Tintin in the Land of the Soviets

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Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
(Les aventures de Tintin, reporter du "Petit Vingtième", au pays des Soviets)
TintinSoviets.jpg

Cover of the English edition
Publisher Le Petit Vingtième
Date 1930
Series The Adventures of Tintin (Les aventures de Tintin)
Creative team
Writer(s) Hergé
Artist(s) Hergé
Original publication
Published in Le Petit Vingtième
Date(s) of publication 10 January 1929 – 8 May 1930
Language French
ISBN 2-203-01101-7
Translation
Publisher Sundancer
Date 1989
ISBN 1-4052-1477-5
Translator(s) Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner
Chronology
Followed by Tintin in the Congo, 1931

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (in the original French, Les Aventures de Tintin, reporter du "Petit Vingtième", au pays des Soviets) is the first title in the comic book series The Adventures of Tintin, written and drawn by Belgian cartoonist Hergé (1907–1983). Originally serialised in the Belgian children's newspaper supplement Le Petit Vingtième between 10 January 1929 and 8 May 1930, it was subsequently published in book form in 1930. Designed to be a work of anti-Communist propaganda for children,[1] it was commissioned by Hergé's boss, the Abbé Norbert Wallez, who ran the right wing Roman Catholic weekly Le XXe Siècle in which Le Petit Vingtième was published.

The plot revolves around the young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel, via Berlin, to the Soviet Union, to report back on the policies instituted by the state socialist government of Joseph Stalin and the Bolsheviks. However, an agent of the Soviet secret service, the OGPU, attempts to prevent Tintin from doing so, and sets traps to get rid of him. Despite this, the young reporter is successful in discovering that the Bolsheviks are stealing the food of the Soviet people, rigging elections and murdering opponents.

The success of the work led to Hergé producing further Adventures of Tintin, starting with the controversial Tintin in the Congo (1930–31), as well as beginning a new comic series, entitled Quick and Flupke. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets was the only one of the 23 completed Tintin adventures that Hergé did not subsequently redraw in a colour edition. He himself thought little of the work, claiming that when he produced it, "I didn't consider it real work... just a game", and later categorising it as simply "a transgression of my youth."[2] Due to this, he prevented its republication, but with the rising production of pirated editions being sold amongst Tintinologists, he finally allowed for an official reprint in 1973, and then an English language translation in 1989. It is one of only three Adventures of Tintin–the others being Tintin in the Congo and the unfinished Tintin and Alph-Art—that have not been used as a basis for any theatrical, radio, television or cinematic adaptations.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Tintin, a reporter for Le Petit Vingtième, and his dog Snowy are sent on an assignment to the Soviet Union. Departing from Brussels, his train is blown up en route to Moscow by an agent of the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, who believes him to be a "dirty little bourgeois". Tintin is blamed for the bombing by the Berlin police but escapes to the border of the Soviet Union. Here he is brought before the local Commissar's office, where the same OGPU agent that tried to kill Tintin on the train secretly instructs the Commissar that they must make the reporter "disappear... accidentally". After escaping again, Tintin finds "how the Soviets fool the poor idiots who still believe in a Red Paradise", by burning bundles of straw and clanging metal in order to trick visiting English Marxists into believing that Soviet factories are productive, when in fact they are not even operational.[3]

Tintin goes on to witness a local election, where the Bolsheviks aim their guns at the voters to ensure their own electoral success. Several Bolsheviks then come to arrest him during the night, but he manages to scare them off by dressing up as a ghost. Attempting to make his way out of the Soviet Union, he is pursued and arrested, before being threatened with torture.[4] Escaping his captors, he reaches Moscow, which Tintin remarks has been turned into "a stinking slum" by the Bolsheviks; he then witnesses a government official handing out bread to those homeless children who adhere to the Marxist ideology and denying it to those who do not. Snowy steals a loaf and gives it to a boy who was refused it. Then sneaking into a secret Bolshevik meeting, Tintin learns that all the Soviet grain is being exported abroad for propaganda purposes, leaving the people starving, and that the government plan to "organise an expedition against the kulaks, the rich peasants, and force them at gunpoint to give us their corn."[5]

