journey across the vast ocean. Captain Mayne Reid, like an ancient mariner, had only to retell his tale through the prism of a different element—the space and the light of the prairie. “What is West, then?”: the West as Floating signifier The antirealism of Reid’s narratives has been perhaps the chief reason for their enduring popularity in Russia and Eastern Europe. Reid recreated the West as it never was—devoid, as Richard White would have it, of basic complexities (11)—but leaving plenty of space to his readers’ imagination. Emptied of its complex geographies, we may be tempted to conjecture, the imaginative West perhaps presents more easily exportable cartographies. In her discussion of the “Old West,” Baym asks, “What is west, then?” and returns the conventional answer that it is “wide-open spaces” (826). We may remember here that Nabokov also associated Reid’s fictive landscapes with absence, openness, and space. In his essay on Speak, Memory, John Espey writes of Nabokov’s journey to America: He was ready for the West . . . because he had luxuriated in his boyhood in the splendid romances of Mayne Reid—particularly “Headless Horseman”—which had given him a vision of the prairies and the great open spaces and the overarching sky. He rediscovered his boyhood in the Rockies and on the Great Plains.

The conflation of America and the West here is indicative of the old Turnerian tendency to read the West as the essence of America. Traditional literary histories imagine the West as “America only more so” (Campbell 55). However, at the same time as the West appears to be the essence of one powerful nation, and thus a concrete signifier, it also emerges as a “floating signifier” of “great open spaces and the overarching sky.” In denoting

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“greatness” and “openness,” the West here refers less to a territory or even a direction than to a conceptual open-endedness. Elizabeth Freeman describes a distinction in Reid’s text between the “European semiotics of landscape,” derived from cartographical exactitude, and a more indigenously “Western” process of “reading the signs of nature” (868). The West, in Reid’s most famous novel, thus emerges as a sliding signifier: The Headless Horseman treats the landscape as shifting scenery always in need of decoding—not conquering, but reading; not taking the land as if it were a virgin woman, but being taken with it as if it were a girl. (Freeman 868)

The landscape of mid-nineteenth century West Texas is here presented to us as “shifting” and “always in need of decoding.” Reid follows wellestablished discursive strategies of claiming for the West a topographical blankness that enables ethnographic or nationalistic rewriting. Throughout The Headless Horseman, Reid compares the “great plain of Texas” to “infinity” and “endless space.” He compares traveling through the prairies of the West to crossing the Atlantic Ocean. The crystallized borderlessness of the West is here underscored by the image of fluidity— ocean-crossing: Only those who have traversed the great plain of Texas can form a true estimate of its illimitable vastness, impressing the mind with sensations similar to those we feel in the contemplation of infinity. In some sense may the mariner comprehend my meaning. Just as a ship may cross the Atlantic Ocean and in tracks most frequented by sailing craft without sighting a single sail, so upon the prairies of South-western Texas, the traveler may journey on for months, amid a solitude that seems eternal! Even the ocean itself does not give such an impression of endless space. (The Headless Horseman, our emphasis)

The transatlantic, trans-spatial West of Reid’s imagination can be seen as what is called in semiotics the “floating signifier.” James D. Faubion emphasizes two “features of the floating signifier”: first, its particular effectiveness as the “carrier of conceptions of the transcendent and the absolute,” and second, the “omnipotentiality that remains not merely undifferentiated but also atmospheric, ineffable, beyond articulation,” precisely because it lacks “semiotic determination” (95). These twin paradoxical impulses—both the carrying of the absolute and the lack of semiotic determination—have been seen as the particular mythmaking functions of the American West since at least as far back as Frederick Turner. The western frontier can serve, in Neil Campbell’s words, as a “borderline that both divides and connects” (263). In Reid’s western topographies, the two functions coexist. He describes the West, as we have seen, in minute ecological detail and feeds, as a


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number of commentators have suggested, into the broad national impulse of manifest destiny (Scharnhorst 284). But Reid also defined “West” as “a wide word . . . [that] signified anywhere within a semicircle of some hundreds of miles” (The Headless Horseman). The open-endedness of his image is not merely indicative of physical space, as the geographically vague, but conceptually inclusive image of the territorial arc seems to indicate. It is a gesture towards what Faubion describes as “omnipotentiality” (95). In The Boy Hunters (1853), Reid attempts to describe one of the most overused images of the territorial and conceptual “openness” of the mythical West, the “rolling prairie”: We have said that our adventurers now travelled upon a “rolling prairie.” The surface exhibited vast ridges with hollows between. Did you ever see the ocean after a storm? Do you know what a “ground-swell” is?—when the sea is heaving up in great smooth ridges without crest or foam, and deep troughs between . . . ! That is what the sailors call a “swell.” Now, if you could imagine one of these billowy seas to be suddenly arrested in its motion, and the water transformed to solid earth, and covered with a green sward, you would have something not unlike a “rolling prairie.” Some think that, when these prairies were formed, some such rolling motion actually existed, by means of an earthquake, and that all at once the ground ceased its undulations, and stood still! (The Boy Hunters)

