The trip to Soviet Russia that dazzled Josep Pla

Barcelona"In 1925, when I went to Russia, I knew about that country about what everyone else knows: practically nothing," he said, with his usual mischievousness, Josep Pla (Palafrugell, 1897 - Llofriu, 1981). He wrote it in the text that heads the expanded and revised edition of one of his first books, Russia. News from the USSR (Diana Editions, 1925), in The North, the fifth volume of the complete works of Destino. In The North, which is preceded by two essential travel books to understand the young Josep Pla, Letters from afar and Letters from further away, that collection of chronicles for the newspaper Advertising has been transformed into Trip to Russia in 1925 and includes a long preamble written from Mas Pla, in Llofriu, at the beginning of 1967, in which the author confronts that "youthful crouch" with his mature vision: "This book is a lovingly simple outline of a construction: the walls and the squares of a wall and the facts are the doubts of whether they fall on them."

Pla's preamble serves not only to put this distant volume in context, but also, in a certain way, to excuse his political vision of the moment. At 28 years old, and during a six-week stay, Pla does not hide his dazzlement by that Russia that is deploying the New Economic Policy promoted by Lenin (1870-1924) and who finds himself in the midst of a struggle between Stalin and Trotsky to succeed the first leader of the Soviet Union. As he travels by train from Riga to Moscow into the land of the Soviets, Pla dismantles the Western prejudice about the poverty of the majority of Russians. The majority have "a uniform, decent, unpretentious, simple, clean appearance," he writes. Shortly after arriving in the capital, Pla notes "the extraordinary abundance of bookshops." And he adds: "Some are grand, among the largest that can be seen in Europe. In most there is a foreign section: there are somewhat anachronistic French novels and fantastic quantities of German books." Later, in another chronicle, Pla points out that in all Soviet villages, however small, there is a library and a cooperative, and in many a school is being built. "The question of getting books to all the peasant villages has been one of the greatest concerns of the Russian government," he says.

Portrait of a "unique" country

During his stay in the USSR, the special envoy of Advertising Pla proposes to detail its operation through visits to factories, a description of the particular mechanics of the elections – those who do not agree with the list proposed by the assembly must express "their opinions" and express "their disagreement in a clear way: by raising their arm, for example" or explaining the distribution of the distribution of the distribution of the narration of the memories of the narration. "They try to make the life that the prisoner leads in the prison have more advantages and comforts than the previous life," Pla explains, shortly before marveling at the possibility that "the prisoners have a few days of freedom from time to time and can go home to see their wife and friends." In addition, if the prisoner does not return when it is time, "nothing is done to arrest him again." "If [...] he fled, it's because prison did him no good or gave him any advantage," explains the director of Sokolniki to Pla and Eugeni Xammar (Vendrell, 1888 - L'Ametlla del Vallès, 1973), a journalist with whom Pla shares part of the trip, together with the politician and translator 9

"Russia is a unique country: there are no strikes, no riots, no sabotage - we read in the chapter The politics of the workers–. Since there are no classes, there is no class struggle. Since there is no subsidiary national class policy, the Russian workers are interested in the affairs of their country. Discipline He is even more enthusiastic: "The people make the revolution to work less, to command, to go to the delivery girl, driven by a disintegrated, centrifugal and aphrodisiac force. Which one?" Pla also highlights that in the Soviet regime "women are placed, absolutely, on the same level as men." Here he describes the six impressions: "The economic circumstances of Russia contribute to afeblir the lligams that we live in our families. The dona works. The dona feels that she is the same as the home, that the mateixes functions of the home. The dona is aware of its public importance and knows that it is defended by the laws.

History of a problematic book

Russia. News from the USSR appeared in 1925 at Edicions Diana. It was the fourth title of the publishing project of Ignasi Armengou (Manresa, 1895 - Buenos Aires, 1954), which Josep Pla had inaugurated that same year with Things seen, his debut in book form after having published hundreds of articles. Pla's first editor could be Joan Estelrich (Felanitx, 1896 - Paris, 1958), then director of Editorial Catalana and a confidant of Francesc Cambó, as explained Xavier Pla to A furtive heart (Destino, 2024): In 1923, when he had already been a correspondent in Paris and had been a special envoy to Italy, Madrid and Germany, Josep Pla writes to Estelrich to announce that he is working on a volume "that will be a compilation of published things." "I will edit it myself and I will give it to him in case the [Catalan] Publishing House wants to publish it separately, as it does with Junoy's conferences," Pla continued. "For its official series next year, I will give the Publishing House a book that will be titled The discovery of the Mediterranean".

Neither of the two projects prospered. Neither did the unfinished novel West Berlin, of which only "two of its supposed prologues" are preserved, according to Xavier Pla, who also explains how Ignasi Armengou, an "inexperienced and vaguely subversive editor", ended up becoming Pla's first guarantor, who would later gain the trust of Josep Maria Cruzet (Barcelona, ​​​​1903 - 1962) who published fifty books for him in Selecta, and Josep Vergés (Palafrugell, 1910 - Barcelona, ​​​​2001), who published the 45 volumes of his complete works from Destino starting in 1966.

In the spring of 1925, Pla inaugurated the collection Biblioteca de Escritores Independientes with Things seen, and the book quickly became a success. "There is no choice but to make a second run," the editor writes in Pla. "We will call it a second edition. This will have a certain effect on the public. At the rate we are going, within a week we will have sold nearly 2,000 copies. No Catalan book had ever arrived." Months later, Russia. News from the USSR The book was also very well received. The problem was that Pla never saw a single cent of royalties from Edicions Diana. The publisher's administrator and distributor was Miquel Ferrer i Sanxis (Castelldefels, 1899 - Barcelona, ​​​​1990), "a revolutionary trade unionist, founder of Estat Català and member of the Society of Military Studies", as Xavier Pla recalls in A furtive heart. Ferrer y Sanxis, who was also the manager of the Librería Italiana, became bankrupt with the income generated by Diana, and in 1926 he was accused of having been part of the Garraf plot, which attempted to end the life of King Alfonso XIII. He spent four years in prison, during which Diana, under the tutelage of the founder of the Librería Catalònia, Antoni López Llausàs (Barcelona, ​​​​1888 - Buenos Aires, 1979), published two more books by Josep Pla, Magic Lantern and Relations, before disappearing.

The journalist and writer had already gained momentum to diversify his production in several publishing houses. Before the war, Pla had already released, among other titles, Manolo's life (1928), Southern letters (1929), Francesc Pujols' system: a manual of hyparxiology (1931) and Madrid, the advent of the Republic (1933). The latest edition of the book about the trip to Russia was made by Labutxaca in 2020, and includes, in addition to theHomenot that Pla dedicated to Andreu Nin at the end of the 1950s, an interesting prologue by the Russian translator Marta Rebón, who recalls that Pla returned to Moscow in 1969 to "see the embalmed body of the god Leninand visit "the institute where the brain was studied." That journey is recorded in A cruise in Northern Europe (included in The journey ends, volume 39 of theComplete work (From Destino). When Pla sees the revolutionary's corpse for the last time, youthful enthusiasm has been replaced by adult skepticism: "It is the largest religious-superstitious-patriotic-imperialist gathering that my eyes have ever seen," he writes. "An indescribable spectacle: serious, silent, orderly."