Tintin infiltrates the Soviet army and warns some of the kulaks to hide their grain from the army officials, but is caught and sentenced to death by firing squad. By planting blanks in the soldiers' rifles, Tintin fakes his death and is able to make his way into the snowy wilderness, where he discovers an underground Bolshevik hideaway in a haunted house. Here he is captured by a Bolshevik who informs him that "You're in the hideout where Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin have collected together wealth stolen from the people!" With the help of Snowy, Tintin escapes, commandeers a plane, and flies into the night. The plane crashes, but Tintin fashions himself a new propeller from a tree using a pen knife, and continues to Berlin, where he gets drunk and passes out.[6] Captured by OGPU agents yet again, he is locked in a dungeon, but escapes with the aid of Snowy, who has dressed himself in a tiger costume. Another attempt to kidnap him is foiled when he manages to capture his assailant, an OGPU agent who "intends to blow up all the capitals of Europe with dynamite". Finally, Tintin arrives back in Brussels to a huge popular reception.[7]

[edit] History

[edit] Background

"The idea for the character of Tintin and the sort of adventures that would befall him came to me, I believe, in five minutes, the moment I first made a sketch of the figure of this hero: that is to say, he had not haunted my youth nor even my dreams. Although it's possible that as a child I imagined myself in the role of a sort of Tintin."

Hergé, 15 November 1966.[8]

Georges Remi—who would become better known under his pen name of Hergé—had been employed to work as an illustrator at Le XXe Siècle (The 20th century), a staunchly Roman Catholic and conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé's native Brussels. Run by the Abbé Norbert Wallez, the paper described itself as a "Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information" and disseminated a far right and fascist viewpoint: Wallez himself was a great admirer of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini and kept a picture of him on his desktop, while Léon Degrelle, who would later become the leader of the fascist Rexists, worked as a foreign correspondent for the paper. As Tintinologist Harry Thompson would later note, such political ideas were not unusual in Belgium at that time, where "patriotism, Catholicism, strict morality, discipline and naivety were so inextricably bound together in everyone's lives that right-wing politics were an almost inevitable by-product. It was a world view shared by everyone, distinguished principally by its complete ignorance of the world."[9] Anti-socialist sentiment was strong, and a Soviet exhibition held in Brussels in January 1928 was vandalised amidst angry demonstrations by the fascist National Youth Movement, in which Degrelle took part.[10]

Wallez decided to begin production of a children's supplement, Le Petit Vingtième (The Little Twentieth), which was to be published in Le XXe Siècle every Thursday, and he decided to make Hergé its editor.[11] In addition to his role in editing the supplement, Hergé was initially involved in illustrating a story known as L'extraordinaire aventure de Flup, Nénesse, Puosette et Cochonnet (The Extraordinary Adventures of Flup, Nénesse, Puosette and Cochonnet),[12] which had been written by a member of the newspaper's sport staff and which revolved around the adventures of two boys, one of their little sisters, and her inflatable rubber pig. However Hergé soon became dissatisfied with this simple illustrative task, and wanted to begin both writing and illustrating his own cartoon strip.[1]

He had already had some experience in creating comic strips. From July 1926 he had written a strip entitled Les Aventures de Totor C.P. des Hannetons (The Adventures of Totor, Scout Leader of the Cockchafers) for the Scouting newspaper Le Boy Scout Belge (The Belgian Boy Scout), which was based around the life of Totor, a boy scout patrol leader.[1] Tintinologists such as Thompson, Michael Farr and Pierre Assouline have noted the strong influence that the character of Totor would have on Tintin,[1][13][8] with Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier stating that "Graphically, Totor was virtually identical to Tintin in every respect, except for his scout uniform."[14] Hergé never denied this, and described Tintin as being like Totor's younger brother.[8] The Lofficiers noted many other similarities between Totor and Tintin's respective adventures, particularly in the illustration style, the fast pace of the story, and the use of humour.[15]

[edit] Influences

Russian revolutionary and future Soviet Premier Vladimir Lenin addressing a crowd in Sverdlov Square, Moscow, 1920.

Hergé wanted to send his newly created character of Tintin on an adventure to the United States, where he could encounter the Native Americans, a people whom Hergé himself had been fascinated with since being a boy scout. Abbé Wallez, however, did not agree with this choice of destination, and Hergé would only be able to achieve it in his third Tintin adventure, Tintin in America. Instead, Wallez wanted Hergé to send his fictional reporter to the Soviet Union, a country that had been founded in 1922 by the governing Bolshevik Party, a Marxist–Leninist group who had seized power in the Russian Empire during the October Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks had set about greatly altering the country's society, nationalising industry and replacing a capitalist economy with a socialist one, in order to create what they saw as a dictatorship of the proletariat, or workers' state. By the late 1920s, when Land of the Soviets was written, the Soviet Union's first leader, Vladimir Lenin, had died and been replaced in this role by the former revolutionary, Joseph Stalin. Being both Roman Catholic and politically right-wing, Wallez was very much opposed to the atheistic, anti-Christian, and extreme left-wing Soviet government, and wanted Tintin's first adventure to reflect this, thereby indoctrinating its young readers with anti-Marxist and anti-socialist ideas.[1] Later commenting on why he produced a work of propaganda, Hergé said that he had been "inspired by the atmosphere of the paper", which taught him that being a Catholic meant being anti-Marxist.[1]

