What I’m reviewing here, understand, is essentially a long homework assignment. Professor Edward F. Danowitz of Rollins College suggested that his class translate and explicate the Pravda political-cartoon output for 1982. You can’t purchase this exercise (just 25 copies were photocopied and bound—one thousand at $10 each might become available later). Danowitz will note in a preface that his students had “limited language experience.” Indeed, their English is now and then not much more comprehensible than the original Russian. (I wish they wouldn’t, all five, refer to Namibia as Nambia.) Still, Pravda, 1982 has cobra fascination: it could send an oversensitive American to the house of constant shrieks.
Each Pravda cartoon is more illustrated slogan than playful conceit: for subtleness I’d prefer a fraternity paddle. And canine distemper is about as humorous. You are not meant to be amused. Most often Pravda artists represent the U.S. by an unimaginative cowboy image: faceless usually, small, conniving rather than dangerous. (Compare, for instance, Curtis’s vicious, huge Russian bear in this magazine. Are we more afraid of them?) Now and again America is the Monopoly Chance Card man or a short goatee-wild Uncle Sam based, I’d guess, on Truman. American working folk stagger out of some WPA mural: they are totally unmodern—children play with stick horses, not Atari. Set design and background haven’t been updated since maybe 1948. This gives your Soviet reader comfortable continuity: America will be the unchanging foe like Satan or cholesterol.
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