Oz behind the Iron Curtain

Aleksandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series

Erika Haber

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496813619
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Research Achievement Award in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University In 1939, Aleksandr Volkov (1891-1977) published Wizard of the Emerald City, a revised version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Only a line on the copyright page explained the book as a "reworking" of the American story. Readers credited Volkov as author rather than translator. Volkov, an unknown and inexperienced author before World War II, tried to break into the politically charged field of Soviet children's literature with an American fairy tale. During the height of Stalin's purges, Volkov adapted and published this fairy tale in the Soviet Union despite enormous, sometimes deadly, obstacles.Marketed as Volkov's original work, Wizard of the Emerald City spawned a series that was translated into more than a dozen languages and became a staple of Soviet popular culture, not unlike Baum's fourteen-volume Oz series in the United States. Volkov's books inspired a television series, plays, films, musicals, animated cartoons, and a museum. Today, children's authors and fans continue to add volumes to the Magic Land series. Several generations of Soviet Russian and Eastern European children grew up with Volkov's writings, yet know little about the author and even less about his American source, L. Frank Baum. Most Americans have never heard of Volkov and know nothing of his impact in the Soviet Union, and those who do know of him regard his efforts as plagiarism.Erika Haber demonstrates how the works of both Baum and Volkov evolved from being popular children's literature and became compelling and enduring cultural icons in both the US and USSR/Russia, despite being dismissed and ignored by critics, scholars, and librarians for many years.

1

THE UNKNOWN HISTORIAN OF OZ

That both L. Frank Baum and Aleksandr M. Volkov, despite the considerable odds against them, managed to create works that would live on long after their deaths and continue to this day to influence the cultures in which they were created, speaks to the tremendous talent and great fortitude of both men. Many miles and years separated Baum and Volkov, yet they shared a number of common experiences on the way to becoming prolific children’s authors. Their individual stories point to the play of fortuitous circumstances that allowed each of them to meet and engage with people who would inspire, support, and promote their early writing efforts. Both authors entered the world of children’s literature at a point when their respective cultures were primed and ready for creative, new contributors. Of course, each possessed both the vivid imagination and ability to engage and entertain children that were essential to his success. Nonetheless, the road to authorship was neither clear nor easy in either case, and both men had to surmount any number of obstacles along the way, in their own lives as well as in the times and societies in which they lived.

Whereas Volkov’s biographical monograph has yet to be written, Baum’s has been the topic of several volumes, but considerable misinformation has also been written about both men and disseminated in print and, especially, on the Internet. By examining the backgrounds and influences on these two men and critically reviewing what has been written about them, I hope to provide a deeper and more accurate context for understanding the trajectory of their careers and the impact of their writings. As a means of understanding why Baum’s story has had such a long and productive history and as essential backstory needed to appreciate Volkov’s achievements in Soviet Russia, this book begins with a discussion of L. Frank Baum’s fairy tale life and works.

EARLY ATTEMPTS AT TELLING THE LIFE STORY OF L. FRANK BAUM

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900, yet the first biographical monograph on Baum did not appear until 1961, more than forty years after his death. Before that publication, only three short pieces of scholarly writing on Baum’s work were published that mentioned in passing a few salient details about his life. None appeared in his lifetime. The first, a 1929 University of Washington chapbook, entitled Utopia Americana by English professor Edward Wagenknecht, featured the earliest scholarly biographical information on Baum. Briefly summing up Baum’s life and achievements in one long paragraph before moving on to discuss his writing, Wagenknecht variously calls him a journalist, an editor, a playwright, as well as “a voluminous writer, the author of some fifty odd volumes, nearly all of them for children” (18). In 1934, James Thurber followed up with a pleasant although superficial essay of appreciation published in the New Republic that relied heavily on Wagenknecht’s work. Thurber provided no new details regarding Baum’s biography, but chronicled his futile attempts to move beyond the Oz books (141–42). By the time he died in 1919, Baum had written fourteen books in the Oz series, nearly two dozen non-Oz books, another thirty books published under six different pseudonyms, and dozens of short stories. Yet for such a large oeuvre, only these two brief accounts of Baum’s life made it into print before the fifties. Truly, no one knew the Royal Historian of Oz.