As Tintinologist Benoît Peeters noted, Hergé did not have the time either to visit the Soviet Union or to analyse all the published information about it.[16] Instead, he based his information on the country purely upon a single pamphlet, Moscou sans voiles (Moscow Unveiled), which had been written by Joseph Douillet (1878–1954), a former Belgian consul to Rostov-on-Don who had spent nine years in Russia following the 1917 revolution. Published in both Belgium and France in 1928, Moscou sans voiles sold well to a public who were eager to believe Douillet's various anti-Bolshevik claims, many of which were of doubtful accuracy.[17][1] As Michael Farr noted "Hergé freely, though selectively, lifted whole scenes from Douillet's account", including "the chilling election episode portrated on page 32 of the Tintin book" which was "almost identical" to Douillet's description in Moscou sans voiles.[18]

A scene from the comic book in which the Bolsheviks force people to vote for them at gunpoint. It is a "chilling" scene lifted straight out of Joseph Douillet's 1928 book Moscou sans voiles, being "almost identical to Douillet's description".[19]

Hergé's lack of accurate knowledge about the Soviet Union led to many factual mistakes; for instance, the story contains references to bananas, Shell petrol and Huntley and Palmers biscuits, none of which actually existed in the Soviet Union at the time.[20] Similarly, he made multiple errors in his use of Russian names, typically adding the ending of "-ski" to them, something which is actually the Polish word for "son", rather than Russian, where the equivalent term is "-vitch".[21]

In creating Land of the Soviets, Hergé was also influenced by innovations within the comic strip medium. He noted that he was heavily influenced by the French comics artist Alain Saint-Ogan, who had recently been producing the Zig et Puce series. The two would meet the following year, and would become lifelong friends. He was also influenced by the contemporary American comics that the reporter Léon Degrelle had sent back to Belgium from Mexico, where he was stationed to report on the persecution of Catholics. These American comics included George McManus' Bringing up Father, George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Rudolph Dirks's Katzenjammer Kids.[14][22] Michael Farr also believed that the cinema of the time was an influence upon Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. He highlighted similarities between scenes in the comic with the police chases of the Keystone Cops films, the train chase in Buster Keaton's The General and with the expressionist images found in the works of directors like Fritz Lang. Farr summarised this influence by commenting that "As a pioneer of the strip cartoon, Hergé was not afraid to draw on one modern medium to develop another."[23]

[edit] Publication

In advertising the upcoming story prior to serialisation, an announcement was featured in the 4 January 1929 edition of Le Petit Vingtième,[1] proclaiming that "we are always eager to satisfy our readers and keep them up to date on foreign affairs. We have therefore sent TINTIN, one of our top reporters, to Soviet Russia." The illusion that Tintin was actually a real reporter for the paper, and not a fictional character, was supported by the claim that the ensuing comic strip was not a series of drawings, but was actually composed of photographs taken of Tintin's adventure.[24] Literary critic Tom McCarthy drew a comparison between this and the early European novels of the 18th century, which also often made a pretense of being non-fictional.[25]

The front page of the 1 May 1930 edition of Le Petit Vingtième, declaring "Tintin Revient!" ("Tintin Returns!") from his adventure in the Soviet Union.[26]

The first installment of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets appeared in the 10 January 1929 edition of Le Petit Vingtième, and would subsequently run in the paper in installments every week until 8 May 1930.[27][1][28] Hergé had not plotted out the storyline in advance, instead improvising new twists and situations to strand Tintin in on a weekly basis, leading Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier to remark that "Story-wise and graphically, Hergé was learning his craft before our eyes".[29] Hergé admitted that the work that he produced for the story was rushed, saying that "The Petit Vingtième came out on Wednesday evening, and I often didn't have a clue on Wednesday morning how I was going to get Tintin out of the predicament I had put him in the previous week."[30] Michael Farr believed that this was particularly evident, remarking that the work's composition looked hastily produced, with many drawings being "crude, rudimentary, rushed; there is none of the polish and refinement which subsequent work methods brought." At the same time, however, Farr believed that Land of the Soviets contained "plates of the highest quality where the freedom and confidence of line is proof of Hergé's outstanding ability as a draughtsman."[31]

