given him a recognition in foreign lands not equalled by any other American writer.
The story of his conquest of world opinion can be told only in outline. It is a story, however, more dramatic in interest than any that he himself wrote. The American is not to be envied who does not feel a patriotic pride in the career of an author who, if he could not lift himself above the handicaps of habit and ill health and poverty, yet drove through them, and gave to the outside world its first and most lasting conception of Americanism as literature. To know Poe one must know this larger story.
It was Russia, not France, that took the initiative in Europeanizing Poe's fame. "Casual translations from Poe," says Abraham Yarmolinsky,[1] "began to appear in leading Russian periodicals as early as the late thirties." But Poe knew nothing of this. Several years later he was called "an unknown writer" even in England. He had questioned Dickens about the prospects of republication in London, and Dickens had written as late as 1842: "The only consolation I can give you is that I do not believe any collection of detached pieces by an unknown writer, even though he were an Englishman, would be at all likely to find a publisher in this metropolis just now."
The popularity of Poe in Russia seems to have been continuous and cumulative. "The first name a Russian is most likely to mention," continues Yarmolinsky, "when the conversation turns to American literature, is that of 'mad Edgar.' It is Poe that has come to be popularly identified in Russia with the American literary genius in its highest achievements.
- ↑ See The Bookman, N. Y., September, 1916.
