Tarzanism vs. Marxism

They read it here, they read it there, those Bolshies read it everywhere. "It" is Tarzan. Six books* of Tarzan adventures, in cheap paper editions costing 60-c-, have been printed to the number of 250,000. "Yet," said a Moscow publisher, "the supply is far inferior to the demand. We could easily sell a million." A Moscow journal said: "We publish books and pamphlets about Marxism and our great revolution. We encourage young authors to interpret its spirit and inspire the masses. We even issue cheap editions of the Russian classics. But the public reads--what? --Tarzan." Explaining why O. Henry, H. G. Wells, Conan Doyle, Jack London and Upton Sinclair are more popular than Russian authors, the newspaper continued: "It is because old Russian literature is out of date, and the new is dry, dull or too subtle for mass com-prehension."

The President of the Russian Poets' "Soviet," one Axionov, "the most sophisticated Russian litterateur," said that the Tarzan vogue was due to "the love of fairy tales instinctive in primitive peoples in general and Russians in particular. "Our revolution killed the fairies, just as education killed them in Western countries. But if you dress up Jack the Giant Killer in a sufficiently modern guise to give him at least a semblance of probability, the masses will love him as did their fathers and grandfathers. And to the fact that Tarzan takes his readers away from strenuous complicated modern life can be attributed the secret of his success. "In my opinion this alone proves the necessity for some dictatorship over the proletariat. On the other hand it appears that Tarzan is also extremely popular in America--but comparisons are odious." Walter Duranty, The New York Times correspondent, explained the epidemic of Tarzanitis by stating that"the newly emancipated Russian nation represents the average cultural level of the American schoolboy between 11 and 16.";

*Written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Published by Grosset and Dunlap.