There is an almost cosmic energy in Reid’s description. The association of the prairie with the earthquake and with the formation of the Earth defines the land in primeval, physical terms. It is almost as if Reid’s enthusiasm for his own physical description of the western landscape exceeds his efforts to establish topographical precision. In an effort to find a precise equivalent for the ridges of the prairie, he points his reader to an imaginary, unspecified ocean swell. This further leads to the purely speculative comment about the physical cause of the prairies themselves. This is a typical pattern in Reid’s ecological descriptions—physical exactitude giving way to imaginative “omnipotentiality.” Both geographically and conceptually, the West of Reid’s fiction seems to elude semiotic exactness. Despite Reid’s interest in delineating the flora and fauna of the spaces that his novels inhabit, despite the precision of his ecocentric and ethnocentric writings, the overarching vision of the West is one of natural and national indeterminacy. the “other” Wests: the West rewritten in russian/ soviet spaces Reid’s vision of the West connects, in a very explicit way, the transnational with the territorial. In the process, he renders the West itself as extraterritorial and opens Western myths up to transnational reinvention. It is interesting in this regard that the trope of the American West, exported

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into Russia through the writings of James Fenimore Cooper as well as Reid, ultimately led to the emergence of the Russian symbolic “West.” According to Friedberg’s 1976 account of the influences of American literature on Russian literature, this reconceptualization of the West in Russia started in the nineteenth century: As early as the 1820s, Russians sought information about America in the romances of James Fenimore Cooper which provided a glimpse of European settlers and indigenous Indians amid the vast expanses of an unexplored land—a picture that bore a degree of resemblance to the Russians’ own penetration of Siberia and the Caucasus which, incidentally, inspired some rather similar writing. (520)

Russia’s own version of manifest destiny persisted after the Russian Revolution, World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War. According to Milosz, what Reid’s novels helped to create, in the long run, was the “exoticism of Russian Asia,” namely Siberia (156). Reid and Cooper gave Russians a taste for travels in wide, wild, open spaces. The mobility that was characteristic of the lifestyle in the Soviet Union, as well as the “porous” borders between the Soviet states, were conducive to imagining and exploring cultural or geographical alternatives within the country’s borders. At the same time, the topographical elusiveness of the Russian “West,” created in the process of such imaginings and explorations, also indicates its “borderlessness” and “unplacedness.” The imaginary “Wild West” of Russia itself was originally situated in the South and the East and was closely associated with the expansion of the Russian Empire into “dikost” (“the wildness”) in the nineteenth century. Scholars have already established parallels between this “Russian Wild West” and the American West. Willard Sunderland muses, “After all, in the final analysis, how different was Potemkin, architect of the Russian south, from Jefferson, architect of the American West? How far removed was the Russian Cossack from the New World gaucho or metis?” (225). As in America, Russian expansion into the wilderness happened at the price of the marginalization of its indigenous people; like the American West, the Russian “West” also became symbolic of the country itself. While in the eighteenth century, according to Sunderland, the steppe had been viewed as an “alien and empty frontier that required colonization” (53), already in the nineteenth century, the steppe became central to the conception of Russian identity (104–05). The symbolism of the Russian wilderness is best illustrated in Russian and Ukrainian literature of the nineteenth century. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt notes that what this literature produced was a particular kind of hero—the Cossack hero, with his “fluid relationship to space and time” (71), who acts as a “mediator between the two opposing realms of civilization and wilderness” (74). This hero is reminiscent of Reid’s European


