Between the real and the fictive: Soviet readers of the 1930s on Theodore Dreiser’s novels

Soviet publishing industry always paid a lot of attention to their readers and tried to gauge public taste and opinion. The Mass Sector of GIHL / Goslitizdat State Publishing House (founded in 1930) responsible for the feedback from the reading audience was getting a huge daily number of letters in which readers expressed their opinion about the books published by Goslitizdat. The surviving part of this correspondence is now stored in the Russian State Archive of Arts and Literature. The paper analyzes the ideas of fictionality as a distinctive property of a literary text, typical for the Soviet readers in the 1930s, and especially focuses on the category of verisimilitude, a key notion for the concepts of Realism and Classics developed by Soviet literary criticism. The study is based on the readers’ letters to Goslitizdat Mass Sector, 1931-1936, about the novels by Theodore Dreiser, who in the mid-1930s had a firm reputation of an outstanding realist and a contemporary classic in the Soviet Union. The classification proposed in the conclusion distinguishes four types of readers depending on their perception of verisimilitude. Readers show different attitudes toward Dreiser’s novels, for example, mixing the real, the fictive and the imaginary, or trying to create ego-documents based on what they read in the novel. In general, the readers’ letters show that in the 1930s literary realism, including the Western realistic novels, for many Soviet people has become both a favorite reading and a valuable part of their life experience.