ERSKINE CALDWELL’S NOVEL ALL NIGHT LONG : A LITERARY TEXT BETWEEN PROPAGANDA AND ART

Abstract

Erskine Caldwell, an American writer who was in the USSR when the Great Patriotic War broke out, wrote several documentary books about the war in the Soviet Union and a novel about the partisan movement, All Night Long . The purpose of the book was to familiarize the American reader with Russia/USSR and to attract the attention of the American public to the military actions in the East of Europe. In the novel, based on his collected stories of Red Army soldiers and partisans, as well as on his impressions from a trip to the front, Caldwell portrayed the struggle of Soviet peasants against the German invaders. The story of the partisans is filled with formulaic situations, ideologically calibrated dialogues, predictable plot twists, and propaganda stamps. Despite the fact that Caldwell’s acquaintance with the experience of guerrilla warfare was limited to conversations with war correspondents and a single conversation with a real partisan during a trip to the front, American critics generally accepted the novel positively, while in the USSR it was never translated, and not a single critical review of the book appeared in the press. The novel All Night Long , like Caldwell’s previous books and articles about the Soviet Union, had a great propaganda value and followed the ideological guidelines dictated by the brutal reality of the war, which at that time were more important than attempts to capture reality in its entirety and complexity.