Nearly six decades after the first publication of Baum’s Oz, in 1957, Martin Gardner and Russel B. Nye edited a comprehensive collection entitled The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was. In addition to a new, black-and-white version of Baum’s first Oz tale, their book included an informative chapter by Gardner that promised “to recount here for the first time the full story of Baum’s remarkable career” (Gardner and Nye 1994, 20). In his introductory essay “The Royal Historian of Oz,” Gardner finally provided rich and copious biographical details as well as anecdotes from Baum’s life and career. Moreover, Nye’s chapter represented the first serious attempt at critical scholarship on Baum and his Oz series, and did an admirable job of teasing out the strengths and weaknesses of Baum’s creation. An anonymous review in the Saturday Review Trade Winds announced the publication of the book with a theatrical flourish: “Who tried to kill the Wizard of Oz? We have had our suspicions for some years and are now pleased to see that Michigan State University Press has made a contribution to the fight to free L. Frank Baum from literary bondage” (4 May 1957, 4). Gardner and Nye’s work at last brought attention and respectability to an author long overlooked and ignored by critics and scholars. Unfortunately, Gardner and Nye received “numerous details” about Baum’s life from his eldest son, Frank Joslyn (Gardner and Nye 1994, vii). This information would ultimately prove problematic for much of the future biographical work on Baum.

A year earlier, Frank Joslyn Baum had approached Russell P. MacFall, a night editor at the Chicago Daily Tribune, to begin collaborating on the first monograph-length biography of his late father. With an M.A. in English from the University of Chicago, MacFall had begun researching a biography on L. Frank Baum a few years earlier. His efforts attracted the attention of Frank Joslyn, who had shown interest in following in his father’s footsteps by continuing the Oz series with a 1938 sequel, entitled The Laughing Dragon of Oz. Unable to interest his father’s publisher, Reilly & Lee, Frank Joslyn took out a trademark on the word “Oz” and published his book with the Whitman Publishing Company in Racine, Wisconsin. This was a controversial and costly move since his mother, Maud, controlled her late husband’s copyrights; in agreement with Reilly & Lee, Maud had allowed for the continuation of the series with authors chosen by the publisher. The legal battle that ensued created bad feelings and long-lasting family problems for the Baums. After Maud died in 1953, Frank Joslyn’s earlier behavior and the ill will it caused left his brothers unwilling to support his projects. The estrangement allowed him to create his father’s past primarily from his own memories and imagination.

Before approaching MacFall, Frank Joslyn attempted to write his father’s story himself. Early reviewers found his manuscript full of bias and errors, and he was unable to find a publisher for the work (BP, SCRC-SUL). Frank Joslyn next reached out to John Frederick “Jack” Snow, a print and radio journalist and a retired army sergeant, who had been stationed at the air base near Syracuse, New York. While living in Upstate New York, Snow had begun collecting material and conducting interviews for his own work on Baum. In addition to having written two volumes in the Oz series, Magical Mimics in Oz (1946) and Shaggy Man of Oz (1949), Snow had published a chronicle of the characters of Oz and brief biographies of the series’ authors and illustrators, entitled Who’s Who in Oz (1954). Frank Joslyn sent Jack Snow a 100,000-word manuscript and an offer to work fifty-fifty on the future biography, but Snow never contributed to the project. Shortly thereafter, Frank Joslyn learned of MacFall’s efforts and offered him the same deal, hoping that MacFall would be able to redraft what Baum had already written in such a way as to get it published (BP, SCRC-SUL). After exchanging a few letters with Frank Joslyn, MacFall realized that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to proceed with his own biography of Baum without Frank Joslyn’s support. MacFall agreed to work with Frank Joslyn on the first book-length biography in late August 1956, fully one hundred years after L. Frank Baum’s birth.

The collaborative writing process was long and difficult. Frank Joslyn sent MacFall what he had already written, and MacFall explained that “We began by tossing out the greater part of it and started over” (Chicago Daily Tribune 12 October 1961, 57). As a journalist and researcher, MacFall set about writing dozens of letters to anyone remotely connected to L. Frank Baum as well as to the town clerks, village historians, and local newspapers in all the places that the Baum family had lived. Using this painstaking process, MacFall succeeded in uncovering a wealth of details about the family and L. Frank’s childhood. Since little had been published and so many myths perpetuated about the author of Oz, MacFall admitted that the project “called for a lot of detective work” (Chicago Daily Tribune 12 October 1961, 57). During this time, MacFall maintained his editorial job at the newspaper, often working on the biography in the wee hours of the morning, when the paper had already gone to press.

In addition to his unpublished manuscript, Frank Joslyn sent detailed letters to MacFall containing his own memories and stories that had been passed on to him. At times, however, it seems that Frank Joslyn valued creativity over fact. In letters to MacFall from December 1956, Frank Joslyn repeatedly suggested that MacFall should add more color to the biography even if it meant including fiction (F. J. Baum to MacFall 5 and 11 December 1956, BP, SCRC-SUL). Evidence of the hyperbole of which he was capable when speaking of his father is found in the June 1957 premier edition of the Baum Bugle, the official periodical of the International Wizard of Oz Club. “My father, who created The Wizard of Oz, was a tall, handsome man who never looked on the dark side of life; never said an unkind word about any person; never swore or told a dirty story. His sunny disposition, quizzical smile and kindly twinkle in his gray eyes, coupled with irrepressible optimism helped all who knew him to see their troubles in a different and less important light” (F. J. Baum 1957, 2). Albeit the fond memories of a loving son, such categorical statements ultimately lend Frank Joslyn’s writings on his father a strongly subjective bias.