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(“civilized”) narrator who acts as a sympathetic channel of the wilderness and its inhabitants. As Deutsch Kornblatt suggests, the difference between the American frontier hero and the Russian frontier hero is purely historical. Symbolically, they mirror each other: “In American literature, he [the frontier hero] bridges the gap between European past and Indian present. The Cossack, we might say on the other hand, unites European present with old Russian and/or even Tartar past. He himself is on the threshold” (74). Examples of the Russian wilderness as a setting for freedom, adventure, and romance abound in nineteenth-century literature. Gogol depicts the Cossacks in his Taras Bulba and “suggests the heroes’ existence outside any fixed spatial realm, . . . largely by associating them with the emotionally laden concept of the frontier” (Deutsch Kornblatt 72). And yet, paradoxically, because of the scope of Russia, Ukraine or America, these heroes “lived in areas with no frontier, in a place of unbounded space” (Deutsch Kornblatt 72). Tolstoy sets up a similar cultural dynamic in his The Cossacks. Pushkin, Lermontov, and Marlinskii all used the Caucasus and the “mountain people” as exotic elements in their adventure tales. The “unbounded space” of the Russian “West” seems virtually interchangeable with Reid’s American West, in which “the eye encounters no mark or limit” (The Scalp Hunters 57). Just as the Cossack embodies this limitlessness, the imaginative “openness” and semiotic “omnipotentiality” of Reid’s prairie landscapes is further extended onto the subject who journeys through these vast uncertain spaces. In The Scalp Hunters, we find Reid’s protagonist suffering from a delirium that blends the subject into his environment: I rest upon a rock—a mass of vast dimensions—but it is not at rest. It is swimming onward through empty space. I cannot move myself. I lie helpless—stretched along its surface—while it sweeps onward. It is an aerolite. It can be nothing but that. O God! there will be a terrible collision when it strikes some planet world! Horror! horror! I am lying on the ground—the ground of the earth. It upheaves beneath me, and oscillates to and fro like the undulations of an earthquake! Part of all this was reality; part was a dream. . . . (The Scalp Hunters 61)

The feverish prairie hero, “swimming onward through empty space,” is thus a liminal figure who encounters the troubling fluidity of subjectivity in a “society” where, the “landmarks do not exist” (The Quadroon). Living “part in dream” and “part in reality,” these “Western” heroes of both American and Russian traditions are mediators in space and time. The parallels between American and Russian frontier literature also betray the cultural anxieties associated with the frontier. In both cases,

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what the fluidity and hybridity of the wilderness revealed was an uncertainty about the very premises of national identity. Reid’s tales in Russia helped to displace Russia’s own national anxieties, so that instead of turning attention inwards, they directed the reader outwards. To paraphrase Julia Kristeva’s famous words, the “strangeness within” the country found its symbolic fulfillment in the “strangeness of the Other”: America. The “West” of Reid’s imagination was, perhaps inevitably, doubly translated into the Russian context—as a locus of both romanticism and Otherness— thus signaling a complex dialectic between Western literature and Eastern reception. Reid became part of a major cultural dialogue, which took place between Russia and America in the years preceding the Cold War. While there was a great fascination with America itself, the West held yet more appeal for a Russian readership. Even Stalin confessed to having read Captain Mayne Reid’s novels. As Alexander Yakovlev reported, “Stalin said that he had read them as a child,” although when his interviewer lamented that “they’re not . . . publishing new editions of the old works,” Stalin “smiled slyly” and replied: “Fancy expecting our publishers to reprint Reid and Cooper when there is nothing in their works about collective farms and tractors” (Yakovlev). Although Reid’s novels were not reprinted during Stalin’s reign, a collection of Reid’s tales came out directly after Stalin’s death in 1953. The six-volume edition of Reid’s best-loved novels that came out in 1956 was issued in 300,000 copies. During the Cold War era, as “the West” became a byword for Otherness, these novels functioned as an imaginative escape from the banal and harsh realities of 1950s existence in Russia and Eastern Europe. Reid’s Western tales pointed to an imaginary realization of new cultural and geographical possibilities. In this sense, he can be likened to his contemporary Karl May, who, in Kate Connolly’s words, “At the time of the Kaiser . . . provided Germans with a fantasy world to inhabit when ordinary people didn’t travel.” Like May’s mythical tales, Reid’s stories of the old American West “gave a sense of the world that was out of bounds to his captive audience” (Connolly). The transnational reception of Reid’s Western adventures reveals the West as a transcultural phenomenon. To be sure, the conventional association of the western prairies with boundless time, space, and light has a distinct presence in Reid’s narratives. At the same time, Reid’s work does offer its own, unique, transatlantic perspective on the West, defined in part by the writer’s Irish/British/American background and in part by his Russian/Eastern European reception. Reid’s novels of Western adventure thus offer a model of transnational analysis that expands the idea of the American West. In creating easily exportable images and stories, Reid helped to create an idea of the West that applied to other cultures, countries, and trajectories. In particular, his fiction was instrumental in helping Russia to create its own version of the “Wild West,” located, paradoxically, in the North, South, and East of Russia. Reid’s speculative depictions of


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the West and his transnational reception in the East reveal the plasticity of the West as a “floating signifier” with a vague, unpinnable signified. Here, the West emerges as a performative category, rather than an ontologically stable concept or a denotative category. A semiotic approach to the West in combination with the analysis of transnational Western reception may offer a refreshing paradigm for the study of Western literature and of the West itself. Gulf University for Science & Technology (Gust), Kuwait

