The First Steps Towards “All-Human Brotherhood”: An Episode from the History of Foreign Literature Publishing in Soviet Russia (1917–1922)

The article traces the history of foreign literature publishing in the first post-revolutionary five-year period (1917–1922) – from Lenin’s Decree on the Press, which initiated Soviet book publishing, to the book exhibition in Florence, which summarised the interim results of the early Soviet book publishing policy. The institutionalisation of the publishing industry in those years went hand in hand with the process of overcoming the reputational crisis resulting from the revolutionary events. One of the main tasks in the conditions of redefining the political orientations of Soviet Russia was the search for international “allies”. Therefore, the publication of foreign literature was included not only in the cultural context, but also in the diplomatic context. The young regime could not control the production of foreign literature, unlike the production of Soviet literature, although it tried tirelessly (sometimes not unsuccessfully) to influence creative practice beyond its control. This inability to restructure literary life beyond the borders of the USSR became an important reason to change the strategy of interaction with it. The aesthetic policy used all available means to form in the “mass” reader an alternative, detached from reality idea of the structure of the “global” literary process and the balance of power on the world cultural map of the first half of the twentieth century. The result of the authorities’ work in this direction was a fairly rapid penetration of Soviet books into the pan-European cultural environment. The article is based on numerous materials on the history of early Soviet book publishing and book statistics, and is accompanied by an appendix containing a bibliographic list of all foreign literature books (published in Gosizdat and World Literature) presented at the Florence Book Fair of 1922.