Oriental Rhetoric and Image of the USSR in J.N. Darling’s Travelogue "Ding goes to Russia"

Abstract

The article is devoted to the little-known text of the American cartoonist Jay Norwood Darling “Ding Goes to Russia”, created in 1932. In the travelogue, the narrator observes and reflects on the processes and results of Soviet reforms, particularly the Five-Year Plan, through the everyday realities of a Soviet human. The political controversy of the travelogue inspires satirical and parodic modes aimed at criticizing the new government, especially the project of creating a ‘new’ human. It is a Soviet human, who becomes the plot centre of Darling's journey. The author expands the visual space of the travelogue, including caricatures, a rare graphic genre for this type of literature. The objective of the article is to reveal the strategies for re-evaluating the established viewpoints in American journalism regarding the progress of the USSR during the Stalinist period. To more clearly outline the direction of Darling's criticism, the analysis includes the texts of the travellers who glorified Soviet achievements in widely circulated ideological formulas (L. Fischer, F. Griffin, W. H. Chamberlin, G. S. Counts). The 'new/old' structural contrast, which serves as the foundation for imaginatively distinguishing the West and the East, became the fundamental structure of the rhetoric of backwardness and uncivilization. Oriental constructions appear in both verbal and visual forms and are used to deconstruct the clichés of Soviet victories and achievements. The Soviet life is represented in a simplistic satirical light, and its future is imaginatively projected through Oriental tropes of nudity, backwardness, intellectual inferiority, silence.