The story was an immediate success amongst its young readers. As Harry Thompson noted, the plotline would have been popular with the average Belgian parent, exploiting their anti-socialist sentiment and feeding their fears that the Russians were a malevolent people.[30] Indeed, the popularity of the series led Wallez to decide on performing publicity stunts to increase interest in it: the first of these was the publication of a faked letter on April Fool's Day claiming to be from the Soviet secret police and confirming the existence of Tintin the reporter.[32] The second was a staged publicity event, suggested by the reporter Charles Lesne,[26] that took place on Thursday 8 May 1930. During the stunt, an actor named Henri de Donckers was employed to portray Tintin, dressed in stereotypical Russian clothing and bringing along a white dog on a lead, representing Snowy. De Donckers was then accompanied by Hergé and ordered to get off of the train from Moscow that was pulling in to Brussels' Gare du Nord. Both the actor and Hergé were greeted by an adoring crowd of avid fans, who mobbed De Donckers and pulled him into their midst.[33] The duo then took a Buick limousine to the offices of Le Vingtième Siècle, where they were greeted by further crowds, and so standing upon the building's balcony, Hergé gave a speech before presents were distributed amongst the assembled fans.[26]

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets also began serialisation in a French Catholic magazine, Coeurs Vaillants (Valiant Hearts), from 26 October 1930 onward.[28] The success of the strip meant that the story was then assembled and published in book form by the Brussels-based Editions du Petit Vingtième, with a print run of 10,000,[34] in French only, the first five hundred of which were numbered.[32][28]

[edit] Later publications

When, from 1942 onwards, Hergé began redrawing his earlier Tintin stories for the modernised colour versions at Casterman, he chose not to redraw Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, believing that the story was too crude. He was embarrassed by it, labelling it a "transgression of my youth".[28] Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier believed that another factor in his decision not to redraw it might have been that the story was too virulently anti-Marxist in a period when many across Western Europe were sympathetic to Marxism following the Second World War.[28]

As The Adventures of Tintin became more popular in Western Europe, and some of the rarer books became collectors items, the original printed edition of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets became highly valued. Because of this, Studio Hergé brought out 500 numbered copies to mark the series' 40th birthday in 1969.[32] Nonetheless, this only encouraged a larger demand for the book, and soon a "number of mediocre-quality pirated editions" were produced and sold at "very high prices."[32] To stem this illegal trade, Hergé agreed that it could be published in 1973 as a part of the Archives Hergé collection, where it was released in a collected volume along with Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America. The release of pirated editions however continued, and so it was decided that a facsimile edition of the original would be published through Casterman in 1981.[32] Over the next decade it would be translated into nine different languages,[20] with an English language edition being published by Sundancer in 1989, translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner.

Sociologist John Theobald noted that by the 1980s, when the book had begun to see widespread publication in the western world, the plot was being "rendered socially and politically acceptable in the climate of the Reaganite repolarisation of the 'Cold War' and the final push towards the demise of the Soviet Union". It was because of the new political acceptability of the comic's anti-Soviet themes that it was "to be found on hypermarket shelves as suitable children's literature for the new millennium."[20]

[edit] Critical reception

[icon] This section requires expansion.

In his study of the cultural and literary legacy of Brussels, André De Vries remarked that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets was "crude by Hergé's later standards, in every sense of the word."[35] Sociologist John Theobald argued that instead of providing factual material on the Soviet Union, Hergé depicted the Bolsheviks rigging elections, killing opponents and stealing the grain from the people, all of which was done in order to portray them in a negative light in the minds of his young readers.[20] Hergé displayed the Bolsheviks and their Marxist-Leninist ideology as being "absolute Evil", and set Tintin to fight against them, but as Jean-Marie Apostolidès noted, "because [Tintin] does not understand [the Soviet government's] origin, he does not directly engage with but merely observes this world of misery", simply fighting Bolsheviks rather than fomenting counter-revolution to actively overthrow them.[36]

