John Cournos

John Cournos (1881–1966), a writer of Russian-Jewish background, was born in the Ukraine, whence his family emigrated when he was aged 10. During the 1910s and 1920s, he lived in Britain, where his literary career started. He later emigrated to the USA, where he spent the rest of his life.

He was one of the Imagist poets, but is better known for his novels, short stories, essays and criticism, and as a translator of Russian literature. He used the pseudonym John Courtney. He also wrote for The Philadelphia Record under the pseudonym "Gorky."

Later in life he married Helen Kestner (1893–1960), who was also an author, under the pseudonym Sybil Norton. However, he is probably best known for his unhappy affair with Dorothy L. Sayers, fictionalized by Sayers in the detective book Strong Poison (1930) and by Cournos himself in The Devil Is an English Gentleman (1932).

Anti-Communist Propaganda

In the aftermath of the October Revolution Cournos was involved with a London-based anti-Communist organization named The Russian Liberation Committee. On its behalf he wrote in 1919 a propaganda pamphlet named London under the Bolsheviks: A Londoner's Dream on Returning from Petrograd.

In Cournos' lurid but humorous future history, a British revolutionary regime introduces a new currency named "The MacDonald" for Ramsey MacDonald; MacDonald is, however, soon shoved aside by the Bolshevik leaders MacLenin and Trotsman (sic). A counter-revolutionary drive by General Haig is defeated at St Albans. Lloyd George is imprisoned in the Tower of London. H.G. Wells, too, is imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, despite his left-leaning book Love and Mr Lewisham. London is portrayed as plagued by poverty, with black market cigarettes and broken lifts, and the narrator wanders round the Strand exclaiming at the filth of the streets, the idlers and the jealous envy displayed towards his new boots.

Bibliography

• Gordon Craig and the theatre of the future (1914)
• The Mask (1919)
• London Under the Bolsheviks (1919)
• The Wall (1921?)
• Babel (1922)
• The Best British Short Stories of 1922 (as Editor, 1922?)
• In Exile (1923)
• The New Candide (1924)
• Sport of gods (1925)
• Miranda Masters (1926)
• O’Flaherty the Great (1928)
• A modern Plutarch (1928)
• Short stories out of Soviet Russia (1929)
• Grandmother Martin Is Murdered (1930)
• Wandering Women/The samovar (1930)
• The Devil Is an English Gentleman (1932)
• Autobiography (1935)
• An epistle to the Hebrews (1938)
• An open letter to Jews and Christians (1938)
• Hear, O Israel (1938)
• Book of Prophecy From Egyptians to Hitler (1938)
• A Boy Named John (1941)
• A treasury of Russian life and humor (1943)
• Famous modern American novelists(1952)
• Pilgrimage to freedom(1953; written jointly with Sybil Norton, illustrated by Rus Anderson)
• American Short Stories of the Nineteenth Century (1955: Everyman's Library)
• A treasury of classic Russian literature (1961)
• With hey, ho... and The man with the spats (1963)
• The Created Legend — translation of a book by Fyodor Sologub [pseud.] (19??)

External links

• List of books on the Open Library

• Works by John Cournos at Project Gutenberg
• Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Cournos
• John Cournos' online introduction to "Taras Bulba and Other Tales" by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
• An account by Alfred Satterwaite, John Cournos' stepson