''A Soviet Journey'' is a 1978
travelogue by South African socialist
Alex La Guma
Alex La Guma (20 February 1924 – 11 October 1985) was a South African novelist, leader of the South African Coloured People's Organisation (SACPO) and a defendant in the Treason Trial, whose works helped characterise the movement against ...
.
Writing in the early 90s, critic Roger Field described the book as one of the under-examined works from La Guma's corpus, because of his reputation as a fiction writer first, and the political nature of Western academics commenting on a book title "Soviet" during the Cold War.
The novel has significant references and comparisons to the works and travels of
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway ( ; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized fo ...
.
The book also reflects substantially on the influence of other works of
literary modernism
Modernist literature originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form a ...
on his own writing.
Biographical context
La Guma's trip also has ties to other parts of his life: when La Guma, was a child, his father had taken a trip to the Soviet Union, and La Guma knew both mentors contemporaries from the anti-apartheid community in South Africa who had visited the Soviet Union.
References
Further reading
*
External links
*
A Soviet Journey', the full book on the
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
in
PDF
Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...
format
1978 non-fiction books
African travel books
Books about the Soviet Union
Works by Alex La Guma
Ernest Hemingway
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