This talk will focus on aesthetic and ideological implications of the first translation of Alexander Pushkin’s erotic and sacrilegious narrative poem “Gabrieliad” (Гавриилиада, 1821) into English by Max Eastman (1883-1969). Eastman was an American poet, novelist, essayist, socialist, feminist, friend of John Reed, and editor of left-wing modernist magazines The Masses and The Liberator. He was also Leon Trotsky’s biographer, translator, and unofficial literary agent, introducing Western readers to Lenin’s so-called “Testament.”

Why did a nineteenth-century frivolous poem turn out to be such a magnetic text for Eastman, as well as for the cohort of other Western translators? The talk argues that the paradox of the “Gabrieliad” is that this bawdy and blasphemous work has been read in the West as a poetic manifesto of free love and the emancipation of women, appealing to author-translators with corresponding ideological agendas—and life experiences.