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Concept
EIMI
Summary
EIMI eɪˈmiː is a 1933 travelogue by poet E. E. Cummings, dealing with a visit to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1931. The book is written in the form of abstract prose verse.
EIMI (Greek εἰμί - "I Am") is a 432-page volume recounting the visit of American poet Edward Estlin Cummings to Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa from May 14 to June 14, 1931. Packing a portable typewriter with him, Cummings kept copious notes of his Soviet journey and wrote the book after his return to the United States.
Although actually a stylized work of non-fiction, Cummings's book was originally touted as a novel by Covici-Friede, a small publisher located in New York City.
In the book Cummings employs an abstract form of verse comparable to that of Ulysses by James Joyce and uses non-standard sentence structure, punctuation, spacing, and text breaks to evoke a sort of confusion and tension in the reader akin to his own feelings as a non-Russian speaker in the Soviet metropolis.
In Moscow, Cummings meets up with an acquaintance from his days at Harvard University, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, a committed Communist then living at the Metropole Hotel. Dana showed Cummings around the city and acted as a mentor, attempting — unsuccessfully — to win the apolitical Cummings' sympathies to the Soviet cause before the pair split over political differences. While in Moscow Cummings also met Joan London, daughter of novelist Jack London, and her husband, the newspaper correspondent Charles Malamuth.
The theme of the work deals with Cummings' growing disappointment with the squalor and inefficiency he saw in the USSR, as well as the lack of intellectual and artistic freedom he observed. In it, he described the Soviet Union as an “uncircus of noncreatures.” Lenin's tomb, in which the late dictator’s preserved body is on display, especially revolted Cummings and inspired him to create the most impassioned writing in the book. In tracing the course of his 35-day trip through the Soviet Union, Cummings made frequent allusions to Dante’s Inferno and its story of a descent into Hell, equating the two journeys.
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