MacFall soldiered on with his intense research and found time to compose new chapters, which he then forwarded to Frank Joslyn for review and comment. The two men revised and edited via correspondence until Frank Joslyn died suddenly in December 1958, two days short of his seventy-fifth birthday. Frank Joslyn’s wife, Elizabeth, stepped in and finished the editing work with MacFall. In 1961, L. Frank Baum’s own longtime Chicago publisher, Reilly & Lee, published To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz, coauthored by Frank Joslyn Baum and Russel P. MacFall. To their credit and despite all the difficulties, Baum and MacFall ultimately produced a detailed, tactful, engaging, and often entertaining account of L. Frank Baum’s life. However, questions remain about the authenticity and factualness of some material and many of the anecdotes that cannot be corroborated, such as the childhood memories of Frank Josyln.

Since Frank Joslyn maintained control of his father’s story until his own death in 1958, many of the relevant personalities and witnesses to his father’s life were long gone. This meant that for many years the biography he produced with MacFall remained the only comprehensive source of information on L. Frank Baum. When Baum’s work began receiving critical attention in earnest in the seventies, and a new crop of biographers began investigating his life, the Baum/MacFall biography became the go-to source, despite its tacit unreliability. As a result, uncorroborated anecdotes and so-called facts from Baum’s life have been repeated and perpetuated from one publication to the next. Today, there exist multiple biographies on Baum, but many of them rely at least to some extent on material from Frank Joslyn and Russell MacFall’s first efforts. Much of what has been published has been accepted de facto as reality through dint of repetition.

In the short biographical narrative about Baum’s life that follows, I have tried to steer clear of unsubstantiated anecdotes from the Baum/MacFall biography, relying instead as much as possible on documented details from L. Frank Baum’s papers, including letters, newspaper clippings, interviews, and other firsthand sources. Leaving the writing of a comprehensive life story to others, my goal in the next section is to provide a snapshot of the people and experiences—with enough added context to understand them—that made Baum into the future children’s author.

BAUM’S FAMILY BACKGROUND

L. Frank Baum’s family traces its roots back to the Holy Roman Empire, what is today known as the central German state of Hesse, and the family retained connections to Germany for many years. The family name Baum means “tree” in German. In 1943, when it was considered deleterious to acknowledge one’s German heritage, Frank’s wife, Maud, insisted that the family name came instead from Holland and originally had a “von” before it (BP, SCRC-SUL). Similar stories and fables about the Baum family have proliferated, making it even more important to uncover facts about L. Frank Baum and his family based on documentation rather than myth and conjecture. In addition to Frank, the Baum family included some truly outstanding and influential members, who undoubtedly influenced him with their resources and encouragement, if not their ideas and achievements.

Philip Baum, L. Frank Baum’s great-grandfather, settled on a farm in New York’s Mohawk Valley, near present-day Canajoharie, in 1748. Philip’s son John, born there in 1797, married Lany (Magdalena) Elwood in 1888.¹ John and Lany produced nine children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. This brood included Benjamin Ward, Frank’s father, who was born in 1821. The eldest son, Benjamin, was closest in age to his next younger brother, Lyman Spaulding Baum (1824–1877). Benjamin’s younger sister, Mary Elizabeth, married a local doctor, Sylvanus Hanchett. In addition to giving birth to eight children, six of whom died in childhood, Mary Elizabeth graduated from Geneva Medical College and became one of the earliest female doctors in the country. Benjamin’s younger brother, Adam Clarke Baum, also became a doctor. In 1862, he signed up to serve as a surgeon in the Union army, an experience that would change him forever. John and Lany died within two days of each other, two years before their grandson L. Frank was born in 1856.³ The surviving siblings remained close, raising their families nearby one another, supporting one another’s efforts, and helping in times of sickness and need. Later, L. Frank Baum would benefit from the connections and financial contributions of this strong and loving extended family.

