Russia Revisited

EIMI (432 pp.)--E. E. Cummings--Sloane ($5).

When it was first published in 1933 (in an edition of 1,300 copies), Poet Edward Estlin Cummings' journal of a visit to Russia fell flat. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style filled with puns, parodies and typographical innovations, it seemed on the surface a needlessly complicated work on a subject of no great difficulty--a trip from Paris to Moscow (and back by Odessa and Constantinople) on which nothing happened,

In the years since, the style* of Eimi (pronounced ay-me--"I am," in Greek) has become slightly more familiar; it offers no real trouble to an attentive reader, and on occasion adds to the sense of immediacy. On the other hand, Cummings' point of view, his simple reliance on what he himself felt, saw and heard, is rarer than ever--at least among travelers permitted to make the same trip nowadays.

Traveler Cummings' afternoon at the home of the influential woman Communist known as Madame Potiphar--with a lean GPU agent appearing unexpectedly, and the hostess disappearing with "a hero of work" while her husband lectures to Cummings about the Cause--is a queer mixture of horror and humor in upper-crust Communist social life. The other episodes and scenes seem to have grown more impressive--the theater ("everywhere a mysterious sense of behaving, of housebrokenness,of watch-your-stepism"), the jail and the nightclubs, the Writers' Club and the literary receptions, the chronic indigestion, the perpetual enthusiasm, the American correspondents, the travelers ("Russia is simply wonderful so immense so throbbing earnest vital people so happy everywhere thrilled with communism building socialism") and the overwhelming sense of relief upon reaching Constantinople.

There no longer seems any need for many of the obscurities in Eimi, but the book as a whole grows more pertinent as the years pass. It is certainly the wittiest, and just possibly the most reliable, of all the Moscow traveler accounts.

* Sample (on the train): "Begins itself conversation. Russian equals English equals square root of minus 1. French he has not; German do I forget. But of gesture we both (fortunately) are made ... he is--quite like a child and totally unlike a childish person . . ."

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