''A Soviet Journey'' is a 1978 travelogue by South African socialist Alex La Guma. Writing in the early 90s, critic Roger Field described the book as one of the under examined works from La Guma's corpus, because of his reputation as a fiction writer first, and the political nature of Western academics commenting on a book title "Soviet" during the Cold War. The novel has significant references and comparisons to the works and travels of

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fic ...

. The book also reflects substantially on the influence of other works of

literary modernism Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented ...

on his own writing.

Biographical context

La Guma's trip also has ties to other parts of his life: when La Guma, was a child, his father had taken a trip to the Soviet Union, and La Guma knew both mentors contemporaries from the anti-apartheid community in South Africa who had visited the Soviet Union.

Biographical context

References

Further reading