[edit] References

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Farr 2001. p. 12.
  2. ^ Thompson 1991. pp. 30 and 33.
  3. ^ Hergé 1999 [1930]. pp. 4–30.
  4. ^ Hergé 1999 [1930]. pp. 31–75.
  5. ^ Hergé 1999 [1930]. pp. 72–81.
  6. ^ Hergé 1999 [1930]. pp. 82–121.
  7. ^ Hergé 1999 [1930]. pp. 122–141.
  8. ^ a b c Assouline 2009 [1996]. p. 19.
  9. ^ Thompson 1991. p. 24.
  10. ^ Apostolidès 2010 [2006]. p. 17.
  11. ^ Thompson 1991. pp. 24–25.
  12. ^ Goddin 2008. p. 44.
  13. ^ Thompson 1991. p. 25.
  14. ^ a b Lofficier and Lofficier 2002. p. 18.
  15. ^ Lofficier and Lofficier 2002. p. 19.
  16. ^ Peeters 1989. p. 26.
  17. ^ Grove 2010. pp. 121–122.
  18. ^ Farr 2001. pp. 12–13.
  19. ^ Farr 2001. pp. 13–14.
  20. ^ a b c d Theobald 2004. p. 83.
  21. ^ Farr 2001. p. 19.
  22. ^ Farr 2001. p. 18.
  23. ^ Farr 2001. p. 17.
  24. ^ McCarthy 2006. p. 3.
  25. ^ McCarthy 2006. pp. 4–6.
  26. ^ a b c Goddin 2008. p. 67.
  27. ^ Assouline 2009 [1996]. pp. 19 and 24.
  28. ^ a b c d e Lofficier and Lofficier 2002. p. 21.
  29. ^ Lofficier and Lofficier 2002. pp. 22–23.
  30. ^ a b Thompson 1991. p. 33.
  31. ^ Farr 2001. p. 15.
  32. ^ a b c d e Peeters 1989. p. 27.
  33. ^ Thompson 1991. pp. 10–11.
  34. ^ "Tintin au pays des Soviets" (in French). Casterman. http://bd.casterman.com/Albums_Detail.cfm?Id=38815. Retrieved 31 January 2011. 
  35. ^ De Vries 2003. p. 77.
  36. ^ Apostolidès 2010 [2006]. p. 18.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Apostolidès, Jean-Marie (2010) [2006]. The Metamorphoses of Tintin, or Tintin for Adults. Jocelyn Hoy (translator). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0804760317. 
  • Assouline, Pierre (2009) [1996]. Hergé, the Man Who Created Tintin. Charles Ruas (translator). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195397598. 
  • De Vries, André (2003). Brussels: A Cultural and Literary History. Oxford: Signal Books Limited. ISBN 1-902669-46-0. 
  • Farr, Michael (2001). Tintin: The Complete Companion. London: John Murray. ISBN 978-0719555220. 
  • Goddin, Philippe (2008). The Art of Hergé, Inventor of Tintin: Volume I, 1907–1937. Michael Farr (translator). San Francisco: Last Gasp. ISBN 978-0867197068. 
  • Grove, Laurence (2010). Comics in French: The European Band Dessinée in Context. United States: Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1845455880. 
  • Hergé (1999) [1930]. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner (translators). London: Methuen Children's Books. ISBN 978-0416197655. 
  • Lofficier, Jean-Marc; Lofficier, Randy (2002). The Pocket Essential Tintin. Harpenden, Hertfordshire: Pocket Essentials. ISBN 978-1904048176. 
  • McCarthy, Tom (2006). Tintin and the Secret of Literature. London: Granta. ISBN 978-1862078314. 
  • Peeters, Benoît (1989). Tintin and the World of Hergé. London: Methuen Children's Books. ISBN 978-0416148824. 
  • Theobald, John (2004). The Media and the Making of History. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. ISBN 978-0754638223. 
  • Thompson, Harry (1991). Tintin: Hergé and his Creation. London: Hodder and Stoughton. ISBN 978-0340523933. 

[edit] External links
The Adventures
of Tintin
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930) · Tintin in the Congo (1931) · Tintin in America (1932) · Cigars of the Pharaoh (1934) · The Blue Lotus (1936) · The Broken Ear (1937) · The Black Island (1938) · King Ottokar's Sceptre (1939) · The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941) · The Shooting Star (1942) · The Secret of the Unicorn (1943) · Red Rackham's Treasure (1944) · The Seven Crystal Balls (1948) · Prisoners of the Sun (1949) · Land of Black Gold (1950) · Destination Moon (1953) · Explorers on the Moon (1954) · The Calculus Affair (1956) · The Red Sea Sharks (1958) · Tintin in Tibet (1960) · The Castafiore Emerald (1963) · Flight 714 (1968) · Tintin and the Picaros (1976) · Tintin and Alph-Art (1986, unfinished)
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