When in Stalingrad, "an expanse of ruin," Steinbeck writes that "Our windows looked out on acres of rubble, broken brick and concrete and pulverized plaster, and in the wreckage the strange dark weeds that always seem to grow in destroyed places." In that terrain, "there was a little hummock, like the entrance to a gopher hole. And every morning, early, out of this hole a young girl crawled." In this one vignette about a hounded, dazed child, Steinbeck captures the agony of besieged Stalingrad. Framed by a window, the verbal composition is crafted to accompany Capa's photos. Indeed, one of the most remarkable qualities of A Russian Journal is the way that

Steinbeck's reporting and Capa's photojournalism intersect. Steinbeck's method seems purely photographic, as if the project itself-collaboration with a photographer-dictated style and approach. As he insistently notes in the first chapter of A Russian Journal, the writer and photographer intend to record only what is seen, nothing more. The photograph is an apt metaphor for visiting the Soviet Union in 1947, where visitors were shown so very little of Stalin's domain, always circumscribed.

II

"John was actually a missionary. He was essentially a journalist… I think he could see things going on… I mean journalist in the power of observation."-Toby Street


The role of literary journalist was not, in 1943, a new one for John Steinbeck. His missionary zeal had found an outlet in the late 1930s, when the heretofore apolitical writer turned his gaze to the contemporary scene in California. The urgent realism of In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men has a journalistic thrust. The impetus behind The Grapes of Wrath was more essentially documentary. In August 1936, Steinbeck was sent by the San Francisco News, a decidedly liberal newspaper, to write a series on migrants in California; those seven articles, published as "The Harvest Gypsies," were Steinbeck's first journalistic triumph, a foray into literary witness that conveyed, through the author's fidelity to truth, the emotional context of the migrants' sorrow.



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