Works Cited Baym, Nina. “Old West, New West, Postwest, Real West.” American Literary History 18.4 (July 2006): 814–28. Print. Brinkley, Douglas. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. New York: Harper, 2009. Print. Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Print. Chekhov, Anton. “Boys.” Anton Chekhov: Early Short Stories, 1883–1888. Ed. Shelby Foote. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Modern Library, 1999. 468–74. Print. Connolly, Kate. “Karl May: The Best German Writer You’ve Never Heard of.” The Guardian Unlimited 22 Apr. 2012. Web. 10 May 2012. Curran, Bob. Mysterious Celtic Mythology in American Folklore. Gretna: Pelican, 2010. Print. Davis, Richard. “Eight Seconds: Style, Performance, and Crisis in Aboriginal Rodeo.” Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback. Eds. Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis. Canberra: Anu, 2005. 145–64. Print. Deutsch Kornblatt, Judith. The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992. Print. Espey, John. “Speak, Memory.” Los Angeles Times. 20 Oct. 1991. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. Faubion, James D. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Freeman, Elizabeth. “Honeymoon with a Stranger: Pedophiliac Picaresques from Poe to Nabokov.” American Literature 70.4 (1998): 863–97. Print. Friedberg, Maurice. Decade of Euphoria: Western Literature in Post-Stalin Russia, 1954–64. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977. Print. ———. Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History. University Park: Penn State UP, 1997. Print. ———. “The U.S in the U.S.S.R.: American Literature through the Filter of Recent Soviet Publishing and Criticism.” Critical Inquiry 2.3 (Spring 1976): 519–83. Print. Giles, Paul. The Global Remapping of American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Print. Harper, Kenneth E., and Bradford A. Booth. “Russian Translations of NineteenthCentury Fiction.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 8.3 (Dec. 1953): 188–97. Print. Herda of Cypress, Lou Ann. “The Evolution of a Legend: the Headless Horseman of Texas, or It May Not Be True, But It Makes a Good Story.” Both Sides of

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the Border: a Scattering of Texas Folklore. Eds. Francis Edward Abernethy and Kenneth L. Untiedt. Texas: U of North Texas P, 2004. 103–17. Print. Kedrov, Konstantin. “Our Mongotimo.” News [Moscow] 5 Apr. 2008. Web. 9 Apr. 2012. Milosz, Czeslaw. Emperor of the Earth. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981. Print. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print. O’Toole, Fintan. The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities. London: Verso, 1997. Print. Reid, Thomas Mayne. The Boy Hunters. Project Gutenberg. 27 Apr. 2007. Web. 28 Apr. 2012. ———. The Headless Horseman. Project Gutenberg. 16 Mar. 2011. Web. 28 Apr. 2012. ———. The Quadroon. Project Gutenberg. 27 Jan. 2009. Web. 28 Apr. 2012. ———. The Scalp Hunters; or Adventures Among the Trappers. New York: R. M. Dewitt, 1866. Web. 9 Apr. 2012. Scharnhorst, Gary. “‘All Hat and No Cattle’: Romance, Realism, and Late Nineteenth-Century Western American Fiction.” A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Ed. Nicolas S. Witschi. Malden: WileyBlackwell, 2011. 281–98. Print. Sunderland, Willard. Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. Print. Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “‘April in Arizona’: Nabokov as an American Writer.” American Literary History 6.2 (Summer 1994): 325–35. Print. White, Richard. “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill.” The Frontier in American Culture. Eds. Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and James R. Grossman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 7–66. Print. Watts, Edward. “Exploration, Trading, Trapping, Travel, and Early Fiction, 1780– 1850.” A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Ed. Nicolas S. Witschi. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 13–28. Print. Yakovlev, Alexander. “Stalin as His Subordinates Know Him.” The Milwaukee Journal 17 Dec. 1944. Web. 17 Apr. 2012.

Photograph by Kenny A. Chaffin (www.kacweb.com). Used with permission. This photograph captures what remains of the once-thriving community of Dearfield, Colorado. Located 23 miles southeast of Greeley, Dearfield represents what the Black American West Museum describes as “the national Black American colonization movement established for promoting self-sufficiency and land ownership.”1 Dearfield was one of a number of self-sufficient all-black towns settled after the Civil War. Established in 1910 by O. T. Jackson, Dearfield introduced dryland (non-irrigated) farming to Colorado when Jackson and seven other homesteaders settled on the site the following year. By 1915, the town included some 27 families; by 1921, it had grown to 70 families and 700 residents. At its height, Dearfield included two churches, a schoolhouse, a grocery store, a boarding house, a filling station and lunchroom, and a dance pavilion. The town’s fortunes would change quickly, though, with the coming of droughts during the Great Depression: by 1940, the population had dwindled to just 12 individuals, including Jackson (who died in Dearfield in 1948). Today, all that remains of Dearfield are a few deserted buildings, one of which is Jackson’s home. 1

“Dearfield.” Black American West Museum and Heritage Center. N.d, Web. 22 May 2013.