Bruno Jasieński, International Literature, and World Literature

Bruno Jasieński, International Literature, and World Literature Daniel W. Pratt (bio) Bruno Jasieński's 1929 novel, I Burn Paris, lives up to the title and destroys the French capital. A disgruntled factory worker, Pierre, releases a new version of the plague into the water supply of the city, and thousands become sick through the waterways and then through airborne transmission of the modified disease, rapidly killing the majority of the inhabitants. The French army surrounds the city, cutting off any access to and from it, in an effort to prevent the spread of the disease. The blockade succeeds in stopping the spread of the virus, but it also prevents any supplies from entering the city itself. The municipal government crumbles, and the different nationalities and classes build up new authorities over regions of Paris: the Chinese Communists rule the Latin Quarter, the Jews take the 4th Arrondissement, the Left Bank ironically becomes the center for loyalist, monarchist Frenchmen, while Belleville and Ménilmontant fall to the French Proletariat. All of it is useless, and everyone in the city dies, except for those in prison who fortunately had their own storehouses of food and local water reservoirs. These prisoners, mostly protesting communists who had been arrested during a May Day celebration, rebuild the city as a Communist paradise in the model of the Soviet Union. It would be an understatement to claim that Jasieński's novel caused an uproar. At the time, it was "the absolute best seller of Proletarian literature" (Rayski 10; my translation).1 The novel was initially serialized in the Communist newspaper L'Humanité in France, and Jasieński's combination [End Page 283] of avant-garde style with the anti-bourgeois novel made him an international celebrity. The novel was translated into several languages and received a warm welcome in the Soviet Union despite its avant-garde style, which was losing ground to forms of Socialist Realism, the genre that would become the Soviet official style in three years' time. The initial run of 140,000 Russian copies sold out immediately. The French authorities, on the other hand, were less pleased with the novel; after being arrested and deported to Germany, where he was also rejected, Jasieński was then allowed to emigrate to the Soviet Union, where he was warmly welcomed in Saint Petersburg by none other than Vladimir Mayakovsky. His arrival was front-page news in the May 22, 1929 issue of Izvestia, and he was featured in several subsequent issues of both Pravda and Izvestia. In his apocalyptic novel, Jasieński sets out not only to burn the fictional Paris of his novel, but also to decentralize it, to demythologize Paris as the world's cultural capital. According to the Polish critic Marta Wyka, Jasieński attacks the very "foundations of the Parisian mythos" (210; my translation). Jasieński wrote his novel in response to Paul Morand's 1925 novel I Burn Moscow (Je brûle Moscou), which attacked Moscow as a provincial backwater. According to Anatol Stern, a former Futurist colleague of Jasieński and prominent literary critic, Morand's novel was itself a response to Mayakovsky calling Paris a provincial city, complete with a personal attack on the Russian Futurist (137).2 Jasieński in turn paints a Paris that is filled with oppression, inequalities, and belligerence, a far cry from the motto that defined the French Revolution. Women are forced into prostitution and men are reduced to digging through trash, while the elites ride around the streets in expensive cars with fancy watches. Jasieński's literary devastation of Paris and his subsequent activities in the Soviet Union represent an attack on what would become World Literature and an attempt to define a Socialist International Literature instead. If Paris, as Pascale Casanova argues, was "the capital of the literary world," the so-called "Greenwich Meridian" of culture, Jasieński's novel and his subsequent literary activities attempted to shift the center from bourgeois Paris to Soviet Moscow (24). Although Jasieński could not be responding directly to Casanova—since he died almost 50 years before Casanova's work was published—he was responding to the status of

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