As a young man, Baum’s father, Benjamin Ward Baum, learned to be a cooper, a profession much in demand in those days in Upstate New York. The Erie Canal had opened in 1825, and bulk goods packed in barrels could be shipped quickly and cost effectively from the Midwest and Great Lakes to the Hudson and then down to the port of New York. As towns and cities along the Erie Canal popped up and their populations grew, Benjamin took a job in New Woodstock, where he met Cynthia “Synthy” Ann Stanton (1820–1905), the daughter of Oliver Stanton, a wealthy farmer in Cazenovia. A Scotch-Irish family, the Stantons descended from Thomas Stanton, one of the founders of Stonington, Connecticut (Houck 1980, BP, SCRC-SUL). Benjamin and Cynthia eloped and were married in Delphi Falls, today a hamlet of the town of Pompey in Onondaga County, on 10 March 1842. They began their family on a farm on Falls Road (Route 13), just south of Chittenango, a town located sixteen miles east of Syracuse. The house in Chittenango no longer stands, but the town has erected a sign in the center of the village, near the corner of Arch Street, that announces: “L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, was born near here.” Since 1979, Chittenango remembers and celebrates its famous son with an annual Oz-Stravaganza, held each summer for three days along the main streets of town, which include several shops and restaurants that have adopted the Oz theme, including Auntie Em’s Place, Over the Rainbow Crafts, Tin Man Construction Co., Emerald City Grill, and Emerald City Bowling, among others. In 2015, the Oneida Indian Nation opened the Yellow Brick Road Casino, a twenty-million-dollar, 67,000-square-foot enterprise located in the Emerald City Plaza in Chittenango. It also houses several Oz-themed establishments, including the Winged Monkey Bar and the Heart and Courage Saloon.

Benjamin turned out to be a hard worker and an astute businessman. By the time Frank was born, his father and uncle Lyman owned their own wooden barrel manufacturing company. Three years later, in 1859, the Drake Well, one of the world’s first commercial oil wells, was drilled just south of Titusville, Pennsylvania, 260 miles southeast of Syracuse. Wasting no time, Benjamin traveled south and wisely invested in the newly discovered oil fields in northwestern Pennsylvania. He earned a sizable return, which he reinvested. He bought land, built an opera house, traded stocks, served as president of the Second National Bank of Syracuse, and helped to start a dry goods store, known as Neal, Baum & CO., with his eldest daughter’s husband, W. H. Neal. In no time, the Baums had become one of the wealthiest families in central New York, and Benjamin had proven himself an excellent husband and provider for his wife and children, supplying them with a rags-to-riches role model.

The Onondaga Historical Society Bulletin from April 1957 notes that the Benjamin Baum family moved to the city of Syracuse in the early 1860s and bought a house at 1 Rust Street (today known as Midland Avenue). In 1866, Benjamin purchased a large house north of the city, which became the family estate, known as Rose Lawn, and located near present-day Mattydale. The fifteen-mile estate stretched for half a mile along the west side of sixteen-and-a-half-mile-long Brewerton Plank Road, the first plank road in America, built in 1846 (“Onondaga Historical Society Bulletin” April 1957, BP, SCRC-SUL). There were four tollgates about four miles apart and the Baum’s home was near the first tollgate. Having traveled to Toronto to observe their plank roads, George Geddes, a local Syracuse farmer, promoted the building of the Brewerton Road to transport salt from a local saltworks into the city of Syracuse, where it was loaded onto barges on the Erie Canal, which at the time still threaded through downtown, along present-day Erie Boulevard (Majewski, Baer, Klein 1993, 7). Today, the Baum home would be located just past the Mattydale Shopping Center, near the intersection of Route 11/Brewerton Road, a major north-south thoroughfare, and Bailey Road. Frank’s father later bought around two hundred acres across from the original property, where he raised Jersey cattle, harness horses, and chickens. The family finally seemed secure.

In 1873, the New York Stock Exchange crashed. The ensuing panic started a domino effect of bankruptcies, which impacted most every industry and retail store, and the US economy slipped into a five-year-long depression. Benjamin’s Second National Bank in Syracuse closed the following year, and the Baum family finances suffered, forcing them to put Rose Lawn up for sale. There were no buyers. In 1880, the estate was sold at auction due to foreclosure. At the auction, the family bought the house with just three and a half surrounding acres; the remaining acreage was sold to the Crouses, another wealthy and influential Syracuse family that owned a successful grocery business. This move allowed the Baums to hold onto their family estate for another half dozen years, until further tragedy struck.

The Syracuse Herald, dated 19 October 1885, reported that Benjamin Baum was thrown from his carriage when his horse bolted and collided with a hitching post. Frank’s father suffered a severe head injury and never fully recovered, despite traveling to Germany for additional medical care. While abroad, he lef...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments and Dedication
• A Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Preface: A Story of Coincidences
• Introduction: The Appeal of the Wizard and the Importance of Context
• Chapter One: The Unknown Historian of Oz
• Chapter Two: Volkov, the Invisible Writer
• Chapter Three: Fairy Tales and the Development of Children’s Literature
• Chapter Four: Baum’s Oz
• Chapter Five: Oz Becomes Magic Land
• Chapter Six: Magic Land Reception at Home and Abroad
• Conclusion: Oz and Magic Land Today
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index