A Russian Journal

I said, 'Maybe they put rocks in it, maybe there aren't any films in there at all.'

He shook the box. 'It sounds like films,' he said.

'It could be old newspapers,' I said.

'You son-of-a-bitch,' he remarked. And he argued with himself. 'What would they want to take out?' he asked. 'It wasn't anything that could hurt.'

'Maybe they just don't like Capa pictures,' I suggested.

The plane flew over the great flat lands with their forests and fields, and the silver river winding and twisting. It was a beautiful day, and the thin blue mist of autumn hung close to the ground. The hostess took pink soda to the crew, and came back and opened a bottle for herself.

At noon we coasted into the field at Kiev. The customs man gave our baggage a cursory inspection, but the box of film was instantly picked up. They had a message concerning it. An official cut the strings while Capa looked on like a stricken sheep. And then the officials all smiled, and shook hands, and went out, and the door closed, and the engines turned over. Capa's hands shook as he opened his box. The films seemed to be all there. He smiled and put back his head, and he was asleep before the ship could get into the air. Some negatives had been taken, but not many. They had removed films that showed too much topography, and the telephoto picture of the mad girl of Stalingrad was gone, and the pictures which showed prisoners, but nothing that mattered from our point of view was withheld. The farms and the faces, the pictures of the Russian people, were intact, and those were what we had gone for in the first place.

The airplane crossed the border, and early in the afternoon we landed in Prague, and I had to awaken Capa.

Well, there it is. It's about what we went for. We found, as we had suspected, that the Russian people are people, and, as with other people, that they are very nice. The ones we met had a hatred of war, they wanted the same things all people want-good lives, increased'comfort, security, and peace.

We know that this journal will not be satisfactory either to the ecclesiastical Left, nor the lumpen Right. The first will say it is anti-Russian, and the second that it is pro-Russian. Surely it is superficial, and how could it be otherwise? We have no conclusions to draw, except that Russian people are like all other people in the world. Some bad ones there are surely, but by far the greater number are very good.

John Steinbeck

Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast – and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two Californian fictions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian labouring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he travelled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals o/The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

Born Endre Erno Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary, on October 22,1913, the self-styled Robert Capa became one of the most celebrated war photojournalists of the twentieth century. He left Hungary at seventeen and, until he died in 1954 – killed by a landmine in Indochina – he roamed the world photographing war. With his beloved companion, photographer Gerda Taro (killed in 1937), he first saw action during the Spanish Civil War, where his emphatic portraits of human anguish won him international acclaim. In 1938 he travelled to China and witnessed the Japanese invasion; he covered World War II, Israel in 1948, and Indochina in 1954. During his life he published five photographic texts: Death in the Making (photographs by Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, 1938); The Battle of Waterloo Road (text by Diana Forbes-Robertson and photographs by Capa, 1941); Slightly Out of Focus (1947); A Russian Journal (1948); and Report'on Israel (text by Irving Shaw and photographs by Capa).

Susan Shillinglaw is a professor of English and director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. She co-edited Steinbeck and the Environment and John Steinbeck: Contemporary Reviews. She edits the Steinbeck Newsletter and has published articles on Steinbeck.

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